An eminent and popular voice in fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri, has also earned a prominent place in contemporary world literature as a translator—in fact, she says, ‘I was a translator before I was a writer’. Born to Indian Bengali parents in London in 1967, Lahiri has grappled with language since childhood. When she was three, her parents moved permanently to the US, and Lahiri grew up with a distinctive sense of shifting from one culture to another, from one language to another, her sense of self structured by the features and forms of different languages. Her entente with English and Bengali in childhood developed into a fascination with language learning, which ended in her enchantment with Italian. Lahiri’s love affair with Italian is beautifully illustrated in In Other Words (2016), a book that she wrote in Italian, which was translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Translating Myself and Others is to some extent an expansion of In Other Words, although the two books are different in style, form, and approach. The latest collection includes some powerful essays on the art of translation as well as on Lahiri’s personal investment in translating from Italian into English. She also offers deep and insightful discussion of relationships between originals and their translations, between a writer and a translator, on superiority and marginality, and also on the necessity of translation. In the first essay, ‘Why Italian’, Lahiri contemplates her growing love for Italian rather than English, her literary language, and Bengali, the language in which she communicated with her parents at home: ‘I am a writer without a true mother tongue’, she says, a writer ‘linguistically orphaned’ (10). She recalls the questions that were raised by her learning another language: ‘You’re of Indian origin, were born in London, raised in America. You write books in English. What does Italian have to do with any of that?’ (9). Even so, she persisted in gathering the details and subtleties that make for an Italian literary style. In the process, she thinks that her life ‘is a series of grafts, one after another’ (20).