Such questions have occupied Lahiri’s mind for pretty much her entire life. Indeed, her new book, which pays homage to translation in its title, opens with a childhood memory that summarizes well what is at stake in this literary activity: making cards for Mother’s Day in a multicultural kindergarten classroom. She recalls being torn between the convenient choice of the anglophone “Mum”, which the kids had been instructed to use, or the Bengali “Ma”, more familiar to her and her mother but inevitably alienating for others. Going over the same dilemma again in 2021, in preparation for this collection, Lahiri realized that behind such an ideologically loaded memory lurks not only an act of writing but also one of cultural translation. Even as an established author, brought to prominence by her first book of short stories, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies (2000), Lahiri has continued to see her life through the refracting prism of translation. As the daughter of Indian immigrants living in the United States, she confesses in the introduction that she has often found herself grappling with the paradox of having written in English about characters chatting in Bengali in her head, while feeling almost no sense of belonging towards either of the two languages she grew up speaking. Her drive to translate originated very early on as a visceral impulse to fill in what almost felt like an ontological lacuna, setting her on an Oedipal quest for self-discovery in which translating the writing of other people, both dead and living, came prior to having enough confidence to produce her own. Putting herself in Descartes’s shoes, in one of the many games of transformation and self-identification that she engages with during the course of the book, she declares: “I translate, therefore I am”.
When she decided to pick up Italian as her third language, Lahiri’s self-awareness and linguistic horizons expanded further. With the rendering of her own first Italian novel, Dove mi trovo (2018), into English as Whereabouts (2021), Lahiri saw the hierarchy between what is authentic and what is derivative finally collapsing beneath her feet. This second version of Dove mi trovo generated a third: a revised Italian edition stemming from her own act of working across the two idioms, correcting former inaccuracies and mistranslations. Reading Translating Myself and Others feels like visiting a private museum in the making, an archive which Lahiri has been curating for years and which puts beautifully imperfect objects on display, the unfinished results of her various transnational experiments with literature. Throughout ten essays in English and Italian, some of which have never been published before, Lahiri takes the reader on a journey from Rome to Princeton and back that revisits her own revisions and transformations—becoming, de facto, yet another version of what literature from Ovid to Kafka and beyond has immortalized as the “Metamorphoses” (in the plural, a form which, for Lahiri, wins over anything singular).
Ovid’s most celebrated work about flux and change provides Translating Myself and Others with the ideal metamorphic frame, offering a convenient start and end point to the collection. The myth of Echo and Narcissus, which informs the title of the fourth essay, “In Praise of Echo”, is the myth that Lahiri herself narrated to her students when she first tried to explain what “translation” is during a seminar at Princeton. In her own rereading of the story, “Echo” stands for the unjust treatment that this linguistic and cultural operation has received in literary history, seen as a mere “shadow” of the original, while Narcissus is the writer that never translates and therefore is “locked in a perennial state of self-reflection”. Yet Ovid’s presence is also palpable in the very thematic structure of Lahiri’s work. Three of the collection’s essays were written originally in Italian—and two of them, “Il Calvino del mondo” and “Traduttrice di me stessa”, have been included in the original in the appendix; considered all together, they encapsulate the quintessentially Ovidian tension between continuous narrative (carmen perpetuum) and self-contained episodes. The essays are ordered chronologically; while we can read and learn from each of them individually, it is also possible to make a coherent whole and follow Lahiri’s personal and literary evolution throughout. The result is a book suspended between unity and hodgepodge, orderly lines and scattered dots. Just as we encounter Lahiri’s own metamorphosis as a translator and a writer—a combination that allows her “to value both being and becoming”—we are also confronted with the transformations of other “characters” who are dear to her. In the “Afterword”, which almost turns the collection into a memoir, Lahiri compares her mother’s inevitable decline to the slowed-down transformation of an Ovidian figure. Just a few days before her death, her mother was pointing towards some plants on the dressing table next to her bed, claiming that she would continue to dwell inside them, like a modern Daphne. Vivid imagery and metaphors help Lahiri, in the same way as they helped Ovid, to explain what is apparently untranslatable in life—whether it is death, illness or exile—but, as scholar Philip Hardie contends, they also "create an unresolved and shifting exchange of literal and figurative meanings that precludes identifying" identity as something certain. Ovid gives Lahiri the pretext to enter a discussion about identities on the move, about what it means to be truly part of a country or a language.
Metaphors are the driving force and leitmotif of the opening essay, “Why Italian?”, written before Lahiri had translated anything from Italian into English. “Why Italian?” is a question that the author has always been at pains to answer; she confesses that In altre parole (In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions), her previous work of non-fiction, emerged in the process as a means of satisfying the morbid curiosity of many Italian native speakers who would constantly demand justification from her: “You’re of Indian origin, were born in London, raised in America. You write books in English. What does Italian have to do with any of that?” The experience of accessing an entirely new language feels somehow impenetrable, and one has to devise one’s own verbal and visual wiles to come to terms with it. Lahiri’s experience of translation, in other words, has always required its own translation. “Why Italian?” is home to three new metaphors that help her do just that: an act of metapherein, of carrying meaning over through images, in a sort of linguistic reincarnation. The snapshots that result from this experiment are indebted to two women writers like her: Lahiri’s ideas of translation as a door and as a pair of blind eyes come from Lalla Romano (from a book also curiously titled Le metamorfosi), while her notion of the “graft”—a consciously imprecise rendering of the Italian “innesto”—is borrowed from Elena Ferrante. What such diverse images have in common is that they all conceive of the translator’s job as sensory or even tactile, something that requires the use of hands to grope along, to knock on doors never opened before, or to plant new elements into old ones, cutting, adjusting, and welding them together. Translation is the seed that acquires strength from its own displacement—like Lahiri herself, “the fruit of a risky graft that is geographical and cultural”. The act of retracing one’s steps, of finding one’s bearings over and over again, is central to her literary activity and personal diaspora, and the metaphors in “Why Italian?” are themselves the product of a fresh awareness, grafted onto the earlier, less ripe imagery of In altre parole. Overall, they offer a perfect testimony to Lahiri’s programmatic statement in the introduction: “I have been thinking about translation for my entire conscious life”.
“Why Italian?”, opening with a question, also ends with a question:
Who possesses a language, and why? Is it a question of lineage? Mastery? Use? Affect? Attachment? What does it mean, in the end, to belong to a language?
These interrogatives resurface throughout the collection in multiple places, especially in the fourth and ninth essays, “In Praise of Echo” and “Lingua/Language”. Largely dedicated to the myth in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “In Praise of Echo” shows how, by translating herself and others, Lahiri keeps clear of becoming a modern Narcissus: the nationalist preaching to “make America great again” or arguing for “Italians first”, enamored with the illusory image of a country that needs nothing other than itself to prosper. There is no such thing as a “real America” or a “real Italy”, Lahiri writes; a culture that turns back to its past in solitude, instead of moving forward and acknowledging diversity as richness, has no choice but to disintegrate like Narcissus. What she hopes for instead is a place—in literature as well as in real life—that can be home to hybrid creatures like herself, a writer-translator born from the joyful union between Echo and Narcissus that never finds completion in Ovid’s masterpiece. If the Roman poet draws attention to the nature of loss, Lahiri focuses on what is gained in the process. Echo, alias translation, does not simply “repeat” but “gives back”; her voice outlives that of her male counterpart. In “Lingua/Language”, similarly, Lahiri rejects the notion of lingua madre, writing that “lingue, not lingua, is everyone’s point of origin”, for in such a plurality she can find “a network of wider, friendlier relations based not only on mother and daughter but also involving aunt, grandmother, cousin and granddaughter”. Hence the use of the plural “Others” in the book’s title, which essentially boils down to understanding the history of translation as the journey of multiple and migratory languages and points of view.
In taking responsibility for the words of other writers, Lahiri shuns the risk of becoming too self-referential. After her justification for learning Italian, three out of the nine remaining essays provide paratextual comments on Domenico Starnone’s Italian novels, which she translated into English over the course of six years. While reading her introductions to Ties and Trick, her translations of Lacci and Scherzetto respectively, in the second and third essays, I could not keep myself from wondering why Lahiri has been such a voracious and analytical reader of this Neapolitan writer with no apparent direct connection to her. By the end of the seventh essay, which contains Lahiri’s afterword to her third translation of Starnone, Trust, everything made sense: Starnone’s plots resonate with her because they reveal a structure and a way of thinking that is just like her own. A great attention to detail and an entrancing fondness for words and their etymologies, for unpacking, slowing the process down, jumping in and out of the multiple Chinese boxes around which the narrative is structured, are typical features in both writers. They share the belief that certain elements within a story need to appear in multiple places at different points in time, to be revised and thrown into question. Starnone has a passion for tiny objects, apparently insignificant or trivial—letters, photographs, souvenirs—which, however, take on enormous value by virtue of their being “read”, or looked at, over and over again. In Ties, Vanda manages to reflect on her relationship with Aldo only through the lens of chaos, after an act of vandalism leaves their house upside down, every secret exposed in material form; she discovers that their cat—Labes, signifying “collapse”, “curse”, “plague”—was named by her unfulfilled husband after the dusty pages of a Latin dictionary found open.
In her analyses, Lahiri shows how well she understands how Starnone constructed his prose, zooming with surgical precision into his recurring symbolisms, yet in the process she also reveals something about herself. Repetition is not only the formal feature that she, as an exceptionally attentive reader, is willing to pin down—she notices, for example, that the Italian adverb “invece” appears sixty-four times in Trust—but it is also the fil rouge that pulls her own collection together, capturing translation in its essence. “Invece”, as she explains, has roots in the Latin prefix vece, indicating an act of substitution or takeover, depriving and enriching at once. Translation fulfils an altogether similar function: it sneaks into a text and alters its DNA; it triggers revision and urges any aspiring writer not to take anything for granted, to let go of the egotistical desire to possess or control a text forever. “Juxtaposition”, the essay dedicated to Starnone’s Trick, ends on the powerful remark that Lahiri’s version, the first in English, “is just one of many that might have been”. This reality opens up a horizon of unexplored possibilities, a network of relationships between people and objects existing within and outside literary works and merging into one another. The Latin lexicon, seen in Ties, is the very same tool that Lahiri consults in the Firestone Library for her own translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a project in the pipeline that she is currently undertaking with the help of a colleague at Princeton, Yelena Baraz. Equally, Narcissus’s fatal mirror/pond in the same text parallels the simulacrum to which Dove mi trovo is compared after its English version, Whereabouts, came out: a silvery surface that makes transfer in both directions always possible, confounding the order of things and how they are brought to light. That’s the ultimate “trick” of translation: by plunging us into the boundless sea of literature, it makes us alert to the external world, a world which will always change insofar as we, who inhabit and infuse it with meaning, change.
On the surface, the “plurality” so dear to Lahiri seems to be at odds with the notion of individual creativity—and in line with a traditional misconception that sees translation as an act merely accessory or ancillary to literature proper. In fact, even when she “hides behind” the authors she translates, Lahiri shows a protean capacity to absorb and readapt signifiers that will come in handy for her own prose. Creativity does not exist in a vacuum, in the “void” that provides an anagram for “Ovid”. In “Traduzione (stra)ordinaria / (Extra)ordinary Translation”, a comment upon Antonio Gramsci’s output during his imprisonment, she names the Italian Marxist philosopher (and translator), after the title of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “an impressive interpreter of maladies.” She detects echoes and similarities between Gramsci’s exile and her own confinement during the ongoing pandemic, and finds in him a model for the translator anyone should aspire to be: always in transit—even after his death, as his ashes were tra(n)slated, or transported, from Verano to Testaccio—with no stable roots. Taking the reader through Gramsci’s personal letters and notebooks, which show a sustained engagement with various languages, Lahiri introduces a dimension of intimacy, almost tentativeness, reminiscent of her own linguistic operations—most notably described in the sixth essay, “Where I Find Myself”, which takes the form of a diary “translating” in polished form the Italian notes she wrote during the process of transforming Dove mi trovo into Whereabouts. Similarly, the final essay traces the story of a writer, Italo Calvino, who “has never written purely in Italian” despite being recognized as one of the most influential Italian authors of his generation, a man whose “Italianness” was “always tilting toward the Other”. Translating also means transforming the perception commonly held of certain established writers, revealing what is quirky and less known about them, shedding a ray of light onto their dusty, seemingly finished portraits. “Calvino Abroad” ends on the rather funky image of Calvino as an astronaut, who knows no other boundaries than the sky. To translate means to gravitate in space—yet another metaphor that Lahiri skyrockets into the universe of literary criticism.
Ultimately, the value of Translating Myself and Others lies in showing what runs under the surface and beneath the skin of Lahiri’s own writing, revealing how she plays with languages and shapes them in such a way that allows her to find a distinctive literary voice, her own linguaggio. The result is a collection that is unafraid of experimenting with weakness, obsessed with scraps of papers and notes in diaries, with what happens behind the scenes and in the margins—for “the untranslatable margins of every language”, as Calvino wrote, are the place where the real fun happens, where “[l]a vera letteratura” is at its best. “An Ode to the Mighty Optative”, the fifth essay in the collection, was my favourite, precisely because of the spaces it opens up for the latent and the promising. In discussing the possible renderings of certain passages from Aristotle’s Poetics, Lahiri asserts that if literature had a mood, it would be the optative, which the ancient Greeks used to express wishes. The act of turning inanimate literary texts into longing, possibly “moody” living creatures is doubtless very Ovidian, but there is more than playful personification at stake here. Lahiri reminds us that translation is all about alternatives, that it “generates multiple ‘mights’ and relatively few ‘shoulds.’” It is not prescriptive but imaginative. And yet, by implicitly suggesting that the potent verb “genoito” should be translated as “might be”, as opposed to “ought to be”, she also frames translation as a resolute, political action: to translate is to engage. It means making a choice now—if only for things to change later—and making it with full awareness that if you inevitably lose some of your resources along the way, the potential to win the next round, to gain from what you have left behind, can never be far from sight. Translation, to use one final metaphor, is a democratic furnace of hope: fueled with the unremitting stock of arguments and counterarguments, conversations and reverberations that have flown and always will flow from the mouths of Narcissuses and their Echoes, from ourselves and others.
