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.
