The Situation of Translation/Translation Situation in Käbi Laretei's Life Writings

The article offers a discussion on life writings of Käbi Laretei, an exile Estonian author and in her day a world-famous concert pianist, whose self-representational narratives make visible the emergence of her textual subjectivity in the both fluid and rigid spaces in-between cultures and languages, always fluctuating between the two axes of speech and sound. One work, Otsekui tõlkes (As if in Translation, 2004), that is also the focus of the article, makes this indeterminacy a central focus, addressing it via a narrative that is at the same time also a self-conscious conceptualization of her life as a process and procedure of being translated, and of "being in translation" as the only possible mode of being and representation.