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..

In the otherwise understated and graceful prose of this new book, there is remorse, even traces of dejection.

On the most obvious level, these essays track Jhumpa Lahiri’s deepening mastery of Italian and through it, a more profound understanding of English, the language in which she is most comfortable, if not too comfortable. Yet they also reveal a mind inclined to metaphorical thinking, endlessly circling the alchemical mystery of translation, comparing it now to this, now to that: to an echo, a metamorphosis, a doubling, a mirror in which one sees someone other than oneself, a conversation, a marriage between texts, etc. Each metaphor reflects some aspects of translation, never all. Still, the cumulative effect over the course of this book sharpens our view of what the imperfect art of translation can, in fact, do.

I find myself wondering if this too is translation, the act of summarizing and distilling her many thoughts on the matter in a succinct volume. I would not have thought it so before reading this book.

Readers will have a newfound appreciation of the translator's ability to illuminate..

Beautiful metaphors relating Lahiri’s pandemic experience to the works of Gramsci and Ovid illuminate the intricacies of translation that move beyond language into sensations and emotions.

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).

... a lyrical meditation on translation and a manifesto establishing translation as an artistic pursuit as creative and authentic as writing in the original language.

As a book of personal essays, Translating Myself and Others is less about translating or others than it is about the ways in which translation refracts Lahiri’s multiple selves: author, translator, academic, and language learner.

These self-appraisals are more interesting than the rather technical essays on other writers (three of which are on her friend Domenico Starnone’s novels).

The insights she offers sometimes nicely blend the personal with the more general.

The collection is singular for Lahiri’s ability to integrate the personal and the theoretical, drawing her examples from literature and from life.

... absorbing.

... Lahiri gives voice to the translator’s experience.

Lahiri’s Ovidian conception of literature — and life — is the enemy of stasis and complacency. Everything is in a state of transformation, of translation, and, because literary relationships are always in flux, there is no permanent, stable text. Just as every translation alters what it translates, every language a speaker adapts alters — and quickens — the speaker.

Possibly the most provocative piece is Where I Find Myself—on the process of translating her own novel Dove mi trovo, from the original Italian into English as Whereabouts (2021)—an essay that finds her first questioning the ethics of self-translation (probed with a surgical metaphor) and then impelled to make revisions for a second Italian edition. The weakest essay is Traduzione (stra)ordinaria / (Extra)ordinary Translation, an appreciation of Italian revolutionary and thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose Letters From Prison reveal a linguist as ferociously compelled to investigate the process of translation as Lahiri herself. Composed originally as remarks for a panel, it reads like an elegantly annotated list of bullet points that will have readers wishing Lahiri had revised it into a cohesive essay. Readers may also find themselves envious of the author’s students of translation at Princeton, but this sharp collection will have to do. Two essays originally composed in Italian are printed in the original in an appendix.

Lahiri gives insights into her processes, as well as penetrating and perceptive thoughts on the act of translating that will be especially illuminating for readers who enjoy translated works..

In a book that is deeply personal yet unaccountably opaque with regard to Lahiri’s self-production in language, this last piece is intense and absorbing.

Three essays on novels that Lahiri has translated by Domenico Starnone, first published as companions to them and slightly unbalancing the collection, are nonetheless among the best, demonstrating the well-rehearsed idea that translation is the most intimate form of reading. This is in keeping with all the essays: these are records of intense relationships rather than holistic critical appraisals. Lahiri uncovers resonances with translation throughout Starnone’s novels which, given the terms of her encounter, feel inevitable. Lahiri’s responses to other writers ­– Calvino, Gramsci, Ovid – are similarly focused, a priori, on translation.

... exhilarating.