Aude Aurore Gwendoline

Fundamentals of the mirror page in self-translation

Translation is usually considered a linear process. When performed by the writer him- or herself, it often becomes a circular process in which the writer/translator goes back and forth between two textual bodies. When writing Fault Lines and Lignes de faille, Nancy Huston switched from English to French and vice versa, creating two similar textual bodies. In self-translating her works, she also turned her fantasy of being “her own cause and her own end” into the reality of a textual entity. Not only is the border between the Subject-Text and the Object-Text blurred, but Huston also succeeds in being both the mother and the child of her text through the textual filiation of self-translation. However, in the circularity of this process, differentiating the Other from the Same thanks to the Mirror Page becomes impossible; only the emergence of linguistic mutants in Huston’s texts contributes to the resurgence of the Other.

Keywords: circularity of self-translation, textual filiation, linguistic mutation

Biography

Aude Aurore Gwendoline is a Doctoral Candidate in Translation Studies at Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle where she is working on the re-translation of Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje. Her approach focuses on the silences of the translated text as a space of subjectivity and freedom for the performing – in a musical sense – translator. She holds an MA in English (2002), an MA in French and Children’s Literature (2008) and an MA in Translation Studies (2012). Her Translation Studies thesis was listed for the Prix Paul Bensimon – an award for the best national research in Translation Studies. As a literary translator, she has translated over 70 children’s and young adults’ books from English to French.