Translating Myself and Others

by Jhumpa Lahiri

To be a writer-translator is to value both being and becoming.

What one writes in any given language typically remains as is, but translation pushes it to become otherwise.

If In Other Words needs a key, it’s the book itself. I began with a metaphor that led me to another, and then another. That was how my thinking unfolded. In the book, my slow but stubborn learning of Italian is a lake to cross, a wall to climb, an ocean to probe. A forest, a bridge, a child, a lover, a sweater, a building, a triangle.

In order to conquer any foreign language, one needs to open two principal doors. The first is comprehension. The second, the spoken language. In between, there are smaller doors, equally relevant: syntax, grammar, vocabulary, nuances of meaning, pronunciation. At this point, one gains relative mastery. In my case, I dared to open a third door: the written language.

Writing in another language reactivates the grief of being between two worlds, of being on the outside. Of feeling alone and excluded.

To read means, literally, to open a book, and at the same time, to open a part of one’s self.

I already knew that writing in a new language resembled a sort of blindness.

Why Italian? In order to develop another pair of eyes, in order to experiment with weakness.

It seems that my decision to write in Italian has emerged from nothing. But this isn’t true. My life is a series of grafts, one after the other.

But a language, even a foreign language, is something so intimate that it enters inside of us despite the fissure. It becomes a part of our body, our soul. It takes root in the brain, it emerges from our mouths. In time, it nestles in the heart. The graft that I’ve made puts a new language into circulation, instills new thoughts within me.

“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.” A language, a person, a country: everything is renewed only thanks to contact, closeness, and mixing with the other.

Writing is a way to salvage life, to give it form and meaning. It exposes what we have hidden, unearths what we have neglected, misremembered, denied. It is a method of capturing, of pinning down, but it is also a form of truth, of liberation.

To translate is to walk down numerous scary corridors, to grope in the dark.

A translation surgically alters the text’s identity, insisting upon a foreign linguistic DNA, requiring a transfusion of alternate grammar and syntax.

I began, on the first day of class, by saying that all translation must be regarded first and foremost as a metamorphosis: a radical, painful, and miraculous transformation in which specific traits and elements are shed and others are newly obtained.

Who is original, who belongs authentically to a place? Who does not? Why are those who are not original to a place—migrants who did not “get there first”—treated as they are?

I may have begun by writing my own books, but I was born with a translator’s disposition, in that my overriding desire was to connect disparate worlds. I

To immigrate is to observe carefully and copy certain cues. Perhaps total assimilation is not possible, nor even desirable. Each case is different, and each human being who has crossed a border is marked by a unique set of reactions and consequences, resulting in a pattern as distinct as fingerprints.

The writer who never translates is at a disadvantage in that he or she will be locked, Narcissus-like, for good or for ill, in an ongoing state of self-reflection. The writer who translates, on the other hand, will both appreciate the limits of any one given language—a crucial awareness, in my opinion—and also take a great leap.

to translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself.

Translation is about choosing, at times wisely, at times reluctantly, always with lingering misgivings (and here it is opportune to recall that in Latin, optare means both to choose and to wish). Translation generates innumerable “mights” and relatively few “shoulds,” causing meaning to keep leaning, like a boat on swelling seas, from one side to another.

To translate is to alter one’s linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.

Given that I read and write in both languages, my brain has developed blind spots.

But working with Italian, even a book that I have myself composed slips surprisingly easily in and out of my hands. This is because the language resides both within me and beyond my grasp.

But alienation, for better or for worse, establishes distance, and grants perspective, two things that are particularly crucial to the act of self-translation.

The laws of Starnone’s fictional universe, which correspond to the universe in general, remind us that everything in life is always on the brink of altering, vanishing, or turning on its head.

The only way to even begin to understand language is to love it so much that we allow it to confound us and to torment us to the extent that it threatens to swallow us whole.

“How easy it is for words to change the shape of things”

A translation may be understood as a marriage between texts: an intimate and, one hopes, everlasting bond.

A translation implies a relationship that is at once intimate and imperfect between two texts, notions, realities, moments.

Reading Gramsci’s letters, one realizes that every interpersonal relationship can be read as a form of translation.

The question of difference and equivalence in language is ongoing for the translator. We search for equivalents, knowing fully that, given the difference between one language and another, no true equivalent exists.

Renaming is a form of translation and also a form of love.

Translating means understanding, above all, how words slip and slide into each other, how they overlap, how they end up producing a fertile lexical promiscuity.