Nancy Huston in Self-translation. An Aesthetics of Redoublement.

Self-translation is a fairly recent branch of studies. Despite its existence as a literary and linguistic phenomenon was proved to date back to ancient times, its practice in the globalized Twentieth Century has lately led scholars (concurrently with the cultural turn in translation studies) to delimit and deepen a field of enquiry that is transdisciplinary in nature, its focus being on multilingual writers who translate their literary works themselves. The phenomenology of self-translation depends on a variety of factors: the type of bilingualism of writers; the geo-political and social standing of the languages involved in their production; the literary traditions they combine; the scopes and consequent strategies for self-translation, etc. As a worldwide phenomenon, thus, self-translation is far from being satisfyingly mapped. For this reason, exhaustively investigated case studies are still needed as a preliminary step for further research leading to universal considerations. Nancy Huston is a prolific bilingual author of both fiction and non-fiction writing, born in Anglophone Canada but living in France since the early Seventies. While secondary bibliography exploring single couples of her self-translated texts presently covers a good deal of her novels, a comparative analysis of the evolution of this practice on a vast span of time was still missing. The aim of the present thesis is precisely to provide such analysis on a selection of Huston’s novels from Plainsong / Cantique des plaines (1993) to Danse noire (2013)/ Black Dance (2014). The thesis is subdivided in two main parts, each of three chapters. Chapter I provides an heuristic overview of self-translation, reporting the most influential bibliographical material that has focused, in turn, on: the theoretical debate ignited by self-translation around the dichotomic relation between ‘originals’ and ‘translations’; the existing typologies of self-translated text; the history of this practice over the centuries; its sociolinguistic assumptions and ...