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Translating Myself and Others

• Jhumpa Lahiri
• X / Twitter

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Copyright year: 2022
• Main content: 208
• Keywords: Writing ; Literature ; Essay ; Self-translation ; Verb ; Poetry ; Antonio Gramsci ; Writer ; Author ; Contraction (grammar) ; Noun ; Italo Calvino ; Translation ; Prose ; Afterword ; Publication ; Grammar ; Language ; Grammatical mood ; Storytelling ; Creative writing ; Adjective ; Dictionary ; Short story ; Clothing ; Allusion ; Thought ; Lingua (play) ; Linguistic system ; Analogy ; Romance languages ; Metaphor ; Interpreter of Maladies ; Preposition and postposition ; Cultural translation ; Idem ; Measurement ; Adverb ; Newspaper ; Phrase (music) ; Leonora Carrington ; Cosmopolitanism ; Sentence (linguistics) ; Listening ; Explanation ; Epigraph (literature) ; Conceit ; Dialect ; Jhumpa Lahiri ; Humour ; National language ; Spoken language ; Typesetting ; Lingua (journal) ; Scrutiny (journal) ; The Other Hand ; Audiobook ; Genre ; Glossary ; Joseph McElroy ; Literary Hub ; Illustration ; Puebloan peoples ; Novelist ; Reading (process) ; Mr. Palomar ; Dialectic ; G. K. Chesterton ; Disciplina ; Participle
• Published: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9780691238609

Translating Myself and Others

Jhumpa lahiri.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published May 17, 2022

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

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.

Confronting a foreign language as an adult is considerable challenge. And yet, the many doors I've had to open in Italian have flung wide, opening onto a sweeping, splendid view. The Italian language did not simply change my life; it gave me a second life, an extra life.

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• Translating Myself and Others

In this Book

• Jhumpa Lahiri
• Published by: Princeton University Press

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.

Table of Contents

• Title page, Copyright
• In Memoriam
• pp. vii-viii
• Introduction
• (1) Why Italian?
• (2) Containers: Introduction to Ties by Domenico Starnone
• (3) Juxtaposition: Introduction to Trick by Domenico Starnone
• (4) In Praise of Echo: Reflections on the Meaning of Translation
• (5) An Ode to the Mighty Optative: Notes of a Would-be Translator
• (6) Where I Find Myself: On Self-Translation
• (7) Substitution: Afterword to Trust by Domenico Starnone
• (8) Traduzione (stra)ordinaria / (Extra)ordinary Translation: On Gramsci
• (9) Lingua /Language
• pp. 131-140
• (10) Calvino Abroad
• pp. 141-146
• (Afterword) Translating Transformation: Ovid
• pp. 147-156
• Acknowledgments
• pp. 157-158
• Notes on the Essays
• pp. 159-160
• (Appendix) Two Essays in Italian
• pp. 161-181
• Selected Bibliography
• pp. 182-190
• pp. 191-198

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Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri review – the sanctuary of language

The novelist’s collection of essays on translation only hint at what led her to take refuge in Italian

T here aren’t many writers who radically remake their style over the course of their life: we might think of Joyce’s revolutions, Woolf’s renewals, or what Jeanette Winterson called the “furnace work” that Eliot undertook on his mature style for Four Quartets .

Rarer still are those who change the language they write in, but to names such as Beckett and Nabokov we can add Jhumpa Lahiri. At the turn of the millennium, Lahiri was a young star of American literature, winning a Pulitzer prize for her debut, Interpreter of Maladies . She could have carried on like that, but little over a decade later, after publication of her novel The Lowland in 2013, she stopped writing in English and took up Italian.

The results so far have been rewarding: the account of her language shift, In Other Words (2016); her extraordinary novel Whereabouts (2021); and her selections, translations and annotations for The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2019), the best anthology of its kind I’ve read.

Now we have Translating Myself and Others , a collection of essays on translation. As Lahiri notes, “I was a translator before I was a writer”: her mother tongue is Bengali, and in In Other Words she wrote of the “continuous sense of estrangement” this gave her in America. Her move to Italian was perhaps a form of taking control, of choosing her own estrangement.

She writes of the appeal and challenges of writing in Italian. She feels like an impostor, a sense not alleviated when Italians ask her why she is writing “in our language”, or when a newspaper refers to her work as “my ‘Italian’ poems”. (“Why ‘Italian’ in scare quotes? Is it because I write in an Italian that’s false, spurious, slanted, nonexistent?”) She vents frustration on translation being seen as “imitative as opposed to imaginative”, and is persuasive on the difficulty of translating your own work: “There are no rules to obey when the only authority is oneself.” These self-appraisals are more interesting than the rather technical essays on other writers (three of which are on her friend Domenico Starnone’s novels).

Lahiri writes in Italian to “feel free” but also values how it makes her slow down – “I knocked on this door quite late, and it creaks a little” – and think differently, like a modernist painter who restricts herself to two colours to learn how it makes her see. A new language, she writes, is a form of blindness, but “I believe I’m blind even in English, only in reverse. Familiarity, dexterity and ease with a language can confer another form of blindness.”

That is not the only blind spot in a book that shows too little of the “myself” in the title. The hole that runs throughout is the answer to why Lahiri moved to Italy, and to Italian, in the first place. She didn’t answer it in In Other Words and she doesn’t here. Is it simply that, as Leopardi put it, “no language has enough words and phrases to correspond to and express all the infinite subtleties of thought”?

No. To return to Winterson on Eliot: “It is clear that [his] stylistic development, from The Waste Land to Four Quartets , is an emotional development of a profound order.” It is equally clear that Lahiri’s is too. But we get only hints of this momentous change: she had “run away” to Italy, “taking refuge in the Italian language in search of freedom and happiness”. One piece is written “during a particularly challenging year of my life”. Why provoke curiosity you won’t satisfy? Without seeing the input that led to the output, we feel as she does in her essay on Gramsci’s prison letters: “We experience only a single strand of a double thread.”

There is, however, a switch right at the end, in an afterword where Lahiri returns to the book best suited to any writer in the business of transformation: the Metamorphoses . “Ovid’s great poem, for me, is the sun.” She recounts the story of her mother’s decline in health, and death, in 2021, when Lahiri derives consolation from Ovid’s lines. “My soul stirs to speak of forms changed into new bodies.” Suddenly, when it is almost too late, this cool, detached book bristles with life and love.

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‘Translating Myself and Others’ Looks at Unspoken Aspects of the Practice

Released this month, jhumpa lahiri's new book explores her relationship with the italian language as a writer and translator  .

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. 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. 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. While in Italian she was ‘a tougher, freer writer’, she did not want to know, yet, how she would fare as a translator.

Lahiri was in love with Italian, and exuberantly so. 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.

A 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. She goes beyond surface-level musings, describing both the grammatical contours of a new language and the challenges of writing in it. 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. Lahiri’s short answer: ‘I write in Italian to feel free.’

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. 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 explores the use of ‘graft’ not just as a literary device within the context of the novel, but as a form of toil. ‘It explains why each one of us searches for something else, something more,’ she says.

Lahiri is at her best when she writes about the Italian words that she found particularly difficult to translate – words with overlapping or multiple meanings, the kind that lead to the struggles over choice that are all-too known to every writer. The way out of this, she writes is ‘…to enter, instead, into a more profound relationship with words; we must descend with them to a deeper realm, uncovering layers of alternatives. The only way to even begin to understand language is to love it so much that we allow it to confound us, to torment us, until it threatens to swallow us whole.’ Lahiri also recounts instances when she has directly mistranslated something, and in doing so creates an honest and comprehensive portrait of a translator at work. She uses the myth of Echo and Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a tool to reflect on self-translation, and to unearth what it teaches us about identity, originality and finding one’s voice.

In Translating Myself and Others, Lahiri writes about how translating other people’s work out of Italian prompted her to realize that she is not only translating herself, but that she is also insecure about not being as fluent in Italian as a native speaker. However, this latest set of essays proves her skill lies in the craft of experimenting with what language can do, both in Italian and English, and both as a writer and as a translator. In a New York Times article, published this year, about the need for increased recognition in the publishing industry of the labour and skill of translators, Lahiri states that, ‘Translation requires creativity, it requires ingenuity, it requires imagination. So often, you must radically rework the text, and if that isn’t the work of imagination, I don’t know what is.’

Jhumpa Lahiri's  Translating Myself and Others  is available from 17 May from Princeton University Press .

Main image: Jhumpa Lahiri; photograph: Liana Miuccio 

Anandi Mishra is an essayist and critic, who has worked as a reporter for The Times of India and The Hindu. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Public Books, Electric Literature, LitHub, Virginia Quarterly Review, Popula, The Brooklyn Rail and Al Jazeera.

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Where I Find Myself

On self-translation.

Having written my novel  Dove mi trovo in Italian, I was the first to doubt that it could transform into English. Naturally it could be translated; any text can, to greater or lesser degrees of success. I was not apprehensive when translators began turning the novel into other languages—into Spanish or German or Dutch, for example. Rather, the prospect gratified me. But when it came to replicating this particular book, conceived and written in Italian, into the language that I knew best—the language I had emphatically stepped away from in order for it to be born in the first place—I was of two minds.

As I was writing Dove mi trovo , the thought of it being anything other than an Italian text felt irrelevant. While writing, one must keep one’s eyes on the road, straight ahead, and not contemplate or anticipate driving down another. The dangers, for the writer as for the driver, are obvious.

And yet, even as I was writing, I felt shadowed by two questions: 1) when would the text be turned into English and 2) who would translate it? These questions rose from the fact that I am also, and was for many years exclusively, a writer in English. And so, if I choose to write in Italian, the English version immediately rears its head, like a bulb that sprouts too early in mid-winter. Everything I write in Italian is born with the simultaneous potential—or perhaps destiny is the better word here—of existing in English. Another image, perhaps jarring, comes to mind: that of the burial plot of a surviving spouse, demarcated and waiting.

The responsibility of translation is as grave and as precarious as that of a surgeon who is trained to transplant organs, or to redirect the blood flow to our hearts, and I wavered at length over the question of who would perform the surgery. I thought back to other authors who had migrated into different languages. Had they translated their own work? And if so, where did translation taper off, and the act of rewriting take over? I was wary of betraying myself. Beckett had notably altered his French when translating himself into English. Brodsky, too, took great liberties when translating his Russian poetry into English. Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, an Argentine whose major works were composed in Italian, had been more “faithful” when rendering his texts into Spanish. Another Argentine, Borges, who had grown up bilingual in Spanish and English, translated numerous works into Spanish, but left the English translation of his own work to others. Leonora Carrington, whose first language was English, had also left the messy business of translating many of her French and Spanish stories to someone else, as had the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi in the case of Requiem , the great novel he wrote in Portuguese.

When an author migrates into another language, the subsequent crossing into the former language might be regarded, by some, as a crossing back, an act of return, a coming home. This idea is false, and it was also not my objective. Even before I decided to translate Dove mi trovo myself, I knew that the idea of “coming home” was no longer an option. I had gone too deep into Italian, and so English no longer represented the reassuring, essential act of coming up for air. My center of gravity had shifted; or at least, it had begun to shift back and forth.

I began writing Dove mi trovo in the spring of 2015. I had been living in Italy for three years, but I had already made the anguished decision to return to the United States. As with most projects, in the beginning, I had no sense that the words I was scribbling in a notebook would develop into a book. When I left Rome in August of that year, I took the notebook with me. It languished in my study in Brooklyn, though in retrospect “hibernated” is the apt term, for when I returned to Rome that winter, I found myself turning back to the notebook, which had traveled with me, and adding new scenes. The following year I moved to Princeton, New Jersey. But every two months or so I flew to Rome, either for short stays or for the summer, always with the notebook in my carry-on suitcase, and by 2017, once the notebook was full, I began to type out the contents. 

In 2018, on sabbatical, I was able to move back to Rome for an entire year for the book’s publication. When asked about the English version, I said that it was still too soon to think about it. In order to undertake a translation, or even to evaluate a translation someone else has done, one must understand the particulars of the book in question, just as the surgeon, ideally, needs to study her patient’s organism before entering the operating room. I knew that I needed time—a great deal of it—to pass. I needed to gain distance from the novel, answer questions about it, hear responses from my Italian readers. For though I’d already written the book, I felt the way perhaps my own immigrant parents felt as they were raising me: the author of an inherently foreign creature, both recognizable and unrecognizable, born from my flesh and blood.

Regarding the eventual English translation, two camps quickly formed. Members of the first camp were those who urged me to translate the book myself. Their opponents urged me, with equal vehemence, to steer clear of the operation. To return to my analogy of the surgeon, I sometimes said, to members of the first camp, What surgeon, in need of an operation, would take the scalpel to herself? Wouldn’t she entrust the procedure to another pair of hands?

Following the advice of Gioia Guerzoni, an Italian translator friend who belonged to the second camp, I sought out the translator Frederika Randall, who worked out of Italian into English. Frederika was an American based in Rome for decades, not far from where I lived: the very part of the city where my book, loosely speaking (though I never specify this), is set. When she said she was willing to translate the first dozen or so pages, so that we could both get a feel for how her translation would sound, I was relieved. I was convinced that she was the ideal person to translate my novel, not only because she was an extremely skilled translator, but because she knew the setting and atmosphere of the book far better than I did.

I thought that perhaps, once she’d finished the translation, I could weigh in on one or two matters, and that my role would be respectfully collaborative. Grandmotherly, which was how I felt when Mira Nair had turned one of my other novels into a film. Perhaps this time I would be a slightly more involved grandmother than I had been to Ann Goldstein’s translation of In Other Words ( produced at a time when I was wary of any reconnection with English, and did not relish the role of being a grandmother at all). Deep down, however, I was convinced that when I saw the English version, it would reveal, brusquely and definitively, the book’s failure to function in English, not due to any fault of Frederika, but because the book itself, inherently flawed, would refuse to comply, like a potato or an apple that, decayed within, must be set aside once it is cut open and examined, and cannot lend itself to any other dish.

Italian translation, for me, has always been a way to maintain contact with the language I love when I am far away from it.   

Instead, when I read the pages she prepared for me, I found that the book was intact, that the sentences made sense, and that the Italian had enough sap to sustain another text in another language. At this point a surprising thing happened. I switched camps and felt the urge to take over, just as, watching my daughter turn somersaults underwater this past summer, I, too, was inspired to learn how. Of course, that discombobulating act of flipping over, the idea of which had always terrified me until the day I finally figured out, thanks to my daughter, how to execute the maneuver, was exactly what my own book had to do. Frederika, who had lived astride English and Italian for so very long, was bipartisan to the core. She had understood, initially, why I’d been reluctant to translate the book myself, and when I told her I was having a change of heart, she wasn’t surprised. Like my daughter, she encouraged me. As is often the case when crossing a new threshold, it had taken her example, just like my daughter’s, to show me that it could be done.

I was still in Rome—a place where I feel no inspiration to work out of Italian into English—when I came to my decision. When living and writing in Rome, I have an Italian center of gravity. I needed to move back to Princeton, where I am surrounded by English, where I miss Rome. Italian translation, for me, has always been a way to maintain contact with the language I love when I am far away from it. To translate is to alter one’s linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.

I began translating at the start of the fall semester in 2019. I didn’t look at Frederika’s sample pages; in fact, I hid them away. The book consists of forty-six relatively brief chapters. I aimed to tackle one at each sitting, two or three sittings per week. I approached the text and it greeted me like certain neighbors—if not warmly, politely enough. As I felt my way back into the book, and pressed through it, it yielded discreetly. There were roadblocks now and then, and I stopped to ponder them, or I stepped over them, determined, before stopping to think too much about what I was doing, to reach the end.

One obvious roadblock was the title itself. The literal translation, which means “where I find myself,” sounded belabored to me. The book had no English title until, at the end of October, with a few chapters still left to translate, I stepped on a plane to go to Rome. Not long after takeoff, “whereabouts” popped into my brain. A word as inherently English, and as fundamentally untranslatable, as the expression dove mi trovo is in Italian. Somewhere in the air, over the waters that separate my English and Italian lives, the original title recognized itself—dare I say found itself—in another language.

Once I finished the first draft, I circulated it to a small group of readers who did not read Italian, who knew me well, and only, as a writer in English. Then I waited, anxiously, even though the book had already been born over a year before, and was already living, not only in Italian but, as previously mentioned, in other languages as well. It was only after these readers told me the book had spoken to them that I believed that the foolhardy operation I had performed on myself had not been in vain.

As Dove mi trovo was turning into Whereabouts , I naturally had to keep referring back to the original book I’d written. I began to notice a few repetitions in the Italian I wished I’d caught. Certain adjectives I was relying on too heavily. A few inconsistencies. I had miscounted the number of people at a dinner party, for example. I began to mark the Italian book with adhesive arrows, and then to keep a list to send to my Italian editors at Guanda, so that certain changes could be made in subsequent editions of the book. In other words, the second version of the book was now generating a third: a revised Italian text that was stemming from my self-translation. When translating oneself, each and every flaw or weakness in the former text becomes immediately and painfully apparent. Keeping to my medical metaphors, I would say that self-translation is like one of those radioactive dyes that enable doctors to look through our skin to locate damage in the cartilage, unfortunate blockages, and other states of imperfection.

Some people insist that there is no such thing as self-translation.  

As discomfiting as this process of revelation was, I felt a parallel gratitude for the very ability to isolate these problems, to be aware of them and to find new solutions. The brutal act of self-translation frees oneself, once and for all, from the false myth of the definitive text. It was only by self-translating that I finally understood what Valéry meant when he said that a work of art was never finished, only abandoned. The publication of any book is an arbitrary act; there is no ideal phase of gestation, nor of birth, as is the case for living creatures. A book is done when it seems done, when it feels done, when the author is sick of it, or is eager to publish it, or when the editor wrests it away. All of my books, in retrospect, feel premature. 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.

Some people insist that there is no such thing as self-translation, and that it necessarily becomes an act of rewriting or emphatically editing—read: improving—the first go-around. This temptation attracts some and repels others. I personally was not interested in altering my Italian book in order to arrive at a more supple, elegant, and mature version of it in English. My aim was to respect and reproduce the novel I had originally conceived, but not so blindly as to reproduce and perpetuate certain infelicities.

As Whereabouts moved through copyediting to typeset pages, with different editors and proofreaders weighing in, so did the changes to Dove mi trovo continue to accumulate—I repeat, all relatively minor, but nevertheless significant to me. The two texts began to move forward in tandem, each on its own terms. When the paperback of Dove mi trovo eventually comes out in Italian—at the time of writing, it hasn’t yet—I will consider it the definitive version, at least for now, given that I have come to think of any “definitive text” largely the same way that I think of a mother tongue, at least in my case: an inherently debatable, perpetually relative concept.

The first day I sat down with the page proofs of Whereabouts , during the autumn of the coronavirus pandemic, I went to Firestone Library, at Princeton, booking a seat and taking my place at a round white marble table. I was masked and many feet away from the other three people allowed in a room that could easily hold one hundred. I realized that day, when pausing to question something in the English text, that I had left my battered copy of Dove mi trovo at home. The translator side of me, focused on bringing the book into English, was already subconsciously distancing and disassociating from the Italian. Of course, it is always strange, and also crucial, at the last stage of looking at a translation, to all but disregard the text in the original language. The latter cannot be hovering, as I did when my children first went off to school, somewhere in the building, alert to cries of protest. A true separation, as false as that is, must occur. In the final stages of reviewing a translation, either of one’s own work or someone else’s, one achieves a level of concentration that is akin to focusing purely on the quality and sensations of the water when one is swimming in the sea, as opposed to admiring elements that float through it or collect on the seabed. When one is so focused on language, a selective blindness sets in, and along with it, a form of X-ray vision.

Reading over the page proofs of Whereabouts in English, I began reflecting in my diary, in Italian, on the process of having translated it. In fact, the text you are now reading, which I’ve written in English, is a product of notes taken in Italian. In some sense, this is the first piece of writing that I have conceived bilingually, and so the subject, self-translation, feels especially appropriate. Here, in translation, are some of the notes I took:

1. The profoundly destabilizing thing about self-translation is that the book threatens to unravel, to hurtle toward potential annihilation. It seems to annihilate itself. Or am I annihilating it? No text should sustain that level of scrutiny; at a certain point, it cedes. It’s the reading and the scrutinizing, the insistent inquiry implicit in the act of writing and translating, that inevitably jostles the text.

2. This task is not for the faint of heart. It forces you to doubt the validity of every word on the page. It casts your book—already published, between covers, sold on shelves in stores—into a revised state of profound uncertainty. It is an operation that feels doomed from the start, even contrary to nature, like the experiments of Victor Frankenstein.

3. Self-translation is a bewildering, paradoxical going backward and moving forward at once. There is ongoing tension between the impulse to plow ahead undermined by a strange gravitational force that holds you back. One feels silenced in the very act of speaking. Those two dizzying tercets from Dante come to mind, with their language of doubling and their contorted logic: “Qual è colui che suo dannaggio sogna, / che sognando desidera sognare, / sì che quel ch’è, come non fosse, agogna, / tale me fec’io, non posando parlare, / che disiava scusarmi, e scusava / me tuttavia, e nol mi credea fare.” (Like one asleep who dreams himself in trouble / and in his dream he wishes he were dreaming, / longing for that which is, as if it were not, / just so I found myself: unable to speak, / longing to beg for pardon and already / begging for pardon, not knowing what I did.” (Inferno XXX, 136-141) 1

4. Reading the English, every sentence that felt off, that had gone astray in the translation, always led me back to a misreading of myself in Italian.

5. Whereabouts will emerge on its own, without the Italian text on the facing page, as was the case with In Other Words . But if anything, the absence of the Italian reinforces, for me, the bond between these two versions, one of which I wrote, and one of which I translated. These two versions have entered into a tennis match. But in fact, it’s the ball that represents both texts, volleyed from one side of the net over the other and back again.

6. Self-translation means prolonging your relationship to the book you’ve written. Time expands and the sun still shines when you expect things to go dark. This disorienting surplus of daylight feels unnatural, but it also feels advantageous, magical.

7. Self-translation affords a second act for a book, but in my opinion, this second act pertains less to the translated version than to the original, which is now readjusted and realigned thanks to the process of being dismantled and reassembled.

8. What I altered in Italian was what, in hindsight, still felt superfluous to my view. The stringent quality of English forced the Italian text, at times, to tighten its belt as well.

In some sense the book remains Italian in my head in spite of its metamorphosis into English.  

9. I suppose the exhilarating aspect of translating myself was being constantly reminded, as I changed the words from one language to another, that I myself had changed so profoundly, and that I was capable of such change. I realized that my relationship to the English language, thanks to my linguistic graft, had also been irrevocably altered.

10. Whereabouts will never be an autonomous text in my mind, nor will the paperback of Dove mi trovo , which is now indebted to the process of first translating and then revising Whereabouts . They share the same vital organs. They are conjoined twins, though, on the surface, they bear no resemblance to one another. They have nourished and been nourished by the other. Once the translation was in progress, I almost felt like a passive bystander as they began sharing and exchanging elements between themselves.

11. I believe I began writing in Italian to obviate the need to have an Italian translator. As grateful as I am to those who have rendered my English books into Italian in the past, something was driving me, in Italian, to speak for myself. I have now assumed the role I had set out to eliminate, only in the inverse. Becoming my own translator in English has only lodged me further inside the Italian language.

12. In some sense the book remains Italian in my head in spite of its metamorphosis into English. The adjustments I made in English were always in service to the original text.

In reviewing the proofs of Whereabouts , I noticed a sentence I’d skipped entirely in the English. It has to do with the word portagioie, which, in the Italian version, the protagonist considers the most beautiful word in the Italian language. But the sentence only carries its full weight in Italian. The English equivalent of portagioie , “jewelry box,” doesn’t contain the poetry of portagioie, given that joys and jewels are not the same thing in English. I inserted the sentence into the translation, but had to alter it. This is probably the most significantly reworked bit of the book, and I added a footnote for clarification. I had hoped to avoid footnotes, but in this case, the me in Italian and the me in English had no common ground.

The penultimate chapter of the novel is called Da nessuna parte . I translated it as “Nowhere” in English, which breaks the string of prepositions in the Italian. An Italian reader pointed this out, suggesting I translate it more literally as “In no place.” I considered making the change, but in the end my English ear prevailed, and I opted for an adverb which, to my satisfaction, contains the “where” of the title I’d come up with.

There was one instance of grossly mistranslating myself. It was a crucial line, and I only caught the error in the final pass. As I was reading the English proofs aloud for the last time, without referring back to the Italian, I knew the sentence was wrong, and that I had completely, unintentionally mangled the meaning of my own words.

It also took several readings to correct an auxiliary verb in English that the Italian side of my brain, in the act of translating, had rendered sloppily. In English one takes steps, but in Italian one makes them. Given that I read and write in both languages, my brain has developed blind spots. It was only by looking again and again at the English that I saved a character in Whereabouts from “making steps.” Having said this, in English, it is possible to make missteps.

In the end, the hardest thing about translating Whereabouts were the lines written not by me but by two other writers: Italo Svevo—whom I cite in the epigraph—and Corrado Alvaro, whom I cite in the body of the text. Their words, not mine, are the ones I feel ultimately responsible for, and have wrestled with most. These are the lines I will continue to fret over even when the book goes to press. The desire to translate—to press up as closely as possible to the words of another, to cross the threshold of one’s consciousness—is keener when the other remains inexorably, incontrovertibly out of reach.

I believe it was important to have gained experience translating other authors out of Italian before confronting Dove mi trovo. The upsetting experience of trying to translate myself early on in the process of writing in Italian, which I briefly touched upon in In Other Words , had a lot to do with the fact that I had yet to translate out of Italian. All my energy back then was devoted to sinking deeper into the new language and avoiding English as much as possible. I had to establish myself as a translator of others before I could achieve the illusion of being another myself.

As someone who dislikes looking back at her work, and prefers not to reread it if at all possible, I was not an ideal candidate to translate Dove mi trovo , given that translation is the most intense form of reading and rereading there is. I have never reread one of my books as many times as Dove mi trovo . The experience would have been deadening had it been one of my English books. 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. The author who wrote Dove mi trovo both is and is not the author who translated them. This split consciousness is, if nothing else, a bracing experience.

Self-translation led to a deep awareness of the book I’d written, and therefore, to one of my past selves.  

For years I have trained myself, when asked to read aloud from my work, to approach it as if it had been written by someone else. Perhaps my impulse to separate radically from my former work, book after book, was already conditioning me to recognize the separate writers who have always dwelled inside me. 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. But alienation, for better or for worse, establishes distance, and grants perspective, two things that are particularly crucial to the act of self-translation.

Self-translation led to a deep awareness of the book I’d written, and therefore, to one of my past selves. As I’ve said, once I write my other books, I tend to walk away as quickly as possible, whereas I now have a certain residual affection for Dove mi trovo , just as I do for its English counterpart—an affection born from the intimacy that can only be achieved by the collaborative act of translating as opposed to the solitary act of writing.

I also feel, toward Dove mi trovo , a level of acceptance that I have not felt for the other books. The others still haunt me with choices I might have made, ideas I ought to have developed, passages that should have been further revised. In translating Dove mi trovo , in writing it a second time in a second language and allowing it to be born, largely intact, a second time, I feel closer to it, doubly tied to it, whereas the other books represent a series of relationships, passionate and life-altering at the time, that have now cooled to embers, having never strayed beyond the point of no return.

My copy of Dove mi trovo in Italian is a now dog-eared volume, underlined and marked with Post-its indicating the various corrections and clarifications to make. It has transformed from a published text to something resembling a set of bound galleys. I would never have thought to make those changes had I not translated the book out of the language in which I conceived and created it. Only I was capable of accessing and altering both texts from the inside. Now that the book is about to be printed in English, it has traded places with the finished Italian copy, which has lost its published patina, at least from the author’s point of view, and resumed the identity of a work still in its final stages of becoming a published text. As I write this, Whereabouts is being sewn up for publication, but Dove mi trovo needs to be opened up again for a few discreet procedures. That original book, which now feels incomplete to me, stands in line behind its English-language counterpart. Like an image viewed in the mirror, it has turned into the simulacrum, and both is and is not the starting point for what rationally and irrationally followed.

© 2021 by Jhumpa Lahiri. By arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and translator.

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Translating Myself: Adventures in Self-Translation at the Iowa Translation Workshop

Posted on September 14, 2015 in Essays

It was my second time presenting work in the translation workshop. The story was called “The Grey Quarter,” and I’d just written it just a few months before, for my fiction workshop in the Spanish Creative Writing MFA. Now I was presenting it into English. Our workshop professor, Aron Aji, said it was a double opportunity for the story to be workshopped: for once, I was both author and translator.

Aron had assured me months before—when I said I wanted to embark upon a selfish and egotistical enterprise in the translation workshop—that self-translation was a viable element of translation as a whole. There was theory about it and (perhaps more importantly, and reassuringly), it was practiced all the time.

The translation workshop began with questions for the translator/author (me). Aron started by asking the narrator’s age. How old is she when she’s telling the story? It should have been an easy question. I—the author, the “expert”—should have known the answer, but I could only reply I knew she was older than I was but was probably, maybe, I wasn’t sure, younger than thirty?

I hadn’t needed more to write the story in Spanish. A sense of her age and her circumstances in relation to my own, an inkling of where she was, and what had happened to her so my unconscious could transform those notions into a voice in Spanish—that was enough. I never thought I would need to know more to translate the story.

In revising my translation I realized how much of my writing happens unconsciously, thoughtlessly, just notched forward by a certain feelings: I felt she was older than me. This is probably to be expected. I’m still getting to know most of the aspects of my own writing. In this exercise of self-translation I understood that while I’m totally obsessed with planning every detail of the plot, I let my characters come to me as sensations, half-formed people whom I get to know little by little as I write.

The greatest virtue I have as a translator of my own work might also be my biggest downfall. I know the text better than anyone else. I’m so close to it that I know exactly what the author was thinking as she wrote it, why she used certain words, how that street looked, how the night felt, even the way the boys on that other street were smirking. But I will never be able to read one of my stories as a reader could.

I’ll always be too close, too attached. I need to step back to recognize the strengths that appear without the slightest plan, as a whim. While trying to translate myself, sometimes I had to recreate the frame of mind I had while writing, before revising, before repeated workshops deconstructed it. I had to return to those first impulses, and ask myself why I had made this or that decision. How old is she? Why is she telling the story now? How does she feel about what happened?    

During the translation workshop, and in my own exercises in self-translation, I realized something else: I don’t know if I’ll ever have the same relationship with English that I have with Spanish. Maybe this should have been obvious from the start, but I had convinced myself that my English was finally good enough, and I had forgotten how sometimes writing feels like a love affair with language. I have gotten to know Spanish with age: its taste in my mouth, its beautiful sounds, its bad sounds, its great words, its horrible words, its quirks, its difficulties, its flexibilities, its strange habits.

But above everything else, I trust Spanish in I way I don’t trust English. Perhaps this is just a matter of familiarity, but during the translation workshop I felt as if I lacked a certain sensitivity that I had no idea how to gain. I have to admit that without an editor—in this case my close-reading peers in the translation workshop—the story would never have ended up as it did.

Self-translation was a great experiment and I wish to continue with it and to continue building my relationship with English. I like having to think about the words I used, the sentences I created, and the reasons behind a story that sometimes are lost in the act of writing it. It was challenging and insightful to recreate the genesis of a story, how it came to be, what the answers to questions I’d never actually asked myself might be. I grew closer to the story and to my own instincts as a writer when I was forced to take a step back and to look at them from afar.

Tagged as: Spanish Creative Writing , Spanish , workshop , Aron Aji , self-translation , fiction

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How to Describe Yourself in French

Last Updated: September 9, 2022 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Language Academia . Language Academia is a private, online language school founded by Kordilia Foxstone. Kordilia and her team specialize in teaching foreign languages and accent reduction. Language Academia offers courses in several languages, including English, Spanish, and Mandarin. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 439,017 times.

Describing yourself is an important skill personally and professionally. You may wish to meet or date someone, get to know a friend better, or present yourself in a professional context. The rules for describing yourself in French are similar to how you would do it in English, but there are a few distinctions to be aware of. Using these guidelines you will have a basic structure that you can expand on to provide a more personalized description of yourself.

Describing your Personality

• The French word for first name is “prenom” (prey–nom). You could say “Mon prénom est...” (mon prey-nom ey) which means “my first name is...”
• The French word for surname is “nom de famille” (nohm dhe fah-mee). In a professional or commercial transaction if someone asks for your "nom" be sure to provide your last name rather than your first.

• Consult a dictionary to find pronunciations of specific numbers.
• You can also describe your age group more generally using the phrase “je suis” (zhe swee) followed by an adjective. “Jeune” (zhuhn) means young. “Vieux” (vee-euh) indicates an elderly man, while “vieille” (vee-ay) indicates an elderly woman. “Je suis jeune” means “I am young.”

• You can also say “my hair is...” followed by a color. The phrase for this is “Mes cheveux sont...” (meh chuh-vuh son). Consult a dictionary for the appropriate color.
• The same construction works to describe your eye color. You would say “Mes yeux sont ...” (mehz-yuh son) which means "my eyes are..." Note that in this case you pronounce the s at the end of “mes” because the next word begins with a vowel.

• “Fort” (for) means strong, while “faible” (febl) means weak.
• “Petit” (petee) for men or “petite” (peteet) for women means small or short.
• “Grand” (grahn) for men or “grande” (grahnd) for women means large or tall.

• Content (cohn-tahn) means happy, while triste (treest) means sad. You would say "je suis triste" to convey "I am sad."
• Fatigué (fah-tee-gay) means tired. You would say “je suis fatigué” to convey "I am tired."

Describing Your Activities

• Male occupations that end with “eur” (euhr) often change to “euse” (euhz) for women. For example, a massage therapist would be either a masseur or a masseuse.
• Male occupations that end in “ier” (ee-ay) often add an extra e to become ière (ee-ehr) for women. A farmer would be either a fermier or a fermière.
• Male occupations that end in a consonant may add an extra e to become feminine. For example, a male student is an “étudiant” (ay-tood-eeon) while a female student is an "étudiante" (ay-tood-eeont). Note that the final consonant is pronounced only in the female form.
• Many occupations have only one form, regardless of gender, such as "professeur" which means teacher.

• “I like” is “j’aime” (zhehm). "I love" is “j’adore” (zha-dor). “J’aime lire” (zhehm leer) means “I like to read.”
• The words “ne” and “pas” on either side of the verb negate the phrase, indicating dislike. "I do not like" is “je n’aime pas” (zhe nem pah). “Je n’aime pas chanter” (zhe nem pas chan-tay) means “I do not like to sing.”

• Mon (mohn) or ma (mah) are used as possessives, when you wish to indicate that you like something that belongs to you. Mes (meh) indicates a possessive plural. [5] X Research source
• Mon is used when the noun is masculine, indicated in the dictionary by the letter m. “J’aime mon chat” means "I like my cat." Note that it does not matter if you are male, it matters that cat (chat) is a masculine noun.
• Ma is used when the noun is feminine, indicated in the dictionary by the letter f. “J’aime ma tante” means "I like my aunt." Again, it matters that aunt is a feminine noun, not that you are a man or a woman.
• Mes indicates a possessive plural noun, such as “my aunts” or “my cats.” You would say “j’aime mes tantes” or “j’aime mes chats.” [6] X Research source

• If this is too challenging it may be easier to use the above recommendations for sharing hobbies, simply saying “I like sports” or “j’aime les sports.”
• This construction also works to describe personality traits. For example gentil/gentille (zhantee/zhanteel) means nice. You would say “je suis gentil” if you are a man or "je suis gentille" for a woman.

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• ↑ https://omniglot.com/language/phrases/french.php
• ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zjx947h/articles/z7ftwty
• ↑ https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/frenchcopy/chapter/2-4-the-verb-etre/
• ↑ http://www.languageguide.org/french/grammar/gender/
• ↑ http://www.thefrenchexperiment.com/learn-french/possessive-adjectives.php
• ↑ https://www.lawlessfrench.com/grammar/possessive-adjectives/
• ↑ http://www.languageguide.org/french/grammar/adjectives/

About This Article

To describe yourself in French, start by learning some of the basic French phrases for introducing yourself, like “Je m’appelle” and “Je suis” to tell people your name and something about yourself. For example, “Je suis blonde” tells people that you’re a blonde, while “Je suis fatigué” means “I’m tired!” To talk about your interests, use the word “J’aime” to say that you love or like something! Scroll down to learn how to use the appropriate adjectives for your gender! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Myself in Translation: An Essay on Alison Bechdel

November 3, 2015.

By Corinne Manning, WITS Writer-in-Residence

This essay was first  published on October 19, 2015 on LitHub , on the occasion of SAL’s program featuring Alison Bechdel in the 2015/16 Literary Arts Series, written by WITS Writer-in-Residence Corinne Manning.

T his is my memory, though it’s technically unconfirmed: my mom had seen this flag that she liked, non denominational, not especially patriotic with stripes of all different colors. On a trip to Tarrytown, New York my mom found an antique store that had a bin of these flags in the back. It was called “An All Seasons Flag” or maybe that was what my mom said it was called. The flag was wrapped in a thick plastic sheath, which my mom discarded once we came home.

“It’s great because we won’t have to keep putting different flags up,” she said as she stuck it into its holder. Maybe she felt like her full self when she looked at the rose bushes outside the house, the trimmed grass, the “All Seasons” flag waving with equal love for every stage of the year. I felt her satisfaction even as she sat on the couch in the living room, reading the paper cover to cover for hours, or just staring out the window, “thinking,” she said, as the flag whipped peacefully in its slot.

“Why does mom have the gay pride flag up?”

This was what my brother asked as we approached the house. He was visiting from art school. In a few years he would come out and tell us that he was a bear, but for now he was just an asexual artist who once made my parents uncomfortable when he gave them a painting of a naked man. This is what I remember.

I found the flag in the trash the next day. When I went up to her room to ask her why I found her lying in bed watching TV. “A wasp got in it,” she said, without taking her eyes away from the screen.

I’ve thought about this moment a lot over the years, but when I think about it now, I picture it in Alison Bechdel’s hand (maximalist detail, minimalist depiction), how Bechdel would capture the fruit basket wallpaper, the pear situated in such a way that it always revealed a clown’s face. Also, the disarray of junk on the desk, even the show my mom was watching. I picture 20/20 , in memory Barbara Walter’s face looms, but it was likely a Sunday, which means it was 60 Minutes . Here again, Bechdel’s attention to detail would keep the scene more factual, more honest.

It took me years to come out—long after my mom and then my brother’s announcement shook the extended family to their born-again breaking point—partially because sexuality is complex, but it’s also possible that I didn’t understand how to construct this narrative. I didn’t know there could be a family where more than half the members were gay. At that time, growing up on the Jersey Shore I hadn’t met any queer women or even seen much representation of one and didn’t realize I could find a place among them.

It’s not that there are stories that are impossible to tell, just complicated—as storytellers we want to capture and express every nuance, to enable the reader, or the person listening to you, to fit something impossible, like the entire state of Washington in their mouth. Not in manageable bites, but the way you had to do it, stretching the skin, the corners of your mouth cracking. But when it is most successful and masterful, as it is in Alison Bechdel’s work, the state—the story—is just suddenly in there, and it’s not just my mouth that’s full, but all of me and it’s a little frightening and beautiful—How did she get all that in there? How did I have room for all of this? How did she?

We can look to Bechdel’s medium for what may be a trite answer: the effect of words and pictures together. But it isn’t just a simple double representation that’s created when Bechdel works, at least not in form, but the way the images and the words often work asymmetrically, allowing for multiple stories, or complex philosophical set ups.

Double representation is actually the phrase I use when I talk about my personal experience of her work. It’s a very nuanced visibility I never expected to see projected: the nature of my family and my own sexuality.

In an early book, The Indelible Alison Bechdel , we can trace the edges of Bechdel’s memoir work—this early process of translation and reflection—as she discusses the development of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For . The first of these comics was published in 1983, the year I was born, in the July-August issue of Womanews . Of the genius beginnings of this project, Bechdel demurs:

The quality of the drawing and writing was wildly uneven—more often than not the cartoons weren’t even funny—but lesbians were so desperate to see a reflection of their lives it didn’t seem to matter much.

I’d like to think that my enjoyment of these cartoons is greater than simple desperation or hunger, or need. It is delightful to see elements of my experience that I didn’t think to be experience, that I am used to having be invisible, presented to me, but they are also just really great cartoons. They’re funny, precisely for the reason that makes Bechdel’s work powerful: they are conscious, alive with detail, at once satirical and compassionate. Sudden visibility can be tricky if you are of a group that isn’t used to being depicted—criticism of that depiction is typical. Dykes to Watch Out For wasn’t immune to that, but there is something so gleefully joyful about this particular reflection, where lesbian sexuality or queer female sexuality, or small town politicized gay life (everyone’s a social worker!), gets translated as funny, in a ha ha way rather than funny as pathetic or the butt of a straight guy’s joke.

I’m thinking about the difference between reflection and translation, if one is meant to reveal and the other is meant to express in one language while retaining the original meaning and feel. The relationship between the two words feels closer than the definitions allow, as the result of neither reflection nor translation is exact, there’s always some distortion.

In Fun Home Bechdel presents herself and her father as a kind of translation (“as close as a translation can get”) of each other: their sexuality, their appreciation of masculinity, and also their distortions: her father’s hidden life, Bechdel’s revealed life. What I see when I read her work is the murky translation, or maybe transliteration of my own experience. My mother came out later in life, but previous to her coming out my image of her was marked by what I would later understand as repression: her own rages, the passionate fights and eventual disappearance of many female friends, and her obsession with my own sexuality. Let’s imagine a panel: I’m in the family den, lying on a tweedy couch trying to watch TV when my mom calls from the top of the stairs “Are you sure you don’t like girls?” or “There’s nothing wrong with meeting a nice girl” or, during a shakier time, “Doesn’t it disgust you? The thought of two women or two men together? It repulses me.” When I told her I wasn’t repulsed, she said, “So you’re gay.” My answer during this period was always an annoyed no, even though I did wonder if there was something wrong with me, by not being repulsed.

I understand now that for a time, my mom hoped that she could see a reflection of herself in me. That perhaps I could be gay if she couldn’t. But then she came out, and watching her process, our Jersey Italian family’s response to it, repulsed me in its own way and kept me at the edges of my own queerness for years. And when I finally did come out I denied her any recognition or connection. I didn’t want to see myself reflected in her. First my sexuality wasn’t related to my identity, then I was queer and she was gay. Much like the scene in Fun Home of Bechdel and her father in the car, there was no joyous reunion. We were trapped in the Ulysses of our experience: fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom.

Which is why Are You My Mother? —Bechdel’s exploration of her relationship with her mother and the nature of psychoanalysis and motherhood, is an important piece to my story too, because both books offer me a more complete vision of myself. At the beginning of Fun Home , as we witness the memory of her father bathing her, Bechdel states that the bar is lower for fathers than mothers. Isn’t the nature of mothers and children or mothers and daughters this resistance to recognize each other (you are of me but you are not me) or as the psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, posits in the relation between infant and mother: I forget you, but you remember me? It is a bond that must be broken, but both long for a time when, at one point, there was this other truth that Bechdel shares: “two separate beings to be identical… to be one.”

When my mother texted me after the repeal of DOMA—“Congratulations, honey!”—I didn’t respond, out of a kind of disappointment, out of my political stand on it being the wrong fight, out of the desire to not be her. It’s a sad drawing, me holding the phone. She wanted a different panel, a simpler drawing; a congratulations in return, to stand across from each other waving little All Seasons Flags. In a Bechdel version of this story, both panels exist, one reflecting the other. We’re both full of longing. We’re both disappointed. This is where the story starts to stretch my mouth. Maybe this is as close as a translation can get.

–Corinne Manning

Corinne Manning is the founding editor of The James Franco Review , an online journal dedicated to the visibility of underrepresented artists. Her writing has appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, The Oxford American, Arts & Letters, Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and as a chapbook through alice blue review’s Shotgun Wedding Series.

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That Viral Essay Wasn’t About Age Gaps. It Was About Marrying Rich.

But both tactics are flawed if you want to have any hope of becoming yourself..

Women are wisest, a viral essay in New York magazine’s the Cut argues , to maximize their most valuable cultural assets— youth and beauty—and marry older men when they’re still very young. Doing so, 27-year-old writer Grazie Sophia Christie writes, opens up a life of ease, and gets women off of a male-defined timeline that has our professional and reproductive lives crashing irreconcilably into each other. Sure, she says, there are concessions, like one’s freedom and entire independent identity. But those are small gives in comparison to a life in which a person has no adult responsibilities, including the responsibility to become oneself.

This is all framed as rational, perhaps even feminist advice, a way for women to quit playing by men’s rules and to reject exploitative capitalist demands—a choice the writer argues is the most obviously intelligent one. That other Harvard undergraduates did not busy themselves trying to attract wealthy or soon-to-be-wealthy men seems to flummox her (taking her “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out” to the Harvard Business School library, “I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence”). But it’s nothing more than a recycling of some of the oldest advice around: For women to mold themselves around more-powerful men, to never grow into independent adults, and to find happiness in a state of perpetual pre-adolescence, submission, and dependence. These are odd choices for an aspiring writer (one wonders what, exactly, a girl who never wants to grow up and has no idea who she is beyond what a man has made her into could possibly have to write about). And it’s bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.

But this is not an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying older men. It is an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying rich men. Most of the purported upsides—a paid-for apartment, paid-for vacations, lives split between Miami and London—are less about her husband’s age than his wealth. Every 20-year-old in the country could decide to marry a thirtysomething and she wouldn’t suddenly be gifted an eternal vacation.

Which is part of what makes the framing of this as an age-gap essay both strange and revealing. The benefits the writer derives from her relationship come from her partner’s money. But the things she gives up are the result of both their profound financial inequality and her relative youth. Compared to her and her peers, she writes, her husband “struck me instead as so finished, formed.” By contrast, “At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self.” The idea of having to take responsibility for her own life was profoundly unappealing, as “adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.” Tying herself to an older man gave her an out, a way to skip the work of becoming an adult by allowing a father-husband to mold her to his desires. “My husband isn’t my partner,” she writes. “He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.”

These, by the way, are the things she says are benefits of marrying older.

The downsides are many, including a basic inability to express a full range of human emotion (“I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that constrains the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him”) and an understanding that she owes back, in some other form, what he materially provides (the most revealing line in the essay may be when she claims that “when someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them”). It is clear that part of what she has paid in exchange for a paid-for life is a total lack of any sense of self, and a tacit agreement not to pursue one. “If he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive,” she writes, “but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials.”

Reading Christie’s essay, I thought of another one: Joan Didion’s on self-respect , in which Didion argues that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” If we lack self-respect, “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.” Self-respect may not make life effortless and easy. But it means that whenever “we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves,” at least we can fall asleep.

It can feel catty to publicly criticize another woman’s romantic choices, and doing so inevitably opens one up to accusations of jealousy or pettiness. But the stories we tell about marriage, love, partnership, and gender matter, especially when they’re told in major culture-shaping magazines. And it’s equally as condescending to say that women’s choices are off-limits for critique, especially when those choices are shared as universal advice, and especially when they neatly dovetail with resurgent conservative efforts to make women’s lives smaller and less independent. “Marry rich” is, as labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards put it in Bloomberg, essentially the Republican plan for mothers. The model of marriage as a hierarchy with a breadwinning man on top and a younger, dependent, submissive woman meeting his needs and those of their children is not exactly a fresh or groundbreaking ideal. It’s a model that kept women trapped and miserable for centuries.

It’s also one that profoundly stunted women’s intellectual and personal growth. In her essay for the Cut, Christie seems to believe that a life of ease will abet a life freed up for creative endeavors, and happiness. But there’s little evidence that having material abundance and little adversity actually makes people happy, let alone more creatively generativ e . Having one’s basic material needs met does seem to be a prerequisite for happiness. But a meaningful life requires some sense of self, an ability to look outward rather than inward, and the intellectual and experiential layers that come with facing hardship and surmounting it.

A good and happy life is not a life in which all is easy. A good and happy life (and here I am borrowing from centuries of philosophers and scholars) is one characterized by the pursuit of meaning and knowledge, by deep connections with and service to other people (and not just to your husband and children), and by the kind of rich self-knowledge and satisfaction that comes from owning one’s choices, taking responsibility for one’s life, and doing the difficult and endless work of growing into a fully-formed person—and then evolving again. Handing everything about one’s life over to an authority figure, from the big decisions to the minute details, may seem like a path to ease for those who cannot stomach the obligations and opportunities of their own freedom. It’s really an intellectual and emotional dead end.

And what kind of man seeks out a marriage like this, in which his only job is to provide, but very much is owed? What kind of man desires, as the writer cast herself, a raw lump of clay to be molded to simply fill in whatever cracks in his life needed filling? And if the transaction is money and guidance in exchange for youth, beauty, and pliability, what happens when the young, beautiful, and pliable party inevitably ages and perhaps feels her backbone begin to harden? What happens if she has children?

The thing about using youth and beauty as a currency is that those assets depreciate pretty rapidly. There is a nearly endless supply of young and beautiful women, with more added each year. There are smaller numbers of wealthy older men, and the pool winnows down even further if one presumes, as Christie does, that many of these men want to date and marry compliant twentysomethings. If youth and beauty are what you’re exchanging for a man’s resources, you’d better make sure there’s something else there—like the basic ability to provide for yourself, or at the very least a sense of self—to back that exchange up.

It is hard to be an adult woman; it’s hard to be an adult, period. And many women in our era of unfinished feminism no doubt find plenty to envy about a life in which they don’t have to work tirelessly to barely make ends meet, don’t have to manage the needs of both children and man-children, could simply be taken care of for once. This may also explain some of the social media fascination with Trad Wives and stay-at-home girlfriends (some of that fascination is also, I suspect, simply a sexual submission fetish , but that’s another column). Fantasies of leisure reflect a real need for it, and American women would be far better off—happier, freer—if time and resources were not so often so constrained, and doled out so inequitably.

But the way out is not actually found in submission, and certainly not in electing to be carried by a man who could choose to drop you at any time. That’s not a life of ease. It’s a life of perpetual insecurity, knowing your spouse believes your value is decreasing by the day while his—an actual dollar figure—rises. A life in which one simply allows another adult to do all the deciding for them is a stunted life, one of profound smallness—even if the vacations are nice.

Translating Myself and Others

• Jhumpa Lahiri

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

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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.

Jhumpa Lahiri: Where I find myself

Awards and recognition.

• Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
• One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of the Year
• One of VULTURE'S 49 Books We Can't Wait to Read
• One of Literary Hub's Best Reviewed Nonfiction Books of the Year
• One of Literary Hub's Best Reviewed Essay Collections of the Year
• A Literary Hub Best Essay Collection of 2022
• A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

"Wonderful. . . . Through language, we come to know ourselves: Lahiri’s work shows how it is always possible to expand that knowledge."—Erica Wagner, Harper’s Bazaar UK

"[Lahiri’s] observations are as plentiful as they are enlightening."—Juliana Ukiomogbe, Elle

"[In this book] a vision emerges of translation as a site where the physical and the textual, the extraordinary and the ordinary, intersect."—Polly Barton, Times Literary Supplement

"[Lahiri] is excellent . . . . Translating Myself and Others is a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they're complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up."—Lily Meyer, NPR

"[ Translating Myself and Others ] is about the consequences of the apparently simple act of choosing one’s own words. . . . [The] book also contains a hope for the liberating power of language."—Benjamin Moser, New York Times

"[A] series of passionate [and] thoughtful essays."—Frank Wynne, The Spectator

"[ 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

"A wry collection."—Adam Rathe, Town & Country

"[Lahiri’s] voice is a strong one in the current campaign to give translators more recognition. Her candidness about the hardships of translation and her enthusiasm for its rewards make you want to hear more from these fascinating figures, who spend so much time in others’ voices but have not lost the use of their own."—Camilla Bell-Davies, Financial Times

"Digestible and approachable. . . . The thought-provoking collection makes for a sharp and luminous exploration of Lahiri’s relationship to language, translation, and literature and made me want to finally tackle my goal of learning a second language."—Jordan Snowden, Apartment Therapy

"[A] memoir of the experience [of learning Italian], recounted with passion and insight."—Gregory Cowles, New York Times

"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

"The collection is singular for Lahiri’s ability to integrate the personal and the theoretical, drawing her examples from literature and from life. . . . Lahiri writes so beautifully that this collection will have broad appeal for anyone interested in literary essays."—David Azzolina, Library Journal

"[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

"Anyone interested in the art of translation will be engrossed by Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri."—Martin Chilton, The Independent

"Lahiri’s ruminations on translation are relatable and luminous. . . . This book embraces simplicity-in-complexity, making it appropriate for both the Lahiri devotee and the uninitiate."—Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Christian Century

"[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

"Throughout these essays, it’s as if Lahiri, feeling misunderstood, were hoping to build a literary home for herself that is ample enough to accommodate her lives as author, translator, academic, and language learner. A home in which she can write, on her own terms, in whatever language she wants, and think, on her own terms, about whatever subject she wants."—Julia Sanches, Astra

"The essays . . . are master classes in translation theory and in critical writing about translation. . . . Fascinating and insightful writing."—Lauren Elkin, American Scholar

"These essays . . . demonstrate the depths of [Lahiri’s] love for her adopted language. . . . Readers will have a newfound appreciation of the translator's ability to illuminate."—Michael Margas, Shelf Awareness starred review

"In this collection of essays, Lahiri gives insights into her processes, as well as penetrating and perceptive thoughts on the act of translating that will be especially illuminating for readers who enjoy translated works."—Joe Rubbo, Readings

"This cool, detached book bristles with life and love."—John Self, Observer New Review

"There is great joy and intrigue to be found in Lahiri’s ruminations on self-translation. . . . [ Translating Myself and Others ] is a love letter to not only translation, but to literary criticism as a whole.”—Malavika Praseed, Chicago Review of Books "—Malavika Praseed, Chicago Review of Books

"[A] portrait of intelligent, sensitive and deeply humane curiosity . . . inspiring."—James Kidd, South China Morning Post

"[T]his latest set of essays proves [Lahiri’s] skill lies in the craft of experimenting with what language can do, both in Italian and English, and both as a writer and as a translator."—Anandi Mishra, Frieze

" Translating Myself and Others feels at once ambitious and safe, playful and formulaic, variegated and quasi-myopic."—Carolina Iribaren, Hopscotch Translation

"[In Translating Myself and Others ] Lahiri achieves the task of portraying her profound love for linguistics and the ways languages give new life to one another in translation. . . . Lahiri’s writing is impeccably strong."—Amanda Janks, Zyzzyva

"Readers . . . will find themselves immersed in a voyage of discovery not just of what makes Lahiri the writer and the translator tick, but of how these two facets or ‘containers’ inform, extend, challenge and ultimately re-create her, while at the same time providing much food for thought for the reader."—Lilit Žekulin Thwaites, Sydney Morning Herald

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

"Eloquent. . . . [Lahiri] explores what it means to be a translator, how translating enhances her identity as a writer and vice versa, and how these multiple identities are mutually enriching"—Hayley Armstrong, In Touch

"A lyrical meditation on translation and a manifesto establishing translation as an artistic pursuit as creative and authentic as writing in the original language."—Lopamudra Basu, World Literature Today

"Anyone interested in the challenges of translating literary works from one language to another will find this book fascinating. . . . It’s certainly a richly rewarding [read]."—Terry Freedman, Teach Secondary

"A deep meditation on the art of translation. . . . Lahiri offers a straightforward but profound and lyrical theory of translation."—Lucky Issar, Economic & Political Weekly

"A lucid and engaging reflection not only on what it means to translate a text and to properly acknowledge that work, but also what translation signifies beyond the act of individual words being noted down in another language."—Franklin Nelson, Wasafiri Magazine

"Rich, deep and, above all, beautifully written, Translating Myself and Others exemplifies the power of words, language, art, ‘‘to explore the phenomenon and the consequences of change itself’’."—Cushla McKinney, Otago Daily News

“Jhumpa Lahiri is a marvel, a writer with the courage to renounce virtuosity for the sake of vulnerability, experiment, and growth, and it’s been wonderful to watch her love affair with the Italian language unfold. In these essays, she delves deep into the fertile interstices of and between languages, giving us a book rich with insights and pleasures.”—Susan Bernofsky, author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

“A remarkable account of Jhumpa Lahiri’s journey from English to Italian and back. Her pages on the myth of Echo are the most poignant and eloquent account of the translator’s art that I have ever read.”—Michael F. Moore, translator of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed

“With this collection of elegant essays, Jhumpa Lahiri makes her career as a writer of two languages and, increasingly, as a translator between them seem less an eccentric adventure than a necessary one. No man is an island—and no language, either.”—David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“In these stunning essays, Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly investigates the fluctuating borders between writer and translator, language and identity, artist and art. Her intellectual and deeply personal inquiries—reminiscent of Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, and Susan Sontag—challenge us to engage with our own mysterious and metamorphic relationship to language and who we are.”—Jenny McPhee, translator of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon

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Why watching the 2024 total solar eclipse might change your life

Regina G. Barber

Science writer David Baron witnesses his first total solar eclipse in Aruba, 1998. He says seeing one is "like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world." Paul Myers hide caption

Science writer David Baron witnesses his first total solar eclipse in Aruba, 1998. He says seeing one is "like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world."

David Baron can pinpoint the first time he got addicted to chasing total solar eclipses, when the moon completely covers up the sun. It was 1998 and he was on the Caribbean island of Aruba. "It changed my life. It was the most spectacular thing I'd ever seen," he says.

Baron, author of the 2017 book American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World , wants others to witness its majesty too. On April 8, millions of people across North America will get that chance — a total solar eclipse will appear in the sky. Baron promises it will be a surreal, otherworldly experience. "It's like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world."

Baron, who is a former NPR science reporter, talks to Life Kit about what to expect when viewing a total solar eclipse, including the sensations you may feel and the strange lighting effects in the sky. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Baron views the beginning of a solar eclipse with friends in Western Australia in 2023. Baron says getting to see the solar corona during a total eclipse is "the most dazzling sight in the heavens." Photographs by David Baron; Bronson Arcuri, Kara Frame, CJ Riculan/NPR; Collage by Becky Harlan/NPR hide caption

Baron views the beginning of a solar eclipse with friends in Western Australia in 2023. Baron says getting to see the solar corona during a total eclipse is "the most dazzling sight in the heavens."

What does it feel like to experience a total solar eclipse — those few precious minutes when the moon completely covers up the sun?

It is beautiful and absolutely magnificent. It comes on all of a sudden. As soon as the moon blocks the last rays of the sun, you're plunged into this weird twilight in the middle of the day. You look up and the blue sky has been torn away. On any given day, the blue sky overhead acts as a screen that keeps us from seeing what's in space. And suddenly that's gone. So you can look into the middle of the solar system and see the sun and the planets together.

Can you tell me about the sounds and the emotions you're feeling?

A total solar eclipse is so much more than something you just see with your eyes. It's something you experience with your whole body. [With the drop in sunlight], birds will be going crazy. Crickets may be chirping. If you're around other people, they're going to be screaming and crying [with all their emotions from seeing the eclipse]. The air temperature drops because the sunlight suddenly turns off. And you're immersed in the moon's shadow. It doesn't feel real.

Everything you need to know about solar eclipse glasses before April 8

In your 2017 Ted Talk , you said you felt like your eyesight was failing in the moments before totality. Can you go into that a little more?

The lighting effects are very weird. Before you get to the total eclipse, you have a progressive partial eclipse as the moon slowly covers the sun. So over the course of an hour [or so], the sunlight will be very slowly dimming. It's as if you're in a room in a house and someone is very slowly turning down the dimmer switch. For most of that time your eyes are adjusting and you don't notice it. But then there's a point at which the light's getting so dim that your eyes can't adjust, and weird things happen. Your eyes are less able to see color. It's as if the landscape is losing its color. Also there's an effect where the shadows get very strange.

Crescent-shaped shadows cast by the solar eclipse before it reaches totality appear on a board at an eclipse-viewing event in Antelope, Ore., 2017. Kara Frame and CJ Riculan/NPR hide caption

You see these crescents on the ground.

There are two things that happen. One is if you look under a tree, the spaces between leaves or branches will act as pinhole projectors. So you'll see tiny little crescents everywhere. But there's another effect. As the sun goes from this big orb in the sky to something much smaller, shadows grow sharper. As you're nearing the total eclipse, if you have the sun behind you and you look at your shadow on the ground, you might see individual hairs on your head. It's just very odd.

Some people might say that seeing the partial eclipse is just as good. They don't need to go to the path of totality.

A partial solar eclipse is a very interesting experience. If you're in an area where you see a deep partial eclipse, the sun will become a crescent like the moon. You can only look at it with eye protection. Don't look at it with the naked eye . The light can get eerie. It's fun, but it is not a thousandth as good as a total eclipse.

A total eclipse is a fundamentally different experience, because it's only when the moon completely blocks the sun that you can actually take off the eclipse glasses and look with the naked eye at the sun.

And you will see a sun you've never seen before. That bright surface is gone. What you're actually looking at is the sun's outer atmosphere, the solar corona. It's the most dazzling sight in the heavens. It's this beautiful textured thing. It looks sort of like a wreath or a crown made out of tinsel or strands of silk. It shimmers in space. The shape is constantly changing. And you will only see that if you're in the path of the total eclipse.

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So looking at a partial eclipse is not the same?

It is not at all the same. Drive those few miles. Get into the path of totality.

This is really your chance to see a total eclipse. The next one isn't happening across the U.S. for another 20 years.

The next significant total solar eclipse in the United States won't be until 2045. That one will go from California to Florida and will cross my home state of Colorado. I've got it on my calendar.

The digital story was written by Malaka Gharib and edited by Sylvie Douglis and Meghan Keane. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected].

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Correction April 3, 2024

In a previous audio version of this story, we made reference to an upcoming 2025 total solar eclipse. The solar eclipse in question will take place in 2045.

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