Self Translation

A fascinating collection of essays and conversations on the changing nature of language. From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation,a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating one’s own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavans’s explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavans’s status, in the words of the Washington Post, as “Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast.” “On Self-Translation is a beautiful and often profound work. Stavans, a superb stylist, offers erudite meditations on translation, and gives us new ways to think about language itself.” — Jack Lynch, author of The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of' “Proper” English, from Shakespeare to South Park “Stavans carries his learning light, and has the gift of communicating the profoundest of insights in the simplest of ways. The book is delightfully free of unnecessary jargon and ponderous discourse, allowing the reader time and space for her own reflections without having to slow down in the reading of it. This is work born out of the deep confidence that complete and dedicated immersion in a chosen field of knowledge (and practice) can bring; it is further infused with original wisdom accrued from self-reflexive, lived experiences of multilinguality.” — Kavita Panjabi, Jadavpur University

This book investigates the political, social, cultural and economic implications of self-translation in multilingual spaces in Europe. Engaging with the ‘power turn’ in translation studies contexts, it offers innovative perspectives on the role of self-translators as cultural and ideological mediators. The authors explore the unequal power relations and centre-periphery dichotomies of Europe’s minorised languages, literatures and cultures. They recognise that the self-translator’s double affiliation as author and translator places them in a privileged position to challenge power, to negotiate the experiences of the subaltern and colonised, and to scrutinise conflicting minorised vs. hegemonic cultural identities. Three main themes are explored in relation to self-translation: hegemony and resistance; self-minorisation and self-censorship; and collaboration, hybridisation and invisibility. This edited collection will appeal to scholars and students working on translation, transnational and postcolonial studies, and multilingual and multicultural identities.

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.

This book explores an important aspect of human existence: humor in self-translation, a virtually unexplored area of research in Humour Studies and Translation Studies. Of the select group of international scholars contributing to this volume some examine literary texts from different perspectives (sociological, philosophical, or post-colonial) while others explore texts in more extraneous fields such as standup comedy or language learning. This book sheds light on how humour in self-translation induces thoughts on social issues, challenges stereotypes, contributes to recast individuals in novel forms of identity and facilitates reflections on our own sense of humour. This accessible and engaging volume is of interest to advanced students of Humour Studies and Translation Studies.

A fascinating collection of essays and conversations on the changing nature of language. Finalist in the Essay category, 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation, a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating one’s own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavans’s explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavans’s status, in the words of the Washington Post, as “Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast.” Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the author of many books, including Borges, the Jew, also published by SUNY Press.

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.

Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by an award-winning writer and literary translator Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages. With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers. Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

Joseph Brodsky and Collaborative Self-Translation is the first in-depth archival study to scrutinize the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky's self-translation practices during the period of his exile to the USA in 1972-1996. The book draws on a large amount of previously unpublished archival material, including the poet's manuscripts in Russian and English, draft translations, notes, comments in the margins and correspondence with his translators, editors and friends. Rulyova's approach to the study of self-translation is informed by 'social turn' in translation studies. She focuses on the process of text production, the agents and institutions involved, translation practices and the role played by translators and publishers in the production of the text.