Self-translators' Allograph Translations. Insights into the translational writing of André Brink and Andrea Zanzotto

Recent research into self-translation has started to question a radical separation between translation and self-translation, which would seem to result from a distinct tendency in literary criticism - but also in translation studies – to overestimate the creative aspect of self-translations (Grutman and Van Bolderen, 2014) and a curious countertendency in the literature on self-translation – namely in authors-translators’ paratexts – to underestimate the creative aspect of ordinary translations. Moving within a theoretical framework which reasserts the value of translation as writing, the present paper intends to investigate whether the process of « writing » a translation is similar to that of « writing » a self-translation, by focussing on two authors-translators who as well as translating their works also translated the works of other authors and setting their allograph translations against their self-translations: the South-African André Brink and the Italian Andrea Zanzotto.