Rainier Grutman
University of Ottawa, Canada
Non interpres sed orator: Self-translational self-fashioning/la posture d’autotraducteur
In this bilingual presentation, I will focus on the image projected and created by self-translating writers, on their discursive identity in other words, as it can be seen unfolding in prefaces, correspondence, and interviews. My analysis of this “paratextual” material will draw on Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “self-fashioning” (which owes quite a bit to Michel Foucault) and on Jérôme Meizoz’s « posture d’auteur » (an offshoot of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology). Preliminary results indicate that much of the rhetoric deployed is oppositional in nature, i.e. it serves to construct translating and writing as not only two different but axiologically opposed practices (hence my title’s reference to one of the most famous prefaces in translation history, Cicero’s De optimo genere oratorum). We will see how and why this is the case.
Keywords: self-translation, self-fashioning, “posture,” habitus
Biography
Rainier Grutman is a Professor of French and Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa. Trained in his native Belgium (Namur, KU Leuven) and in Spain (UC Madrid) before earning his Ph.D. in Canada (Université de Montréal), he enjoys an international reputation as a translation scholar, notably for his contributions to research on literary translation and, in particular, the phenomenon of self-translation. He has published extensively on these subjects in French, English, Spanish and Italian, both in journals (Target, TTR, LANS, Quaderns, Ellipse, Atelier de traduction) and in works of reference, most notably the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998, 2nd ed. 2009), the IATIS-Yearbook on Self-translation (2013), and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies (2014, co-authored chapter with T. Van Bolderen).