What Jhumpa Lahiri found in translation

The essays are varied, comprising her written thoughts about translation over the last few years, some of which were composed in Italian. They are at their most absorbing when they contain personal reflections on life and language.

That apart, there are meditations on the way writers and thinkers such as Gramsci, Calvino and Ferrante use language. Also included are introductions to the novels of Domenico Starnone, whom she has translated from the Italian.

Looking back, Lahiri feels she was always a translator of sorts. Growing up meant living simultaneously in English and Bengali and translating between them for herself and others. In an early online essay, she wrote of being born into a “linguistic world split in two”, so that becoming a writer in English meant becoming a translator as well.

Later, a deeper knowledge of Italian transformed her writing. It allowed her to work with new words, experiment with styles and forms, and structure sentences differently. This shift in sensibility will be clear to those who read The Lowland, her last novel in English, and then Whereabouts, her first novel in Italian.

Dictionary definitions appear in several essays, allowing her to dig under words for their foundations. In her In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein, she wrote that the first book she bought in Italian was a pocket dictionary before a trip to Florence. It served as both a map and a compass. Then as now, it was “a kind of authoritative parent, without whom I can’t go out...a sacred text, full of secrets, of revelations”.

Lahiri emphasises that translation, which “simultaneously repeats, converts, reflects, and restores”, is central to the production of literature, not an accessory to it. This is an echo of her words in the introduction to the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. There, she pointed out that though language is the substance of literature, it also “locks it up again, confining it to silence and obscurity”, which is why “translation, in the end, is the key”.

Another strand here is the role of myth. Drawing a neat parallel, Lahiri says that the tale of "Echo and Narcissus" from Ovid’s Metamorphoses provided her with a way to explore what it means to translate a text from one language to another.

Like Echo, the translator’s art presupposes the existence of an original text, she explains. It also presupposes that “much of what makes that text beautiful and unique in the original will be impossible to maintain in another linguistic context”.

More than that, as she used to tell her Princeton students, the Metamorphoses, “governed by ambiguity, instability, and acts of becoming”, is a metaphor for converting texts from one language to another. They undergo “a radical, painful, and miraculous transformation”.

Translating her own writing made her understand deeply what Paul Valéry meant when he said that a work of art was never finished, only abandoned. Flaws or weaknesses in former texts become “immediately and painfully apparent”, turning every work into a work in progress. Thus, translation becomes the most intense form of reading and rereading.

“Everything I write in Italian,” Lahiri goes on to say, “is born with the simultaneous potential—or perhaps destiny is the better word here—of existing in English”. This brings to mind the time Gregory Rabassa was asked whether he knew enough Spanish to translate Gabriel García Márquez. Rabassa’s reply: “You asked me the wrong question. The real question is, do I know enough English?”

Lahiri begins and ends Translating Myself and Others with memories of her mother. Apt, because this is a figure who, for most of us, is our introduction to language. At the start, she recollects being asked to write “Dear Mom” while crafting a Mother’s Day card in a Rhode Island kindergarten.

However, she knew her mother not as “Mom” but “Ma”. While she was reluctant to use an English word her mother would have found alien, she was also embarrassed to employ the Bengali equivalent. (A predicament familiar to translators who struggle with the first word of Camus’s The Stranger.)

Decades later, during her mother’s last days, Lahiri finds consolation in Ovid’s work: “I kept thinking to myself, she’s not dying as much as becoming something else. In the face of death, the Metamorphoses had completely altered my perspective.”

In Sympathy for the Traitor, Mark Polizzotti says that translation may be the poor cousin of literature for some, but for others, “it is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment”. For Lahiri, as she eloquently demonstrates, writing and translating are aspects of the same activity that allow her “to swim greater distances, and at greater depths, through the mysterious element of language”.