Abstract

This contribution concerns self-translation in the work of Francis Tessa, an Italo-Belgian author who was born in Rossano Veneto in 1935 (known at the registry office as Francesco Tessarolo) and settled in Wallonia (a French-speaking region in the south of Belgium) in 1952 to join his family, who had emigrated from the Vicenza countryside in the immediate post-war period for economic reasons. In Belgium, Francis Tessa has now established a solid reputation as a French-speaking poet, but he is also a translator from Italian into French and vice versa, as well as a self-translator between these two languages. In particular, this study focuses on a bilingual collection, Dans le tremblement du souffle. Nel tremolio del soffio (1989), which could be defined as a «simultaneous self-translation» (Grutman 2009), since the author states that he carried out the two texts simultaneously in the two languages. The case of Francis Tessa also sheds light on the relationship between self-translation and migratory experience, a relationship in which Vanvolsem (1995) sees a characteristic of some authors of Italian origin writing in Belgium, especially when it comes to poetry.