ABSTRACT
Vassilis Alexakis is the most consistently self-translating of the authors studied in this book. He writes in either French or Greek and then translates toward the other language. What this chapter argues is that his self-translations are variably successful exercises in creating estuarine ecosystems. Meaning is produced for Alexakis’s narrators in what the self-translation silences, in the annotations or deletions that it occasions, and in the spaces that it creates for liminal linguistic and historical events to position themselves while shifting and reconfiguring—or, conversely, reinforcing and sedimenting—the receiving language’s and culture’s expectations. Although not foreignizing, the translation of La langue maternelle, originally written in Greek, unsettles the expectations of French readers to the extent that it undermines the larger political mythology of Greece as the European foundational event. In Les mots étrangers, instead of creating an estuarine environment of relationality, the act of translation objectifies, in most instances, a third, African, indigenous language (Sango, the dominant language of the Central African Republic) and its culture as an absolute border between two European languages (French and Greek, the languages of the bilingual narrator), thus reconfiguring but without essentially altering linguistic hierarchies of the colonial and neo-colonial eras.
