Anne Xu:
Professor Lahiri discussed her latest short story collection, Roman Stories, as well as themes of translation in her work. Roman Stories was originally written in Italian, then translated by Lahiri and her co-translator Todd Portnowitz into English. Many of the short stories were actually translated during Lahiri’s time at Princeton, and she recounts how alienating the experience of self-translation was. Because the texts were conceived in Italian, Lahiri felt that there was a disconnect between her thoughts in Italian and her words in English. In order to rewrite her own words, she often had to “dissociate” into two separate personalities, that of the author and the translator, which contributed to the impression of alienation. It seems to me that translating oneself may prove to be the most difficult of all, because the translator-author must be at a linguistic distance from his/her own thoughts . Nonetheless, I think self-translation destabilizes traditional ideas of fidelity in translation, and makes us productively question the value of “faithfulness”. What does it mean to be faithful (or unfaithful) to yourself, and your own words?
Lahiri chose to translate the stories in collaboration with another translator because she thought that there was value in collaborative translation. Besides being helpful in avoiding translation errors, another benefit of collaboration is that each translator brings their unique interpretation of the text to the table, which produces a richer text in translation. In addition to co-translating Roman Stories, Lahiri mentioned that she is currently working on a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with Princeton’s Yelena Baraz (one of my professors for the Western humanities sequence). She described how Professor Baraz’s skills as a latinist and her own background as an author make for a unique translation—which I can’t wait to read when it is published!
Elaborating on her and Professor Baraz’s new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lahiri claims that they are creating an original work, which disrupts the notion that Ovid’s Latin is the “original”. Their translation must be original, otherwise there would be no justification for another re-translation of Metamorphoses when there are already so many on the market. I really like conceptualizing every translation as an original—in the same way that the source text is an original—because I think it emphasizes the creative aspects of translation over its inescapable derivative ones. If we conceive of every translation as an original interpretation/edition, in another language, the translator’s role is elevated to that of the author’s. Knowing whose interpretation of the source text a reader is receiving is something which I think would greatly benefit all readers of translated literature.