Self-Translation between Minor Literature, Bilingualism and Posteriority
The lecture discusses symptomatic problems which fade into the background through the shift in theories of self-translation from exile and Alien Tongues (1989) to migration, bilingualism and re-writing, followed by leveling the differences of languages involved: namely the translation work itself and the ambivalence of self-translation for authors of ‘minor literatures’. Referring to Benjamin, Derrida, and Goldschmidt, the article assumes that in translation the internal foreignness or exophony of each language meets the external foreignness between different languages. While writing in a foreign language is considered a translation without original, self-translation implies the process of remembering, repeating, working through. Examples: Yoko Tawada, Hannah Arendt, Stéphane Mosès.