Self-translation in the galaxy of languages

By studying self-translation as an intercultural phenomenon, this paper seeks to go beyond traditional modes and models of literary history and criticism that were mainly conceived for the analysis of monolingual corpora. It privileges instead a double sociological vantage point, combining De Swaan's and Calvet's work on the "galaxy" of languages and Casanova's study of international literary competition. It thus appears that the most-studied and best-known cases of self-translation embody but one of two distinct categories, i.e. so-called "horizontal" transfers between the widespread languages of established cultures. In many other instances, however, "asymmetric" configurations of self-translation can create sociocultural and therefore collective dilemmas, in addition to being an interlinguistic balancing act for individual writers.