In this essay self-translation will not be addressed as some kind of freakish accident of nature, but rather as the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Beneath the water dwell many more bi- or even multilingual writers, to which we gain access by going beyond traditional models of literary history and criticism. In fact, the best-known cases of self-translation (Beckett, Nabokov, and Green yesterday, Huston, Semprun, and Dorfman today) embody but one of two categories: “horizontal” transfers between symmetric pairs of widespread languages. In many other instances, however, “asymmetric” linguistic configurations saddle the act of self-translation. At least three categories of self-translators whose linguistic repertoire is characterized by such asymmetry can be distinguished: (1) “(post)colonial” writers who alternate between their native tongue(s) and the European language of the former colonial powers; (2) recent immigrant writers who expand on work begun in their home country while staking out new ground for themselves in the language of their adoptive country; (3) writers belonging to traditional linguistic minorities because of the multilingual make-up of the State of which they are citizens. While drawing attention to the existence of those writers, this article will also develop a typology of self-translators, thereby looking beyond the famous case of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has often been constructed as a hapax legomenon, the quintessential exception that confirms the unwritten rule of monolingual writing, a situation that stands in the way of a better, more general comprehension of self-translation as such. In this essay, we want to show that Beckett can help us gain many precious insights into self-translation, but only if we allow ourselves to look beyond him, instead of staying in the shadow he casts.

Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998) is a translingual memoir, an account of how its author constructed a new identity in and through a new language. Born in Buenos Aires, Dorfman moved to New York when he was two and a half years old. Traumatized by a hospital stay, he rejected his native Spanish entirely in favor of English for the next ten years, until his family relocated to Santiago, Chile. Antipathy toward Yankee imperialism led the young author to vow never again to write in English. The coup against Salvador Allende, for whom Dorfman worked as an adviser, forced him into exile in the United States, where he has learned to make use of what he calls his “linguistic ambidexterity.” Heading South, Looking North is the nonfictional Bildungsroman of a man who recognizes that his identity is constructed out of language and who, though desperate to be monolingual, is torn between Spanish and English selves. After completing his book in English, Dorfman, a self-proclaimed “bigamist of language,” immediately translated it into Spanish as Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte (1998). Just as Dorfman himself remains suspended between English and Spanish, his text itself, a product of the dialogic imagination that refuses a single linguistic form, exists in the space between the English and Spanish versions. Beginning with the different titles (deseando means “desiring,” not “looking”), Dorfman as self-translator takes liberties that he acknowledges the translators of his novels and plays into Italian and Korean would not dare. A different Dorfman is constructed by each rendition of the life. Dorfman's ambilingual attention to two different communities is apparent in the separate ways he handles cultural references in the English and Spanish editions. Examination of the English and Spanish versions of his memoir reveals what he calls “the anxiety, the richness, the madness of being double.”

This article looks at the English, French, and Dutch versions of the “History of Andrew, the Hebridean,” an allegorical tale of a Scotsman's successful adaptation in colonial America by the eighteenth-century French–American author J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. This story was first published as part of the third letter of Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782). It reappeared two years later in Lettres d'un cultivateur américan, the author's self-translation of his work into French, as well as in the expanded second French edition, published in 1787. Finally, the story figures in Brieven van eenen Amerikaenschen landman, an anonymous Dutch translation of the English original published around the same time as the first French edition, and which so far has received little scholarly attention. By examining how these different versions of the tale of the Hebridean relate to each other, the article attempts to pinpoint the differential quality of auctorial translations vis-à-vis allographic ones. Our analysis reveals that the assumption that self-translators should be regarded as “privileged” translators (Tanqueiro) is in need of correction in that it fails to consider the allographic and plural nature of historically embedded self-translations.

Dans cet article, nous visons à élucider quelques stratégies de traduction (et d’écriture) mises en œuvre par Nancy Huston, qui figure aujourd'hui parmi les écrivains « translingues » les plus couronnés. Plainsong (1993), roman écrit en anglais et traduit par l'auteur vers le français (Cantiques des plaines, 1993), forme le point de départ de notre réflexion. En premier lieu, nous tâchons de découvrir dans quelle mesure Nancy Huston fait prévaloir son autorité d'auteur dans son autotraduction. Ensuite, en comparant Plainsong–Cantique des plaines à sa traduction en néerlandais, réalisée par l'auteur du présent article, nous mettons en lumière en quoi les stratégies de traduction de Huston diffèrent de celles adoptées par une tierce personne. Les résultats de cette analyse nous permettent de questionner l'opposition classique entre original et traduction, entre créativité et reproduction servile.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in literary self-translation within translation studies. Yet for various reasons the phenomenon remains unknown to most readers. Publishing self-translations as bilingual editions might be an advisable strategy against this invisibility. However, the publication in a dual-language format proves to be a highly complex endeavor, opening up a whole new area of research. This article will focus on three aspects: reasons for publishing self-translations as bilingual editions, potential reading strategies, and possible edition styles. Apart from the well-known en face edition, editors have developed various ways of arranging texts in order to meet the needs of the intended reader while still respecting the author's bilingual writing. As dual-language editions are expected to fulfill more functions than just rendering the translation process visible, publishers have to choose the edition style on a case-by-case basis according to several decisive factors. Further research on different edition styles and their respective potentials and pitfalls is needed in order for a typology of multilingual editions to be developed. Such a typology might then raise awareness among publishers of the various possibilities for presenting self-translations.