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Translating Myself and Others
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About This Book
Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by an award-winning writer and literary translator Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages. With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid's myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle's Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino's popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question "Why Italian?," and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers. Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri's most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator's art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.
Reviews
"This is a love letter to not only translation, but to literary criticism as a whole."
"A vision emerges of translation as a site where the physical and the textual, the extraordinary and the ordinary, intersect."
"Lucid and provocative, this is full of rewarding surprises."
"a subtle yet ultimately engrossing work, somewhat academic at times, yet infused with the kind of understated, often startling capacity for observation that has always been Lahiri's literary superpower."
"The collection is singular for Lahiri's ability to integrate the personal and the theoretical, drawing her examples from literature and from life ..."
"That is not the only blind spot in a book that shows too little of the 'myself' in the title."
"Readers may also find themselves envious of the author's students of translation at Princeton, but this sharp collection will have to do."
"Readers will have a newfound appreciation of the translator's ability to illuminate."
"she does not dwell on what one might call the postcolonial or political aspects of her own biography."
"While these vivid descriptions bring translation to life, elsewhere her essays 'on translating others' can be complex or baffling ..."
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