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

Abstract

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’.