Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by an award-winning writer and literary translator

Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.

With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers.

Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

"[Translating Myself and Others] movingly describes [Lahiri’s] history with translation from her experiences as an immigrant child . . . to her early literary-translation efforts and her eventual decision to move to Rome and learn Italian." - Vulture

"Poetic." - New York Magazine

"Lahiri explores her relationship with literature, translation, and the English and Italian languages in this exhilarating collection. . . . Lucid and provocative, this is full of rewarding surprises." - Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A scrupulously honest and consistently thoughtful love letter to ‘the most intense form of reading…there is.'" - Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"[An] absorbing new collection of essays. . . . Translating Myself and Others is a subtle yet ultimately engrossing work, somewhat academic at times, yet infused with the kind of understated, often startling capacity for observation that has always been Lahiri’s literary superpower." - Bookpage

"Translating Myself and Others is a thought-provoking collection of essays about the art of modern translation." - Foreword Reviews

"[Lahiri] explores [translation] with her customary rigor and candidness in this new essay collection, featuring several pieces originally written in Italian and translated into English by Lahiri for the first time, an act of metamorphosis as dazzling to her as it is to the reader." - Chicago Review of Books

"These deeply thoughtful meditations . . . illuminate the art of literary alchemy." - Saga Magazine