The translation of the personal essay: the essayist narrator in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Clothing of Books
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/ertci.17.2026.21894Keywords:
translation, personal essay, essayist narrator, essayistic voice, Translation StudiesAbstract
This text presents a comparative analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri's essay "The Clothing of Books" with its Mexican Spanish translation. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion surrounding the personal essay in the field of translation studies. Following the postulates of Nathaly Bernal (2020), we propose a characterization of the personal essay, as well as a series of features that define the essayist narrator of this subgenre: voice, point of view (internal or zero), narrative technique (direct, indirect, free indirect and interior monologue style) and marks that account for the narrator's background. We conclude that the personal essay requires a translation capable of conveying the characteristics of the essayist narrator, since this is inseparable from the figure of the author and, therefore, is the one who supports the stated discourse.
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