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The literary friendship of James Joyce and his student and instructor in Jewish customs, the Italian businessman Ettore Schmitz, better known as the novelist Italo Svevo, gave birth to one of literature’s greatest characters. It also unites the giant of literary modernism with the founder of psychoanalysis.
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.
When Jhumpa Lahiri gave up English and found a new voice while writing in Italian
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When Jhumpa Lahiri gave up English and found a new voice while writing in ItalianBy Joumana Khatib, New York Times
Last Updated: Apr 22, 2021, 07:39 PM IST
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Synopsis
In 2012, she moved to Rome so she could pursue a decades long interest in the language.
New York Times
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Literary translators have come up with plenty of analogies for their trade. Some compare it to acting, others to performing in a chamber ensemble.
Jhumpa Lahiri opted for a more visceral description in “In Other Words,” the first book she wrote in Italian. English was “a hairy, smelly teenager” menacing her nascent Italian, she wrote, which she cradled “like a newborn.”