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Silvia Albertazzi (University
of Bologna) The aim of my paper is to pay homage to a great bilingual intellectual, Ariel Dorfman, by commenting on his memoir Heading North, Looking South: A Bilingual Journey, which constitutes the unique example of an autobiography where the facts of an eventful life are dealt with in the light of the author’s relationship with his two languages, English and Spanish. Born in Argentina into a family of Jewish origins, brought up in the USA, compelled to escape to Chile in the days of McCarthy’s anticommunist craze, and to fly first to Europe, then back to the States, when the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown, Dorfman deals with his multiple exiles as if they were a never-ending translation, from one language to the other, up to the point when he reaches what he calls his “linguistic ambidexterity”, and rejects the monolingual option for good. In fact, nowadays not only does Dorfman auto-translate his works, but he is one of the greatest advocates of bilinguism in his essays. His poetry, on the other hand, is mainly devoted to pondering on the terrible paradox of not being more than “an intermediary, not even a bridge” , in spite of his two languages, when it comes to expressing trauma and the pain of the others. Giuseppina Brunetti (University of Bologna) Those who translate their own works must reflect upon
a silent conversation, first and foremost amongst themselves and afterwards
with those that the author imagines will read and analyze the works in
question. The various cases of self-translation in the Middle Ages have
been only minimally explored. They have been studied for the most part
only on a case by case basis and not observed comparatively. For these
cases there is still no reliable and scientific catalogue, either more
nor less complete. Self-translation is most often found in places and,
more importantly, in individuals who, acting as true “living bridges”
– and for the same historic reasons that later on brought about
the formation of new linguistic and cultural physiognomies in modern Europe
– find themselves directly involved in the problems posed and or
resolved by multilinguism. “People don’t think about it, but
if you’re a bridge, at night you feel lonely.” Francesco Stella
opens an article dedicated to auto-translation with these words from Snoopy
(Semicerchio, 1999) to remind us, with undoubted originality, of an intrinsic
characteristic of self-translation: solitude. This characteristic is also,
however, the same separation that gives the act a differentiated bounty.
This solitude therefore is evidently intrinsic in extraordinary capability,
belonging only to the aforementioned bridges, to join and to bring together,
to allow, in short, multiple steps in various new directions. In this
paper, we intend to trace a first synthetic course through the principal
questions, comprising as well of essential methodological highlights and
by bringing to light some of the most recent works dedicated to the theme.
Furthermore we will carry out a comparative examination of some exemplary
cases, mainly literary cases of the Anglo-Norman area between the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, to the French area of the troubadours and Jean
Gerson etc., and to the Italian area of Dante and Francesco da Barberino.
Andrea Ceccherelli (University of Bologna) Twentieth-century Polish literature provides surprisingly
many examples of writers who happened to become translators of their own
works, such as Stanislaw Przybyszewski (German), Tadeusz Rittner (German),
Waclaw Sieroszewski (Russian), Bruno Jasienski (Russian), Stefan Themerson
(English and French), Maria Kuncewiczowa (English), Stanislaw Baranczak
(English), Witold Gombrowicz (Spanish), Czeslaw Milosz (English), and
this list could be further enlarged. The author of this paper aims first
of all to draw attention to the practice of self-translation by Polish
writers, which turns out to be much more widespread than the number of
studies devoted to it (even important ones, like Edward Balcerzan’s
essay on Jasienski or Ewa Kraskowska’s dissertation on Themerson)
would suggest. The paper is meant to be a sort of preliminary reconnaissance
of the field of analysis, leading to the realization of its real dimensions,
of the kind of issues it involves, of its constants and variants. An outline
of each self-translator’s activity will be traced, including an
analysis of self-translation’s motivations (internal factors and
external factors, also in comparison with writers who in the same circumstances
have chosen to produce monolingual texts in the foreign tongue), directionality
(from and into which language, unidirectional or bidirectional), frequency
(occasional, repeated or usual) and degree of authoriality (alone or in
collaboration). Anthony Cordingley (University of Paris VIII –
Vincennes-Saint-Denis) Discussions of self-translation often distinguish between writers who, for political, historical or cultural reasons, need to self-translate and those who decide to self-translate of their own free will. Criticism relating to this second group of writers often asserts and celebrates self-translation as an exploratory, creative act: a positive discovery or negotiation of multiple “selves”, even the emancipation of one or many identities within the self. However, there are writers for whom the experience of self-translation is especially arduous and unpleasant — Samuel Beckett being the archetypal modern example. These writers often confess that self-translation involves a process of inflicting violence upon their texts and/or pain upon themselves. Rather than simply putting such claims down to self-directed expressions of the common fate of the translator, “Traduttore, traditore”, I will explore how psychoanalytic interpretations of masochism from Sigmund Freud and Theodor Reik to Gilles Deleuze offer new ways of conceptualising this form of reflexive transference, or auto-translatory action. Viewed as such the decision to self-translate is implicated in the desire for suspense, subversions of the ego and a resistance to completion. Far from seeing the self-translator as a dupe to such subconscious processes, I will consider how self-translation offers the “social masochist” the possibility to square up to his dominant ego, or other. In order to do so, I will consider self-translation as a form of criticism which may be illuminated by Paul Mann’s study of the masochistic dimension to professional literary criticism: masocriticism. Xosé Manuel Dasilva (University of Vigo) The present study aims especially to claim attention
to the practice of self-translation within the Portuguese literary community
during the period of Luso-Castilian bilingualism that took place from
the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, the interval 1580-1640
being the most active in that regard, a time in which the Portuguese territory,
following the tragic death of King D. Sebastião, is annexed to
the Spanish monarchy. This constitutes a field of study hardly ever approached,
undoubtedly owing to factors of an ideological nature. Alessandra Ferraro (University
of Udine) Antonio D’Alfonso, essayist, poet and novelist
was born in Montreal to parents from Molise (Italy). Founder of the multiethnic
publishing house, Guernica, and editor of the trilingual magazine,
Vice Versa, D’Alfonso is one of Canada’s writers
who, as a consequence of his transcultural education, has extensively
practised the art of self-translation. After a brief presentation of his
work as self-translator, work which involves his whole literary production
(essays, novels, poems), we will focus in particular on self-translation
in his poetic works and how these are in continuous transformation as
the texts alternate from French to English to Italian and back again.
We will then see how his continuous exercises in self-translation have
inevitably entailed the review of critical concepts such as “mother
tongue”, “origin/ originality”, “public reception”
and “national literature”. Rainier Grutman (University
of Ottawa) After the so-called cultural turn of the 1990s, translation studies are experiencing another, sociologically-inspired, turn. One of the most commonly invoked models is Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. More emphasis is placed on the people involved in translational transfers, most notably on the translators themselves, whose habitus enables them to occupy different positions in the cultural field of one or sometimes several countries. This paper will examine the trajectory of a particular category of such intercultural agents, namely writers who have translated part of their own work into another language. The aim is to develop a typology of self-translators that would go beyond the famous case of Samuel Beckett. In addition to being the best-known self-translator of the 20th century, Beckett has often been studied in splendid isolation, with little attention being paid to his double trajectory in both the French and British literary fields. His case has been constructed as the quintessential exception that confirms the unwritten rule of monolingual writing, a situation which unfortunately stands in the way of a better understanding of self-translation as such. The paper’s title, whilst perhaps provocative, does not, however, imply a negative judgment of Beckett’s work. It is actually more akin to the compliment Medieval and Renaissance scholars used to pay to their predecessors when comparing themselves to “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants”, a position which allowed them to see further than those very giants, only because the latter had done most of the groundwork. Beckett similarly allows us to gain many precious insights into self-translation, but only if we look beyond him instead of staying in the (admittedly long) shadow he casts. Gabriella Elina Imposti (University of Bologna), Irina
Marchesini (University of Bologna) What is translation? On a platter According to George Steiner ("Extraterritorial",
in: TriQuarterly, n°17, 1970, p. 123), “the multi-lingual,
cross-linguistic situation is both the matter and form of Nabokov’s
work”. Drawing from this assumption, a focus on Nabokov’s
(tri) bilingualism appears to be relevant. The need for such an investigation
is also underlined by the surprising scarcity of contributions on this
topic in the Italian field, whereas Anglo-Saxon criticism has highlighted
the importance of this issue through several relevant studies. Barbara Ivančić (University of Bologna), Roberto
Mulinacci (University of Bologna) Interest in Translation Studies in the phenomenon of
self-translation is a fairly recent development. We were reminded of it
in the introductory text of our meeting, recalling our attention to the
different status afforded to this practice in the two editions of the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. In fact, in the first edition
(from 1998) one could still see a certain critical coldness with respect
to the topic. In the edition that followed (from 2009) one notices a significant
change in stance, effectively consisting of the awareness of the relevance
(theoretical even) that self-translation has in the overall area of Translation
Studies. Within the general area of translation studies, self-translation
seems to insert itself with a specific physiognomy, the definition of
which appears anything but problematic. This phenomenon consists of all
cases in which an author translates his own work, passing therefore from
the role of author to the role of translator. The two roles live side-by-side
in a single person, implying necessarily two opposing points of view for
certain aspects of the work. On one side is the “künstlerischer
Ausdruckswille”, or rather “the desire of artistic expression”
and on the other is the “übersetzerische Pflicht”, also
known as the “obligation of the translator” as the German
translation scholar Greiner has called them. This is a condition that
can be found in all those cases (and they abound) in which a writer is
at the same time a translator of others’ works, but who, in the
case of self-translation, (though much rarer, yet not isolated) ends up
coinciding in a single object. It is precisely this overlapping of roles
and of texts that render the phenomenon so unusual and its definition
much more complex and multifaceted than one might at first expect. Should
we, therefore, talk about translation or rewriting? What is the relationship
between the so-called original work and the translated work? In our paper
we will tackle these problems and suggest some possible solutions. Paolo Leonardi (University
of Bologna) Willard van Orman Quine was a first-rate philosopher
of the last century. His most well-known thesis concerns the indeterminacy
of translation and was introduced in Word and Object in 1960.
He writes: Giovanni Gentile G. Marchetti (University
of Bologna) The recent flowering of poetry, fiction, drama and nonfiction
in the native languages of America has inevitably forced most authors
to self-translation. In Latin American countries - and particularly in
Mexico - this has meant self-translating into Spanish. Therefore, self-translation
was not a choice but a necessity dictated by the desire to reach a wider
audience of readers. This forced indigenous writers to address the crux
of the relationship between indigenous languages and the language, literary
models and world-view imposed by colonization. This process has had very
significant results for the promotion of multilingualism. Monica Marsigli (University
of Bologna) Profuse and extremely miscellaneous translation is a
fundamental element in the artistic persona of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
and a factor that cannot be separated from his original work. As Rilke
was raised in the rather unusual linguistic setting of a small, educated
minority group from Prague with Austro-German roots, he was part of the
strange scenario surrounding their idiom, a language that apparently was
gradually losing vigour due to the lack of contact with its homeland and
ostensibly fed on déchet du parler allemand. A sort of
aversion for Sprachabfälle (linguistic trash), mature to
the point of almost being rotten, apparently gave rise to Rilke’s
passion for other languages, French and Russian in particular, so much
so that he would eventually become capable of poetic expression in them. Valentina Mercuri (University
of Barcelona) The question of literary genre has always
been one of the most debated issues among scholars, since it concerns
a phenomenon as old as literature itself. Among theose contemporary scholars
who have dealt with this problem, Todorov (1988) has asserted the importance
of genre as a propulsive power of literature, whereas Schaeffer (1989)
has explained its function in relation to literary criticism, considering
a literary work as a contextualized communicative act. In the field of
translation studies, genre is investigated mainly from the point of view
of technical translation. Trosborg (2002), for example, explains how text
typology can help the translator to “develop strategies that facilitate
his/her work and provide awareness of various options as well as constraints”.
Similarly, Hurtado (2001) defends the study of genres in the different
analyzed fields (technical, legal, audiovisual and literary), for a better
knowledge of translation procedures and types. In the light of these considerations
we consider literary genre to be a fundamental variable in the field of
literary translation and, specifically, in the still under-explored area
of self-translation. AUTOTRAD research group (2007), indeed, has outlined
a close relation between literary genre and the translation strategies
used by self-translators. Our paper will highlight the connection between
self-translation and autobiography. In the case of a self-translated autobiographical
work, we have a quadruple onomastic correspondence between author-narrator-main
character-translator of the work: it causes a growth in the subjectivity
of the “Self” which will mark specific translation choices.
Through real examples from self-translated autobiographical texts (a diary,
Piccolo Karma by Carlo Coccioli and Canícula Snapshots
from a girlhood en la frontera by Norma Cantù, a “fictional
autoethnobiography”) we will consider autobiography as the privileged
area for the study of self-translation. Enrico Monti
(University of Bologna) My paper analyzes the role of self-translation in the
works of bilingual writer Raymond Federman (1928-2009). He was born in
France and emigrated to the United States in 1947. Federman wrote novels,
short-stories, poetry and criticism in English and French, translating
himself into both these languages. Chiara Montini
(University of Aix-en-Provence) This paper tackles the problem of translating a bilingual
text, which is both the text and its self-translation, as Hokenson and
Munson define it. Tina Montone (University
of Bologna) In sixteenth-century Antwerp, a cosmopolitan city and
mercantile centre of international renown described so fittingly by Ludovico
Guicciardini in his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (editio
princeps Antwerp 1567), the guilds, cultural associations, academies
and numerous colonies and “nations” of foreign merchants made
up the face of an expanding metropole, and formed it into the beating
heart of the country’s cultural life years before its conquest by
Spanish troops. In a historical moment of profound sociocultural and religious
changes, in which the question of a written language was becoming more
and more urgent and immediate, and local literature (“l’arte
della retorica”) was gradually passing over into a “Renaissance”
production, the erudite aristocrat, neo-Platonic and Petrarchan poet Jan
van der Noot quickly became a prominent figure for the city’s intellectual
life. Van der Noot was an ambitious and active mediator, in constant contact
with the many representatives of the local intelligentsia, and one of
the first poets in the Southern Low Countries who actively translated
his own work. Although writing in the vernacular, he aimed at an international
audience and his works are testimony to a brilliant use of the linguistic
medium and a multicultural outlook: an example is the editing process
of his cycle of sonnets to Olympia, and his efforts to get many translations
of his collections. One of his most important works in this context of
multilingual, auto-translating compositional technique is the bilingual
edition of Lofsang van Braband/Hymne de Braband (1580). With
a quite perfect command of both Dutch and French, Van der Noot translated
himself in this long hymn to his land and, by means of translation solutions
to which he entrusted real, eternal fame, proclaimed himself the Homer
of glorious Brabant. Alessandro Niero (University of Bologna) This paper focuses on Brodskij’s concept of self-translation,
which he often practised from Russian into English, from the first years
after his forced emigration from the USSR (1972), until his death (1996).
Monica Perotto (University of Bologna) The problem of translation as “perevod avtora”
both in the Soviet and post-Soviet period, rather than in the author’s
biographical or literary world can find an adequate explanation in the
dynamic of Russian language policy and sociolinguistic processes developing
inside the national republics from the Twenties of the last century up
to now. Valentina Piazza (Welfen Gymnasium,
Ravensburg) What you have been reading is neither a translation nor a new book: it’s another version, a parallel book, if you will for my children and my American students […] I have written this book twice. With these words Ruth Klüger, an Austrian writer
of Jewish origin born in Vienna in 1931, introduces and presents her book
“Still Alive - A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered”, written
in English in 2001. This is the second version of her original autobiography
“weiter leben - Eine Jugend”, which was published
in German nine years before. Ilaria Piperno (University of Bologna) Within the literary production of Romain Gary, a Jewish
writer of Lithuanian origins, now naturalized French, multilinguism holds
an emblematic place of honor. This phenomenon is connected both to the
problematic of self-translation as well as to that of the diversity of
literary genres. Gary, in fact, novelist, poet, cinema scholar and actor,
wrote both poetry in Polish – his mother tongue – as well
as novels in French and in English, which he himself then translated –
with variations and additions – into the other language for the
Anglo-American and French editions of the same texts. The polylinguistic
matrix of Gary’s literary production is connected, furthermore,
to an identitary theme found not only in the Jewish origins of the author,
but also in the relationship with post-colonial Africa that Gary saw for
himself. This theme is also partially evident in the continuous creation
of pseudonyms (among the many there are Fosco Sinibaldim Shatan Bogat,
and Émile Ajar, under which he won his second Prix Goncourt). We
intend to focus on the relationship between Gary’s multilinguism
and his literary production, starting with some particularly significant
examples of his self-translation – specifically with the novel Éducation
européenne / Forest of Anger, written both in English and
in French by Gary – to conclude with a study of the trans-national
dimension of his literary production. Paola Puccini (University
of Bologna) When examining the work of translation and self-translation
by Marco Micone, Quebecker playwright of Italian descent, two main topics
arise: emigration and identity, of which the former does not exist without
the latter, given their strong interconnection. Fabio Regattin (University of Bologna) The paper will focus on a circumstance that is unique
in the literary production of its author: the self-translation into English
of Boris Vian’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I
Shall Spit on your Graves). Laura Salmon (University
of Genova) Translation theory focuses on two fundamental and different aspects: the products and the processes. Even though they can be interrelated, they differ both in methods and in aims. The products are examined through the historical-descriptive method developed by the Humanities, while the processes are the privileged objects of cognitive sciences (in particular of psycho- and neurolinguistics). In the two different fields, the mere concept of self-translation itself has two different meanings. It is a label that, in the former case, defines particular existing products, or, in the latter case, particular operations performed by a human brain. After explaining a model of the translation process which meets the criteria of scientific methodology and which can be an epistemologically justified postulate, we will analyze those technical and psycho-cognitive elements which make it impossible for any writer to translate his/her texts as a professional translator and, therefore, make the process of self-translation an example of contradictio in adjecto. These elements resemble, at best, the limits of a surgeon who has to operate on himself, but, often, they simply mirror the limits of someone who wants to operate on himself without even being a doctor. This is to the detriment of common sense, which uses and reinforces the following falsifiable axioms: the author knows his/her own text and his/her own intentions better than any other readers; the author proclaims an eternal devotion to his/her own text; translation does not entail a specific, hard and continuous training and a sophisticated, balanced and cultivated bilingualism. Francesco Santi (University
of Cassino) The presence of multilingualism in the Middle Ages has
been underestimated and pointing this out has become increasingly fashionable
in recent years, following a line that, in medieval Latin studies, finds
in Peter Dronke a guide. Accepting the existence of multilingualism frees
us from an interpretative scheme which has weighed down studies. This
proves also a valuable stimulus to the understanding of medieval literature.
The old pattern recognized signs of rebirth in the presence of references
to the classics (or to the fathers of the early Church), according to
a reductive concept of the Middle Ages that seemed to work only when looking
away from itself. Sensitivity to multilingualism, on the other hand, invites
us to understand the Middle Ages which is, indeed, the place where the
Mediterranean and continental cultures are compared, by inventing a plurality
of new centers, with the usual number of conflicts and new discoveries
that such an exercise entails. Gino Scatasta (University of Bologna) In the second collection of his poems published in 1920,
Eliot added a group of poems he had written in French some years before.
These poems are the only attempt made by Eliot to write poems in a language
different from English. He would never translate his French poems into
English but was going to reuse almost literally some lines of “Dans
le restaurant”, the longest of the group, translating them into
English in his poem The Waste Land, published in 1922. Oddly,
in a poem characterized by multilingualism Eliot did not choose to use
the original form of the lines but to translate them. Valeria Sperti (University of Basilicata) The paper deals with a female contemporary Francophone
writer, Nancy Huston, born and raised in English-speaking Canada, who
afterwards moved to the United States and to France, to Paris and to Berry,
where she has now lived for more than thirty years. Her evolution as regards
a linguistic identity is of particular interest. The writer, who describes
herself as a “reluctant English speaker”, inaugurated her
literary production exclusively in French (Les Variations Goldberg, 1981)
and turned to writing in her mother tongue finally in 1993 with her Plainsong.
Soon afterwards she began a furious practice of self-translation which
seems to fuel itself on the “differences/waste” between one
language and another and which creates, based on various editorial decisions,
either a linguistic version or a more “original” version or
even a re-writing of a text. The analysis of this case study seems interesting
for two reasons: 1) the auto-translative practice has been inserted even
into the literary creation (Huston affirms that since 1993 she has written
her novels partly in French and partly in English only to then self-translate
them successively); 2) the writer has, besides her literary production,
a fertile production of criticism (Lettres parisiennes, Autopsie de
l’exil,1986; Nord Perdu, 1999), in which with an autobiographical
perspective that considers the legacy of the instruction of Roland Barthes
(whose courses she followed), she investigates theoretically the questions
that influence creation: exile, translation, bilingualism, identity and
the choice of both the code and the source languages. In particular she
analyses, with a particular eye to self-translation and to bilingualism,
two writers who share her own particularities and of whom she is a passionate
reader: Samuel Beckett and Romain Gary. Helena Tanqueiro (University of Barcelona) Our paper aims to draw attention to a peculiar case of
self-translation that usually goes unnoticed. Focussing on the case-studies
examined by the AUTOTRAD research group and restricting the field to the
treatment of cultural references, we were able to verify the presence
of instances of (self)translation in original literary works that meet
the following criteria: either the “Textwelt” belongs to a
linguistic-cultural universe which is different from the original text’s
language and culture, as in the case of Sostiene Pereira and
La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro by Antonio Tabucchi, written
in Italian and set in Portuguese culture; or the works are set in a minority
culture, but for various reasons (for example they do not have a written
tradition, a normalized writing, or any potential readership) they are
written in the majority language, such as is the case of colonial and
post-colonial literatures. In these cases we observe that, from the point
of view of cultural references transmission, in the (self)translation
itself the authors play the role of (self)translators, (sometimes overtly
declaring this), in order to act as cultural mediators for their readers.
This process of self-translation, which we call mental self-translation,
is much less perceptible than the explicit one consisting of writing a
self-translation and publishing it in another language. Moreover, this
kind of self-translation has the same consequences when a work is translated
into other languages, since the translators can rely on the fact that
the cultural problems are already solved by the author in the (self)translation.
We will focus on important passages taken from works by Portuguese-speaking
African writers such as Mia Couto, Suleiman Cassamo, Luis Bernardo, Honwana
and José Luandino Vieira. From a theoretical point of view, we
will refer mainly to the studies realized by our research group, to concepts
elaborated by Paul Bandia and Bill Ashcroft and to an excellent paper
by Rebecca Hernandez. Claudia Tatasciore (University
of Bologna) Franco Biondi lives in two languages: Italian and German.
Since he moved from Forlì to Germany as a Gastarbeiter,
he started a literary project, which gave birth to the so-called German
“Gastarbeiterliteratur”. Writing at first in Italian,
than in Gastarbeiterdeutsch, since 1983 he has written only in
German. Self-translation is not a usual practice in his work, its main
feature being interpreted – in a rather negative way – as
a continuous creative stream, which opens to several variations, each
of them expression of the two different views of the bilingual experience
on the same subject matter. Peeter Torop (University of Tartu) Research in the field of translation and translating
well illustrates the efforts of one area of culture towards self-understanding
and self-description. Self-description is a process of self-communication,
and its result can be a self-model that identifies the dominants, the
principles of unification and generates itself a language of self-description.
Lotman can see in culture three types of self-models: 1) self-models of
culture that strive to maximally approach the real existing culture; 2)
self-models that are distinct from the practice of culture and are intended
to change that practice; 3) self-models that exist as you can omit it
ideal self-awareness of the culture distinct from the culture itself.
Trish Van Bolderen (University
of Ottawa) This paper constitutes a summary of the findings from
my master’s thesis, in which I investigate the under-representation,
or invisibility, of self-translation within the field of Translation Studies.
Alessandro Zironi (University of Bologna) Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) is without a doubt the most
well known female Scandinavian author outside northern Europe. Her often
adventurous life, made famous by the film Out of Africa, which
was inspired in large part by her best-known work of the same title, seems,
however, to be in contrast with a biography spent mainly in two places
about which she has written: the house in Rungstedlund, in the Danish
Sjælland, and the farm at the base of the Ngong mountains in Kenya.
These two residences represent emblematically Blixen’s course as
a writer, nourished with oral communication during her Danish childhood
and in her contacts with the native Africans, a period in which the young
Karen collected stories which would only later be written down upon her
definitive return home to Rungstedlund. |