Cover not available
Part of
Humour in Self-Translation
Edited by Margherita Dore
[Topics in Humor Research 11] 2022
► pp. 41–62

Chapter 3
Punning herself

Nancy Huston’s puns in two self-translated novels

ORCID logo | Universidad de León
Plays on words, humorous or not, pose serious challenges to the translator, as Dirk Delabastita (1997), among many others, has stated. Self-translators know the intended communicative effect behind the puns, giving them a privileged perspective regarding their translation. This is the case with author Nancy Huston, born in 1953 in Alberta, Canada, and residing permanently in France since 1973. She started using self-translation consistently after discovering she could thereby improve her work, which regularly includes wordplays.
This work looks at puns from two of her earlier self-translated novels, comparing Huston’s English and French version to see how she deals with the complexity they entail. Following Delabastita’s typology of puns (1996: 128, 2014: 604), Huston’s puns are both vertical and horizontal wordplay, display paronymy and homophony as well as many more aspects. This chapter comments on cases of pun-to-pun translation, pun-to-alliteration, pun-to-no pun, etc. Huston herself claims she desires the two versions to be as alike as possible (Mi-Kung YI, 2001), and this article aims at confirming this.
Keywords: self-translation, wordplay, methods of translation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A short biography of Nancy Huston
  • 3.Humor in translation
    • 3.1Priorities and restrictions
    • 3.2General theory of verbal humor (GTVH)
  • 4.The pun in translation
  • 5.Huston’s wordplays in translation
    • 5.1Pun to Pun
    • 5.2Pun to Non-pun
    • 5.3Zero pun to Pun
    • 5.4Pun to Other rhetorical device
    • 5.5Other rhetorical device to Pun
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Original Works by Nancy Huston
  • Works cited
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/thr.11.03ric
References (31)
Original Works by Nancy Huston
Huston, Nancy. (1993). Plainsong. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
. (1993). Cantique des plaines. Montreal: Lemeac; Arles: Actes Sud.Google Scholar
. (1994). La virevolte. Montreal: Lemeac; Arles: Actes Sud.Google Scholar
. (1996). Slow Emergencies. Toronto: Little Brown.Google Scholar
Works cited
Huston, Nancy. (1998). Cantique des plaines. Paris: Editions J’ai lu.Google Scholar
. (2002). Plainsong. South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press L.C.Google Scholar
. (2002b). Slow Emergencies. New York: Vintage International.Google Scholar
. (2008). La virevolte. Paris: Editions J’ai lu.Google Scholar
References
Anonymous. (26 February 2000). Une Canadienne à Paris, or is she? [URL] (accessed: 30 November 2020)
Argand, Catherine Argand. (2001). Interview Nancy Huston. Lire. [URL] (accessed 15 January 2021).
Attardo, S. & Raskin, V. (1991). Script theory revis(it)ed: joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor 4:3–4, 293–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Attardo, Salvatore. (2002). Translation and Humour: An Approach Based on the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH). The Translator. Vol. 8, No. 2, 173–194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty. (2014). Nancy Huston’s Danse noire . [URL] (accessed: 15 Jan 2021)
Chiaro, Delia. (Ed.). (2010). Translation, Humour and Literature Volume I. Continuum.Google Scholar
Danby, Nicola. (2004). The Space between: Self-translator Nancy Huston’s Limbes/Limbo . La linguistique. 2004/1, Vol. 40, 83–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Delabastita, Dirk. (1996). Introduction. The Translator, 2:2, 127–139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (1997). Introduction. Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation. In Dirk Delabastita, (Ed.), Kindle ed., Special Issue of Target 12(1), 161–166.Google Scholar
. (2014). Wordplay as a translation problem: A linguistic perspective. In H. Kittel, A. P. Frank, N. Greiner, T. Hermans, W. Koller, J. Lambert, F. Paul (Eds.), Übersetzung, Translation, Traduction (pp. 600–606). Berlin, Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. [URL] (accessed: 21 Jan, 2021)
Dore, Margherita. (2019). Humour in Audiovisual Translation: Theories and Applications. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dorfman, Ariel. (2002). Resisting Hybridity. In D. Balderstone & M. E. Schwarz (Eds.) Voice-Overs. Translation and Latin American Literature (pp. 55–57). Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Gentes, Eva. (2020). Bibliography on Self-Translation. [URL] (accessed: 20 January 2021)
Huston, Nancy. (2002c). Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self. Toronto: McArthur & Co.Google Scholar
Klein-Lataud, Christine. (1996). Les voix parallèles de Nancy Huston [The parallel voices of Nancy Huston]. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 9, n° 1, 211–231. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morreall, John. (2020). Philosophy of Humor. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. [URL] (accessed: 30 April 2021)
Santoyo, Julio César. (2005). Autotraducciones: Una perspectiva histórica [Self-translation: A historical perspective]. Meta: journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal, vol. 50, n° 3, 858–867. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Santoyo, Julio–César. (2013). Autotraducciones: ensayo de tipología [Self-translation: An essay on typology]. In P. M. Alba, J. A. Albaladejo Martínez & M. Pulido (Eds.) Al humanista, traductor y maestro Miguel Ángel Vega Cernuda (pp. 205–221). Madrid: Dykinson.Google Scholar
Shread, Carolyn. (1998). An Interview with Nancy Huston. Sites: The Journal of 20th-Century Contemporary French Studies. 2.2 (Fall), 246–252.Google Scholar
Vandaele, Jeroen. (2011). Wordplay in translation. In Y. Gambier and L. van Doorslaer (Eds.) Handbooks of Translation Studies. Vol. 2 (pp. 180–183). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wigston, Nancy. Ca. (2001). Nancy Huston Unbound. Interview. Books in Canada. [URL] (accessed: 15 May 2021)
Yi, Mi-Kyung. 2001. Épreuves de l’étranger: entretien avec Nancy Huston réalisé par Mi-Kyung [Trials of the foreigner: interview with Nancy Huston by Mi-Kyung]. Horizons philosophiques, vol. 12, n° 1, 1–16. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zabalbeascoa, Patrick. (2005). Humor and translation – an interdiscipline. Humor 18–2 , 185–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar