Genesis of a Self-Translation: Inside the Archive of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills

This article explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel A Pale View of Hills as a translation of the avant-textes made of the typescripts and notes held at the Harry Ransom Center archive (Austin, Texas) on the basis of on Jakobson’s (1959) threefold definition of translation comprising intralingual translation. The dossier génétique of the novel shows the process of encoding of the narrator’s unreliability and of erasure from the text of information that is merely hinted at in the published version. The study of the different self-translational strategies at work reveal that Kazuo Ishiguro plays on different levels of implicitness and ambiguity. In particular, the second typescript contains an alternative ending much more explicit than that of the published novel. I argue that the key process at work here is not simplification, as Zethsen (2009) claims to be generally the case in intralingual translation; rather, the translational shifts at play show a tendency towards complexification through a process of erasure that makes the processing of the text harder.