Jumpha Lahiri on self-translation

Pedaços do texto escrito por Jumpha Lahiri sobre seu processo de traduzir seu último livro do italiano para o inglês.

"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.

(...)

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.

(...)

I remember reading Bulgakov, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn for the first time and, as a consequence, thinking about the political, aesthetic, and ethical value—and, I hasten to add, necessity—of translating literature across time and space."

photo and collage by me