Beckett and Beyond

In this essay self‐translation will not be addressed as some kind of freakish accident of nature, but rather as the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Beneath the water dwell many more bi‐ or even multilingual writers, to which we gain access by going beyond traditional models of literary history and criticism. In fact, the best‐known cases of self‐translation (Beckett, Nabokov, and Green yesterday, Huston, Semprun, and Dorfman today) embody but one of two categories: “horizontal” transfers between symmetric pairs of widespread languages. In many other instances, however, “asymmetric” linguistic configurations saddle the act of self‐translation. At least three categories of self‐translators whose linguistic repertoire is characterized by such asymmetry can be distinguished: (1) “(post)colonial” writers who alternate between their native tongue(s) and the European language of the former colonial powers; (2) recent immigrant writers who expand on work begun in their home country while staking out new ground for themselves in the language of their adoptive country; (3) writers belonging to traditional linguistic minorities because of the multilingual make‐up of the State of which they are citizens. While drawing attention to the existence of those writers, this article will also develop a typology of self‐translators, thereby looking beyond the famous case of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has often been constructed as a hapax legomenon , the quintessential exception that confirms the unwritten rule of monolingual writing, a situation that stands in the way of a better, more general comprehension of self‐translation as such. In this essay, we want to show that Beckett can help us gain many precious insights into self‐translation, but only if we allow ourselves to look beyond him, instead of staying in the shadow he casts.