Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture

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Self-Translation: Brokering originality in hybrid culture provides critical, historical and interdisciplinary analyses of self-translators and their works. It investigates the challenges which the bilingual oeuvre and the experience of the self-translator pose to conventional definitions of translation and the problematic dichotomies of "original" and "translation", "author" and "translator". Canonical self-translators, such Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Rabindranath Tagore, are here discussed in the context of previously overlooked self-translators, from Japan to South Africa, from the Basque Country to Scotland. This book seeks therefore to offer a portrait of the diverse artistic and political objectives and priorities of self-translators by investigating different cosmopolitan, post-colonial and indigenous practices. Numerous contributions to this volume extend the scope of self-translation to include the composition of a work out of a multilingual consciousness or society. They demonstrate how production within hybrid contexts requires the negotiation of different languages within the self, generating powerful experiences, from crisis to liberation, and texts that offer key insights into our increasingly globalized culture.

Reviews

Original, insightful and contradictory, these essays set up a site of debate where self-translation becomes far more than a marginal oddity: it is key to the configuration of Translation Studies. Self-translation is shown to be a question not of texts, but of what happens to the subject in the overlaps of cultures: it is translation of the self, and thus of a self in translation. The marginal oddity is henceforth the assumption of an original. -- Anthony Pym, Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies, Rovira i Virgili University, Spain, and President of the European Society for Translation Studies
This book is by far the most varied and comprehensive treatment of the topic of self-translation to date. The book showcases the rich and diverse research being undertaken, as perspectives from a variety of disciplines as well as new approaches to translation scholarship are brought to bear upon the act of self-translation. -- Paul F. Bandia, Concordia University, Canada, and author of Translation as Reparation

Author Bio

Anthony Cordingley is Lecturer in Translation at the Universit de Paris 8, France.