Abstract
For many years now, issues raised by self-translation have been given insufficient attention in
both translation and literary studies. Though recently some works like The Bilingual Text:
History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation (2007) and Routledge Encyclopedia of
Translation Studies (2011) have dealt with the problems of self-translation, it is difficult to
systematically account for the diversity of interesting features of self-translation. One of the
reasons is that self-translation often becomes “invisible” for some personal reasons of writers.
This paper outlines the invisibility of literary self-translations in the 20th Century by examining
some specific cases: James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jerzy Kosinski,
Andreï Makine, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nancy Huston, and Fernando Pessoa. This overview leads us
to conclude that self-translation is a major topic of twentieth-century literature and such inquiry
and research is essential in its applications for both translation studies and literary studies.