Felicia Mihali: portrait of an “unquiet” self-translator

Abstract

This article analyzes the practice of self-translation in the work of Felicia Mihali, a Romanian writer who writes, translates, and publishes her own works in three languages: Romanian, French, and English. Before leaving Romania, she published three novels; after settling in Quebec in 2000, she first adopted French as a language of writing in order to integrate into the Quebec literary field, and later English to broaden her literary horizons and reach a wider North American readership. More recently, her return to Romanian through self-translation has marked both a recovery of her mother tongue and an act of identity reconquest. Her command of three languages enables her to create a chameleonic body of work in which each language corresponds to a particular stage in her personal and literary trajectory: French becomes a language of survival and literary recognition, English a language of freedom and renewal, while Romanian represents a return to her origins and childhood memories. Self-translation consequently appears by turns as a survival strategy, a school of writing, a means of literary reinvention and consecration, and a way of reconnecting with a readership left behind. Rather than focusing directly on textual translation procedures, the study examines the paratext to identify the signs that reveal or, conversely, conceal the self-translational process. Drawing on the notion of the “self-translation pact”, the analysis demonstrates that Mihali assigns different statuses to her works according to language, period, and editorial circumstances. Her early French versions of Romanian texts tend to erase their origins and present themselves as new originals, thereby facilitating her entry into a more powerful literary space. Later transfers between English, French, and Romanian display varying degrees of hybridity, oscillating between explicitly acknowledged translation and autonomous rewriting. Her eventual return to Romanian makes self-translation more openly visible and becomes a means of reconnecting with her origins without erasing the literary identity she developed in Canada.