Nicola Danby
The Space Between: Self-Translators Nancy Huston and Samuel Beckett
(viii + 127 pp.)
2003

Thesis Supervisor / Directeur du mémoire : Christine Klein-Lataud

A theoretical look at the fundamental characteristics of self-translation, this work is coupled with a comparative analysis of Nancy Huston's self-translation practices in the example of her book Limbes/Limbo : un hommage à Samuel Beckett and its original unpublished version. The latter text permits a singular approach to controversial questions in self-translation theory: auctoriality, the definition of the original, the location of meaning, and the definition of self-translation. These deductions are applied to the comparative analysis of Huston's self-translation practices. Tables map her practice of transposing form and content in her self-translations, and detailed analyses of humour, cultural references, literary, biblical, and fairytale references establish her life as led in each of her languages. The notions of original and location of meaning are further applied in reference to the comparison of the published and unpublished versions of Limbes. The unpublished version maps Huston's switches between languages, and provides a first-person stream of consciousness testimony of the bilingual writer's mind, as it in turn is led either by form or content.

Huston's original unpublished version of Limbes stretches beyond the parameters of currently defined and examined self-translation. As such it constitutes a particular genre of writing defined here as "simultaneous bilingual writing", a prism at the axis of her two language-defined identities, honouring Samuel Beckett's practice and life lived in limbo, or in the space between the two languages.