Earlier this year, I read Daniel Hahn’s excellent translation memoir Catching Fire, and I loved the experience so much that I jumped at the chance to read essays about translation by Jhumpa Lahiri – an author I’ve come to late, but whom I am loving. Princeton University Press kindly sent a review copy of Translating Myself and Others (2022), and here we are. It doesn’t quite count for Women in Translation month but it is certainly Women About Translation. Actually, it does include two essays translated into Italian, but I’m afraid I can’t read those.
Lahiri moved to Italy in 2012 and a few years later started publishing in Italian. She’s now written a novel, a collection of short stories, poetry and several works of non-fiction in Italian – but that wasn’t sufficient for this polymath polyglot! She has also turned her hand to translating her own work, which is the genesis of this collection of essays.
I don’t speak any language other than English, so reading Lahiri’s experience as an adult language learner, and writer, was a portal to another world – and she writes about it with her usual elegance:
Confronting a foreign language as an adult is a considerable challenge. And yet, the many doors I’ve had to open in Italian have flung wide, giving onto a sweeping, splendid view. The Italian language did not simply change my life; it gave me a second life, an extra life.
Reading, writing, and living in Italian, I feel like a reader, a writer, a person who is more attentive, active, and curious. Each new word encountered, learned, and listed in my notebook constitutes a small door. My Italian dictionary, meanwhile, serves as a doorway. I think of the books I read, the sentences I write, and the texts I finish all as doors, along with every conversation with an Italian friend, each occasion to express myself.
In terms of the title of the collection, the most relevant essay is ‘Where I Find Myself’ – originally published on Words Without Borders – which examines the process of turning Dove mi trovo into Whereabouts. It is certainly the essay I found more interesting, and Lahiri talks us through the contronting experience of returning to a ‘completed’ work with a new task at hand.
The profoundly destabilizing thing about self-translation is that the book threatens to unravel, to hurtle toward potential annihilation. It seems to annihilate itself. Or am I annihilating it? No text should sustain that level of scrutiny; at a certain point, it cedes. It’s the reading and the scrutinizing, the insistent inquiry implicit in the act of writing and translating, that inevitably jostles the text.
In this essay, and throughout the collection, Lahiri tends more towards the abstract and philosophical rather than the word-by-word experience of translating. I find an approach like Daniel Hahn’s – in which he details tiny decisions, as well as larger ones – is very satisfying to read. Lahiri’s writing is entertaining and thought-provoking, but harder to take grasp of. I suppose it’s easier to get a handle on how a translator might line up three potential options and land on one particular word than it is to construct a broader philosophy of translation.
I would like to pause for a moment on the ramifications of being first as opposed to second. Now that I have become a translator in addition to remaining a writer, I am struck by how many people regard what I am doing as “secondary” and thus creatively inferior in nature. Translation, it seems, is considered imitative as opposed to imaginative. Some people, when I tell them I am translating someone else’s work as opposed to writing something of my own, appear almost sorry for me, as if translation projects represent a dearth of my own ideas, the solution for a fallow period, a drying up of my original voice. Readers who react with suspicion to a work in translation reinforce a perceived hierarchy in literature between an original work and its imitation. This hierarchy, sadly prevalent, between what is authentic and what is derivative—one might take another step and say, between what is pure and what is tainted—influences not only how we regard literature but how we regard one another. Who is original, who belongs authentically to a place? Who does not?
Sections like this – jumping off from Lahiri’s personal experience being a translator, or what being a translator means for her reputation – really interested me. It’s a good conversation to have about authenticity. But I did question why she has conflated translator and translation? Isn’t it possible for somebody to think of a translator being imitative (at least to an extent, and without diminishing the creativity needed) without disparaging the idea of reading something in translation?
Elsewhere, I found some of her bold statements rather confusing. She writes this with certainty: “While the shock of change is often a catalyst for art, art is not—should not—be an instrument for change of any kind.” Surely that isn’t true? Surely it rules out enormous amounts of fiction, non-fiction, visual art, cinema..? But then sometimes she says something so pithily that you forgive her occasional surprising views. For example, I loved the simplicity of this: ‘Translation is about choosing, at times wisely, at times reluctantly, always with lingering misgivings’.
The essay collection is structured chronologically by publication date, and includes three introductions/afterwords she wrote to her translations of three Domenico Starnone books – which, because of that structure, don’t appear together. The longest essay is about Antonia Gramsci, and I do think you have to have some interest in him to really get the most of it.
It’s definitely a mixed bag, and some are less likely to have the widest appeal – but there is also a lot of really thoughtful and thought-provoking consideration of the act of translation, and what it tells us about writing, language, writers and readers. It certainly tends to the abstract rather than the specific, so bear that in mind – and adds to my admiration for the many strings to Lahiri’s bow.
