Translating Myself and Others Quotes

“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.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“Containers may be the destiny of many in that they hold our remains after death. But this novel reminds us that narrative refuses to stay put, and that the effort of telling stories only pins things down so far. In the end it is language itself that is the most problematic container; it holds too much and too little at the same time.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“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.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“We write books in a fixed moment in time, in a specific phase of our consciousness and development. That is why reading words written years ago feels alienating. You are no longer the person whose existence depended on the production of those words.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“Only when things are reread, reexamined, revisited, are they understood: letters, photos, words in dictionaries.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“Translation will open up entire realms of possibilities, unforeseen pathways that will newly guide and inspire the writer’s work, and possibly even transform it. For to translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“When I began writing stories as a child, I wrote copies of what I read, and in many respects, that is what I’ve have continued doing, in only a slightly less obvious way. The illusion of artistic freedom is just that, an illusion. No words are “my words”—I merely arrange and use them in a certain way.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“I continue to admit that Italian is not my language, that it's an adopted language I love and use without possession. But I also ask myself: Who possesses a language, and why? Is it a question of lineage? Mastery? Use? Affect? Attachment? What does it mean, in the end, to belong to a language?”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“It has been said by many that the risk, for the author who self-translates, is to rewrite more than translate, given that there are no rules to obey when the only authority is oneself. What is the meaning of obedience, of faithfulness, when the other does not exist. 57”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“When it comes to literature, wishes are important to keep in mind. One of the first things I learned when I started writing stories was that characters must desire something. And if we unpack the word desire, from the Latin desiderare, meaning, literally, away from the stars, we learn that every desire implies a distance, an absence, a lack of satisfaction. That longing, that empty space, is where the volcanic potential of the optative genoito resides.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“Had the myth of Narcissus and Echo had a happy ending, their child might have grown up to become a writer-translator like me. I can trace aspects of my own creative impulses to both figures. For writing is, among other things, a deep and direct regarding of oneself. The best of writing comes from unflinching introspection. And yet I see myself equally in Echo. From my earliest memories I have been listening to the world, trying to cast back the experiences of others. 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 have devoted a great deal of energy in my life to absorbing the language and culture of others: the Bengali of my parents, and then later, after I became an adult, Italian, a language which I have now creatively adopted. When I write in Italian, one way to perceive it would be as an echo of the language itself. Let’s go back to the scientific explanation—what happens when a language, in encountering a foreign body (in this case, me) is cast back differently?
Some Italian readers[…]”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“The trick to a good translation is to be unable to recognize which is which. The minute a translation “feels” or “sounds” like a translation, the reader jumps back and accuses it, rejects it. The enormous expectation we place upon translation is that it sound “true.” This is why the demands upon a translation are even greater than those placed on an original text.
But what makes something original, as opposed to a derivation? As a writer, I can vouch for the fact that everything “original” I have ever written derives necessarily from something else, not just from my experiences but from my reading of other works, and through inspiration I have drawn, consciously and unconsciously, from countless other authors. Creativity does not exist in a vacuum, and much of it involves responding by imitating, as theorists from Plato to Erich Auerbach to Harold Bloom have reminded us. I am attracted to myths—incidentally, the very first stories I learned to read—not only because they point me back to my own origins as a reader, but because they are the only original stories that exist: stories with counterparts in all cultures that belong to everyone and to no one.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“To translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“To translate a book is to enter into a relationship with it, to approach and accompany it, to know it intimately, word by word, and to enjoy the comfort of its company in return.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“Why Italian? In order to develop another pair of eyes, in order to experiment with weakness”
― Jhumpa Lahiri , Translating Myself and Others

“Writing in another language reactivates the grief of being between two worlds, of being on the outside. Of feeling alone and excluded.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“Translation has transformed my relationship to writing. It shows me how to work with new words, how to experiment with new styles and forms, how to take greater risks, how to structure and layer my sentences in different ways. Reading already exposes me to all this, but translating goes under the skin and shocks the system, such that these new solutions emerge in unexpected and revelatory ways. Translation establishes new rhythms and approaches that cross-pollinate the process of contemplating and crafting my own work. The attention to language that translation demands is moving my writing notonly in new directions, but into an increasingly linguistically
focused dimension.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“It was only by self-translating that I finally understood what Paul Valéry meant when he said that a work of art was never finished, only abandoned... The act of self-translation enables the author to restore a previously published work to its most vital and dynamic state—that of a work-in-progress—and to repair and recalibrate as needed.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“To translate is to alter one’s linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others

“The question has led to a realization: that while the desire to learn a new language is considered admirable, even virtuous, when it comes to writing in a new language, everything changes. Some perceive this desire as a transgression, a betrayal, a deviation.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others