Translating Myself and OthersJhumpa Lahiri. Translating Myself and Others . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 208 pp (original) (raw)
Related papers
Textus: English Studies in Italy 32.2, 2019
Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the most prominent contemporary authors of Indian origin writing in English. Her short stories and novels raise many important issues, such as the quest for self, the investigation of diasporic identities, the exploration of the everyday tensions and cultural conflicts of Bengali expatriates to the United States. Writing in the interstices of borders between languages, because of her multifaceted Bengali-American background, Lahiri's recent linguistic migration to the Italian language brings to the fore the link between language and self through literature. This article surveys the main manifestations of writing as self-quest in Lahiri's Italian production. To do so, it addresses the category of "self-begetting fiction" (Kellman 1976; 1980) as instrumental in foregrounding a shift towards a more abstract and yet autobiographic style. On the one hand, I argue that Lahiri's Italian writing assumes the shape of a "fragile shelter", despite her exposure to linguistic limitations. On the other, I argue that these limitations are still envisaged as a reparative strategy, evocative of Ricoeur's narrative identity. In Lahiri's hands, the fiction of self-begetting becomes one of self-definition and rebirth, a Heideggerian invitation to 'dwelling in language' which eventually prevails over the aesthetics of dislocation.
Contemporary Women Writing Race: Textual Interventions and Intersections Symposium, 2021
Jhumpa Lahiri became world famous for her Pulitzer-prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies, in 1999. The bestselling books that followed, namely The Namesake (2003), Unaccustomed Earth (2009) and The Lowland (2013) share, with her debut, the same Bengali-American subject matter and focus on migrant families. Lahiri has written expansively about the pressure and cultural weight placed on her shoulders as the figurehead of “Indian American” literature. In 2015, she took the radical decision to no longer write in English, and to choose Italian instead – a language in which she believes to be “a tougher, freer writer”. Following the publication of her 2015 language memoir, In Altre Parole (In Other Words), she wrote a novel entitled Dove Mi Trovo which she translated as Whereabouts in May 2021. I argue that this subversive linguistic choice allows Lahiri to escape the burden of representation while anchoring herself even further into the Western canon. In this presentation, I compare her English-language and Italian-language writing to suggest that what occurs in her most recent publications is not only a linguistic ‘deracination’ but also a form of ‘deracialisation’. Leaving behind detailed descriptions of Bengali life, Lahiri’s Italian texts are more impressionistic and meditative. They contain nameless and wandering characters and take place in unidentified locations. And yet, the themes of identity and otherness continue to dominate her writing, while her grammatically perfect Italian is, as scholars have observed, somewhat peculiar to a native ear. As such, Lahiri’s Italian stories reveal the pain of being unable to indulge in a sense of belonging fully to a culture and of being devoid of secure roots.
2022
Francesco Cusani Confalonieri (1802-1879) was a well-known Lombard historian, a great prolific translator, and a publisher during the Italian Risorgimento. Despite his important contribution to modernize Italian culture, his intellectual activities as well as his subjectivity have been barely investigated. With an integrated approach to archival research and the paratextual analysis of his translations, this proposal aims at bringing to light for the first time the profile of Cusani as a translator in the European socio-political context of the 19th century. Thanks to an in-depth archival study on Cusani’s personal documents and letters, till now untouched, the paper will trace the connection between his literary activity as a translator and his political involvement as a patriot. To achieve this purpose, the first part of the presentation, conducted by Federica Re, will examine his educational and cultural background, and analyse how it was influenced by Romanticism and liberal ideas. Then, the focus will be on the cultural and implicit political meaning of his translations of Walter Scott's works and of his contribution to the translation projects by “Pirotta e Compagni”, the Milanese publishing house he was a member of from 1835 to 1859. Drawing on Batchelor’s (2018) studies, the second part, led by Marco Barletta, will present an analysis of Cusani’s paratextual interventions in his translations of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. The spotlight on Bulwer’s translated novels will clarify and amplify Cusani’s individuality and subjectivity: on the one side, it will provide evidence of his active role in the modernization of the Italian culture through his didactic use of prefaces and footnotes; on the other side, it will attest his participation in the nation building process and his patriotism through the use of cutting comments against Bulwer’s sarcastic statements about Italian culture.
The Writer's Double: Translation, Writing, and Autobiography
Romance Studies, 2009
Self-translation is generally considered as something marginal, a sort of cultural or literary oddity, as a borderline case of both translation and literary studies. Recent research in the history of this particular area has shown that self-translation has a long tradition, continues to be a widespread phenomenon in several cultures, and is closely linked to the representation of self. In this context, this paper seeks to explore the links between creative writing, self-translation, and autobiography through a reading of Francesca Duranti's novels. The fi rst part of the essay gives a brief overview of her fi ctional representations of the 'split self'; the second part focuses on the production of a 'double text': Sogni mancini (1996), and the English self-translation, Left-handed Dreams (2000). It is argued that the process of self-translation is often associated with the problematization of identities, and that bilingualism is sometimes used as a way to regenerate writing. This type of writing is explicitly associated with the movement of the writer him/herself as is the case with Duranti, who draws on her own experience as a migrant from one culture to another to refl ect on what it means to be 'translated' both geographically and textually. Translation becomes an integral part in the creation, embodiment, and voicing of meaning and identity.
Journal of Literary Multilingualism, 2023
This article compares the Italian original of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel Dove mi trovo (2018) with the English self-translation, which was published in 2021 under the title Whereabouts. Lahiri claims that her embrace of Italian was a means to escape the alienation caused by her bilingual upbringing in Bengali and English. Paradoxically, this quest for wholeness was coupled with insecurity in Italian, a language in which Lahiri only achieved fluency in middle age. Self-translation puts this linguistic ambiguity to a new stress test. In the confrontation between Lahiri's Italian-language and Anglophone selves, her English becomes affected by Italian calques, creating a hybridized language mirroring the author's own hybrid linguistic consciousness.