Translation that dare not speak its name: Amara Lakhous as an ambivalent self-translator

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to address translation as a transaction, a negotiation and an intervention on behalf of the translating agent. Looking at the institutional trajectory and the public persona displayed by the multilingual Algerian-Italian novelist and self-translator, Amara Lakhous, I analyze his many interviews as discursive interventions and ‘position-takings’ (Bourdieu: prises de position) in the Italian literary field. By contrasting a constructed Author-persona with an equally constructed figure of the Translator as Other, Lakhous not only reactivates rhetorical commonplaces but takes a stance against translation that should not be taken at face-value but deconstructed on its own terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-translation
• migrant writing
• Italian literature
• Amara Lakhous

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to the latest figures available on https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm.

2. Several of those friends receive thanks at the end of Divorzio: Roberto De Angelis (the dedicatee of Scontro), scholars of migrant (Armando Gnisci) and Arabic literature (Jolanda Guardi, Francesco Leggio – who translated Lakhous’ first novel) but also his publishers, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola. Lakhous (2010a: 187) explains he did not thank them in Scontro because he did not want to embarrass them ‘in the event of a flop’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rainier Grutman

A Professor of French and Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa (Canada), Rainier Grutman was trained in Romance philology at Namur, Leuven and Madrid universities before going to Montreal to obtain his Ph.D. in French Studies. The book that grew out of his doctoral dissertation on multilingualism in Quebec literature, Des langues qui résonnent (Montréal, 1997), was awarded the Gabrielle-Roy prize for Canadian literary criticism. His work on translation and self-translation has appeared in journals in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Romania, Spain, and the US, as well as in several works of reference, most notably the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (ed. M. Baker, 1998, 2^nd ed. 2009), the IATIS-Yearbook on Self-translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture (ed. A. Cordingley, Bloomsbury, 2013), and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies (ed. C. Porter and S. Bermann, 2014). His most recent contribution to that conversation is a jointly edited (with A. Ferraro) collection of essays entitled L’Autotraduction littéraire: perspectives théoriques (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016).