Nancy Huston

Last Monday, I participated in „the day of Canada”, organised by our university. It was a great occasion to get to know something interesting about this unusual country, famous for its bilingualism.

One of the lectures concerned Nancy Huston, the author of many fiction and non-fiction novels, plays and books for children. She was born in 1953 in Calgary and grew up in Canada and United States. She spent also some time in Germany when she was a little child and later, at the age of twenty, she came to Paris for the purpose of studying. She earned a master’s degree there under the supervision of Roland Barthes. She stayed in Paris and it was there that she learned French, her language of literary expression.

Nancy Huston is one of the authors who translate their works themselves, which is very intriguing about her because not so many authors do that. Even more so because French is not her first language, but she had said that this foreignness paradoxically helped her to find her literary voice. She had got to use to be a foreigner because of numerous removals in the past and finally, she had accepted the role of a foreigner as her own choice and the way of being. What’s more, she considers her self-translation as a fact of re-writing (réécriture), so she privileges the uniqueness of a language and she perceives a translation as a new, different text.