On Self-translation

An Exploration in Self-translators' Teloi and Strategies

Simona Anselmi

• Publisher: LED Edizioni Universitarie
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9788855130356
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Übersetzen & Dolmetschen

The book explores aspects of self-translation, an all but exceptional phenomenon which has been practised, albeit on the quiet, for nearly two thousand years and has recently grown exponentially due to the increasing internationalisation of English and the growing multilingualism of modern societies. Starting from the premise that self-translation is first and foremost a translational act, i.e. a form of rewriting subject to a number of constraints, the book utilises the most valuable methods and findings of translation studies to account for the variety of reasons underlying self-translation processes and the diversity of strategies used by self-translators. The cases studied, from Kundera to Ngugi, and addressing writers like Beckett, Huston, Tagore, Brink, Krog and many others, show that the translation methods employed by self-translators vary considerably depending on their teloi. Nonetheless, most self-translations display domesticating tendencies similar to those observed in allograph translations, which confirms the view that self-translators, just like normal translators, are never free from the linguistic and cultural constraints imposed by the recontextualising of their texts in a new language. Most interestingly, the study brings to light certain recurring features, e.g. a tendency of author-translators to revise their original during the self-translation process or after completing it, which make self-translators privileged authors who can revise their texts in the light of the insights gained while translating.

1.
SELF-TRANSLATION STUDIES

1.1. THE STATE OF THE ART IN SELF-TRANSLATION STUDIES

After being a long-neglected area of research, self-translation, defined as early as 1976 by Anton Popovič (1976:19) as “the translation of an original work into another language by the author himself”, is finally attracting increasing attention from translation scholars ¹. The interdiscipline of translation studies, whose object of study are translation processes and products, is certainly the best placed among disciplines to address the phenomenon of self-translation, also known as auto-translation or authorial translation ², which refers “both to the act of translating one’s own writings into another language and the result of such an undertaking” (Grutman, 2009:257). As Tanqueiro puts it, “l’autotraduction est traduction, et en tant que telle, elle doit être objet d’étude de la théorie de la traduction littéraire” (2009:108).

This surge of interest, witnessed by the growing number of international symposia³, special issues of translation journals and publications entirely devoted to self-translation⁴, as well as by the foundation of a research group such as AutoTrad ⁵ exclusively dedicated to it, is partly due to the recently gained awareness that self-translation is in no way marginal, rare or exceptional (Santoyo, 2006). On the contrary, research into the history of self-translation is increasingly demonstrating that it is “a much more widespread phenomenon than one might think” (Whyte, 2002:64). It has existed at least since the first century AD, has become extremely common since the middle ages, and it is widely practised nowadays, especially in bilingual and multilingual countries, both in Europe (e.g. Belgium, Ireland and Spain) and outside (e.g. Brazil, Canada, India, Puerto Rico, South Africa)⁶. Today it seems that the number of self-translations, of various text types and language pairs, is even growing exponentially due to a variety of historical, socio-linguistic and political factors, such as the expanding use of English as the language of international communication, which is, for example, leading a growing number of scholars of different mother tongues to translate their own works into English, and the growing multilingualism of modern, globalised societies, whose “ ‘new’ nomadic citizens are characterized as polyglots travelling in between languages, in a permanent stage of (self-) translation” (Meylaerts, 2006:1).

The considerable attention that self-translation is receiving from translation researchers is also due to the growing realisation that self-translation is first and foremost a translational phenomenon, which deserves to be studied as such, and not as an exceptional writing practice. Until at least the late 90s, self-translation was dealt with almost exclusively within literary studies, by critics who were interested in the writing of bilingual authors that used to translate their own works, like Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, to mention the most widely studied. In their analyses of self-translations literary critics found no or little support in translation theory, as lamented, for example, by two Beckett scholars like Brian Fitch, who stated that “direct discussion or even mention of self-translation is virtually nonexistent in writings on theory of translation” (1988:21), and Corinne Scheiner, who, a decade later, reasserted that translation studies “for the most part, has neglected and continues to overlook the phenomenon of self-translation” (1999:175). It was only from 2000 that translation researchers began to address the topic of self-translation more systematically and with a view to describing the features and specificities of this form of translation, rather than to gain new insights into the writing process of an individual self-translating author. In the new millenium a growing number of scholars started to view self-translation as a possible “alternative line of study, within literary translation theory” (Tanqueiro 2000:62), a sort of subfield of translation studies, which, on the one hand, cannot be investigated without the models and methods offered by its parent discipline and which, on the other, can contribute to the study of the broader phenomenon of translation (Anselmi, 1998; Mavrodin, 2007). Fundamental to the changed approach to self-translation were a number of ideas, concepts and methods developed within the discipline of translation studies, which helped translation scholars to correct certain mistaken assumptions about self-translation, and which, as is the aim of this study to demonstrate, can still offer a significant contribution to this area of research: namely, the diachronic approach to translation, the theorisation of translation as a form of creative rewriting, the recognition of the constrained and/or mediated nature of translation, the discovery of the cultural component in translation matters, commonly referred to as the “cultural turn” (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1990), the focus on translators and their behaviour, the corpus-based finding that translations have distinctive features that set them apart from non-translated texts.

1.2. (SELF-)TRANSLATION BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND CONSTRAINTS

Traditionally, literary approaches to self-translation, mostly focused on individual writer(s), have tended to highlight the differences between self-translation, or auto-translation, and allograph translation, that is, translation done by anyone who is not the author of the original text, on the basis that the former is either more original, more creative and above all freer than the latter. For, example, Jacqueline Risset, in her analysis of James Joyce’s own Italian versions of two passages from his Work in Progress, argues that Joyce’s self-translations are “no pursuit of hypothetical equivalents of the original text (as given, definitive) but a later elaboration representing […] a kind of extension, a new stage, a more daring variation on the text in process” (1984:6), somewhat assuming that normal translations pursue equivalence and dare less than self-translations. In a similar vein, Brian Fitch concludes his comparative study of Samuel Beckett’s original French version of Bing and its English second version, Ping, by asserting “that self-translation truly represents a case apart and that the status of the text produced thereby enjoys a specificity that it shares with no other form of translation” (1989:24). For Fitch the writing of the second version on the part of the author of the original is a process of reorganization, reformulation and restructuring in which the writer is accorded a certain freedom, which is not accorded to an ordinary translator, who would be accused of betrayal should he enjoy the same freedom as the author of the original: “if he were not the author of the original text as well, would we not say that he has taken certain liberties with the latter?” (Fitch, 1988:24).⁷ In her study of bilingual Russian émigré writers Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour asserts the equality of original and translation when the latter is a self-translation as it “provides the Mephistophelian pleasure of creating two mutually orbiting works in dynamic equilibrium” (1989:175), a pleasure which is presumably not afforded by normal translation.

The difference between self-translation and normal translation has also been highlighted by certain self-translators and translation scholars. The writer and scholar Raymond Federman (1993:79), who translated his own work from English into French and vice versa, explicitly denies the status of translation to his self-translating activity:

when I finish a novel (as you know I have written seven or eight now, either in English or in French), I am immediately tempted to write (rewrite, adapt, transform, transact, transcreate -- I am not sure what term I should use here, but certainly not translate) (emphasis added) the original into the other language.

For him self-translators should be allowed to take more liberties with their own works mainly because they belong to them. The act of self-translation, rather than that of ordinary translation, not only augments, enriches, and even embellishes the original text, it also allows the writer to correct its initial errors. As a result, self-translation is not to be viewed as “an approximation of the original, nor a duplication, nor a substitute, but truly a continuation of the work – of the working of the text” (Federman, 1993:81). Similarly, the translation scholar Lucía Aranda states that “Auto-translations can be regarded as more prestigious than ‘regular’ translations in part because they are not considered copies” (2007:7).

These approaches seem to rest on an interpretation of translation that has been widely called into question by translation studies, that is, the old image of translation as an equivalent copy of the source text. Besides, by insisting on the freer nature of the task of the self-translator, they seem not to take into adequate consideration the constrained or mediated nature of any act of translation.

1.2.1. Self-translation, rewriting and the creative turn

Underlying most of the approaches that emphasise the difference between self-translation and normal translation is still a notion of translation as accurate and faithful reproduction of the source text, in accordance with Catford’s equivalence-based definition of translation as “the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent material in another language (TL)” (1965:20). However, as most contemporary translation theories have demonstrated, the concept of equivalence, which has dominated the source-oriented linguistic approaches to translation since the 1950s, has proven to be inadequate to account for the complexities involved in translating. The notion of translation as the equivalent transfer of the source text has, in fact, been questioned by a series of newer projects and paradigms suggesting alternative, more creative, views of translation.

In his Propositions pour une poétique de la traduction (1973), for example, Henri Meschonnic opposes to the notion of transparency, which echoes that of equivalence, the view of translation as a work on language, which is the same in the case of a source text as it is in a translation. For Meschonnic (2003:341) the translation of a text, when it is structured as a text is

the writing of a reading-writing, historical adventure of a subject. It is not transparency with regard to the original […] a re-uttering specific to a historical subject, interaction of two poetics, decentring, the inside-out of a language and its textualities

For him translating means working

in the chains of the signifier (in and by the text-system, the chains that make system, from the small to the large unit) as a practice of the contradiction between foreign text and re-utterance, logic of the signifier and logic of the sign, one language-culture-history and another language-culture-history. (Meschonnic, 2003:344)

Meschonnic’s insistence on translation as a work on language, decentring, that is, a textual relation between two texts in two languagecultures, foretells deconstructionist ideas – such as Derrida’s notions of différance, the play of signifiers and the unstable source – which profoundly influenced translation studies. In deconstructing the notion of origin (“impossible presence of the absent origin” Derrida, 1978:292) and positing that meaning is a product of the text which neither precedes nor exists beyond the text (“There is no outside-the-text” Derrida, 1989:841), deconstructionism destabilises the hierarchical relationship between source and target text, which posits that the target text is inherently inferior to the ‘original’, and invalidates the principle of faithfulness. If “meaning is never self-identical and inevitably changes over time according to the new contexts in which it is (re)-produced […] no single translation or translation strategy can lay claim to total faithfulness. A translation is necessarily ‘different’ from its source text” (Varney, 2008:117).

Almost at the same time attacks on the notion of a superior source text to which the target text should be equivalent came from the Skopos and descriptive paradigms. As noticed by Pym (2009), the Skopos Theory, for which the dominant factor of each translation is its purpose and generally translations fulfil quite different functions to those of source texts, makes equivalence a special case that occurs in situations where ‘functional consistency’ is required between the source and target contexts. The Skopos Theory postulates the possibility that translators’ actions include rewriting of all kinds, including the production of a completely new text.

Descriptive translation scholars, for their part, interested in finding out what translations are actually like and not in defining an ideal form of translation, show that translators behave differently in different socio-cultural and historical settings, and adopt different modes of equivalence, thus challenging any absolute equivalence equations. For them, equivalence is a functional-relational concept standing for “that set of relationships which will have been found to distinguish appropriate modes of translation performance for the culture in question” (Toury, 1995: 86). Accordingly they view translating as a form of text-production, manipulating the source text to produce a target text in a new cultural system. Starting from these premises, which Snell-Hornby summarises as “not intended equivalence but admitted manipulation” (1995:22), descriptivism paves the way to the vision of translations as forms of textual manipulation. From this perspective André Lefevere (1985) suggests viewing translation first as refraction, rather than reflection, of a source text, to stress the fact that translations, unlike mirrors or copies, involve changes of perception, and then as rewriting, a notion which further recognises the status of translation as recreation of an original text.

By emphasising the creative interpretation and the recreation of the source text involved in any translation process, all these positions and paradigms make it particularly difficult to distinguish self-translation from regular translation on the assumption that the former is more creative and freer than the latter.

New insights into the status of self-translation vis-à-vis normal translation can be gained by rethinking self-translation in the light of the recent “creative turn” that is going on in translation studies (Loffredo and Perteghella, 2006). Drawing on some of the poststructuralist and deconstructionist ideas described above, which empowered the translator as an active player in the production of meaning, new approaches within translation studies are further investigating the creative element in translation and re-affirming translation as a mode of writing. In particular, a growing number of scholars are recognising the presence and the influence of the translator’s agency and subjectivity. Loffredo and Perteghella (2006) claim that the translator’s creative input is to be identified by looking at the translator’s identikit or individuality but also at the relationship the translator establishes with a given translation. According to them, a translation reflects the translator’s “responsibility”, that is, his/her ability to respond to a text, which entails a relationship with the source text, in which a dialogue is established and the translating subject is defined. In this sense “the target text turns into the inscription of the translating subjectivity in the act of self-reflection and ultimately self-translation” (2006:7). Likewise, Hermans argues that the translating subject cannot be eliminated from translations in that translating, as a form of text-production, requires the use on the part of the translator of linguistic means in the host language which make his/her utterances necessarily “marked, revealing a discursively positioned subject” (2007:28). Varney suggests viewing translation as “a form of textual practice which seeks in some way to re-express the meanings of the source text whilst adopting, through the lexical or syntactic reworkings characteristic of translation in general, a definite critical subject-position” (2008:119).

The awareness of a translator’s subjectivity necessarily inscribed in the target text might provide evidence in favour of the distinction between self-translation and ordinary translation in that in the former case there is the same subjectivity inscribed in the original as in the self-translated text, whereas in the latter case two distinct subjectivities are inscribed in the original and in its translation. With this regard reporting the findings of the research team on self-translation Autotrad Tanqueiro (2009:109) states that in the case of self-translation

subjectivité, qui généralement interfère dans les critères d’analyse des traductions parce que réalisées par un traducteur autre que l’auteur, […] est, pour utiliser la terminologie de Christiane Nord, presque réduite à zéro. On peut donc dire, par rapport à l’autotraduction, que du point de vue de la subjectivité, elle est un cas extrême de la relation auteur-traducteur. ⁸

Yet, this argument rests on an absolute and free view of the translator’s subjectivity, which has been questioned by a number of translation paradigms, such as Lawrence Venuti’s theory of the translator’s invisibility, defined as an illusionistic effect of discourse concealing “the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, starting with the translator’s crucial intervention in the foreign text” (1995:1). According to Venuti, far from being free, the translating subjectivity is “constituted by cultural and social determinations that are diverse and even conflicting, that mediate any language use, and, that vary with every cultural formation and every historical moment” (1995: 24). The constrained nature of the translator’s intervention has been reasserted by many scholars investigating the translator’s creativity, like Boase-Beier and Holman (1999), for whom creativity is a direct effect of the constraints to which one is subject, the more one is constrained the more one is creative. Boase-Beier and Holman claim that, like any creative process, the...