Publications

Publication details [#32399]

Hulme, Harriet. 2017. Self-Translating Between Minor and Major Languages: a hospitable approach in Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak. In Castro, Olga, Sergi Mainer and Svetlana Page, eds. Self-Translation and Power: negotiating identities in European multilingual contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 165–188.
Publication type
Article in jnl/bk
Publication language
English
Person as a subject
Title as subject

Abstract

This chapter engages with the ways in which self-translation problematises traditional binary hierarchies between minor and major languages through a close reading of Basque author Atxaga’s 1988 text Obabakoak. Atxaga’s writing process with regards to this text reflects the diglossia between a minor and a major language which exists in the Basque Country. He originally wrote Obabakoak in the Basque language Euskera, a language spoken by fewer than one million people worldwide. A year later, he translated the text into Castilian, making significant changes to the structure and the content of his book in the process. Responding to Venuti’s theory of translation as an inherently violent process, captured within a power binary of foreignisation and domestication, the author suggests Atxaga’s text is caught within a similar tension: between the demands of the “domestic” and “foreign”, as demonstrated by his decision to exceed the linguistic bounds of Euskera through both his translation into Castilian and his creative use of intertextuality and plagiarism within Obabakoak itself.
Source : Based on abstract in book