Literary self-translation, exile and dialogism: the multilingual works of Vassilis Alexakis

Eleftheria Tassiopoulos has now published an article on Alexakis based on her lecture presented at the conference “New Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies” held in Tarragona in 2009.
Her article Literary self-translation, exile and dialogism: the multilingual works of Vassilis Alexakis is available online. Referring to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, she discusses two of his works Talgo (fiction) and Les Mots étrangers (autofiction).

How a Poet Translates His Own Poetry

Yihai Chen writes his poems in English and Chinese. In How a Poet Translates His Own Poetry (you have to scroll down for the English version) he tells about his experience of editing a bilingual edition of his poems and therefore translating a selection of his poems in both directions. As a self-translator he feels privileged because he "knows the author and the text much better than anyone else". Although he rises some important questions: "Which is more faithful, the poet’s own translation or a professional translator’s? Does a poet translator encounter the same problems of cultural transfer as other translators do? Is his or her strategy in solving such problems different from that of other translators?", he unfortunately does not answer them.

Interview with Vassilis Alexakis

Yesterday Vassilis Alexakis talked about his new book "Le premier mot" at France Inter Cosmopolitaine. If you missed it, you will soon have the possibility to listen to the whole broadcasting on the website from France Inter-Cosmopolitaine. Meanwhile you could listen to an interview about his new new book, which he gave to RFI in september last year.

Nancy Huston: Goldberg Variations adapted

At Paris you can see an adaptation of the French version of The Goldberg Variations from 6th January till 6th March at La Folie Théâtre.

Lecture Anne Weber in Bielefeld, Germany

Anne Weber, born in 1964 in Offenbach (Germany) studied in France and currently lives in Paris. She writes each book in German and French. She will present her current book "Luft und Liebe" at the Literaturhaus in Bielefeld (Germany) on Wednesday, 23 february 2011 at 8pm.

Bibliography: Updated version

A new version of the bibliography (50 pages!) is now available online on http://www.autotraduzione.com/

Everyone is invited to contribute with new entries to the bibliography.

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.

Writing Past Each Other? Literary Translation and Community...

... is the title of a conference which will take place at Wellington, New Zealand, 11-13 December 2010. On Sunday there will be a panel on self-translation including the following topics:

• Ruth Diver: Self-translation as Self-reinvention: the Case of Romain Gary
• Sally Hill: Renatos Amato’s Antipodean Self-translation
• Eduardo Zuccato: Tempting Translation: ‘Minor’ Languages and Global Literature
  

To see the full programm please click here.

Lecture on self-translation and Shoah Literature

Fransiska Louwagie (Université de Louvain) will give a lecture on "Témoignage et réécriture: Les écrivains de la Shoah en français et l’autotraduction" on Monday, November 29 at 6:00 p.m. at the Barker Center, Room 133 in Cambridge. For more information see the Anthropology Graduate Program at Harvard University.

Self-translation from indigenous languages

Last week I attended the first international conference on self-translation in Pescara, Italy. There I had the chance to meet Julio-César Santoyo, who has been researching on self-translation for many years. During our talk, he made me aware of self-translation from indigenous languages, an aspect of self-translation I had completely ignored till that day. He was so kind to give me a copy of a presentation he gave last year in Canada on this topic as a starting point for my own research. Back in Germany I now started researching. It is a really fascinating field.
Today I would like to present you a Mayan writer and self-translator: Humberto Ak'abal. He was born in 1953 in Momostenango, Guatemala. He writes his poetry in Quiché and translates it into Spanisch. His poems are published in bilingual editions. Some of his work has been translated from the Spanish version into English, German and other languages.

For further reading and listening:

• Presentation of the author by Mariolein Sabarte Belacortu
• Presentation of the author and the book "Drum Stone", a trilingual edition of selected poems. With the possibility to see inside the book.
• Podcast from a lecture with his english translators given at the Ullapool Book Festival 2010
• Erich Hakl on his German translation "Trommel aus Stein" (in German)
• Article in L'Express (15/10/2010): Humberto Ak'abal: hymnes, lamentos et tambours de pierre (in French)
  

Alexakis book presentation in Tours, France

Vassilis Alexakis will present his new book Le premier mot this thursday, 18th November, at the Libraire La boîte à Livres in Tours, France.