Self-Translation, Literary Creativity, and Trans-Lingual Aesthetics: A Québec Writer’s Perspective

Abstract

Self-translation and bilingual writing are drawing increasing critical attention in literary and translation studies. Bilingual writing can cover a wide range of phenomena involving varying degrees of bilingualism. Scholarly focus has been on emigrant, expatriate or exiled writers and more recently, on bilingual writers writing in a post-colonial context, using the acquired language of the colonizer. The emphasis has been on the cultural and political power inequalities between languages. Self-translation has also been seen from the broader, ontological point of view as a form of double representation of the writing self. My own experience in the particular cultural geography of a bi-national, multicultural country such as Canada offers a different context for reflecting on self-translation and bilingual writing, or what I prefer to call “cross-writing,” based on the fundamental cross-cultural communicative aesthetics underlying my specific writing and self-translation process.