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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 collection to be read in bits and pieces, some of it most suitable for the translators among us, but others broadly accessible."
"Two essays originally composed in Italian are printed in the original in an appendix ..."
"Lucid and provocative, this is full of rewarding surprises."
"Her candidness about the hardships of translation and her enthusiasm for its rewards make you want to hear more from these fascinating figures, who spend so much time in others' voices but have not lost the use of their own."
"Why provoke curiosity you won't satisfy?"
"Readers will have a newfound appreciation of the translator's ability to illuminate."
"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."
"A vision emerges of translation as a site where the physical and the textual, the extraordinary and the ordinary, intersect."
"'Look,' her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to."
"She offers lists of near-synonyms."
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