My only language is English, my working knowledge of my ancestral language, Malayalam, limited to phrases here and there and a fairly coherent understanding. Indeed, translation itself is a concept I can only gaze at from a distance. Some are even kept in their original Italian towards the end of the book, and these essays I cannot claim to know first hand. They are the introductions of books she has translated, ruminations on her own work, some of them originally penned in English and others in Italian. Lahiri’s essays are excerpted from many places. I would not have thought it so before reading this book. 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. That of interpreter, close reader, devotee, and scholar. Lahiri has always been a translator in its purest sense, learning both Bengali and English in early years, but also in the broader, more imaginative sense she sets forth in these essays. Yet, upon reading her collection of essays Translating Myself and Others, which focuses primarily on the translation efforts of more recent years, I can see the connections in the eras.
It is tempting to separate the arc of Jhumpa Lahiri’s career in two distinct eras-her early work, sparse, understated fiction of the Indian diaspora, and her later work, in and out of the Italian language and immersed in Italian culture.
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