A Privileged Voice?

This article looks at the English, French, and Dutch versions of the “History of Andrew, the Hebridean,” an allegorical tale of a Scotsman's successful adaptation in colonial America by the eighteenth‐century French–American author J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. This story was first published as part of the third letter of Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782). It reappeared two years later in Lettres d'un cultivateur américan, the author's self‐translation of his work into French, as well as in the expanded second French edition, published in 1787. Finally, the story figures in Brieven van eenen Amerikaenschen landman, an anonymous Dutch translation of the English original published around the same time as the first French edition, and which so far has received little scholarly attention. By examining how these different versions of the tale of the Hebridean relate to each other, the article attempts to pinpoint the differential quality of auctorial translations vis‐à‐vis allographic ones. Our analysis reveals that the assumption that self‐translators should be regarded as “privileged” translators (Tanqueiro) is in need of correction in that it fails to consider the allographic and plural nature of historically embedded self‐translations.