Writing Between Languages: Self-Translation as a Critical Gesture in Nancy Huston

Abstract

This article examines self-translation as a critical gesture in Nancy Huston, especially from the essays, Nord Perdu (1999) / Losing North (2002). Articulating Translation Studies, Philosophy of Language and Literary Criticism, this article proposes that self-translation, far from being a mere transposition between languages, is a poetic principle, as in Samuel Beckett, as well as a political gesture, in Nancy Huston, capable of destabilizing linguistic hierarchies and revealing identity tensions. The analysis shows how the Anglophone Canadian writer, by writing directly in French and self-translating her books into English, performs the theoretical losing north that she describes. Self-translation thus becomes a constitutive part of the work's internal textual functioning, questioning fixed notions of original and translation. By emphasizing the creative, and not just technical, dimension of self-translation, the aim is to broaden the debate on literary plurilingualism, highlighting its potential to rethink disciplinary boundaries and the limits of translation. Finally, the perspective of losing north is the starting point for discussing self-translation in its political dimension, without obscuring its inherent contradictions.