In Translating Myself and Others she writes about learning the word innesto, meaning ‘graft’ (in the horticultural sense), from Ferrante’s third novel La figlia oscura (‘The Lost Daughter’, 2006) Ferrante uses innesto against the word’s dictionary meaning, so not to denote hard work, but to indicate ‘an imperfect joint, a failure’. Lahiri has lived in Rome on and off for almost a decade, and learned Italian through reading the works of Italian writers, in particular Lalla Romano and Elena Ferrante, whom she cites as inspirations. Lahiri’s short answer: ‘I write in Italian to feel free.’ Lahiri explains that In Other Words was inspired by ‘the realization that I am a writer without a true mother tongue’, and after the book was published, the number of people asking ‘Why Italian?’ increased. She goes beyond surface-level musings, describing both the grammatical contours of a new language and the challenges of writing in it. Courtesy: Princeton University PressĪ collection of ten personal essays on translation and self-translation (Lahiri translated the majority of the book’s content herself, having broken out of her self-imposed exile from English), Translating Myself and Others explores the often unspoken aspects of translation as a discipline through the course of the book, we see the writer’s interaction with Italian change and intensify. Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others, 2022, book cover. Did her ideas translate well in Italian? Did the people of Italy accept her writing a book in their mother tongue? Six years on, in the author’s latest book, Translating Myself and Others (2022), released this month, she says she wasn’t surprised to learn that they had not: ‘“ Lahiri scrive nella nostra lingua” (‘Lahiri writes in our language’) – means that Italian remains, by definition, the language of others as opposed to my own.’ In the otherwise understated and graceful prose of this new book, there is remorse, even traces of dejection. Lahiri was in love with Italian, and exuberantly so. While in Italian she was ‘a tougher, freer writer’, she did not want to know, yet, how she would fare as a translator. In Other Words also masked Lahiri’s vulnerabilities: in not translating the essays herself, she denied herself a chance to interact with her adopted language in a deeper way that translation would have offered. Translated by Ann Goldstein, the book is a series of essays about writing in a new language together they form a stirring meditation on the condition of departing from a long-known language or mother tongue and venturing into uncharted linguistic territory. Written in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2016 book In Other Words was the first time the American author (the London-born daughter of first-generation Bengali immigrants, and brought up in Rhode Island) moved away from writing in English.
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