The poetics of displacement: Self-translation among contemporary Russian-American poets. Issue 2 (4th May 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Wanner, Adrian
• Is Part Of: Translation studies. Volume 11:Issue 2(2018)
• Page Start: 122
• Page End: 138
• Publication Date: 2018-05-04
• Subjects: Self-translation -- translation of poetry -- Russian-American poetry -- translingualism -- Andrey Gritsman -- Katia Kapovich; Translating and interpreting -- Periodicals; 418.0205
• DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2017.1336641
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1478-1700

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article explores the practice of self-translation by two bilingual Russian-American poets, Andrey Gritsman and Katia Kapovich. A close reading of some of their self-translated texts elucidates the idiosyncratic nature of self-translation and its poetics of displacement. For both Gritsman and Kapovich, translating their own work becomes a means of exploring the mutation of the self through time, migration, and changing linguistic and cultural environments. A significant difference between the two authors concerns the way in which they present their poems. Gritsman invites a comparison between source and target text and the gaps between them in a bilingual en face edition, whereas Kapovich camouflages her self-translated poems as English originals. In spite of the different staging and performance of self-translation, both poets – by stressing difference rather than similarity in translation – turn their self-translated texts into a metacommentary on their own shifting transnational identities.