Self Translation

Examines writers and artists negotiating their multilingual cultural contexts and hybrid identities when producing works in one language which they then translate into another. This book establishes an understanding of the heterogeneity of this form of cultural production known as self-translation. Self-Translation: Brokering originality in hybridculture provides critical, historical and interdisciplinary analyses ofself-translators and their works. It investigates the challenges which thebilingual oeuvre and the experience of the self-translator pose to conventionaldefinitions of translation and the problematic dichotomies of "original" and"translation", "author" and "translator". Canonical self-translators, suchSamuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Rabindranath Tagore, are here discussed inthe context of previously overlooked self-translators, from Japan to SouthAfrica, from the Basque Country to Scotland. This book seeks therefore to offera portrait of the diverse artistic and political objectives and priorities ofself-translators by investigating different cosmopolitan, post-colonial andindigenous practices. Numerous contributions to this volume extend the scope ofself-translation to include the composition of a work out of a multilingualconsciousness or society. They demonstrate how production within hybridcontexts requires the negotiation of different languages within the self,generating powerful experiences, from crisis to liberation, and texts thatoffer key insights into our increasingly globalized culture.