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

Writing It Twice, Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French focuses on self-translation in contemporary French literature. The connections Kippur establishes between autobiographical or life-writing, self-translation, and world literatures make it an excellent resource for scholars in these fields as well as those seeking a clear, compact treatment of issues central to contemporary French literature.

Self-translation, “the translation of an original work into another language by the author himself,”¹ has not received the same critical attention as has translation of works by translators other than the author. Kippur’s analysis aims, first, to fill this gap in translation theory.

Second, Kippur connects self-translation to world literature studies. Previous scholarship in translation studies tends to understand the practice of self-translation in instrumental terms, as a way of expanding the author’s audience (18).² Kippur claims a larger purpose for self-translation “as both a response to literary precedents and a reflection of an era characterized by exile, migration, and an increasing sense of the porousness of boundaries” (5). As precedents, she cites poets and essayists of the 15^th and 16th centuries who routinely produced texts both in Latin and in the vernacular prior to the 18^th- and 19^th-century development of nation-states and national languages. The late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, according to Kippur, have witnessed the increase in self-translation among authors, such as her four main subjects, who migrated from their country of origin (“source culture”) to settle in a different one (“host culture”), and who often, like their 15^th- and 16^th-century predecessors, write in their own native tongue as well as in another language. The Anglophone Canadian, Nancy Huston; the Spanish minister of culture, Jorge Semprun; and the Argentinian, Hector Bianciotti, all live in Paris or have lived there for extensive periods; Raymond Federman, born in France, resided in the United States. All have written in at least two languages, “destabilizing” the distinction between source and host cultures (11).

Third, Kippur sees self-translation as integrally tied to varieties of life-writing, including memoir, autobiography, and “autofiction,” a work labeled as fiction but centered around “real” events with an author, narrator, and main character who all have the same name (103–4).³ If self-translation blurs distinctions of nationality and language, it also blurs the line between the author’s lived experience and its depiction in writing (128).

Kippur’s four main author examples draw attention to the reality of national, linguistic, and genre borders while challenging the concept of a country, language, or text of origin. Kippur’s chapters proceed “conceptually rather than chronologically” to demonstrate a range of practice from “a steadfast commitment to self-translation to its virtual erasure” (23–24). For Kippur, two imperatives govern Nancy Huston’s writing practice. First, Huston’s self-translation of all of her novels and essays proceeds from a sense of literary obligation and an insistence that both versions are “original” (31–32). The language of the characters, English or French, of any given novel governs the order in which Huston writes the two versions (33). The result, which Kippur calls Huston’s “aesthetics of translatedness” and “literary strangeness,” forms the focus of this chapter (35, 45). The next chapter, on Raymond Federman, addresses issues of authorship and agency rather than those of the created text. Drawing on the medieval scholar Paul Zumthor’s concept of “mouvance,”⁴ “the dynamic variability between productions of the same text” (24), Kippur explores how a work’s sometimes contradictory variations can call into question assumptions of authorial reliability and identity. In contrast to Huston and Federman, Kippur’s third example, Jorge Semprun, self-translated only one text. His concern for what Kippur calls “language authenticity” leads him to resist depicting events or conversations in a language other than the one...