Jan Walsh Hokenson - The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation

First published 2007 by St. Jerome Publishing

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Jan Walsh Hokenson & Marcella Munson 2007

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ISBN 13: 978-1-900650-93-9 (hbk)

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hokenson, Jan

The bilingual text : history and theory of literary self-translation/Jan Walsh Hokenson & Marcella Munson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-900650-93-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Translating and interpreting. 2. Bilingualism and literature. 3.Bilingual authors. I. Munson, Marcella. II. Title.

PN241.H57 2006

418.02--dc22

2006032796

Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson

Bilingual texts have been left outside the mainstream of both translation theory and literary history. Yet the tradition of the bilingual writer, moving between different sign systems and audiences to create a text in two languages, is a rich and venerable one, going back at least to the Middle Ages. The self-translated, bilingual text was commonplace in the mutlilingual world of medieval and early modern Europe, frequently bridging Latin and the vernaculars. While self-translation persisted among cultured elites, it diminished during the consolidation of the nation-states, in the long era of nationalistic monolingualism, only to resurge in the postcolonial era.

The Bilingual Text makes a first step toward providing the fields of translation studies and comparative literature with a comprehensive account of literary self-translation in the West. It tracks the shifting paradigms of bilinguality across the centuries and addresses the urgent questions that the bilingual text raises for translation theoriststoday: Is each part of the bilingual text a separate, original creation or is each incomplete without the other? Is self-translation a unique genre? Can either version be split off into a single language or literary tradition? How can two linguistic versions of a text be fitted into standard models of foreign and domestic texts and cultures?

Because such texts defeat standard categories of analysis, The Bilingual Text reverses the usual critical gaze, highlighting not dissimilarities but continuities across versions, allowing for dissimilarities within orders of correspondence, and englobing the literary as well as linguistic and cultural dimensions of the text. Emphasizing the arcs of historical change in concepts of language and translation that inform each case study, The Bilingual Text examines the perdurance of this phenomenon in Western societies and literatures.

Jan Walsh Hokenson studied literature and language at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Paris, before receiving her PhD in literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Currently Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University, she is the author of Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 18672000 (2004) and The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique (2006).

Marcella Munson is currently Head of French Studies and Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University. She received her PhD in French with an emphasis on medieval studies from the University of California at Los Angeles, and was a fellow of the UCLA Program in Critical Theory. She has published articles on verse narrative and epistolary prose in the medieval context, and is completing a book on late medieval authorship.

For allowing us to quote from their publications, we extend our gratitude to both Oxford University Press and to ditions Champion, for permission to quote from texts by Charles dOrlans, and to Western Michigan State University Press for permission to quote from texts by tienne Dolet.

We would like to extend warmest thanks to the many friends and colleagues who have helped bring The Bilingual Text to completion:

For their invaluable help in resolving fine points of translations or literary history:

Konstantinos Nikoloutsos

John Leeds

Martha Mendoza

Evelyn Trotter

Angela Martin

Yolanda Gamboa

Brian McConnell

Prisca Augustyn

Galina Paramonova

For their expertise in translating too, plus their crucial moral or intellectual support:

Anthony Tamburri

Rita Copeland

Nora Erro-Peralta

Michael Horswell

For reading parts of early drafts and supporting this project from the beginning to the end:

Mona Baker

Ruby Cohn

Dominique Desanti

For generously endowing the annual Howard M. Rosenblatt Distinguished Lecture in Translation Studies at Florida Atlantic University, which has brought fine scholars to students and to us:

Laurie Rosenblatt and the Rosenblatt Family

And especially, for their long-suffering largesse and many timely sacrifices, our partners Sandra Norton and Benjamin Kolstad.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the many archivists, manuscript illuminators, printers, booksellers, editors, and publishers who have through the centuries helped bring self-translators work to the public.

What is the bilingual text? Like Bacons treatises or Nabokovs novels, the bilingual text is a self-translation, authored by a writer who can compose in different languages and who translates his or her texts from one language into another. Such self-translators have long been neglected in literary history and translation theory, and it is still often assumed that they are just rather idiosyncratic anomalies, mostly preening polyglots or maladaptive immigrants. Yet the tradition of the bilingual writer creating a single text in two languages, smoothly spanning different audiences, is a rich and venerable one, arising in Greco-Roman antiquity and thriving in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Self-translation was a common practice in the ambient translingual world of early modern Europe, when bilingualism was the norm, and writers increasingly translated between Latin and vernaculars.