Update Bibliography on self-translation

The bibliography on self-translation has been updated.
To download the pdf-file please click here.

If you have any suggestions for further entries, please leave a comment.

The next update is scheduled for 1st of July.

Regional Identities on a Global Scale: Translation, Audiences, Reception

Self-translation will be a topic at the conference Regional Identities on a Global Scale: Translation, Audiences, Reception. Transnational Perspectives in Italian Studies, taking place March 31 – April 2, 2016.
Location: Green College, Coach House, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Saturday 2nd April 9:00-10:30 am:
Anna Casas Aguilar (Whitman College): “From Catalan to Spanish: Paternal Language, Mother Tongue and Self-translation in Terenci Moix’s Works”

Saturday 2nd April 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Rainier Grutman (University of Ottawa): “The Stance of the Self-translator: Looking into Lakhous”


For more information, please click here.

Marlene Van Niekerk on self-translation

In a recent interview with The White Review Afrikaans writer Marlene Van Niekerk (*1954) reflects upon her experience of translating her own poems vs. translating poems by Seamus Heaney into Afrikaans:

In translating my own poems, I sometimes take liberties and change things depending on what works out better. I just try to get the spirit and the texture of the thing. With Heaney there is always also the architecture to try and fathom – and then to scale.

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Conference: Collaborative Translation and self-translation

A Workshop at the University of Birmingham Saturday 23 January 2016, 9am - 6pm Room 112, Muirhead Tower, Edgbaston Campus, University of Birmingham. All welcome.
The workshop is funded by CEELBAS and has been organised by Dr Natasha Rulyova under the auspices of the Birmingham Centre for Translation

PROGRAMME
09:15-11:15 Panel One: Theorising Collaborative Translation and Self-Translation

• Anthony Cordingley, ‘A Genetic Approach to Self-Translation and Collaborative Translation’ 
• Julie Hansen, ‘Different Types of Self-Translation, with a Focus on Translingual Writing’ 
• Eva Gentes, ‘Translating with a Self-Translator: The Many Faces of Collaborative Translation’ 
• Dr Olga Castro, ‘Self-translation, Power and Activism: the (In-)visible Author-Translator’s Role’ 

11:30-13:00 Panel Two: Collaboration in (Self-)Translation: From German Philosophy to Basque Literature

• Hilary Brown, ‘Translation, Collaboration and Gender in Early Modern Germany’ 
• Elizabete Manterola Agirrezabalaga, ‘Collaborative Self-translation in a Diglosic Literature and The Power Implications’ 
• Duncan Large, ‘Self-Translations by Western Philosophers’ 

13:00-14:00 Working Lunch: Discussion about further development of relevant research and collaborative (!) work on potential large grants

14:00-16:00 Panel Three: Identifying Collaboration (or Lack of It?) in Self-Translation

• Lyudmila Razumova, ‘Polyvalence of Self-Translation in Vladimir Nabokov’s Writing’ 
• Alexandra Berlina, ‘Memory and More in Brodsky’s Self-Translations’ 
• Eugenia Kilbert, ‘(Un)collaborative Self-Translation’ 
• Natalia Rulyova, ‘Brodsky’s Collaborative Self-Translation’ 

16:00-16:15 Coffee Break

16:15-18:00 Panel Four: Learning from Practitioners: Writers, Translators and Self-Translators

• Natasha Lvovich, ‘Medication against Nostalgia’ and the Window into Translingual Creative Process’ 
• Robert Chandler, ‘Researching and Reshaping the Source Text’ 
• Victor Sonkin, ‘All Roads Lead To… Where? The joys and pitfalls of self-translating a historical guidebook’ 
• Alexandra Borisenko ‘Translator’s Investigation: Compiling Anthologies of Crime Fiction at the Translation Workshop’

Update Bibliography

The bibliography on self-translation has been updated.
For any additions, please leave a comment.
To access the pdf-file, please click here.

« Regards croisés autour de l’autotraduction », PAOLA PUCCINI (éd.)

New publication on self-translation: 

Issue n°6 of Interfrancophonie. Revue des littératures et cultures d'expression française dedicated entirely to self-translation. Edited by Paola Puccini. Title: Regards croisés autour de l’autotraduction.

All articles are available online as pdf files. Open Access.

Content:
Paola Puccini: Avant-propos. Pour une cartographie de l’autotraduction

Rainier Grutman: Francophonie et autotraduction

Patricia Godbout: Marius Barbeau et l’autotraduction. Le cas du Rêve de Kamalmouk

Louise Ladouceur: L’auto-traduction selon Marc Prescott. Entre la fidélité à soi et la cohérence de l’œuvre dans l’autre langue

Paola Puccini: L’autotraduction comme malheureuse nécessité. Le cas de La Maculée / sTain de Madeleine Blais-Dahlem

Valeria Sperti: Vassilis Alexakis et Nancy Huston au miroir de l’autotraduction

Licia Canton: Se traduire au quotidien

Gianna Patriarca: La langue à l’intérieur de mes langues

Chiara Lusetti: Junun de Jalila Baccar. Le personnage de Nun et l’expression du Moi entre arabe et français

Fabio Regattin: Quand les préfixes se cumulent. La « pseudo-auto-traduction »

Martina Della Casa: L’esthétique d’un corpus bilingue : « en moi il y a toujours eu deux pitres ». Écriture et auto-traduction chez Beckett

Gisela Bergonzoni: « Company / Compagnie » de Samuel Beckett: face à un miroir déformant

Vassilis Alexakis: Propos échangés avec Valeria Sperti. 'C’est un peu l’histoire qui a décidé de moi'

You can find abstracts for all articles on the website of the journal.

Please click here.

Conference Translation in Exile, December 09-11, 2015, Brussels

Self-translation will be a topic at the conference Translation in Exile, taking place from December 09-11, 2015, Brussels.

December, 10

09:00-10:30
Self-translation (I) Chair: Philippe Humblé (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Room Francqui

• Suzanne Jill Levine (University of California, Santa Barbara): Translating Against Censorship: Cabrera Infante as Self/Collaborative Translator 
• Maria Alice Antunes (State University of Rio de Janeiro, UERJ): Self-translation and the question of exiled writers translating their work into English: the case of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Ariel Dorfman

11:00-12:30
Self-translation (II) Chair: Ilse Logie (Ghent University), Room Francqui

• Michele Russo (G. d’Annunzio University of Pescara): Self-translation and ‘intratextual’ expansion in Nabokov’s autobiographical texts: a model for Brodsky’s memoirs 
• Rozemarijn Vervoort (Ghent University): Permanently in-between. Self-translation as a characteristic of Sámi society in Sigbjørn Skåden’s work

14:00-15:30
Self-translation (III) Chair: Judith Woodsworth (Concordia University), Room Francqui

• Lucía Azpeitia Ortiz (Pompeu Fabra University): Una antologia de la lírica nord-americana: Agustí Bartra’s catalan canon of American poetry 
• Maria-Clara Versiani Galery & Júlia de Melo Arantes (Federal University of Ouro Preto): Samuel Beckett and Nancy Huston: Self-translation, Exile and Liminality

December, 11

9:00-10:30
Soviet Union I Chair: Natalia Kaloh Vid (University of Maribor), Room Francqui

• Julia Holter (Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts (ITEM), CNRS/ENS): Vadim Kozovoï’s Self-translation in France 
• Jamie L. Olson (Saint Martin’s University): Americanness and Self-Translation in Joseph Brodsky’s Exile Poetry

For the complete conference program, please click here.

Research Seminar: Borrowed Words: Brodsky’s Collaborative Self-Translation

In their Research Seminar Series 2015-16 the Birmingham Centre for Translation offers a lecture on self-translation by Dr Natasha Rulyova (Birmingham) on Tuesday 17 November 2015 1-2pm, Ashley Building, room 121a (Building R17 on the Edgbaston campus map)

Abstract of the talk:
In this paper, I will propose that collaborative translation and self-translation are not mutually exclusive but, in fact, are two sides of the same coin. Independently, each field – collaborative translation and self-translation – has recently started to receive considerable scholarly attention. Self-translation has become a burgeoning subject of research since the 1980s (Grutman 2013; Boyden & De Bleeker 2013; Hokenson & Munson 2007). Collaborative translation is a newer field but has increasingly been gaining pace (Wakabayashi 2011; Cordingley forthcoming 2016). I will show that self-translation can be, in fact, a form of collaborative translation, especially for late bilingual writers who require a certain ‘reprogramming’ from one language to another (Pavlenko 2014, p.168) This process of re-programming is dialogic: bilingual writers do not only start a dialogue with their inner selves in L2 but they are also in dialogue with native speakers of L2 who often become their implicit co-authors. It is in this dialogic process of co-creation, late bilingual writers conduct their self-translation. As my case study, I discuss the work by Joseph Brodsky, a Russian-American Noble Prize winning poet. Brodsky was a late bilingual who arrived in the USA in 1971, having been exiled from the USSR. His early work was translated into English by excellent translators including George Kline, Daniel Weissbort, Alan Myers and others. By the late 1970s, Brodsky started feeling sufficiently confident to intervene in his translators’ work and to self-translate. My study of his manuscripts and correspondence with his translators reveals some fascinating facts about the way in which Brodsky acquired his English-language voice through borrowing, mixing and experimenting, sometimes at the expense of his dedicated translators and friends.

Talk on self-translation at the University of Oregon

Organized by the Translation Studies Working Group (TSWG) at the University of Oregon 

Friday, November 6, 2015, 3-5 p.m. in EMU South Dining West. Free and open to the public. 

• Brandon Rigby (RL), “Polysemy of the Space Between: Self-translation in Contemporary Transatlantic Bilingual Poetry”

Update! Bibliography on self-translation

The bibliography on self-translation has been updated.
For any additions, please leave a comment.

To access the pdf-file, please click here.

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.