"Am I Still There?": On the Author's Sense of Becoming in a New Language.

What is the author's experience of a constructed "self" in translation? This question offers us a brief incursion into the problem and the opportunity of being translated, which I plot on a cline from anxiety, uncertainty and loss of self, to renewal. Two arcs on the metaphoric axes are ethereal and carnal, respectively: soul, manifested in such comparisons as translation as metempsychosis, and body, which appears in translation tropes such as war, on the aggressive end, and erotics, on the cooperative. We also see variations such as enslavement and reproduction. These figures form ways of coming to terms with the double authorship of all translation - even self-translation - and of the author's sense of survival as "self" or "other" in the process of inscription in a new language, as well as the author's perception of the translator with respect to his or her identity formation. The primary dichotomy of the translator as collaborator or competitor - that is, the dynamics of coexistence or the tensions of domination - underlies these conceptualizations. Keywords: identity, body, estrangement, metaphors of translation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]