Self Translation And Re Writing

A fascinating collection of essays and conversations on the changing nature of language. From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation,a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating one’s own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavans’s explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavans’s status, in the words of the Washington Post, as “Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast.” “On Self-Translation is a beautiful and often profound work. Stavans, a superb stylist, offers erudite meditations on translation, and gives us new ways to think about language itself.” — Jack Lynch, author of The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of' “Proper” English, from Shakespeare to South Park “Stavans carries his learning light, and has the gift of communicating the profoundest of insights in the simplest of ways. The book is delightfully free of unnecessary jargon and ponderous discourse, allowing the reader time and space for her own reflections without having to slow down in the reading of it. This is work born out of the deep confidence that complete and dedicated immersion in a chosen field of knowledge (and practice) can bring; it is further infused with original wisdom accrued from self-reflexive, lived experiences of multilinguality.” — Kavita Panjabi, Jadavpur University

This companion offers a wide-ranging introduction to the rapidly expanding field of translation studies, bringing together some of the best recent scholarship to present its most important current themes Features new work from well-known scholars Includes a broad range of geo-linguistic and theoretical perspectives Offers an up-to-date overview of an expanding field A thorough introduction to translation studies for both undergraduates and graduates Multi-disciplinary relevance for students with diverse career goals

Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by the award-winning writer and literary translator Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages. With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers. Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. “Another masterstroke in a career already filled with them.” —O, the Oprah Magazine Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone. We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change. This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.

Though the practice of self-translation long predates modernity, it has found new forms of expression in the global literary market of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The international renown of self-translating authors Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, and Vladimir Nabokov has offered motivation to a new generation of writers who actively translate themselves. Intervening in recent debates in world literature and translation studies, Writing It Twice establishes the prominence and vitality of self-translation in contemporary French literature. Because of its intrinsic connection to multiple literary communities, self-translation prompts a reexamination of the aesthetics and politics of reading across national lines. Kippur argues that self-translated works should be understood as the paradigmatic example of world literature and, as such, crucial for interpreting the dynamics of literary circulation into and out of French.

This book investigates the political, social, cultural and economic implications of self-translation in multilingual spaces in Europe. Engaging with the ‘power turn’ in translation studies contexts, it offers innovative perspectives on the role of self-translators as cultural and ideological mediators. The authors explore the unequal power relations and centre-periphery dichotomies of Europe’s minorised languages, literatures and cultures. They recognise that the self-translator’s double affiliation as author and translator places them in a privileged position to challenge power, to negotiate the experiences of the subaltern and colonised, and to scrutinise conflicting minorised vs. hegemonic cultural identities. Three main themes are explored in relation to self-translation: hegemony and resistance; self-minorisation and self-censorship; and collaboration, hybridisation and invisibility. This edited collection will appeal to scholars and students working on translation, transnational and postcolonial studies, and multilingual and multicultural identities.

Self-Translation: Brokering originality in hybrid culture provides critical, historical and interdisciplinary analyses of self-translators and their works. It investigates the challenges which the bilingual oeuvre and the experience of the self-translator pose to conventional definitions of translation and the problematic dichotomies of "original" and "translation", "author" and "translator". Canonical self-translators, such Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Rabindranath Tagore, are here discussed in the context of previously overlooked self-translators, from Japan to South Africa, from the Basque Country to Scotland. This book seeks therefore to offer a portrait of the diverse artistic and political objectives and priorities of self-translators by investigating different cosmopolitan, post-colonial and indigenous practices. Numerous contributions to this volume extend the scope of self-translation to include the composition of a work out of a multilingual consciousness or society. They demonstrate how production within hybrid contexts requires the negotiation of different languages within the self, generating powerful experiences, from crisis to liberation, and texts that offer key insights into our increasingly globalized culture.

"Autumn of Fury reads like a political thriller. It is also a salutory revelation. For years Sadat, the actor manqué, played a part before Western audiences, who were happy to see only what they wanted to see. For years Sadat's censors prevented Mr Heikal from telling the truth as he knew it. Now the truth can be told. Sadat dramatically transformed Nasser's Egypt. He expelled the Russians; he almost archived victory over Israel in October 1973; he allied himself with the Americans; and he made a separate peace with Israel."--Jacket.

Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and English-at various points in Ilan Stavans's life, each of these has been his primary language. In this rich memoir, the linguistic chameleon outlines his remarkable cultural heritage from his birth in politically fragile Mexico, through his years as a student activist and young Zionist in Israel, to his present career as a noted and controversial academic and writer. Along the way, Stavans introduces readers to some of the remarkable members of his family-his brother, a musical wunderkind; his father, a Mexican soap opera star; his grandmother, who arrived in Mexico from Eastern Europe in 1929 and wrote her own autobiography. Masterfully weaving personal reminiscences with a provocative investigation into language acquisition and cultural code switching, On Borrowed Words is a compelling exploration of Stavans's search for his place in the world.

The book explores aspects of self-translation, an all but exceptional phenomenon which has been practised, albeit on the quiet, for nearly two thousand years and has recently grown exponentially due to the increasing internationalisation of English and the growing multilingualism of modern societies. Starting from the premise that self-translation is first and foremost a translational act, i.e. a form of rewriting subject to a number of constraints, the book utilises the most valuable methods and findings of translation studies to account for the variety of reasons underlying self-translation processes and the diversity of strategies used by self-translators. The cases studied, from Kundera to Ngugi, and addressing writers like Beckett, Huston, Tagore, Brink, Krog and many others, show that the translation methods employed by self-translators vary considerably depending on their teloi. Nonetheless, most self-translations display domesticating tendencies similar to those observed in allograph translations, which confirms the view that self-translators, just like normal translators, are never free from the linguistic and cultural constraints imposed by the recontextualising of their texts in a new language. Most interestingly, the study brings to light certain recurring features, e.g. a tendency of author-translators to revise their original during the self-translation process or after completing it, which make self-translators privileged authors who can revise their texts in the light of the insights gained while translating.