Self-Translation

Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture

Anthony Cordingley, Anthony Cordingley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441175755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

S elf-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.

PART ONE

Self-translation and literary history

CHAPTER ONE

The self-translator as rewriter

Susan Bassnett

Abstract: This chapter considers the multilingual work of a range of writers – including Nancy Huston, Rabindranath Tagore, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Amalia Rosselli and Samuel Beckett – and argues that the concept of self-translation is misleading and unnecessary. All these writers negotiate between languages in different ways, and for different reasons. Borges’ witty dismissal of originality serves as a framework concept, along with Andre Lefevere’s redefinition of all translation as rewriting.

Research across the landscape of Translation Studies over the last decades has diversified to the point where we could say that there are now a number of clearly discernible pathways. One such pathway, that has been one of the most significant approaches to translation, is polysystems theory, which evolved through the 1970s and 1980s, and has led in particular to a great deal of valuable research into the history of the transmission of translations over time. Ever since Itamar Even-Zohar first suggested that variations in translation activity in different cultures were not only apparent but could also be mapped, scholars have investigated the role played by translated texts in literary systems with surprising results, and such investigations continue to proliferate. One clear manifestation of this line of approach has been research into changing norms of translation, along with a re-evaluation of translation as a literary activity, and of the role played by translation as a shaping force in the history of different literatures.

The dominance of polysystems theory and Descriptive Translation Studies in the 1980s gave way to the cultural turn of the 1990s. When Andre Lefevere and I edited the collection of essays, Translation, History and Culture in 1990, we argued that the object of study had been redefined and that what had come to be studied ‘is the text embedded within its network of both source and target cultural signs’ (12). Translation Studies, following the cultural turn, should employ tools not only from linguistics and literary studies but also from cultural history and cultural studies. What was needed was greater understanding of the complexities of the translation process in toto, of the agency of the translator, of the socioeconomic factors that determine the selection and publication of translations, of the diffusion of translations in the target culture and of the ways in which translation serves to construct an image of an author, a literature or even of a whole society for a target readership.

The cultural turn has led to a vast amount of important work into the sociocultural aspects of translation. Emily Apter, Bella Brodzki, Michael Cronin, Edwin Gentzler, Harish Trivedi, Sherry Simon, Maria Tymoczko, Lawrence Venuti and many others have written important books that take thinking about translation into new, exciting realms. Venuti’s theorizing about the invisible translator in particular has been highly influential. In his book that first appeared in 1995, The Translator’s Invisibility, Venuti explored the history of translation in the Anglo-American tradition and concluded that the emphasis placed in that tradition on creating an illusion of fluency, by which he means creating the impression that a text has not been translated at all, both marginalizes translation as a literary activity and serves to make the translator seem invisible. Post-colonial translation scholars developed the idea of the translator’s invisibility to highlight ways in which an uneven balance of power between languages and literatures had been exploited in translation.¹ It is important to remember that translation plays a vital role in determining how a society receives work produced at another time and in another culture, and far from being an invisible filter through which a text passes, the role of the translator is fundamental. Lefevere’s call for translation to be re-labelled ‘rewriting’ strikes a powerful chord; rewriters, he argues are ‘responsible for the general reception and survival of works of literature among non-professional readers, who constitute the great majority of readers in our global culture, to at least the same, if not a greater extent than the writers themselves’ (1).

The cultural turn in Translation Studies opened the way to a proliferation of research into the politics and economics of translation, into the inequitable power relationships between languages and literatures, into ethical issues and into the agency of translators. At the same time, we have witnessed a growing number of leading international literary figures such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Eva Hoffman or Milan Kundera both engaging in translation themselves and writing about translation, which doubtless reflects the reality of today’s globalized world where millions of people have, through choice or necessity, become bi- or multilingual. Translation has therefore assumed a global significance that it did not have in previous generations. Hence Bella Brodzki can argue that translation is as significant as gender in that it underwrites ‘all cultural transactions from the most benign to the most venal’ (2). At this juncture we can see translation studies and the study of comparative and world literature starting to come together in their investigations of the translator/rewriter. What is just beginning to develop, as greater attention focuses on the translator as rewriter, is a more profound investigation into individuals who write in more than one language, writers who may (or may not) be categorized as ‘self-translators’.

The term ‘self-translation’ is problematic in several respects, but principally because it compels us to consider the problem of the existence of an original. The very definition of translation presupposes an original somewhere else, so when we talk about self-translation, the assumption is that there will be another previously composed text from which the second text can claim its origin. Yet many writers consider themselves as bilinguals and shift between languages, hence the binary notion of original–translation appears simplistic and unhelpful. Nancy Huston, the Canadian author who writes versions of her novels in French and in English (just to note: her first language was English) deliberately rejects such facile labelling. In a public interview at the University of Toronto, Victoria College, on 24 February 2003, she dismissed attempts to persuade her to adhere to the original–translation dichotomy:

Do I take the same liberties with the French language as I do English? No idea. Don’t want to know. . . .

In that same interview she professes herself to be uncomfortable with the shift between languages, wishing that she could make a definitive choice, but instead has to accept that she is ‘Handicapped in both, not happy, not satisfied’, adding that ‘because if you’ve got two languages, you haven’t really “got” any at all’.

Significantly, when her Cantique des plains won a major award for Canadian French language fiction, there were protests because it was held by some to be not an original work but rather a translation of her Plainsong, which speaks volumes about the differentiation in status between what is seen as ‘original’ and what is seen as ‘translation’. In Huston’s case, the choice of languages appears to be an impulse driven by issues of identity, as she wrestles with a sense of discomfort in both her languages. Her work implies that there is neither an original nor a translation, rather there are two versions of a piece of writing in two languages, each with its own set of significations.

Huston has drawn an intriguing and powerful parallel between the self-translator struggling to exist in two distinct languages and a child caught up in her parent’s divorce, running back and forth between father and mother:

trying to explain mummy to daddy and daddy to mummy, listen you guys, it may not sound like it but in fact you’re saying exactly the same thing, listen listen, you’re compatible, stay together, don’t break up, don’t fly apart, don’t destroy us all by destroying your marriage, (. . .) why such a deep rift between anglophones and francophones, the important things are the same in all our lives, aren’t they? (personal communication)

Yet by the end of the process, Huston acknowledges that she feels a sense of satisfaction at being able to tell the same stories in two languages: ‘as if that somehow proved that I’m not a schizophrenic, not crazy. Because ultimately the same person in both languages’ (personal communication). To Nancy Huston, self-translation is difficult and painful because it appears at first to expose gaps between languages, to raise the spectre of a divided mind and of a divided world, but when the translation is completed, the gaps are closed, the process has become a healing one and the self-translator is no longer caught between languages but able to exist fully in both. Huston acknowledges that, somehow, the split between her two language selves has been healed through translation.

Borges saw shifting between languages simply as part of a creative process that drew upon a variety of sources. He declared that he always rewrote, that he repeated himself, even going so far as to accuse himself, ironically, of plagiarism:

I have read so much and I have heard so much. I admit it: I repeat myself. I confirm it: I plagiarize. We are all the heirs of millions of scribes who have already written down all that is essential a long time before us. We are all copyists . . . there are no longer any original ideas. (Borges in Kristal 135)

For Borges, creativity in writing practice was indissolubly linked to reading; texts are endlessly being transmitted and retransmitted so that any notion of a point of origin, of an original, becomes absurd. Borges would have loved the Internet, I think, for here too notions of originality dissolve. We have only to look at multilingual advertising to become aware that what is going on here is not so much translation of a single original, but rather target-focussed versions of a template intended to market a particular product. Reading the instructions of a globally marketed product in a range of languages shows subtle (and not-so-subtle differences) in the presentation of that product for different consumers, suggesting that rather than there having been a single source text from which translations have been made, there has been a product template which is then modified in accordance with the expectations and conventions of the target audience.

In her book on the Brazilian writer and self-translator, Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro, Maria Alice Gonçalves Antunes stresses the importance of the differences between different language readers. If writers write with a particular readership in mind, then once their work is translated, a whole new set of readers need to be identified. Her book, which is yet to appear in English, is one of the few volumes that tackles the question of self-translation and endeavours to provide an overview of some of the issues. She draws attention, for example, to the practice of writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa whose knowledge of the target language is good enough to enable them to work closely with their translators, a practice that may be said to border on self-translation, and through close analysis of some of Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro’s work, she examines the degrees of modification that have taken place between his Portuguese and English versions. Her conclusion is that understanding self-translation is highly complex: on the one hand, there is the question of the role played by a different readership, while on the other hand there are other factors linked to an individual writer’s own creativity. She suggests that some of the changes introduced by Ribeiro derive from his wish to conform to the expectations of his English-language readership, while ensuring that specifically Brazilian cultural signs are not lost. Yet she also concedes that ‘a certain number of changes can be attributed to the author’s desire to rewrite his own original’ (253).

The urge to rewrite in other languages is by no means a recent phenomenon. Long before the Internet, some writers were consciously experimenting with languages in an endeavour to find an authentic voice. We can see such a process at work in the writing of Amalia Rosselli, the poet who composed in English, French and Italian before finally settling down to write in Italian, publishing Serie ospedaliera in 1963. In the following brief extract from her ‘Diario in tre lingue’, written in 1955–6, we can trace how her reading in all three languages failed at that stage in her life to help her determine which linguistic path to follow in her own work:

dal francese si passa al surrealismo

nell’italiano predomina il concreto, verso greco-latino inconscio, anche stornello

Montale-Proust

italian stornello popolare

greek-latin prose

Joyce, frantumazione

surrealismo (french)

classici

argots

Chinois

strutture lingue straniere

eliot-religious

nous voulons nous rapprocher du contenu

(de ses droigts humides)

‘per dir la verita non son contenta di nessuna di queste’. (76)

Rosselli referred to her early writings as poetic exercises during the process of deciding which language to write in; English she saw as primarily a language in which to write about religion, while French offered her surrealism and Italian was the language of ‘concrete rhythms’. In some of her poems she switches languages, while her sequence October Elizabethans is a kind of pastiche, composed in an artificial mock-Elizabethan English. For Rosselli, moving around linguistically was a means of finding her poetic voice and establishing her own poetic identity.

For other writers, the decision to change languages may be linked to a desire to speak to a wider readership, as in the case of Milan Kundera who shifted from Czech to French, though another factor here may well be the flight from a language and a culture that has painful associations. Vladimir Nabokov is another famous example of a writer shifting from his native tongue, constrained by circumstances to become creative in a learned language. Nabokov, however, had a very low opinion of translation, and in his ‘On translating Eugene Onegin’ compared translation to ‘A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter’, even going so far as to declare it ‘a profanation of the dead’ (1). In compensation, Nabokov wanted mountainous footnotes, paratexts that would compensate for all that was lost in the shift from one language to another. If Nabokov felt that translation was profanation of the dead, we may imagine how gravely he viewed translation of the living.

Not all writers are driven by circumstances to write in a globally significant language. The case of a writer like Ngugi Wa Thiongo reveals a shift of language as a means of asserting the status of a minority language. Ngugi chose to make a political statement by rejecting English, the global language, preferring to write in Gikuyo, despite the obvious implications of turning his back on the Anglophone market. In an autobiographical essay, he explains the reasons for this decision. It seemed natural, he declares, to have started writing in English while a student at university in Kampala in the 1960s, because the writers he was reading and studying wrote in English, and the new wave of African and Caribbean writers in whom he found inspiration were also writing in English. It was not until he came to work with a radical community theatre group in 1977 that he began to write in Gikuyo, and following a spell in prison as a political activist, he wrote his first novel in that language.

Ngugi’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction: Self-translation, going global Anthony Cordingley
• PART ONE Self-translation and literary history
• PART TWO Interdisciplinary perspectives: Sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy
• PART THREE Post-colonial perspectives
• PART FOUR Cosmopolitan identities/texts