In the last decade or so, the study of self-translation has established itself as a very productive subfield of Translation Studies and the same applies to investigations into the translation of humour. But hardly any publications so far have seriously addressed the interface of these two subfields – and this is the research void that the volume under review now aims to fill. What happens and what is at stake when authors (including comedians, etc.) decide to translate their own humour, not somebody else’s, into another language and for a different audience? The book thus covers what may perhaps strike one as a “small niche in both Humour Studies and Translation Studies” (p. 7). Research topics can be called ‘niche’ for all sorts of reasons. It might be that they constitute a blind spot in the dominant discourses, having a very significant scholarly and/or societal relevance that is yet waiting to be acknowledged. In other instances, topics are perceived as niche because their focus is so specific that they are unlikely to appeal to a very wide community of authors and readers now or any time. While Humour in Self-Translation may be closer to the second than the first category, it does a truly good job of exploring and demonstrating the relative “breadth and depth” (p. 7) of the topic. The collection of papers was put together by Margherita Dore, who has published prolifically over the past years on the topics of humour and its translation, and whose excellent Introduction doubles as the book’s first chapter. In addition to presenting the theme of the volume and the various chapters to follow, Dore highlights the phenomenon of migration in the 21st century. This discussion may look off-theme at first sight, but then, migrants typically find themselves leading multilingual lives, having to translate and indeed to self-translate while also often resorting to humour, for instance, as a form of social critique or as a coping mechanism. As it turns out, many of the self-translating authors of humorous texts discussed in the book could be described as ‘migrants’ of some sort, albeit mostly migrants of a privileged variety (being multilingual, articulate, gifted with creative intelligence) which is not necessarily representative of the wider migrant experience. The volume is aptly concluded by a chapter that serves as its Epilogue by Rainier Grutman, one of the doyens in research on self-translation. With wisdom and wit, Grutman’s piece reflects on the book as a whole and does so from a critical perspective that cuts to the thematic heart of the volume by asking the question of the specificity of self-translation of humour compared to the more usual situation of ‘allographic’ translation (that is, the standard situation whereby the author and the translator of the humorous text are different people). As Grutman explains, Grutman goes on to add further nuance to this position, but at the end of the day “the single most spectacular feature of self-translation,” the only one which really “makes it stand out among translational practices in general” (p. 271), is the factor of simultaneity in the specific scenario of authors writing and self-translating their humorous texts at the same time. In this scenario, the translation (still in the making) will typically cause the original (also still in the making) to be revisited and revised, resulting in two-way feedback loops of inspiration and creativity which blur our sense of which of the two texts in the process is the ‘original’ or the ‘translation,’ which indeed makes it unclear whether such bilingual writing can still be called ‘translation’ at all. In the other …
