New Voices in Self-Translation: Cristina Sandu (Finnish-English)

Finnish author Cristina Sandu (*1989) was born in Helsinki to Finnish-Romanian parents. She currently lives in the UK and is signed with the literary agency Rights & Brands. Sandu grew up bilingual and speaks six languages, however she only self-translates between Finnish and English:

"I grew up in a bilingual family, speaking Finnish with my mother and Romanian with my father. In Finland everybody needs to learn Swedish too, as those are the two official languages of the country. In addition to that, I learned French and English at school, and Spanish by myself mainly out of passion for Latin American literature." (Loughran 2021)

Sandu wrote her debut novel Valas nimeltä Goliat (Otava 2017) in Finnish. While it has been translated into several languages and got nominated for the prestigious literary Prize Finlandia, it is not yet available in English translation. Her second novella Vesileikit (Otava 2019) / The Union of Synchronised Swimmers (Scribe 2021 (UK,USA & Australia); Book Hug 2021 (Canada)), however, Sandu wrote in both Finnish and English. She was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for literary translation for the English version (see https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/oxford-weidenfeld-prize). So why did Sandu started self-translating? Like Itäranta, Sandu start self-translating early on to get feedback on her drafts:

"My closest writer friends don’t speak Finnish, so when I needed readers, already while writing the Finnish draft, I started working on the manuscript in two languages. It was more writing in two languages than translating, really." (Sidal 2021)

The bilingual writing process resulted in "dozens of drafts in both Finnish and English." (Sidal 2021) While the initial impulse to self-translate was reader-orientated, Sandu soon became aware of the potential of translation to improve the draft:

"But then I also realized that translating is a very useful tool for editing, because as I moved from one language to the other, I got some distance with the text and I could see more clearly my own excesses, repetitions, clumsinesses, and so on." (Book*hug Press 2021: 01:42-02:04)

Sandu feels that the English version has lost some clarity and dynamics compared to the Finnish version:

"In Finnish there are no genders, nor articles or prepositions (Finnish has cases). I sometimes feel that these details make the English version less dynamic and clear. This is probably because I still approach English from the outside, and translating/writing happens slowly, with the help of dictionaries. (Siddal 2021)

The novella is still trying to break through to the international market, but translation rights have been sold for Dutch in April 2022.

References:

Book*hug Press. 2021. "Cristina Sandu Introduces The Union of Synchronized Swimmers". Published on June 21, 2021 on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3khKnApJFw&ab_channel=Book%2ahugPress 

Loughran, Sean.2021."In conversation with Cristina Sandu". Published on September 16, 2021 on the book review platform Avocado Diaries: https://www.avocadodiaries.com/2021/09/in-conversation-with-cristina-sandu.html

Rights & Brands. 2021."Finnish-Romanian author Cristina Sandu navigates between two cultures in her narrative". Podcast Episode 7 on: https://rightsandbrands.com/news/rights-brands-podcast-episode-7-finnish-romanian-author-cristina-sandu-navigates-between-two-cultures-in-her-narrative

Siddal, Lizzy. 2021. "Meet The Author/Translator: Cristina Sandu". Published on June 10, 2021 on the blog Lizzy's Literary Life (Volume One) – Celebrating the pleasures of a 21st century bookworm. URL: https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2021/06/10/meet-the-author-translator-cristina-sandu/

New Voices in Self-Translation: Emmi Itäranta (Finnish-English)

Acclaimed science fiction author Emmi Itäranta (*1976) writes her novels in both Finnish and English, with manuscripts always created side by side. She was born in Tampere, Finland, but moved to Canterbury, UK, in 2007 where she lived for 14 years. Recently, she moved back to Finland. Since she kept travelling back to Finland while living abroad, she can be classified as a transmigrant self-translator (Gentes 2019).

Thus far, Itäranta has published three self-translated novels, which won several awards both in Finland and in the UK:

• Teemestarin kirja (Teos, 2012) / Memory of Waters (Harper Collins 2014);
• Kudottujen kujien kaupunki (Teos 2015) / The City of Woven Streets (Harper Voyager, UK 2016) / The Weaver (Harper Voyager USA 2016);
• Kuunpäivän kirjeet (Teos, 2020) / Moonday Letters (Titan Books, UK 2022)

Itäranta wrote the manuscript of her first novel while pursuing a master's degree in creative writing at the University of Kent. Because the Finnish manuscript of her first novel Teemestarin kirja (Teos, 2012) / Memory of Waters (Harper Collins 2014) won Teos Publishing's science fiction and fantasy novel contest in 2011, the Finnish version of the novel was published much earlier than the English one. As is often the case, however, the gap between the two publications does not indicate a consecutive self-translation process. Itäranta is indeed a systematic simultaneous self-translator (for the distinction between simultaneous and consecutive self-translations see Grutman 2009), writing both versions of her novels at the same time. So how did Itärante become a bilingual writer?

Her first novel grew out of an attempt to write a short  story during a creative writing course at the University of Kent. So English was an obvious choice. So why did she decide to include Finnish in the process?

"Once I had written one or two chapters, I realised that it would be really useful to get some feedback from my Finnish writing group. We meet once a month online. So I wrote those early chapters in Finnish, too. As I was doing that, I began to realise that working in both languages actually helped me polish the writing, because I had to look at it so closely." (Marten 2015)

Itäranta takes a very strategic approach to writing (on her writing process, see Riikonen 2014 in detail), and so it is not surprising that she also immediately developed a strategy for her bilingual writing process, which she improved upon for her next two novels:

“Most of the time I ended up writing the first draft of each chapter in Finnish, then I would translate it into English and edit it, making some changes as I translated, then update the Finnish version of the chapter” (Marten 2015). 

Each chapter goes through several versions in both languages before Itäranta moves on to the next chapter. The editing process is never unidirectional and both versions influence each other throughout the self-translation process: “Each chapter actually took shape through those two languages” (Marten 2015). Being constantly aware about the translation task ahead, may affect a self-translator's choice of style, as Itäranta confirms:

"I thought about how sentences and words would translate from one language to the other already while writing, and sometimes this may have simplified the language unnecessarily. [...] In order to find balance between the languages, I had to make some compromises. [...] I would have probably used Finnish more daring had I not been thinking about the English equivalents when writing. On the other hand, using two languages stripped away superfluous words and unnecessary decorations, because I had to think about the way each sentence worked several times" (Riikonen 2014, p. 18).

The negotiation between the two languages sometimes results in neologisms which prove challenging for her translators: "Sometimes I hear back from translators who don’t know what to make of my neologisms or other choices" (Karppanen 2017:7). The bilingual writing process also presents an additional challenge for her Finnish editors: 

“Finnish editors also need to be able to spot any Anglicisms in my writing. I try to be careful not to use them, but sometimes I slip up. Readers are also very particular about good language, so it’s important that any foreign structures are edited out” (Kortela 2021).

The textual relationship between the two versions is a subject of much controversy in research on self-translation (see, e.g. Fitch 1988, Oustinoff 2001). Itäranta takes a clear stand on this issue: 

"The English version is not a translation. The Finnish version is not a translation. They are both the original, and each was shaped by the constant presence of the other. They are twins, inseparable, and would not be the same without each other." (Itäranta 2014) 

In her analysis of the debut novel Memory of Waters, Katarina Leppänen underscores that the bilingual approach to writing creates a novel that "transgresses culture" in a unique way: 

"What Itäranta does is to build her work on two sets of languages and cultures simultaneously. In contrast to the effect of multilingual or bilingual texts, where distance and familiarity is created by words present in the text, such as slang, foreign words or sentences, or dialect, Itäranta’s text produces a world beyond the assumed British and Finnish literary and cultural contexts. What is achieved is not a hybrid, but rather an abstraction. It is thus already in the moment of creation a piece of world literature that transgresses culture not only by placing the events in another (fictive) world, but also by the cross-fertilization in making sense of different cultural contexts, the very process of intellectual back-and-forth movement, which cannot be grounded anywhere in between." (Leppänen 2020: 428)

Self-translation is often portrayed as a painful experience, a tedious re-enactment of a once creative act: "a real torture" (Miletic 2008: 44), "Boring, frustrating, painful" (Cordingley 2013: 5), "exquisitely painful" (Beaujour 1995: 719).  Itäranta, however, asserts: "It's not a burden.[...] I enjoy the interaction between the two languages" (Islam 2022: 3:59-4:27). In fact many statements by authors are followed by a "but" (see Gentes 2017: 109-112), and writers like Itäranta highlight the rewarding nature of self-translation:

 "You get very, very close to the text when you work in two languages; translators often spot details that the author and editor may have missed. It is a slow process, and hard work, but ultimately I find it rewarding." (Moore 2014)

Itäranti's novels are internationally successful: According to the website of her literary agency Elina Ahlback, the debut novel was translated into 21 languages, translation rights for her second novel have already been sold to Brazil, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy and for her third novel to Czech Republic and Hungary. Katarina Leppänen suggests that the English self-translation may have played a decisive role in this success: "When it comes to the question of quick global publication, an existing English version is of course a great benefit for a debuting author as it gives access to the transnational world literary networks" (Leppänen 2020: 428).

References on Itäranta:

Homepage: https://www.emmiitaranta.com/
Literary agency: https://www.ahlbackagency.com/author/emmi-itaranta/?authorId=15

Islam, Mahmudul.2020. "Dystopian thinking, bilingual writing, and Finnish culture". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXntTW-F7jM&ab_channel=MahmudulIslam-Finnophile

Itäranta, Emmi. 2014. "Guest Post: Emmi Itäranta, author of MEMORY OF WATER". Published on 16.06.2014 on Harper Voyager: https://www.harpervoyagerbooks.com/guest-post-emmi-itaranta-author-of-memory-of-water/

Karppanen, Pasi Karppanen. 2017. "Conquering the World as a Finnish Author". In: Spin, issue 2/2017. http://pasikarppanen.net/texts/2017-02a_Conquering-the-World-as-a-Finnish-Author.pdf 

Kortela, Anne. 2021. "Turku Book Fair. Digging into the Core". https://anjasnellmanbooks.com/book-fair.html

Leppänen, Katarina. 2020. "Memory of Water: Boundaries of Political Geography and World Literature." European Review, 28(3), 425-434. doi:10.1017/S1062798719000541

Marten, Peter. 2015. "Finnish author writes memories of the future". May 2015. https://finland.fi/arts-culture/finnish-author-writes-memories-of-the-future/

Moore, Lucy. 2014. "Exclusive interview with Emmi Itäranta". Published on 15.05.2015 on Female First, https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/books/emmi-itaranta-memory-of-water-470063.html

Riikonen, Marika. 2014. "The words will flow as long as she can move her hands". Finnish Weird. Translated by Marianna Leikomaa. First published in Tähtivaeltaja 2/2011. English translation available on: https://www.finnishweird.net/files/finnish_weird_2014.pdf

References on self-translation research:

Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty. 1995. "Translation and self-translation". In: Vladimir E. Alexandrov (ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York / London: Garland, 714–724.

Cordingley, Anthony. 2013. “The Passion of Self-Translation: A Masocritical Perspective.” In: Anthony Cordingley (ed.), Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture. London: Continuum, 81–94.

Fitch, Brian T. 1988. Beckett and Babel. An Investigation into the State of the Bilingual Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Gentes, Eva. 2017. (Un-)Sichtbarkeit der literarischen Selbstübersetzung in der romanischsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Eine literatur- und übersetzungssoziologische Annäherung. Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.  https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-45333/Gentes_Dissertation.lit_Selbstübersetzung.pdf

Gentes, Eva. 2019. “Transmigration und Selbstübersetzung – Linda Olsson und Miroslav Penkov.” In: Bruno Berni & Alessandra D’Atena (eds.), Autotraduzione. Obiettivi, strategie, testi. Roma: Istituto italiano di studi germanici, 122–144.

Grutman, Rainier. 2009. "Self-translation". In: Mona Baker (ed.): Routlegde Encyclopaedia of Translation. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge, 257–260.

Miletic, Tijana. 2008. European Literary Immigration into the French Language. Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprún. Amsterdam / New York: Rodop.

Oustinoff, Michaël. 2001. Bilinguisme d’écriture et auto–traduction: Julien Green, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov. Paris: L’Harmattan.

New Voices in Self-Translation: Lana Bastašić (Serbo-Croatian->English)

The first author featured in the new series "New Voices in Self-Translation" is Serbian writer Lana Bastašić (see blog entry on October 23, 2021). The English self-translation of her debut novel Catch the Rabbit was published in 2021 with Picador (UK) and Restless Books (US). The self-translation is visible to the reader as the title page of the Picador version states "Translated by the author". We are thus dealing with a case of a transparent self-translation (for the distinction between opac and transparent self-translation see Dasilva 2011).
Lana Bastašić  wrote Uhvati zeca (Kontrast 2018) while living in Barcelona, Spain. She can thus be considered a migrant self-translator, but unlike most migrant self-translators she does not use Catalan or Spanish, the language of her current residence, for self-translation. Bastašić explains, that she had to translate the manuscript into English in order order to approach agents and publishers, "I was a Bosnian living in Barcelona. No one spoke my language." (Behnke 2021). She thus translated the manuscript for mere practical reasons - not thinking about a possible publication of the English version: 

"When I set out to translate the novel, I never thought my translation would be published. I simply needed a readable draft to show to an agent, so that he or she would know what the book was about. Later, I had to rework the text and improve it because the UK publisher wanted my original translation." (Kalaba 2021)

The self-translation process proved to be complex. While translating, Bastašić identified weaknesses in the original and thus began to edit the new edition of the original version as well: “If I don’t want to bother translating this sentence, then it shouldn’t be in the book." (Behnke 2021). The English self-translation  helped her improve the text, find an agent and get translated into several languages: "That’s how in the end I got an agent, and that’s how I got all these translation deals. Otherwise, I think maybe it wouldn’t have happened." (Listi 2021)  However, she would still prefer to be translated by a professional translator: "Of course, I still believe it is better to have someone else translate your work. There is a distance and you feel more responsible. But unfortunately, if your language is considered “small,” that is highly unlikely to happen". (Behnke 2021)

Thanks to her initial self-translation into English, the novel gained visibility on the international market and attracted the interest of publishers around the globe. The novel Uhvati zeca (Buybook 2018) was awarded the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature and is now available in many languages:

• Catalan: Atrapa la llebre (Edicions del Periscopi / Navona) Translator: Pau Sanchis Ferrer, 2018.
• Dutch: Vang de Haas (Meulenhof). Translator: Pavle Trkulja, 2021. Translated from the Serbo-Croatian.
  
• French: Attrapez le lapin (Actes Sud, Éditions Gaïa). Translator: Aleksandar Grujičić in collaboration with Isabelle Liber, 2022. Translated from the Serbo-Croatian.
• German: Fang den Hasen (Fischer Verlag). Translator: Rebekka Zeinzinger, March 2021. Translated from the Bosnian.
• Hungarian: Kapd el a nyulat! (Metropolis). Translator: Emese Rajsli, 2020
• Italian: Afferra il coniglio (Nutrimenti edizioni). Translator: Elisa Copetti. Translated from the Serbo-Croatian. 2020
  
• Russian: Поймать зайца (Eksmo). Translator: Larisa Savelieva, 2021
• Slovenian: Ujemi zajca (Sanje). Translator: Dijana Matkovič, 2021
• Spanish: Atrapa a la liebre (Navona). Translator: Pau Sanchis Ferrer, 2020
• Turkish: Tavşanı Yakala (Ilksatir). Translator: Gökce Cicek, 2020

Translation rights have also been sold to  Perseus (Bulgaria), Artconnect (Macedonia), Dituria (Albania). Bastašić, who was born in Croatia and grew up in Bosnia, lives today in Serbia after spending several years in Barcelona. She explains that publishers have difficulties locating her: 

“Now some translations have come out, some say ‘translated from the Serbo-Croatian,’ some say ‘translated from Bosnian,’ some say ‘from Serbian.’ Then this article came out in Switzerland, where I was a Croatian writer,” she laughs, “I love it." (Petrick 2021)

Translation rights are handled by Salmaia Literary Agency on behalf of Edicions del Periscopi.

Sources:
Behnke. Emily. 2021. "An Indies Introduce Q&A With Lana Bastašić".  Published on May 20, 2021 on: https://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-qa-lana-bastašić-1625833 

Kalaba, Jovanka. 2021. "Lana Bastašić Still Believes in Beauty". Published on August 19, 2021 https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2021/08/19/lana-bastasic-still-believes-in-beauty/

Listi, Bradi. 2021. "“It’s Not Something I Would Recommend.” Lana Bastašić on Translating Her Own Book In Conversation with Brad Listi on Otherppl". Podcast "Otherppl", June 16, 2021, published on: https://lithub.com/its-not-something-i-would-recommend-lana-bastasic-on-translating-her-own-book/

Petrick Daniel. 2021. "In her novel Catch the Rabbit, Lana Bastašić explores who tells the story of Yugoslavia’s ethnic conflict". Calvit Journal. Published on June 17, 2021 on: https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/12868/novel-catch-the-rabbit-lana-bastashi-90s-yugoslav-war 

Cited research literature:
Dasilva, Xosé Manuel (2011): "La autotraducción transparente y la autotraducción opaca". In: Xosé Manuel Dasilva & HelenaTanqueiro (eds.), Aproximaciones a la autotraducción. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 45–68. 

Lana Bastašić on self-translating her novel

In an interview with Jovanka Kalaba for Asymptote Journal, Yugoslav-born author Lana Bastašić discusses the self-translation into English of her novel Catch the Rabbit (2021). 
She initially started translating the novel to show it to a literary agent and did not think of a possible English publication at that time. When the English publisher asked for her own translation, she had to rework the entire text. She found the self-translation process "very educational":

"This was a difficult process but also very educational. When you translate your own work, you look at your text from a distance. Suddenly you are thinking as a translator, and you can see every little weakness of the book."

She then used the English version to "edit the new edition of the Bosnian and Serbian book".

To read the full interview please visit Asymptote: 
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2021/08/19/lana-bastasic-still-believes-in-beauty/ 

Essay by Jhumpa Lahiri: Where I Find Myself: On Self-translation

In their April 2021 issue, Words Without Borders published a very interesting essay by Jhumpa Lahiri who recently published her first self-translated novel Dove mi trovo / Whereabouts.  In her essay, she reflects on the process of deciding whether or not to translate the novel herself, the translation process, and how this self-translation will affect future editions of the original.  
Here are three quotes of her very interesting reflections on self-translation:

"... self-translation is like one of those radioactive dyes that enable doctors to look through our skin to locate damage in the cartilage, unfortunate blockages, and other states of imperfection."

"Self-translation is a bewildering, paradoxical going backward and moving forward at once. There is ongoing tension between the impulse to plow ahead undermined by a strange gravitational force that holds you back."

"That original book, which now feels incomplete to me, stands in line behind its English-language counterpart. Like an image viewed in the mirror, it has turned into the simulacrum, and both is and is not the starting point for what rationally and irrationally followed."

To read the complete essay, please go visit the Words Without Border journal:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/april-2021-where-i-find-myself-on-self-translation-jhumpa-lahiri 

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer: "Translation can serve as a wonderful editing tool"

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer was born in Bulgaria and moved to the United States in 1995. She has published her poems in a bilingual edition The Air around the Butterfly / Въздухът около пеперудата (2009). She has also translated a wide range of Bulgarian poets into English. On her blog she talks about the experience of self-translating her poetry and choosing the language for a poem. She stresses the quality of translation as an editing tool:

I feel lucky to be using two languages for writing poetry, because translation can serve as a wonderful editing tool. If something doesn’t work in a poem or group of poems, translate it into another language to see what it looks like and to hear what it sounds like with completely different words. It will really make you think about what you wanted to say in the first place. Even if you think your poem is perfect, taking it apart and reassembling it in another language may give you ideas on how to say something differently. Very rarely when I translate my poems do the originals stay intact.

To read her complete blog entry "Writing in two languages" please click here.

Sébastien Doubinsky on self-translating

Sébastien Doubinsky, born in France but living in Denmark, speaks about his experience of self-translating his novels in an interview with the arts and literary journal The Missing Slate:

I have translated myself—and others—many times and know well that perfect translation doesn’t exist. It can be seen as a tragedy, a communication failure, but actually I consider this a chance—a chance of freedom, of the irreconcilable space between cultures—and the mutual respect it implies. So if you read closely and compare the two versions of the same novel I’ve written, I think you might be shocked by the liberties I am taking with the original text! But that is because the second one becomes a new original, if you want, another text altogether. (The Missing Slate 2015)

To read the complete interview please click here.

Jen Minkman: Self-translation & Self-publishing

Jen Minkman (*1978) has self-translated her novel Shadow Time from Dutch into English.:

"[T]he chances of being translated into English as a Dutch writer are very, very slim. So I decided to translate my books myself so I could reach a wider audience of readers worldwide. Since most of the Anglophone publishing world works with agents, I chose to self-publish because that would be a quicker way to get my book on the market." (Word Vagabond 2013)

Self-translation has been a good experience for her and she especially appreciates the possibility to improve her novel while translating it:

"I am planning to translate each and every book I write from now on. Not only is it a good way to get known across the border, it is also a very good method to revise your own manuscripts. When you’re translating a story, sometimes you suddenly realize that certain dialogues or scenes just don’t work, so you cut them out or change them."  (Word Vagabond 2013)

To read the full interview with Jen Minkman on World Vagabond, please click here.

Asli Perker: " I now translate all my novels into English"

Asli Perker (*1975) has self-translated her latest novel Soufflé (2013) from Turkish into English. It was her first self-translation, but not her last:

“I don't know how or why I came up with the idea, but I now translate all my novels into English. It’s such a long process, but it really helps me get the feeling right.”

Please click here to read the full interview.

Marine Petrossian: "I decided to translate my poems into English myself"

Interesting interview conducted by Jill McCoy with the Armenian poet Mariane Petrossian, who learned French in order to appreciate the French translations of her poems and was shocked by the result:

And then, fluent enough in the language, I started reading my poems translated into French and was shocked! The texts were quite different from the ones I had written. The translator had changed the tone of my poems, making them more “poetic”. This is how it happened that I decided to translate my poems into English myself.

To read the full interview, please click here.

" If something doesn’t work, you can change it."

Lene Kaaberbøl is a Danish writer of juvenile fantasy novels, which she has self-translated into English. Her first crime fiction novel Drengen i kufferten (2008), co-written with Agnete Friis, and recently translated by Lene Kaaberbøl into English as The Boy in the Suitcase (2011), won the Harald Mogensen Award for Best Danish Crime Novel in 2009. In an interview with Jordan Foster (Publisher's Weekly), she explains that she enjoys the liberties she can take when translating her own work into English: "you get to cheat".

Interview:
Jordan Foster (2011): The Copenhagen Connection: PW Talks with Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. In: Publisher's Weekly, Sep 16, 2011.

I took too many liberties that's why I stopped ...

translating my own work, explained the author Waciny Laredj recently in an interview with Katja Ghosn in L'Orient n°54, 12/2010. Laredj was born in Algeria in 1954, he went to exile to Paris in 1994, where he teaches literature at the Sorbonne. He started self-translating one of his book Sayyidat al-maqâm/Les ailes de la reine from Arabic to French, because he could not find a publisher for his book. For that reason he wrote the next novel Hârisat al-dhilâl /La gardienne des ombres directly in French but translated it also to Arabic. So Laredj self-translated in both directions, from Arabic to French and vice versa.
Today he has stopped self-translating his work because he noticed that the two versions did not resemble anymore. For Laredj self-translation became rewriting and unlike other authors he was not satisfied with this development.

To read the full interview (in French) please click here

To learn more about the reasons for his literary language choice, please read his interview with Jeune Afrique.

To learn about how he collaborated with Marcel Bois and Catherine Charruau on some of his translations, please read the interview with Yelles.

Samar Attar

Samar Attar was born in Damascus (Syria). She has studied Comparative Literature in Syria, Canada and the United States, worked in Algeria, West Germany and Australia and is married to a German. Samar explains that being surrounded by so many different languages, makes it hard to tell which is your mother tongue (see Attar 2005, p. 132).
Attar started to self-translate because she had a hard time to get her novel Lina: A Portrait Of A Damascene Girl - written in Arabic - published. (see Attar 2005, p. 133). She sees the act of self-translation as a "response to continuous attempts to stifle and silence my voice as a novelist.The act of self-translation has made me visible and has given me a voice which I was denied as a writer in Arabic". (Attar 2005, p. 134) Self-translation also helps her to keep her Arabic language alive but overall "censorship was and still is the reason that forced me to use translation as a strategy to assert my voice as a writer". (Attar 2005, p. 141).
Concerning the discussion of the terms orginal/translation she states:
"Self translators cannot reproduce in one language what they have created in another. Ultimately, what they produce through self translation is a complementary literary text which does not simply echo the original, but has its own echo and effect in the target language and culture. Unlike conventional translation contexts, self translators do not usually engage in the two-stage process of reading-writing activity (their reading activity is of a different nature), but rather in a double writing process. Thus, their translated text becomes a version or a variant of the original text, indeed an original work in its own right." (Attar 2005, p. 139)

For further reading:
Attar, Samar (2005): Translating the exiled self. Reflections on translation and censorship. In: Intercultural Communication Studies XIV:4, p. 131–147. >> A longer version of this article appeared in Translation Review (special issue on Arabic), 65 (2003), p. 35-46.

Reasons for self-translation

There are many different reasons why authors decide to self-translate their works. One can distinguish at least political, literary, economic and personal reasons.
André Brink started with self-translation because one of his work was banned in South Africa, so he decided to translate the original - written in Africaans - into English to get it published. Reaching a wider audience is also the main motiviation of authors writing in a minority language especially in Spain for Catalan and Galician writers but also for Gaelic authors. Some writers started to self-translate because they felt misunderstood and deceived by the translations done by professional translators. So they prefered to do it on their own or others like Kundera claimed to review the translations before they were published. Some bilingual writers explain that they feel the work is only completed if it exists in both languages. Several authors started to write the two works simultanously and translating helped them to find the weak points and so while translating they improved the other version and so the two versions were finished at the same time - before even one was published. Thats why often it is hard to tell which version was the first one or it doesn't really exist an "original" version. But this another issue I will soon adress in another posting. There are also personal reasons for self-translation, as some authors state that by chosing one language over the other, they feel kind of guilty. So self-translation helps them to restore a kind balance and harmony between their two languages. For others it is a way to stay in touch with both languages, especially if they live in exile, it is a way for them to keep their first language alive.