Translators in Body and Soul 

Lisa Katz 

Fifty Sounds: A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing by Polly Barton. Liveright, 2022, 384 pp., $27.95 (hardcover). 

Homesick: A Memoir by Jennifer Croft. The Unnamed Press, 2019, 256 pp., $28 (hardcover). 

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri. Princeton, 2022, 208 pp., $21.95 (hardcover). 

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. Riverhead Books, 2021, 225 pp., $26 (hardcover). 

The Kimono Tattoo by Rebecca Copeland. Brother Mockingbird Press, 2021, 355 pp., $18 (paper). 

Subjects We Left Out by Naomi Washer. Veliz Books, 2021, 178 pp., $19 (paper). 

The act of translation evokes a broad spectrum of attempts to define and judge it in a general way. It has been generously envisioned as a kind of “hospitality,” nonetheless involving expulsion, albeit from the womb—“parturition” (Paul Ricouer). On the other hand, it is seen as a wrenching “trial of the foreign,” inevitably filled with “deformations” such as “clarification” and “ennoblement” (Antoine Berman). Translation has also been conceptualized neutrally as “rewriting” shaped by various power dynamics (André Lefevere). [Words inside quotation marks are from published translations into English of the original French essays.] 

Translation is seen as an agent of colonialism (think: Bible) and of cultural appropriation. We are encouraged by critic-scholars to be aware of these complications and/or faults when we read translations. But it turns out that trying to understand translation in general is light years away from the individual translator’s experience, which is of a particular and often intimate transformation of language occurring within the context of a real life and often involving exponential changes on the page—and even in that life.