Introduction
Considerable research has been devoted to the intersection between literary self-translation practices and the Spanish language. We see this in the extensive scholarship on authors who translate their own writing in each of the autonomous communities of Spain (Catalonia: Ramis, 2017; Galicia: Dasilva, 2009, Vega, 2015; the Basque Country: Manterola Agirrezabalaga, 2011, Arrula-Ruiz, 2018). We also see it in more recent enquiries into certain geopolitical regions of the Americas-namely, Mexico (Gentes, 2019) and the Wallmapu territory (Stocco, 2018)-with these focal points made more or less explicit in the monograph, Literary Self-Translation in Hispanophone Contexts: Europe and the Americas (Bujaldón de Esteves et al., 2019). What can be observed with respect to region-based investigations thus far is an overwhelming inclination to locate Spanish-language self-translation in spaces where Spanish not only has official language status but also is the dominant language. Thus, the notion of “Hispanophone Europe” is effectively limited to Spain, while “the Hispanophone Americas” seems to cover the land that begins in Mexico and runs southward to Argentina, bypassing along the way the likes of Brazil and various parts of the West Indies. One exception to this scholarly tendency would be the Oxford Bibliographies entry on self-translation, which specifically addresses Spanish-language practices in the United States (Gentes & Van Bolderen, 2018): although no language in the US has de jure official status, and despite Spanish and English constituting “the country’s two principle [sic] languages” (Washbourne, 2019, p. 92), it is of course the former, rather than the latter, that proves more dominant there (Washbourne, 2019, pp. 86-87).
A related observation is that Canada represents a notable gap in the research. In this officially bilingual (French-English) country of 35 million people (Statistics Canada, 2018), French (in the province of Quebec) and English (in the other nine provinces and three territories) are also the dominant languages. However, Spanish is the mother tongue of some 500,000 people, making it the fifth most common “non-official” mother tongue in the country; furthermore, it is the most common non-official language spoken at home, used by over 550,000 people (Statistics Canada, 2017). Of these hispanohablantes, only some will actually write in Spanish, and of those writers, most will continue to engage with Spanish exclusively (Hazelton, 2007, pp. 22-23). In terms of self-translation, my research indicates that there are at least 25 people who translated their own writing into or out of Spanish in the country between 1971 and 2016, which would seem to make these writers the single largest (linguistically defined) subset of Canada-based self-translators working with a non-official language during that period.
But who are these authors? What might be said about them and their self-translations? And what does it mean to self-translate using Spanish when that language does not have official status? Rather than scrutinizing writers’ intertextual transfer choices or their language “mastery,” I am interested in exploring these questions by observing trends and anomalies pertaining to three areas of biobibliographical enquiry:
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Biographical time and space: When and where were these writers born?
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Bibliographical frequency: How often do these authors translate their own writing?
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Biobibliographical languages: How might self-translators and self-translations be characterized in terms of language variety and combinations?
In this analysis, literary self-translations will be considered through a product-oriented lens, insofar as the corpus under study is restricted to published material. More specifically, the corpus is limited to self-translation text-sets-the term I propose for referring to a single piece of writing in one language (or in one variation of a mixture of languages) in conjunction with each of its self-translation counterparts in other languages-in which at least two of the texts are published. In this sense, self-translations are understood as cultural artefacts existing within the public realm.
In addition to serving the logistical purpose of limiting data collection for subsequent analysis, the later edge of this study’s temporal framework (i.e., 2016) coincides with the most recent Canadian census, whose contents inform certain contextual reflection in this article. The year 1971, on the other hand, is meaningful because it was on October 8th of that year that the Pierre Elliott Trudeau government announced the implementation of the Policy of Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework. A “historical juncture” (Haque, 2012, p. 5) that featured prominently in Canada’s larger project of reinventing itself, the policy is still in effect today. It has remained relevant and indeed controversial in its embodiment of (inter)national narratives about Canada’s character, explicitly addressing culture and language while attempting to harmonize specific notions of duality and plurality.
What I will ultimately seek to argue in this article is that, in the context of self-translation in Canada and as compared to Spanish-language self-translation in other studied spaces, Spanish walks a unique line between being imposing- that is, pushing resolutely against established paradigms of two-ness, such as expressed through the country’s official bilingualism- and being imposed upon, since Spanish does not have official status of its own and therefore lacks the infrastructural robustness that accompanies such status. My hope in advancing this argument is to contribute to deepening our understanding of, among other things, “the diversity and multiplicity of self-translation experiences in the Hispanophone literary realm, which we broadly define here by its inclusion of Spanish among its languages of writing” (Bujaldón de Esteves et al., 2019, p. 13).
1. Who Are Spanish-Language SelfTranslators in Canada?
Table 1 puts names to the 25 individuals who lived in Canada some time between 1971 and 2016 and who, during their residency period, had at least one text published that was self-translated into or out of Spanish.
Table 1
Names of Spanish-Language Self-Translators in Canada (1971-2016)
2. What Might Be Said About These Self-Translators and Their Self-Translations?
2.1. Biographical Time and Space
2.1.1. When Were These Self-Translators Born?
Part of understanding who these Spanish-language self-translators are and what contexts informed their upbringing and self-translation practices is appreciating when they were born. Preliminary self-translator generations are thus proposed below, according to decade of birth (see Table 2). As indicated, writers in this group were born no sooner than 1933 (Manuel Betanzos Santos) and no later than 1979 (Yazmet Madariaga Sánchez), with over a third (36%, or 9) of them born in the 1940s. Indeed, more corpus writers were born in that decade than in any of the others represented, with 1940s figures more than doubling each of the other totals. The forties mark a particularly steep increase from the previous decade (up from just two); and, although numbers dip back down (to four) in the 1950s, they remain steady during the 50s, 60s and 70s (Table 4). As for Appleton, Espinoza and Pastén, whose birth years I have not yet been able to confirm (see Table 3), we can be almost certain that they were born no later than in the 1950s, 1970s and 1940s, respectively.
Table 2
Summary of Self-Translators by Decade of Birth
| 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | Unconfirmed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 9 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 3 |
Table 3
Self-Translators Born in the 1930s and 1940s or Whose Birth Year Has Not Been Confirmed
[i]* In 1982, Appleton was in the process of completing a Ph.D. (Nómez, 1982, p. 290). If we assume she was at least 25 years old at that time, she would not have been born later than in the 1950s.
[ii]** Espinoza moved from Chile to Canada in 1995, and one of the universities she attended before moving was the University of Chile (Espinoza, 2001, inside flap). Since it is therefore unlikely that she was under 20 years old when she migrated, she would have been born in the mid-1970s or earlier.
[iii]*** Chilean-born Pastén stopped teaching at the University of Chile at Antofagasta in 1973 and went on to direct the Immigrant Learning Centre in Winnipeg between 1978 and at least 1982 (Nómez, 1982, p. 246). If we assume he was least 25 when his teaching in Chile ended, then Pastén would have been born no later than in the 1940s.
Table 4
Self-Translators Who Were Born in the 1950s-1970s
The apparent absence of corpus self-translators born in or after 1980 compels us to wonder why such a gap might exist and/or what that gap might suggest about the factors that have motivated Spanish-language self-translation in Canada. After all, it is certainly plausible for a 36-year-old-that is, the age of the oldest among these absentee writers-to have translated their own writing. What’s more, there is evidence of non-corpus writers who have published Spanish-language self-translations in Canada since 2016. A case in point is Sofía Monzón Rodríguez (2020a, 2020b), who was born in Toledo (Spain) in 1993 and thus far has two published self-translation text-sets to her name, both involving Spanish and both published in 2020 in Canada, after her 2018 move to the country (S. Monzón Rodríguez, personal communication, June 11, 2021). It is useful to consider this gap by imagining alternative ways of understanding self-translator generations. That is, in addition to defining them per the writer’s year or decade of birth, we could conceive of them in relation to when writers first self-translated. For instance, what self-translator generation does a writer belong to in terms of:
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when in their career as a (published) writer they first self-translated?
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how old they were when they began
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self-translating? or
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when, in relation to their arrival in Canada (in the case of international migrants), they started to self-translate?
In short, Spanish-language self-translators in Canada who were born in the 1980s and afterwards may, like Monzón Rodríguez, only be beginning to produce self-translations in more recent years.
2.1.2. Where Were These Self-Translators Born?
When it comes to birthplace, this corpus of self-translators collectively represents 9 countries, as summarized in Table 5.
2.1.2.1. Countries in Which Spanish Is an Official Language
Given the language that defines this corpus, it is surprising that Spanish has official status in only four of the countries listed: Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Spain. Equally surprising is that three of those four countries are represented by only one (Bolivia, Spain) or two (Mexico) writers. The uniqueness of the only Spanish-born writer-Manuel Betanzos Santos, who moved to Canada in 1959 (Hazelton, 2007, p. 5)-can be usefully understood in relation to the fact that, among those who migrated from Spain to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s and went on to be published writers, many had “already [been] successful authors in Spain before they emigrated” (Hazelton, 2007, p. 5). In other words, there seems to be no evidence, in works published between 1971 and 2016 at least, that pre-migration writerly status encouraged or foreshadowed Spanish-language self-translation among this group of migrants; while they may have published self-translations before that period, I have not come across any such examples thus far. For context, it may be useful to consider examples of writers who seem to have had potential to self-translate, such as madrileño Jesús López Pacheco (1930-1997) and Galician-born Antón (a.k.a. Antonio) Risco (1926-1998), both of whom went on to work as professors in Canadian universities (Western Ontario and Laval, respectively). López Pacheco continued to write extensively in Spanish after his 1967 arrival in London (Ontario) and translated other writers’ works from English into Spanish; Risco, for his part, continued to produce literary works-mostly science fiction/fantasy-in Spanish and, predominantly, Galician after relocating to Quebec City (Hazelton, 2007, p. 5, p. 234, pp. 264-265). Neither writer seems to have translated their own work, however. The fact that Betanzos Santos was Galician (Hazelton, 2007, p. 5) may not be insignificant either, since it is in Galicia (as well as Catalonia and the Basque Country), albeit predominantly during the post-Franco era, that Spain-based literary self-translation has been especially prevalent.
As compared to the limited figures associated with Spain, Mexico, and Bolivia, a whopping 15 of the 25 corpus self-translators hail from Chile, the fourth country in which Spanish has official status. The abundance of Chilean-born self-translators in Canada is indeed striking, with Chilean-Canadian writers clearly constituting an important cohort of Spanish-language self-translators in Canada. Their high concentration is not entirely surprising, however, given the 1973 putsch push factor that led to massive Chilean emigration (Wright & Oñate, 2012, p. 149) and saw some 7,000 emigrants arriving in Canada around that time (Dirks, 1995, p. 61). What is perhaps more remarkable is the corpus’s non-representation of certain countries that resemble Chile in terms of Spanish being their official language and large numbers of their people having moved to Canada during the period under study. This is the case, namely, for Argentina and Colombia, although the former is notably the country where Margarita Feliciano grew up, having moved to Argentina from Italy as an eight-year-old.
2.1.2.2. Countries in Which Spanish Is Non-Official But Dominant
When it comes to the five countries in which Spanish does not have official status, the United States stands out because of the dominant position the language nonetheless occupies there. With Latinos/Hispanics making up roughly 17 % of the national population (Washbourne 2019, p. 86), the country is home to upwards of 40 million Spanish speakers. This figure is of course dwarfed by the number of people who speak English; nevertheless, in addition to outnumbering those who speak any other single language there, it sees the U.S. rivalling Argentina, Colombia, and Spain as the country with the second largest (after Mexico) number of Spanish speakers worldwide. What is noteworthy, then, is that, whereas hispanohablantes in the U.S. more than double the total population of Chile, only one (versus Chile’s 15) of the corpus self-translators was born in the nation to Canada’s immediate south: draft resister Hugh Hazelton.
One might therefore expect that, for this writer, Spanish would have been inherited through a kind of genealogical legacy, at-home acculturation, or other form of immersion within the immediate community. Instead, Hazelton is among those who learned the language through his own initiative. His interest in and familiarity with Spanish, including its cultures, began to develop when he was an early reader-very curious about “archeology, including the Mayas, Olmecs, Incas, and pre-Incans and other civilizations in Central America and South America, as well as [about] Latin American history”-and it deepened thanks to secondary and postsecondary study, as well as extensive travel throughout South America as an adult (H. Hazelton, personal communication, July 7, 2021; permission to cite this material was granted by H. Hazelton (personal communication, July 13, 2021)). Since those earlier linguistic and cultural encounters, he has become a writer and translator whose works and personal and professional activities routinely involve Spanish. He has also become the foremost scholar in Hispanic-Canadian literature, all of this clarifying why he is sometimes referred to by his friends and colleagues as an honorary Latin American (H. Hazelton, personal communication, July 14, 2021).
2.1.2.3. Countries in Which Spanish Is Neither Official nor Dominant
As the preceding observations demonstrate, five of the nine birth countries identified would have been in an especially good position to encourage their writers’ potential self-translation practices to incorporate Spanish. In terms of self-translators, these countries actually account for 20 (or 80%) of the corpus writers, leaving five who were born in countries where Spanish is neither an official language nor a dominant one.
Three of these self-translators were born outside of Canada: Patricia Appleton in Scotland, Roger Moore in Wales, and Margarita Feliciano in Italy. As already mentioned, Feliciano actually grew up in Argentina; consequently, “Spanish became her mother tongue” (Hazelton, 2007, p. 52), which helps to explain the presence of that language in her self-translation practice. As for Moore and Appleton, each had spent time in Spain prior to relocating to Canada and went on to study Spanish at the graduate level at the University of Toronto, with Moore going on to have a career as a Spanish professor at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick (Nómez, 1982, p. 290; “Roger Moore,” n.d.). I have not been able to confirm additional details about Appleton. The two self-translators who were born in Canada, and more specifically Montreal, are Lisa Carducci and Claude Hamelin. Hamelin principally worked as a prolific molecular biologist (Villedieu, 1986, p. 8), teaching at the Institut Armand-Frappier (Université du Québec) from the late 1970s until 2000 (“Claude Hamelin, poète”). I do not know how he came to know Spanish. As for Carducci, she is a writer and a language (Italian, French), theater and history teacher, who has primarily resided in China since 1990 (L’Île, 2015). Although her Canadian and Chinese milieus were less informed by Spanish than Hazelton’s U.S. context was, she is similar to Hazelton in that her interest in Spanish seems to have been more intrinsically motivated, learning the language through reading, through Hispanophone acquaintanceships, and through trips to Mexico and Spain, rather than through formal study (L. Carducci, personal communication, July 14, 2021).
These five cases, along with Hazelton’s, help to clarify how “Spanish-language” is used in this discussion to refer to the presence, within a writer’s self-translatorly œuvre, of self-translation texts that are written in Spanish, rather than to refer to some essential trait (e.g., birthright, citizenship) of the writing subject. Tables 6,7 and 8 identify the countries of birth for each of the corpus self-translators and, when known, the year in which the writers arrived in Canada.
Table 6
Self-Translators Who Were Born in Bolivia, Italy, Scotland, Spain, and Wales
Table 7
Self-Translators Who Were Born in Canada, Mexico, and the United States
Table 8
Self-Translators Who Were Born in Chile
2.1.2.4. Migrant and Sedentary Self-Translators
The information above allows us to further describe the corpus in terms of “migrant” versus “sedentary” self-translators (Grutman, 2015, p. 10) (Table 9), with the vast majority of the writers identified according to the former classification.
Table 9
Sedentary vs. Migrant Self-Translators
| Migrant Self-Translators | Sedentary Self-Translators |
|---|---|
| 23 | 2 |
What we can also appreciate is the extent to which Spanish-language self-translation in Canada seems to be an activity that is primarily practiced by first-generation migrants-that is, those who immigrated to Canada as adults. As detailed in Tables 10 and 11, only four self-translators might be considered “generation-1.5 migrants” (Rumbaut, 2004), meaning that they immigrated at a relatively young age and were therefore brought up in Canada.
Table 10
Generation-1.5 Migrants
Second-generation Canadian migrants-the misnomer used to refer to people who were born (and typically raised) in Canada but whose parents were born (and typically raised) elsewhere-does not seem to apply to any of the sedentary self-translators in the corpus. In this regard, the only unknown quantity, and therefore potential candidate, would be Claude Hamelin. As for the other sedentary self-translator, Lisa Carducci, it was her (paternal) grandparents who migrated from Italy to Canada (L. Carducci, personal communication, July 14, 2021), which would make her a third-generation migrant (another misnomer) (Table 12).
Table 12
Third-Generation “Migrants”
| Self-Translator | Emigration Country of Grandparents | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lisa Carducci (b. 1943) | Italy |
According to findings for regions studied thus far, contemporary Spanish-language self-translation in other parts of the world overwhelmingly features sedentary self-translators. The preceding survey helps us to understand that writers in Canada who translate their own works using Spanish are, by contrast, overwhelmingly migrant self-translators, and primarily first-generation migrants. Furthermore, it characterizes these migrant roots as predominantly Latin American and especially Chilean, rather than Spa(i)nish, while also clarifying the range of alternative birthplaces, most of which are unexpected.
2.2. Bibliographical Frequency
These writers’ profiles are also defined by how many times the authors have self-translated, since this bibliographical frequency acts as a kind of self-translatorly fingerprint, a trace of the writer’s presence. There are several ways to go about counting self-translations depending on how the notion is understood (Van Bolderen, 2021, pp. 269-283). Given that it is not possible here to consider every interpretation, however, we will restrict our discussion to that of (literary) self-translation text-sets, which is the definition that optimizes the number of self-translations represented. As articulated at the outset of this article, a self-translation text-set refers to a single piece of writing in one language (or combination of languages) in conjunction with each of its self-translation counterparts in other languages, where at least two of the self-translation texts are published. An example of one text-set would be Ramón Sepúlveda’s “The Reception” // “La recepción.” Both of these self-translation texts are short stories, the first of which appears in Sepúlveda’s English-language collection Red Rock (1990), and the second of which was published a year afterwards in his same-named Spanish-language collection (Red Rock, 1991). Together, these two books contain other textsets by Sepúlveda, each of which is considered distinct and is, in turn, counted separately. As shown in Table 13, the 25 writers in our corpus have collectively produced 600 text-sets. (For a detailed list of all of the works summarized here, see Appendix B in Van Bolderen, 2021, pp. 564-787).
Table 13
Self-Translation Text-Sets per Writer
As self-translation text-sets are a frequency-based notion, they do not, on their own, account for self-translation effort-that is, the relative challenge or ease associated with producing a given self-translation. Effort will vary based on a number of additional factors that are not considered here, such as the text’s length or genre, or the period of time separating the moments when each corresponding text is written. Yet what Table 13 allows us to begin appreciating is the range of self-translatorly productivity reflected in the corpus. As illustrated in Table 14, however, the figures can be more clearly and usefully understood when they are conceived of according to text-set clusters, which I propose as a way of grouping together writers who have similar frequency rates. (For a detailed discussion of the rationale underlying these clusters, see Van Bolderen, 2021, pp. 305-308).
Table 14
Self-Translator Frequency Categories by TextSet Clusters
As we can see, one-time self-translators account for 9 corpus writers, constituting the largest of the frequency categories but notably not most of the self-translators. If indeed “authors who self-translate only once […] represent the majority of self-translators” (Gentes & Van Bolderen, 2021, p. 377), then Canada-based Spanish-language self-translators, 36% of which are one-timers, seem to reflect atypical behavior. Activity among the remaining self-translators underscores the non-anomalous nature of Canadian self-translation involving Spanish, and thus demonstrates that the majority of these writers not only consciously choose to translate their own writing between languages (Grutman, 2019, p. 516) but also repeat this choice. Equally important is how the figures associated with these self-translators powerfully illustrate the breadth of such repetition, covering varying degrees of some (cf. rare, occasional) as well as different expressions of many (cf. active, seasoned, prolific).
Perhaps surprisingly, two of the busiest self-translators in this corpus are home grown. Indeed, the busiest writer is (prolific) sedentary self-translator Claude Hamelin, all of whose text-sets, which are published over three poetry collections, involve a Spanish text. The other sedentary self-translator, seasoned Lisa Carducci, has also produced numerous self-translations; in her case, however, Spanish is involved in only two of them. (We will return to this matter shortly.)
2.2.1. Texts and Text-Sets
While self-translation text-sets most often consist of two self-translation texts, this is certainly not always the case, and it is meaningful to our understanding of self-translators’ “fingerprints” to consider such divergences. Per Table 15, five corpus writers, who together represent four of the six frequency categories, have at least one text-set that involves more than two self-translation texts. Even within a writer’s self-translatorly œuvre, we see a clear preference for bitextuality, as seen with Martha Bátiz Zuk (5 out of 6 text-sets), Luciano P. Díaz (109 out of 113), and Carmen Rodríguez (38 of 41). Yet Hazelton distributes his energies evenly across biand tritextual text-sets (14 vs. 13), and all 144 of Hamelin’s self-translation text-sets exist tritextually. What makes Rodríguez’s case particularly interesting is that one of her text-sets contains as many as four texts.
Table 15
Self-Translators With More Than Two Texts per Text-Set
2.3. Biobibliographical Languages
If self-translation frequency is a fingerprint, then the language of each self-translation text is kinesiological in nature since it is through language that these texts circulate, just as languages are able to circulate through these texts. When it comes to self-translation languages, a number of questions can be considered, such as Which languages are used? and How are they combined?
2.3.1.1. Language Variety Within the Corpus
While the corpus analyzed in this article has been linguistically designed around the Spanish language, the texts contained within the corpus are of course not restricted to that language alone, since that would contradict the interlingual nature of the translations being discussed. Indeed, what we observe is that texts are also written in English, French, and standard Italian. Table 16 describes the distribution of all 1366 of these self-translation texts across the four languages, highlighting the collective tendency to write-whether “authoring” or “(self-)translating”-in Spanish and, to a slightly lesser extent, English.
Table 16
Representation of Self-Translation Texts by Language
| Language | Number of Self-Translation Texts (% of All Corpus Texts) |
|---|---|
| Spanish | 548 (40%) |
| English | 488 (36%) |
| French | 288 (21%) |
| Italian | 42 (3%) |
The fact that a writer has incorporated Spanish into their self-translation practice does not, however, imply that all or even most of their self-translations involve that language. It is therefore meaningful to consider how many corpus text-sets actually involve Spanish, per Table 17. Note that, since “all” of the text-sets in the œuvre of a one-time self-translator necessarily involve Spanish, the table does not list those writers.
Table 17
Use of Spanish Language Among “Rare” to “Prolific” Self-Translators
As we can see, levels of engagement with Spanish are very high indeed. This helps to validate the use of “Spanish-language” to characterize this corpus of self-translations and, in turn, its self-translators. At the same time, it is noteworthy that these writers do not necessarily incorporate Spanish into their self-translation text-sets. Three writers have text-sets that do not involve Spanish. For two of the self-translators, non-involvement applies to quite a small number of their works: 3 out of 27 text-sets, in Hugh Hazelton’s case; 1 out of 5, in Alejandro Saravia’s. The third writer, Lisa Carducci, is an outlier in this regard, having written only a minimal number of self-translation texts in Spanish: 2 out of 51 text-sets (as mentioned earlier).
How does this level of self-translator engagement compare with levels for the other three languages? Table 18 summarizes the proportions. These findings, along with those observed in Table 16 with respect to texts, underscore the variations that evidently characterize language use within self-translators’ own œuvres.
2.3.1.2. Language Variety Within a Writer’s Self-Translatorly Œuvre
The vast majority of these writers have bilingual self-translation repertoires, which consist of Spanish and English in 13 of the cases and, Spanish and French in 8 others (per Figure 1 below). The four remaining self-translators have either trilingual repertoires (Hamelin, Hazelton, Saravia), involving Spanish and both of Canada’s official languages, or repertoires that are quadrilingual and additionally contain Italian (Figure 2). Carducci is the only corpus writer who has incorporated this language (cf. Table 18).
2.3.2. Language Combinations Within a Writer’s Self-Translations
How are languages combined within these writers’ self-translation text-sets? Figures 3 and 4 provide a summary of these combinations, as they relate not only to the number of textsets they reflect but also to the number of writers they represent.
2.3.2.1. English-Spanish vs French-Spanish
A number of observations can be made in response to these results, the first of which pertains to how Spanish pairs up with French and English. There are strikingly different levels of productivity associated with English-Spanish and French-Spanish: While the same number of people combine the two languages in each case (13), there are four times as many English-Spanish text-sets (312 vs. 78).
2.3.2.2. French-Italian
Despite having four languages in her self-translatorly repertoire, Carducci has combined Italian with French only. This accounts for most (42) of her 51 text-sets, with the other 9 made up of French-Spanish (2) and English-French (7) text-sets. The consistent French-language base of Carducci’s practice corresponds logically to her Francophone Montreal upbringing. Her comparably strong inclination to self-translate with Italian, however, would be best appreciated in relation to how she came to know the language. While she had Italian-born grandparents, and although her father spoke the Ripabottoni dialect, standard Italian was not spoken in the home in which she grew up, since neither of her parents knew the language; instead, Carducci learned Italian independently, in much the same way she learned Spanish (L. Carducci, personal communication, July 14, 2021).
2.3.2.3. English-French-Spanish
Figure 4 alerts us to the fact that, of the three writers who have English-French-Spanish self-translatorly repertoires, only two have text-sets that also function trilingually. Hamelin’s self-translatorly behavior is consistent throughout his practice, with 144 text-sets containing self-translation texts in each language. By contrast, Hazelton has paid more balanced attention to both bilingual and trilingual practices, with 14 of the former (3 x English-French; 1 x French-Spanish; 10 x English-Spanish) and 13 of the latter. Saravia is the outlier in this respect, having consistently worked bilingually within the three languages. He has one English-Spanish text-set, one English-French text-set, and three text-sets that involve French and Spanish. Thus, when self-translating, writers do not necessarily explore all of the potential combinations within their respective linguistic repertoires (cf. Carducci, Saravia), just as they do not explore all of their active combinations equally (cf. Carducci, Hazelton, Saravia).
2.3.2.4. Type-Language vs. Token-Language
On the other hand, we notice that such exploration sometimes goes beyond combinatorial expectations. Hence, certain cases involve more than one self-translation text in a given language: English-English-Spanish and English-English-Spanish-Spanish. The first of these combinations describes one text-set each in Martha Bátiz Zuk’s and Carmen Rodríguez’s œuvres, and four textsets in Luciano P. Díaz’s work.
Bátiz Zuk translated her Spanish-language short story “Día de plaza” into English, first as “Square Day”-which she describes as a more literal translation-and then as “Plaza Requiem,” which according to her, reflects major modifications (M. Bátiz Zuk, personal communication, Sept. 22, 2020). In other words, more than just the title changes in the English versions of this text-set. In Díaz’s case, three of his poetry collections-of which two are in English, both entitled Nomads, and a third is in Spanish (Nómadas)-collectively contain four self-translation text-sets in which certain differences exist between the two English versions. In “The Sailor” ≈ “The sailor” ≈ “El marinero,” for instance, a line in one of the English texts reads “remember those who pollute the waters,” whereas the same line in the other version is worded as “remember the little men who pollute the waters with their pretensions.” Similarly, there are a variety of differences between Rodríguez’s short stories “Hands” and “Hand-Made Times,” the Spanish version of which is entitled “Manos.”
I have also made comparisons between the two Spanish versions and between the two English versions of Rodríguez’s short story text-set “Los barquitos en la bahía” ≈ “Tiny Boats in the Bay” // “Juegos y jugarretas” // “In the Company of Words.” In both cases, a handful of syntactical and lexical differences were identified: for example, “Del piso 42” versus “Del piso 32,” and “disappeared the 19th of September” versus “disappeared the 11th of September.”
Rather than republications of existing material, the second English and/or Spanish texts in each of the referenced text-sets constitute new versions of the work. A distinction can therefore be observed between type-language and token-language (Wetzel 2005, p. 1028, referencing Charles Sanders Peirce), whereby Bátiz Zuk’s text-set, for example, involves two type-languages (English, Spanish) but three token-languages (English, English, Spanish). Accounting for token-languages in this sense allows for the density of the practice of self-translation to be appreciated.
3. What Does It Mean to Self-Translate Using Spanish (in Canada), Where That Language Does Not Have Official Status?
The preceding reflections could, of course, be further nuanced by observations related to other matters, such as collaborative self-translation: who else is involved in the self-translation process, to what extent, and why? There is also the question of language directionality: when is Spanish the linguistic starting point versus “destination” of self-translation, and what does it mean when directionality with respect to writing order coincides with or differs from that of the order of publication? (For broader discussions of such questions, see Van Bolderen, 2021, pp. 155-234, pp. 399-437.) Yet the present analysis already goes a long way in underscoring the incontrovertible fact of Spanish-language self-translation in contemporary Canada, shedding light on the varied nature of the practice and its writers as well as on the limits of such heterogeneity and on how this juxtaposition contributes to reflecting and, especially, unsettling certain established paradigms of two-ness.
3.1. Migrant/Sedentary Self-Translators
Differentiating between writers who were and were not born in Canada allows us to appreciate that Spanish-language self-translation in this country is a highly migrant practice and yet not the exclusive domain of those born abroad. The migrant-sedentary distinction has currency in the context of a country whose demographics and national narratives have-particularly since the Policy of Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework’s inception-been so fundamentally shaped and defined by immigration. At the same time, the profiles of the corpus writers reflect variations in residency-related notions, helping to complexify our understanding of what it means to describe a self-translator as migrant or sedentary.
As we have seen, migrant self-translators consist of those who relocated to Canada as adults (first-generation migrants) and of those who migrated when they were younger and were therefore immersed in Canada for potentially longer and, arguably, at a more impressionable moment of their lives (generation-1.5 migrants). Similarly, the idea of a sedentary self-translator is destabilized and de-homogenized by the known presence of a “third-generation migrant” writer (Lisa Carducci). The misnomer notwithstanding, this term implies the idea of a migration legacy and, in turn, the possibility (though not necessarily existence) of second-generation or fourth-generation (etc.) Canadian migrants working with Spanish. Thus, we are compelled to wonder how and to what extent sedentary Claude Hamelin, for instance, might fit into such an extended framework of migrant generations.
Notions of migrant and sedentary are further variegated and nuanced by those corpus writers who are transmigrants or Canadian emigrants. While most of the migrant self-translators in the corpus made their way to Canada directly from their country of birth, we have seen that a handful of writers lived in more than one country prior to moving to Canada. This is the case for transmigrants Patricia Appleton (Scotland, Spain) and Roger Moore (Wales, Spain) as well as for Margarita Feliciano who, in addition to being born in Italy and growing up in Argentina, spent several years in the United States (California) for postsecondary studies and had also returned to Italy for a year (Feliciano, 1981, back cover). Similar remarks could be made about Carmen Rodríguez, as she also lived in California before moving to Canada (Rodríguez, 2020). Meanwhile, we have seen that some of the corpus writers are, in fact, Canadian emigrants. This is the case of “sedentary” Lisa Carducci, who relocated to China at the start of the 1990s, continuing to self-translate there. There are also two other cases of emigration, this time among one-time generation-1.5 migrant self-translators: one returned to Chile some time ago, while the other moved to England (S. Martínez, personal communication, April 19, 2016); to my knowledge, however, their self-translation products remain limited to the single text-sets they wrote in Canada.
We quickly appreciate, then, that the distinctions between migrant and sedentary, and the migrant qualifiers of first-generation and generation-1.5 prove relative, namely to the space under study (Canada) rather than to the writer’s biography or other spaces that could be examined. For example, surely, in an analysis of self-translation in China, Carducci would instead be classified as a migrant self-translator. Should a study of Canada therefore see her as both a sedentary self-translator (for her earlier publications) and an emigrant self-translator (for later works)? As this question highlights, these distinctions and qualifiers are, of course, also critically defined in relation to self-translation. In other words, for all of these self-translators, and indeed all of the writers in our corpus, Canada is the birthplace (and birthright?) of their self-translation practices.
3.2. Text 1/Text 2; Language 1/Language 2
In most cases, corpus writers have bilingual self-translatorly repertoires, and each of their self-translation text-sets consists of two texts, respectively written in two type-languages. As we have seen, however, several writers self-translate in ways that move beyond these thresholds. Some have trilingual and quadrilingual repertoires (Claude Hamelin, Hugh Hazelton, Alejandro Saravia; Licia Carducci). Some of these writers, as well as a few others, have also incorporated three or four texts into their text-sets (Hamelin, Hazelton, Martha Bátiz Zuk, Luciano P. Díaz, Carmen Rodríguez); and some of these engage in self-translation between token-languages, effectively exploring forms of intralingual transfer, à la Jakobson (Bátiz Zuk, Díaz, Rodríguez). Thus, while most challenges to two-ness are predicated on multiplication, on an expansion beyond the binary, we see, in the case of text-sets which partly stem from intralingual self-translation, that token-languages challenge two-ness (L1, L2) via a kind of one-ness (L1, L11), reflecting a doubling down and doubling back on resources already existing within the binary system.
3.3. Official/Non-Official Languages
Findings have shown that the degree to which Spanish is incorporated into the corpus writers’ self-translation text-sets is extremely high, both overall and at the level of individual self-translators. In the only instance in which this was not the case, text-sets were not confined to English-French pairings but, instead, privileged another non-official language: Italian. Indeed, while 42 of the 600 corpus text-sets pair Italian and French, only 11 combine English and French alone. Nonetheless, at least one of the last two languages appears in each of the corpus text-sets. What we see then is, on the one hand, that Canada’s official language structures do not prevent Spanish-language self-translation from taking place and, on the other, that official languages are nonetheless dominant as languages for combining with Spanish.
In other words, these Spanish-language self-translators work with, but not within, Canada’s official languages. The most compelling illustration of this, I would argue, is found in the consistencies and inconsistencies with which languages are combined among self-translators who have trilingual and quadrilingual repertoires. Hamelin’s steady production of 144 poems in French, English, and Spanish would seem to express an assertion of (curiosity about, commitment to, love for, etc.) Spanish in the face of the official languages, while the inconsistencies involved in how languages are bilingually or trilingually combined in Carducci’s, Hazelton’s, and Saravia’s self-translations speak not only to the writers’ own dexterity but also to a playfulness within the parameters set out by (non-)official language status.
3.4. Minority/Majority; “Diachronic”/“Spatial” Minority
Spanish-language literary self-translation in Canada reminds us that, in the context of this country, Spanish is not simply a non-official language; it is a minority language. The fact that it is simultaneously a major language in numerous other countries and on the international stage, meanwhile, reminds us that “[t]he concept of ‘minority’ with respect to language is dynamic rather than static” and “is the expression of a relation not an essence” (Cronin, 1995, p. 86). The form that this “relation” assumes, however, has perhaps not been fully articulated yet. It would not be suitable, for instance, to classify the major-to-minor shift in status of Spanish in Canada as “diachronic” or “spatial” (Cronin, 1995, p. 86). The latter refers to language minoritizing that results from national boundaries being redrawn, such that the locally minoritized language has majority status in an adjacent space (cf. the Russian language in most Baltic Republics, post-Soviet Union). With the “diachronic” relation, by contrast, language status shifts from major to minor because of developments that have unfolded in a given space over a relatively long period of time and that leave no “larger linguistic hinterland to provide patronage for translation activity” (e.g., the Irish language in Ireland) (Cronin, 1995, pp. 86-87).
What we see then is that, in instances where a minority language is defined as a diachronic or spatial relation, the language undergoing the shift in status is endogenous to the minoritizing space. That is, it existed and was used in that space before and after the shift in status, but the circumstances and context characterizing the space changed, and in turn, so did the status of the language. With Spanish-language self-translation in Canada, by contrast, the language in question is exogenous to the minoritizing space. The language acquires minority status by dint of reaching or implanting itself in the new space. In the abstract, zeroing in on contemporary Canada entails witnessing the Spanish language shift from a globally major language to a locally minor one. From the perspective of the vast majority of the corpus writers, namely migrant self-translators coming from Hispanophone countries, the major-to-minor shift that Spanish undergoes is consistently defined on the local scale. For instance, when Alejandro Saravia moved from La Paz to Montreal in 1986, he would have witnessed Spanish shift from a locally major language (in Bolivia) to a language that is locally minor (in Canada).
3.5. Imposing/Imposed Upon
As one collective manifestation of Spanish in Canada, the literary self-translators and self-translations that we have examined here are simultaneously an assertion of that language and an expression of minority. Indeed, on the one hand, the very presence of Spanish in Canada is an imposition. Self-translations are particularly powerful reflections of this because a text-set (typically) involves the existence of a Spanish text where, theoretically at least, no Spanish text is needed: after all, the material can, will, or already does exist in one of Canada’s official languages. Yet, as we have seen, what the language does through these works is contribute to pushing dynamically against a number of powerful ontological binaries associated with text-set constitution, residency status, and language status. Meanwhile, the very fact of the minority position that Spanish occupies in Canada means that the language is also implicitly imposed upon, subject to the pressures and parameters of more familiar and stable structures, including the binaries it resists. Much remains to be examined in terms of Hispanophone self-translation. The present discussion underscores the value of paying attention not only to spaces where Spanish is a major (official, dominant) language but also to those in which Spanish occupies a minor position.