For the last decade Jhumpa Lahiri has written and translated fiction (including her own) in a third language acquired as an adult, Italian. She has described her upbringing as a psycho-linguistic conflict between adversaries: Bengali, the parental language of insulated early childhood; and English, the institutional language of education and American society. English is imagined as a demanding stepmother who has usurped the mother tongue. In this account, ‘becoming’ linguistically Italian allowed Lahiri to distance herself from the void (‘il vuoto’) of her origin and to triangulate the hitherto direct line of hostility between Bengali and English. Italian is born out of her (‘nasce da me’): linguistic self-formation is represented as a violent, Ovidian metamorphosis which clears the way to writing without style.

However, making a new home in language must result in the autogenesis of a new style rather than its removal. Lahiri is all too aware of the translingual literary ancestry she has followed, one which calls to mind writers such as Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Emil Cioran, Vladimir Nabokov and more recently, Ágota Kristóf. For Lahiri, Italian words have sent her into a world (‘le parole che mi mettono al mondo’) and she has made an abode in it. This paper considers how the initially placeless abstractions of Lahiri’s Italian-authored, self-translated fiction only half-conceal her interactions with Italian letters. Italian is both the fountainhead of modern Italian literature, Dante, but also the language of racialised insult which ‘others’. Thus, the plural meanings of 'il volgare' and the vulgar are significant. The 'dolce stil novo' of Dante is the vernacular of Tuscan dialect: the so-called vulgar which supplanted Latin and became the modern-day language of the Italian nation-state. It is in this idiom that Lahiri conceives and rather programmatically self-fashions a literary 'vita nova'.

Many of the theorists have different interpretation to understand the morality principle viz-a-viz the nexus of causality and obnoxiousness when involve in inflicting moral judgements focusing on the thin properties of goodness and badness – because objective information is based about morality through intuition. John Milton’s book Paradise Lost claims that Civil Disobedience of Man justifies ways of God to Men. Michael Huemer in his book Ethics Intuitionism says moral judgements are cognitive states. While Immanuel Kant in his book The Metaphysics of Morals states that all immoral actions are irrational because they violate the “Categorical Imperative” – it means that categorization of basic moral duties towards ourselves and others, yet the same moral philosophy is interpreted in his other book The Critique of Practical Reason in making sense with such human endeavour that does not arise moral conflict due to too much of ethics – as moral absolutism/perfection may deprive of happiness or well-being if the subjectivity of one’s morality deprives existence as what Alexander Pope says in his book Essay on Criticism “Whatever is Right, is the Right”.

Concerning his decision to write in English, Ha Jin, who emigrated to the U.S. in his late twenties, claimed: “I do it for the freedom in English.” Prevented from going back to China by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the author explains that English gives him not only political freedom but also literary freedom since it frees him from the very elaborate traditions of Chinese writing. At the same time, he continues to write about Chinese and Chinese migrants. One of his novel’s settings, Korea, was chosen because, according to him, it “is a neutral space”—by which he must have meant a space in-between (his fourth novel, War Trash, is mainly set in a Korean POW camp during the Korean War Panmunjom negotiations), a symbolic condition of the linguistic and cultural movement of the author’s writings. In the 2010s, with much less an apparent political occasion, Jhumpa Lahiri, by then already much-celebrated and established Indian-American writer, started to write in Italian, moving back and forth between Italy and the U.S. When asked to explain her new choice of creative language, she answered: “I write in Italian to feel free.” She further explicates that she has always felt that she is “a writer without a true mother tongue,” and by choosing to write in Italian instead of an Indian language as people expected her to, she “complicated the situation considerably.” Yet even in Italian, Lahiri argues, her works continue to be “about migrants”—that is, “immigration and imagination.” The two writers’ rationales for writing in the languages they newly acquired, as well as their works written in them, illustrate that an author’s carving of a writer’s self sometimes has less to do with mastering a language than with moving away from a language and navigating complex relations between different languages. This study examines the way migrant authors create creative space from language differences, the linguistic negotiations and transgressions involved therein, and the broader implications of such projects for an expansive understanding of translation.

I propose to study the prominence of spatial metaphors to account for the translingual experience in Jhumpa Lahiri’s essayistic and fictional writing. This case study will explore the ethical and aesthetic stakes of “literary translingualism” (Kellman, 1991) in a bilingual author (speaking Bengali and English) who has made the original choice to learn a third language, Italian, a language with no apparent link to her spatial, linguistic and family origins, with no link to her parents’ emigration from Calcutta to London and then to the United States, and to turn it into a new writing language. In her language memoir In altre parole, estranged from both Bengali and English, without a homeland and a single mother tongue, the writer presents herself as “exiled even from the definition of exile”. Translingual self-writing does indeed appear to be an experience of defamiliarization. I will examine the singularity of this experience of inner exile in relation to notions of “third space” (H. Bhabha) and “non-places of exile” (A. Galitzine-Loumpet). Translingualism translates into a series of spatial metaphors that reflect the physical and linguistic displacements of the writer who lives on both sides of the Atlantic, between Rome and the East Coast of the USA.

I will focus on Lahiri’s recent essay, Translating Myself and Others (2022), and on the fiction entitled Dove mi trovo (2018, literally: Where I Am), the first novel Jhumpa Lahiri self-translates from Italian into English under the title Whereabouts. The study of spatial metaphors (such as the margin, the crossing of a lake, the fragile shelter…) will provide an opportunity to address questions of self-translation, translatability and untranslatable in the translingual experience. I will also discuss the conflict between minor and major languages in the literary field, as Lahiri takes the risk of writing in Italian, a language that modifies her writing style, as she declares: “In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way”. By writing in Italian, Lahiri has chosen an ethic of literary minority and linguistic diversity against the hegemony of English. The author’s translingualism thus perhaps offers a way of rethinking world literature by making the choice of a minor language not the object of an inheritance or a personal conquest but of a free ethical, political and aesthetic commitment – beyond the still powerful ideology of the “mother tongue” even in current reflections on translingualism.

When a writer translates their own work, are they reinventing it or maintaining it ? This question lies at the centre of ethical concerns in self-translation, an act that complicates notions of fidelity and creative freedom. If a literary text can be performed in infinite ways by different readers, then a self-translator is also a reader of their own work. From a comparative perspective, this paper will attempt to theorise and propose self-translation as a relational act of self-reading, where the author/translator engages with language difference and ideological/philosophical shifts. The paper will examine O.V. Vijayan’s self-translation of Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969) in Malayalam into The Legends of Khasak (1994) in English in an attempt to answer: (1) What does the act of self-translation reveal about the ethics and inherent creative possibilities that arise when translating one’s own work? (2) How does the act of self-translation affect a writer's sense of "where they are writing from"? The English translation of the novel, The Legends of Khasak written after almost two decades, was bereft of the existential despair and ideological disillusionment that the Malayalam original was rooted in. Vijayan in his English translation is writing from a new political moment, where his self-translation positions Khasakkinte Ithihasam differently in relation to India’s socio-political and cultural situation. Vijayan’s translation becomes an authorial self-reading that leads to an ideological and formal transformation of the original. Vijayan, in translating the work into The Legends of Khasak, does not just reproduce a previous text - he re-reads it as a new ‘work’, a self-reading across time. Rebecca Walkowitz’s concept of "born translated" points to works written with translatability and its circulation in mind. Vijayan’s self-translation, however, can be read as a “reborn translation”, a work re-read by the writer himself through the prism of time, space and history. By engaging with the questions put forth, this paper will argue that self-translation can be seen as an ethically charged act of self-reading where the author does not simply render meaning into another language but reinterprets and re-constructs their own work.