Translating Myself and Others

Jhumpa Lahiri

Princeton University Press

Otago Daily Times, January 21st 2023

Is translation an act of imitation or creation? Craft or art? Is the translator’s role to faithfully transcribe a writer’s words from one language to another or to recreate the voice and style of the original? Do I, as a reader, want a text that locates an unfamiliar landscape within a familiar frame of reference or one that transports me to another land? In Translating Myself and Others, Jhumpa Lahiri provides invaluable insights into the function and experience of translation on a personal, literary, and societal level.

Having grown up bilingual in Bengali and English, Lahiri describes herself as having been a translator longer than she has been a writer. But it was not until 2011, when she moved to Rome and started writing in Italian, that she felt free to establish her own relationship with language. This act of physical translation led to her becoming a literary translator in her own right, and the seven pieces in this collection are drawn from a variety of sources, including introductions and afterwords to her translations of Domenico Starnone’s novels, speeches, panel discussions, and essays for Italian and English publications.

 ‘In Praise of Echo’ likens the relationship between translator and writer as analogous to that of Echo and Narcissus: the translator “nowhere to be seen, always to be heard…[striving] to echo works of literature on their own linguistic terms, according to their vision and interpretation with it”, while the writer is “a singular, inimitable voice to be doubled and diffused”. Here, Lahiri challenges the assumption that the translator should be innocuous and unobtrusive, relegated to a traditional female archetype of subservience, arguing that in order to translate a text, “I must now only know what it means, but how it comes to mean what it means [while] as a writer, caught up in the act of writing, I am far more ignorant, and even unconscious of what I do”. (It is not without irony that male critics have chastised her for writing introductions to novels she has translated in which she analyses the text and her role as translator).  She then expands the analogy to argue that “a nation that flees its echoes is a culture that is turned inward, in love with…an idea of itself”, a situation which, as Narcissus – and history – shows, will not end well.

In other essays, she explores the way translation can serve as a source of revelation, enrichment and possibility, closing with a description of how translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses during her mother’s final days altered her perspective of both death and the text: the transformation of Latin into English of a poem about the passage from life to death enabling  her to “translate her unalterable absence [like Daphne] into everything that is green and rooted under the sun” 

Rich, deep and, above all, beautifully written, Translating Myself and Others exemplifies the power of words, language, and art “to explore the phenomenon and the consequences of change itself.”