Translation that dare not speak its name: Amara Lakhous as an ambivalent self-translator

What is it about?

This article seeks to address translation as a transaction, a negotiation and an intervention on behalf of the translating agent. Looking at the institutional trajectory and the public persona displayed by the multilingual Algerian-Italian novelist, Amara Lakhous, I analyze his many interviews as discursive interventions and ‘position-takings’ (Bourdieu: prises de position) in the Italian literary field. By contrasting a constructed Author-persona with an equally constructed figure of the Translator as Other, Lakhous not only reactivates rhetorical commonplaces but takes a stance against translation that should not be taken at face-value but deconstructed on its own terms.

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Why is it important?

It is important to double-check writers' statements against their actual practice. In this case, when preparing an Italian version of a novel previously written in Arabic (or vice versa), the writer in question stuck much more closely to his source-text than public statements about "rewriting" vs. "simply translating" would have us believe. The questions then become: why and to what end?