Self-Translation, Literary Creativity, and Trans-Lingual Aesthetics: A Québec Writer’s Perspective

• Authors: Daniel Gagnon
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Self-translation and bilingual writing are drawing increasing critical attention in literary and translation studies. Bilingual writing can cover a wide range of phenomena involving varying degrees of bilingualism. Scholarly focus has been on emigrant, expatriate or exiled writers and more recently, on bilingual writers writing in a post-colonial context, using the acquired language of the colonizer. The emphasis has been on the cultural and political power inequalities between languages. Self-translation has also been seen from the broader, ontological point of view as a form of double representation of the writing self. My own experience in the particular cultural geography of a bi-national, multicultural country such as Canada offers a different context for reflecting on self-translation and bilingual writing, or what I prefer to call “cross-writing,” based on the fundamental cross-cultural communicative aesthetics underlying my specific writing and self-translation process.

Keywords

EN

self-translation; bilingual writing; cross-writing; communicative aesthetics

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Linguaculture
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 2015
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 45-55

Dates

published

2015-06-01

online

2016-02-22

Contributors

author

Daniel Gagnon

• McGill University, Montréal

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/lincu-2015-0035