In this dissertation, I argue that self-translators embody a borderline sense of hybridity, both linguistically and culturally, and that the act of translation, along with its innate in-betweenness, is the context in which self-translators negotiate their fragmented identities and cultures. I use the poetry of Urayoán Noel, Juan Gelman, and Yolanda Castaño to demonstrate that they each uniquely use the process of self-translation, in conjunction with a bilingual presentation, to articulate their modern, hybrid identities. In addition, I argue that as a result, the act of self-translation establishes an interliminal space of enunciation that not only reflects an intercultural exchange consistent with hybridity, but fosters further cultural and linguistic interaction. As a manifestation of their hybrid sensibilities, each of these three poets employs the process of self-translation as an extension of their poetic themes, including a critique and parody of postmodern globalization, reappropriation of language to combat forces of oppression and deterritorialization, or a socio-linguistic representation of bilingual life in a stateless nation from the perspective of a minority language. Self-translation highlights the interliminality between languages, establishing a “third space” of communication that transcends the incomplete communicative ability of each of the two languages. When presented bilingually, self-translation foregrounds the act of translation; the presence of both languages not only encourages interaction between the two languages, but also draws attention to the act of translation, instead of obscuring it in a layer of transparency. This brings the reader to ponder the act of translation and the relationship between languages, ultimately enabling the reader to more fully appreciate the generative qualities of translation.

This thesis focuses on the unusual phenomenon of exile from a frontier land, as it is explored by the work of the Istrian writer Fulvio Tomizza. It deals with the diaspora from Istria, a territory at the intersection of different civilizations – the Italian and the Croat-Slovenian – which has historically shaped a mixture of cultures and languages, remarkable for its hybridity. The massive exile which took place at the end of the Second World War, after the redefinition of the Italo-Yugoslav border, presents original features which, by taking advantage of the narrative tool, overturn traditional parameters attributed to exile. Focusing on Fulvio Tomizza’s novels Materada, La ragazza di Petrovia and L’albero dei sogni, and also on some of his most significant essays, I will seek to outline the specific traits that typify the detachment from one’s own native country. In particular, I shall suggest that identity and idioms are called into question even before characters have left their homeland. In addition, exile begins with a clarification of characters’ sense of belonging, which inevitably leads them to split, making the choice of whether to abandon the home country even more complicated. Once abroad, characters will develop a deep sense of estrangement, dictated by the impossibility of fitting into any other context, which will eventually drive them to a double, parallel, unsuccessful exile. In order to investigate fully the characteristics of Fulvio Tomizza’s exile, I will employ some linguistic postulates to examine the bilingualism and diglossia of the origins. The theoretical approaches of Edward Said, Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva will be used to inform my analysis of the more subtle mechanisms which rule exile, starting with doubleness and examining the dynamics which commonly characterize the exilic experience, including those in relation to the elaboration of the narrative itself. The novelty of this work lies in its approach to exile without preconceived arguments, which run the risk of limiting the analysis of the topic, and in the exploration of the most crucial aspects of a frontier land shaken by a territorial redefinition. This thesis also aims to reallocate the figure of Fulvio Tomizza, who has as yet not been investigated in any significant manner, most often being neglected or misunderstood. The aim is also to highlight one of the most European writers of the Italian second Novecento and his relationship with Eastern European languages and literatures.

Ce travail explore la « francophonie translingue », littérature écrite en français par des auteurs dont le français est une langue seconde, apprise tardivement par une démarche individuelle. Au sein de cet ensemble est examinée l’œuvre à la fois représentative et problématique d’Agota Kristof.Qu’implique le choix d’écrire en français, lorsque le français est une langue seconde, apprise par une démarche volontaire à un âge relativement avancé ? S’agit-il d’une simple « conversion » à un centre politique et littéraire prestigieux et à sa tradition littéraire, ou bien d’une pratique littéraire hybride, qui perturbe les liens supposés nécessaires entre langue, littérature et nation ?Une première partie de la recherche est consacrée à l’élaboration d’une poétique francophone translingue, qui rend compte des contraintes communes des écrivains du point de vue de l’institution littéraire, de la diversité et complémentarité de leurs imaginaires des langues et de la traduction, des régularités formelles et thématiques dans leurs œuvres.Dans une deuxième partie est abordée l’œuvre d’Agota Kristof. Son appartenance à la francophonie translingue constitue le point de départ pour interroger les positionnements de l’auteure, les transformations de sa poétique et les stratégies d’écriture qu’elle déploie.Si l’œuvre d’Agota Kristof gagne à être lue au prisme de la francophonie translingue, inversement la francophonie translingue mérite d’être « mise à l’épreuve » d’une écrivaine qui semble excéder son cadre. / This doctoral thesis explores literature written in French by non-native authors who learned the language of their writing relatively late. Among this literature, which I propose referring to as “translingual francophone literature”, I focus on work which is both representative and problematic of Hungarian-Swiss writer Agota Kristof. While the conceptualization of translingual francophone literature sheds new light on Kristof’s oeuvre, the single author analysis also allows the concept to be tested.In the first part of my work, I describe the elements of translingual Francophone poetics. I contend that translingual francophone writers share several formal choices, as well as institutional constraints; I then analyze the representations of languages and translation in their work, which work as rival positions in the translingual discursive space. Lastly I examine their narratives in novel and autobiography, whose frequent topics show their common intentions and the variety of literary solutions.In the second part of the thesis, I consider the work of Agota Kristof. Translingual francophone literature will not be an explanatory principle, but the starting point of the investigation. Through this lens I will examine the author’s isolation strategy in the French literary field and in the translingual discursive space, her trajectory from Hungarian poetry to French novel through self-translation and theater, her representation of languages as separate, non-communicating entities, the importance of the theme of the border in her plays and novels and the construction of an “illiterate writing” through her mature work.

Personne ne peut nier la part de la création dans la littérature et les auteurs ont certes la possibilité de s'exprimer de plusieurs façons afin de véhiculer leurs pensées et leurs émotions. Qu'en est-il de la traduction ? En effet, la créativité peut être masquée, voire même modifiée si la traduction est faite par un tiers. La présente thèse se focalise sur la façon dont l'auto-traduction renforce la créativité chez les auteurs bilingues qui traduisent, eux-mêmes, leurs romans. Notre travail porte sur les problèmes traductologiques révélés dans la traduction du roman La langue maternelle de Vassilis Alexakis, roman qui a obtenu le prix Médicis en 1995. Notre étude repose sur l'analyse approfondie des données recueillies après l'examen des tapuscrits inédits, du roman grec et des versions françaises dans un laps de douze ans. Ce travail tente de prouver que l'œuvre littéraire de Vassilis Alexakis n'est pas une simple traduction, mais au contraire un texte qu'il a (re)écrit entièrement après avoir révisé sa traduction. Ainsi, son œuvre reflète un processus créatif continu et fascinant. La comparaison des œuvres publiées a révélé plus de deux mille cas, classés en cinq catégories afin de permettre une analyse appropriée : morphosyntaxique, lexico-sémantique, culturel, omissions et réécriture. Une attention particulière est accordée à l'implication personnelle de l'écrivain, à la relation entre l'identité et l'altérité ainsi qu'à la dimension diachronique de la grécité à travers le processus auto-traductif.Les résultats de notre étude sont variés. Évidemment l'œuvre n'est pas complète avant que l'écrivain ne l'ait revue et traduite, puisque chaque traduction implique une nouvelle version. Nous avons constaté que l'auteur emploie le langage de façon ingénieuse et qu'il transfère le message librement, car il choisit par instinct la traduction la plus adéquate et la plus pertinente. Il se sert souvent de la stratégie de modulation afin de traduire les éléments du texte source. En outre, la communication bilingue semble être complémentaire, les différentes versions n'existant pas séparées les unes des autres. En effet, même si elles présentent des différences apparentes, leur fonction poétique et tellement proche pour les considérer à part. Nous examinons aussi comment l'emploi de stratégies d'exotisation enrichit la culture d'arrivée et le dialogue intralinguistique. La fonction globale de l'œuvre de Vassilis Alexakis revêt un rôle double ; d'une part, elle assure un réseau dynamique et harmonieux entre la langue grecque et la langue française, dont les interférences réciproques garantissent une vraie créativité et une littérature innovante, et d'autre part, elle assure la découverte et l'invention, et par voie de conséquence l'apprentissage et l'acquisition du savoir à travers le voyage vers l'autre côté… / The art of creativity in literature is undeniable and certainly authors may express themselves in any number of ways in order to vehicle their thoughts or emotions. What about translation though? Indeed, the overall movement of creativity may be hidden or altered when translation is done by a third party. The focus of the present PhD thesis is on how self-translation supplies the creative ability of bilingual authors who translate their own novels. This work carries out an approach on translating problems revealed in Vassilis Alexakis' novel La langue maternelle (The mother tongue) which won the french literary award Prix Médicis in 1995. Our study achieves its purpose through meticulous analysis of field data, most precisely by exploring unpublished manuscripts, as well as greek and french versions published on a twelve-year framework. The present dissertation argues that Vassilis Alexakis' literary work is not a mere translation but a text (re)written from scratch after revising his own translation, thus his work is a constant creative and amazing process. Publications comparison reveals more than two thousand cases, classified into five specific categories so as to allow better analysis : morphosyntaxic, semantic, cultural, omissions and reproduction. Focus is also given to the level of personal implication, the relationship between identity and alterity and the diachronic dimension of hellenic elements via self-translation procedure.The research findings are various. Obviously, the literary work is not complete until he has revised and translated it, given that every translation implies a new version. We have noticed a felicitous use of language and author's tendency to transfer message more freely, as he knows intuitevely which rendering is more adequate and suitable. He often uses modulation strategy in order to translate source texts elements. Moreover, bilingual communication seems to be complementary and apparently his versions do not exist in isolation from one another. Indeed, even if they present apparent differences, their poetic function is too similar to be considered separate. It is also discussed if the use of alienating strategy enriches target culture and intralinguistic dialogue. The overall function of Aleaxakis' self-translation appears to play a double role ; on the one hand ensuring a dynamic and harmonius network between french and greek languages, whose reciprocal interferences warrant pure creativity and innovative literature and on the other hand, ensuring finding and inventing, and consequently learning and knowing acquisition, through the trip towards the other side...

This research aims to understand self-translation as a postcolonial, social, political, cultural and linguistic phenomenon and it focuses on how it communicates a hybrid transcultural identity that not only challenges the monolingual literary canons and concepts of national homogeneous identities, but also subverts to patriarchal society. Thus, I understand self-translation as a mean of empowerment and contestation. The cases under study are Puerto Rican writers Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago, and their novels The House on the Lagoon and América’s Dream, written in English and translated into Spanish by the authors themselves. I believe that Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago are representative of a group of writers, artists and intellectuals who through their work originated from the island and from the U.S. Diaspora, have aimed to give voice to a Puerto Rican postcolonial hybrid identity that has been silenced until recently. Therefore, they disrupt the official national cultural and linguistic discourse about the Puerto Rican identity that has been weaved by the Spanish language in opposition to U.S. colonialist attempts of linguistic and cultural assimilation. This dissertation is located in the intersection between the fields of comparative literature, translation, cultural, gender and postcolonial studies. The question that guides this research is: Is self-translation in the case of Puerto Rico, a result of cultural hybridity in Puerto Rico’s postcolonial context?Therefore, this is a multidisciplinary research project that integrates elements from the humanities and the social sciences. Methodologically, it integrates qualitative and quantitative approaches. Hence, hybridity is embedded in this research not only because it discusses English and Spanish writing, but because it includes textual analysis, content analysis and statistical analysis. The main finding is the deep conection between socio-political context, language, culture, identity, power and translation that supports the idea that self-translation is a postcolonial act, which in the case of Puerto Rico is strongly related to hybridity as an everyday practice of identity affirmation.

This thesis constitutes a first large-scale study of literary self-translators and self-translations in Canada, with self-translation understood as interlinguistic and intertextual transfer where the same legal person is responsible for writing the antecedent and subsequent texts. Three main questions guide this investigation: To what extent is Canada fertile ground for self-translation? What does it mean to self-translate in Canada? Why does self-translation in Canada matter? After situating Canada-based research within broader self-translation scholarship, I engage in a critical analysis of the definition and implications of self-translation and contextualize the theoretical, sociopolitical and methodological rationale for studying Canada and adopting a macroscopic approach to examining self-translations and their writers in this country. The thesis predominantly revolves around self-translation artefacts produced by three groups of writers who self-translated in Canada at least once between 1971 and 2016: 1) those self-translating exclusively between English and French; and those self-translating into and/or out of 2) Spanish; or 3) standard Italian. Exploring the theme of collaboration, I propose a new typology of collaborative self-translation, attempting to account for both process- and product-related considerations. In examining the theme of frequency, I identify self-translators and discuss their relative distribution vis-à-vis language, generation, country of birth and location within Canada; I also map out a conceptual framework for defining and counting self-translation products, proposing new ways of understanding and classifying writers in light of their self-translational productivity. In considering the theme of language, I analyze how writers and their self-translations can be characterized in relation to language variety, language combinations and language directionality. In this thesis, I argue that Canada is a significant hub of heterogeneous self-translational activity, and that large-scale, quantitative and product-oriented study constitutes a useful research approach that can generate rich findings and complement other forms of investigation. The thesis also contains an extensive appendix in which I identify Canadian self-translators and their self-translations.

ABSTRACT COLONIALISM, EDUCATION, AND GABON: AN EXAMINATION OF THE SELF-TRANSLATION OF GABONESE CITIZENS IN THEIR POSTCOLONIAL SPACE THROUGH EDUCATION AND LANGUAGE. SEPTEMBER 2016 MOUSSAVOU FROY BATSIELILIT, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Maria Tymoczko Gabon’s educational model, mode, and language of instruction are similar to that of France. Likewise, the official language in Gabon remains French. The similarities between both countries, as a result, have continued to perpetuate and reinforce the indirect, or direct, influence of French culture in Gabon. The resemblance also contributed to the inability of Gabon to create an independent identity from France. As a result, Gabonese citizens are self-translating and rewriting themselves as an extension of France while simultaneously censoring half of their identities from the narrative of nation. To understand the current situation, I investigate education and the language situation in Gabon and relate them to the field of Translation Studies in terms of the latter’s concepts. The thesis begins with a historical background of Gabon. The discussion then shifts to analyze the connection between language and power, and its use during French colonialism in Africa. The importance of language and power is in turn linked to education, resulting in an analysis of Gabon and France’s educational systems and materials. The issues of education, language, and identity are discussed so as to determine the influences on Gabonese citizens’ identities.

This master's thesis focuses on a bilingual Czech-English collection of short stories Hořící nebesa/The Burning Skies by Jiří Fränkl. It creates a profile of the author and studies the bilingual text questions of self-translation, bilingual writing and identity, which serves as a basis for analysing both language versions and examining their differences with regard to the author's personality.

Nous voulons démontrer que le plurilinguisme n’est pas un procédé accessoire, mais une fonction majeure de la littérature. Pour ce faire, cette thèse étudie l’écriture de trois auteurs italiens plurilingues : Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996), Edoardo Sanguineti (1930-2010) et Patrizia Vicinelli (1943-1991). La première partie analyse le plurilinguisme littéraire d’un point de vue théorique, historique et formel. Après avoir défini les concepts essentiels, nous dressons une synthèse argumentée des études fondatrices sur ce sujet. Parallèlement, nous montrons comment le plurilinguisme se développe dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. Enfin, nous dégageons les caractéristiques formelles récurrentes des textes plurilingues, du micro-texte au macro-texte, et proposons plusieurs typologies. De plus, nous soutenons que le plurilinguisme a un rôle crucial dans la pensée, les émotions et les images véhiculées par les textes littéraires. La deuxième partie explore trois caractéristiques majeures de cet imaginaire plurilingue : la subjectivité, la représentation de l’espace mondial et la conscience métalinguistique. Le plurilinguisme a enfin des conséquences globales sur les logiques de réception et de traduction, comme le montre la troisième partie. Plus généralement, le lecteur lui-même est toujours plongé dans une traduction potentielle. Après avoir examiné les questions théoriques que pose la traduction du plurilinguisme, nous critiquons différentes traductions de nos auteurs en plusieurs langues. Nous insistons sur les cas particuliers de l’autotraduction et de la traduction réalisée avec l’auteur. / My aim is to demonstrate that multilingualism is not an incidental process, but a substantial function in literature. Therefore, this thesis studies the works of three italian multilingual authors: Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996), Edoardo Sanguineti (1930-2010) and Patrizia Vicinelli (1943-1991). The first part analyses literary multilingualism from a theoretical, historical and formal point of view. After defining essential concepts, I give a detailed overview of the founding studies on this topic. At the same time, I point out how multilingualism raises during the second half of the XXe century. Then I identify the main formal patterns of multilingual texts, from microtext to macrotext, and propose different typologies. Moreover I argue that multingualism plays a leading role in thoughts, emotions and images conveyed by literary texts. Thus the second part focuses on three major features of the multilingual imagination: the subjectivity, the representation of world space and the metalinguistic awareness. Multilingualism has finally a global impact on the reception and the translation of texts, which is the topic of the third part. The reader himself is always engaged in a potential translation. After investigating the general questions raised by the translation of multilingualism, I criticize different translations of our authors in several languages. I also emphasize the specific issue of self-translation and translation written with the author.

L’autotraduction est le résultat d’une équation qui combine bilinguisme, traduction et littérature L’autotraducteur n’est pas un simple médiateur entre texte source et texte cible : il est écrivain, puis lecteur de son œuvre, puis écrivain à nouveau et enfin lecteur de sa traduction, qui acquiert une valeur de deuxième œuvre originale. C’est à la lumière du cas de Agustín Gómez-Arcos que cette thèse se propose de répondre à la question de la stratégie de réécriture et d’adaptation mise en place lors du processus de l’autotraduction, en étudiant les différents mécanismes auxquels a recours l’autotraducteur, qu’il s’agisse de choix contraints ou de prise de liberté auctoriale, mais aussi en analysant les interférences entre les deux langues qui laissent entrevoir une « pollinisation » certaine des œuvres bilingues du corpus choisi. Cette réflexion sur la poétique de l’autotraduction à travers les obstacles qui peuvent gêner l’écriture bilingue, mais aussi à travers la liberté qu’apporte à un auteur le fait d’être son propre traducteur, se veut une manière de rendre hommage à la figure du traducteur littéraire. / Self-translation is the result of an equation that combines literature with bilingualism and translation. The self-translator is not a mere mediator between the source text and the target text. In fact, he is the writer and reader of his work, but also the writer and reader of his translation, which becomes a second original work. The aim of this thesis is to address the issue of how Agustín Gómez-Arcos rewrites and adapts his novels when he self-translates them. That is why we are going to study the various translation procedures he uses – be they choices that conform to constraints or auctorial licenses – and then analyse the way the two languages interact with one another and lead to cross-pollination within the bilingual novels of the selected corpus. This reflection on the poetics of self-translation not only through obstacles to bilingual writing, but also through the freedom offered to an author who is his own translator, can be regarded as a tribute paid to the figure of the literary translator.