Writing It Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French by Sara Kippur (review)

In her study of four authors who practise self-translation to varying degrees and ends, Sara Kippur makes a case for thinking about world literature in a new way. She tracks the orbit of the translingual writers Nancy Huston, Raymond Federman, Jorge Semprún, and Hector Bianciotti in and around the French language, demonstrating their different relationships to French. Many recent studies have examined such choices, especially in the wake of the ‘Pour une littérature-monde’ manifesto (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), including Kippur’s own articles on these authors; but the originality of her approach here lies in her forensic focus on when, how, and why these authors have translated their own work for publication. She follows up with the claim that by ‘writing it twice’, they have contributed to making a world literature in French. Defining self-translation as ‘the translation of an original work into another language by the author himself’ (Anton Popovič, quoted p. 4), Kippur re-interprets the term throughout the text, notably to ‘problematize the limits of translation, of the self, and of the intersection between them’ (p. 48). In the Introduction, she positions self-translation at the nexus of several fields including translation, translingualism, and world literature, hinging her argument on the notion that self-translators are ‘quintessential creators of a world literature in French — because of the ways that they actively compose and publish texts for two language audiences’ (p. 12). Time and memory, truth and distance are issues for all self-translators, as is the omnipresence of Beckett. Each chapter title eloquently directs the reader to central concerns regarding the relevant author’s self-translation practices. Reading Huston as essentially engaged with multilingualism and modernist aesthetics, Kippur’s first chapter aligns this self-translator’s approach to the linguistic strangeness of Beckett. She then interrogates the nature and stability of authorship in Federman’s work using the framework of mouvance, drawn from medieval scholarship, which considers a series of manuscripts or versions of a text as variations without an authoritative original. After explaining Semprún’s autobiographical logic for language choice, Kippur analyses his particular emphasis on language authenticity that valorizes the specificity of the original speech and recognizes the need to make these linguistic interventions accessible through translation within the text. And her approach to Bianciotti’s life-writing, or autofiction, with its inauthentic quotations that are diametrically opposed to Semprún’s language authenticity, is to let him and all other bilingual autobiographers off the hook, saying that they ‘cannot tell the “truth” across the divides that life creates’ (p. 125). The copious references bear witness to the thorough research undertaken to compose this book. While the writing flows well, one wonders whether some of the compressed narratives in the endnotes might have been integrated into the main text, giving these intertwined accounts of the four authors’ works more body and volume. Despite its slim spine, this book makes a huge contribution to self-translation and translingual studies, and challenges us to think about world literature from the perspective of its capacity for ‘engaging distinct language publics’ (p. 128) rather than according to its presence within a literary system beyond that of its original culture.