This article examines briefly the representation of translation and translators in Canadian and Quebec literature generally from the mid-1940s to the works of such authors as Nicole Brossard, Jacques Poulin, Gail Scott and Francine Noël in the 1980s, before examining more particularly the case of authors including Nancy Huston, Robert Dickson and Agnès Whitfield who translate their own works between English and French. Detailed analysis of the writer’s own novels, The Marriageable Daughter and My Husband the Doctor, confirms the hypothesis that, in Canadian and Québécois contexts of self-translation, figures of the translator or translation process tend to emphasize writerly and creative dimensions.
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.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.