Menu
Next in the queue
54
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
21/100Critics
52/100Scholars
89/100Author:
Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Date:
May 17, 2022
In 2016, the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri published In Other Words, the story of her quest to learn Italian, which involved moving with her family to Italy to immerse herself fully in her adopted language. The book builds on that account through eight essays that reflect her early career as a translator.
What The Reviewers Say
With the fervor of a true language person, Lahiri dives into the dictionaries. She savors unexpected etymologies. She offers lists of near-synonyms. She dedicates an entire essay to the optative mood in ancient Greek...Above all, she makes herself at home in the unhomey — unheimlich, eerie, uncanny — borderlands between languages.
Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the 'essential aesthetic and political mission' of translation. She is excellent in all three modes — so excellent, in fact, that I, a translator myself, could barely read this book. I kept putting it aside, compelled by Lahiri's writing to go sit at my desk and translate.
Lahiri depicts the soul of translation.
A vision emerges of translation as a site where the physical and the textual, the extraordinary and the ordinary, intersect. 'Gramsci', she concludes, 'embodied and enacted translation both ordinary and extraordinary.' The same can be said of Jhumpa Lahiri..
