Self-translation in translingual writing. Luan Starova’s Albanian and Macedonian versions of the novel ‘The Times of the Goats’

Abstract

In this contribution I examine the Macedonian and Albanian versions of the novel ‘The Times of the Goats’ both written by the Albanian-born writer, poet and translator Luan Starova who lives in the Republic of Macedonia. His prose fiction displays an interesting case of literary translingualism and self-translation, because he uses two working languages in his literary production: Macedonian, the acquired language, and Albanian his mother tongue, learned only in the family context. As a bilingual and bi-cultural mediator, Starova has built a bridge between the Albanian and Macedonian cultures. The process of (re)creation and (re)writing some parts of the text blurs a clear-cut distinction between the ‘original’, represented by the first version of the novel published in Macedonian, and the ‘translated’ version, published in Albanian nine years later. The result is a sort of ‘twin work’ or better said a ‘bicephalic’ text in which the different lexical and stylistic choices are adapted to the two different linguistic, semantic, pragmatic and sociocultural contexts..