Jhumpa Lahiri on self-translation

In a very interesting interview with Victoria Livingstone for Asymptote (16th April 2018), Jhumpa Lahiri talked about various aspects of translation, including translating other authors, being translated and translating herself. Here is a short quote about her plan to self-translate her current novel:

"I’ve just written a new novel in Italian and so my energy will go towards translating that myself. [...] I recently translated one of my short stories into English, which appeared in The New Yorker a couple of months ago. I now have more of a sense of what it will involve to translate myself. But we’ll see. That was a very short story that I had written four years ago in Italian. It was ten pages long. Translating it into English was weird, but it was also brief. I don’t know what it will be like to translate a novel, but I feel that it’s important to try. If it doesn’t feel satisfying, I may have to reconsider the choice. Right now every project I’m doing has its own set of needs and I can’t really say until I’m inside of it how I feel about it."

Please click here to read the full interview.