Jhumpa Lahiri and the Translation Memoir: To Write and Exist Beyond the Mother Tongue

ABSTRACT

In 2016, following the publication of her memoir, In Other Words, Pulitzer Prize author Jhumpa Lahiri announced her intention to abandon English to solely write in Italian. Six years later, having become an acclaimed Italian writer and translator, Lahiri returns to English to consider her role as a ‘postmonolingual’ subject (Yildiz) in an era still dominated by a paradigmatic monolingualism. Released in 2022, Translating Myself and Others can be considered to all effects Lahiri’s translation memoir as it extends to the field of translation, the reflections initiated by In Other Words on the questions of language, identity, and cultural assignation. Through the analysis of both texts, this article discusses how the notion of ‘mother tongue’ is progressively deconstructed in Lahiri’s memoirs and how translation and self-translation become the vehicle through which overcoming what Yasemin Yildiz defines as the ‘monolingual paradigm’.

KEYWORDS:

• Jhumpa Lahiri
• translation
• mother tongue
• memoir
• monolingualism
• translingualism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Professors Lily Robert-Foley and Delphine Grass for useful and productive feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benedetta Cutolo

Benedetta Cutolo is a PhD candidate in Comparative literature from the City University of New York and an Adjunct lecturer in Italian and French at the College of Staten Island. She also teaches video production at La Guardia Community College. She holds a double MA in Comparative literature from the University of Strasburg and the University of Bologna and an MA in video journalism from NYU.