Against Self-Translation

Abstract

Self-translation as I understand it means that the author of a literary text completed in one language subsequently reproduces it in a second language. The second text resembles the first one sufficiently to be presented as its translation, though obviously to define it that way begs a number of important questions. Although my primary interest in this connection is poetry, prose writers translate themselves too. I could name a Catalan novelist who invented a fictitious personage to mask his own part in the Spanish-language edition of one of his books. Indeed, self-translation is a much more widespread phenomenon than one might think. The most eminent, and some would say the most notorious recent example is the Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, who, after intervening massively in the translations of his Russian originals by other hands, began to do his own, even, where he saw fit, adding further stanzas to a poem in its new English format. In Paris in 1929, Marina Tsvetaeva, whom Brodsky has described as the greatest phenomenon in Russian verse since Pushkin, attempted first a French translation, then a French reworking of her epic poem The Swain, unpublished to this day. In 1933 she also offered to a series of French journals a prose piece entitled Les nuits florentines, based on her letters to Abram Vishniak, who had run a small publishing house in Berlin when she lived there.1