The Linguist

14 The Linguist Vol/65 No/2 ciol.org.uk/thelinguist FEATURES 'Bad English' in self-translation isn't always a bad thing, says Ursula Deser Friedman. It can be an act of revolution I n 1913, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) became the first Asian Nobel Laureate for his poetry collection Gitanjali: Song offerings, which he had translated from Bengali into English himself. However, Tagore assessed his self-translation as having done a "gross injustice" to his source text. He performed Gitanjali for an elite global audience by rendering the poetry in an ornate Shakespearean style far removed from the concise Bengali version. As a result, he reluctantly gained a place in world literature before he became well-known within the Bengali literary tradition. 1 By contrast, Ha Jin (哈金; pen name for Xuefei Jin 金雪飛, b. 1956) intentionally catapulted himself into the world literary polysystem by publishing first in his non- native English. Despite scooping up the PEN/Faulkner Award, Jin raised eyebrows by writing novels in a hybrid 'translationese' style that he translates back into his native Chinese. Where Tagore hoped to further his Pan-Asia political movement by promoting himself on the world stage, Jin has sought to channel nostalgia for mainland China to gather a Chinese readership and, by translating back into Chinese, to use self- translation for personal catharsis. Self-translation as rewriting Self-translation is a self-reflexive process through which authors translate their own writing into other languages either simultaneously or consecutively. Many self- translators refer to this process as one of transaction 2 or rewriting 3 , rather than translation per se. My research centres around émigré Sinophone authors' self-translation practices. As these authors translate their own works between Chinese and English both languages are revitalised. In adapting dialogue, idioms and humour from Chinese into English and vice versa, they add local flavour and idiosyncrasies to their writing. Jhumpa Lahiri, who has translated her own writing from Italian into English, describes self-translation as a reversal of the assumed direction from source to translated text: "Like an image viewed in the mirror, [the source text] has turned into the simulacrum, and both is and is not the starting point for what rationally and irrationally followed." 4 According to Hokenson and Munson, the self-translated text simultaneously exists in two languages and in two separate versions, often featuring overlapping content. 5 Because the writer-translator has access to their own authorial intentions, they are empowered to take creative liberties that a conventional 'outside' translator might shy away from. Defamiliarising trauma Authors may translate their own work for pragmatic reasons, such as to forgo a translator's fee, to reclaim their own cultural capital or to control the reception of their work; for creative reasons, such as the impulse to revisit and improve the original; and for psychological reasons, such as a desire to restore wholeness to their split selves, and/or as a means of distancing themselves from memories of war and exile. The Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky argued that writing in a foreign language defamiliarises trauma. 6 By gaining distance from our own language, we gain distance from personal and inherited traumas. The resulting self-awareness allows us to view our trauma from a distance, to break the immobilising cycle of traumatic recollection, retrieval and re- experience through reader-enabled catharsis. Self-translation defamiliarises the source text when both the self-translator and the reader allow the text to surprise and challenge them. In this way, it juxtaposes linguistic and cultural systems in a way that can catalyse linguistic innovation and evolution. By defamiliarising their own narratives through the smokescreen of a different language, self-translators cultivate renewed cultural and aesthetic awareness, which often leads to artistic breakthroughs. Performing their text(s) in another language(s) establishes a critical distance or detachment that can deliver fresh insight into the work at hand. I maintain that every creation is, in essence, a recreation; moreover, every act of self- expression is one of self-translation – we are constantly sublimating our non-verbal thoughts and feelings into oral and written linguistic structures, and re-inscribing the world back into our own psyche. As the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz put it, "when we learn to speak, we are learning to translate." 7 In this sense, language is itself a form of translation: translatimus, ergo sumus ('we translate, therefore we are'). 'Weirding' colonial languages The outside translator may be able to translate more ethically than the self-translator. The latter's privileged access to the process of composing the source text may actually skew Rewriting the self

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