“At Sea, At Odds, Astray, Adrift”: Linguistic Destabilization in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Self-Translated Novel Whereabouts

Abstract

Abstract This article compares the Italian original of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel Dove mi trovo (2018) with the English self-translation, which was published in 2021 under the title Whereabouts. Lahiri claims that her embrace of Italian was a means to escape the alienation caused by her bilingual upbringing in Bengali and English. Paradoxically, this quest for wholeness was coupled with insecurity in Italian, a language in which Lahiri only achieved fluency in middle age. Self-translation puts this linguistic ambiguity to a new stress test. In the confrontation between Lahiri’s Italian-language and Anglophone selves, her English becomes affected by Italian calques, creating a hybridized language mirroring the author’s own hybrid linguistic consciousness.