Translation in Diasporic Literatures

Guanglin Wang

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789811366093
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This book investigates issues of translation and survival in diasporic and transcultural literature, combining Chinese and Western theories of translation to discuss the centrifugal and centripetal forces that are inherent in diasporic Chinese writers. Cutting across philosophy, semiotics, translation studies and diasporic writing, it the book tackles the complexity of translation as a key tool to re-read the dynamics of Sino-Anglo literary encounters that reset East-West parameters. Focusing on a range of specialized areas of cultural translation sand China-related writings, this book is a key read for scholars of translation and cross-cultural writings, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, American and Australian literature studies, and global Chinese literature studies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Guanglin WangTranslation in Diasporic Literatureshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6609-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Translator Translated: Concentric Routes (Roots) of Cultural Identities of Diasporic Chinese Writers

Guanglin Wang¹

(1)

SISU, Shanghai, China

Guanglin Wang

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to discuss the cultural identities of diasporic Chinese writers in the context of their translation of Chinese cultures and the way the texts are received when they are translated back into Chinese language. The author examines the in-between situation of Chinese American writers in their postmodern literary representation of cultures and discusses the controversies involved around Chinese translations of the works of diasporic Chinese writers while avoiding the cultural presuppositions in both translation and criticism of diasporic Chinese literary works and trying to give the readers a mutually inclusive conception of these writers. The author maintains that the critics should pay attention to both centrifugal and centripetal forces that are inherent in the diasporic writers and adopt a mutually inclusive approach toward their cultural identities.

Keywords

Chinese AmericanTranslationCultural identityRoots and routesTraveling

End Abstract

Diasporic Chinese were called “birds of passage” as they suffer from the “after China” syndrome,¹ with China as their imaginary homeland that was left behind but to which they still were very much attached. Physically removed from yet psychologically associated with the ineradicable image of China, the Chinese in diaspora are thrown into a state of confusion wrestling between the ancestor culture and the host culture. Leaving the ancestral culture and moving toward the First World, the migrants have to engage themselves in an ethnographic translation across cultures which would involve inevitably a negotiation between roots and routes.

In The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today , Tu Wei-ming proposes the concept of cultural China to reclaim the discussion and debate of “Chineseness.” The epithet “living” in the title exhibits a state of great vigor in that the tree develops branches and leaves and becomes luxuriant and profuse: the living tree is therefore a metaphor for the concept of Chineseness, implying that the Chinese are scattered around the world, like branches and leaves of the tree, and develop different routes while the exuberant foliage indicates a deep root they share. It is a matter of oneness and difference, which is well informed in traditional Chinese culture.

The changing and dynamic aspect of Chineseness is best seen in the image or the very totem of Chinese culture, 龙 (Long or Lung), which is often wrongly translated as “dragon” in English. The Long is an auspicious and composite image in Chinese culture, often associated with rain or water and flying high above in a wavy manner, rotating and jumping into the clouds. It represents a culture that is dynamic and transcends time and space, showing infinite variations. Chinese often call themselves the descendants of Long (龙的传人), and the Chinese Long is seen in every aspect of Chinese culture, from the emperor to ordinary human beings, from temples to mountains.

The Long is a case in point to summarize the relationship between roots and routes, the center and the periphery, and the one and many, as in mythology: “the five-clawed dragon was also worn by the emperor because legends state that the Dragon King moves in all four directions simultaneously; the fifth direction is the Center, where he remains” (Perkins, 131). The centrifugal and the centripetal pulls are best summarized by Tu Wei-ming as:

Conceptually, it is convenient to use “dragon,” the mythic symbol of potency, creativity, and transformation, to signify this process of integration. As a composite totem, the dragon possesses at least the head of a tiger, the horns of a ram, the body of a snake, the claws of an eagle and the scales of a fish. Its ability to cross totemic boundaries and its lack of verisimilitude to any living creature strongly suggest that from the very beginning the dragon was a deliberate cultural construction. The danger of anachronism notwithstanding, the modern Chinese ethnic self-definition as the “dragon race” indicates a deep-rooted sense that Chineseness may derive from many sources. (Tu 1999, 4)

In other words, the Chinese center, as epitomized by and constantly narrated in Chinese Dao (道), is a dynamic one. Historically and spatially, the Chinese center can be in Anyang, Xi’an, Nanjing, or Beijing; culturally, Chinese history is a constant dialogue between the center and the peripheries. The chronology of the dynasties of China indicates that Chinese culture is not a monolithic one but a constant conflict and compromise between the center and the periphery, the Han ethnicity and non-Han ethnicity. The center is accumulated through treasures of books and oral narratives, the refinedness and elegance of the center radiate into the neighboring area, the centrifugal and the centripetal forces are both at play in the formation of Chinese culture, and the roots and the routes are good responses to the metaphor of the living tree.

The continuum between the center and the periphery is therefore an inescapable state of mind in defining Chineseness. Living in China may not necessarily make one closer to traditional Chinese culture, as is seen through the vicissitudes of modern Chinese cultural revolutions, and living abroad may not necessarily make one deviate too far from traditional Chinese culture, as can be demonstrated in overseas Chinatown cultures and the continuation of Chinese cultures and practices. The relationship between the center and the periphery is dynamic and flowing, not fixed and lethargic.

In “traveling theory,” Edward Said , based on the exilic theory in the West, uses traveling to describe the phenomenon of migration. He gives much consideration to the discursive power of the migrants and endows traveling with new implications. The traveling theory, according to Said, consists of four well-connected phases: one, departure point, where ideas are formed or condensed due to certain influence in certain contexts and expressed through language, therefore known to the public, and becomes the trope or discourse for traveling; two, the distance traversed, that is, journey, where the theory has traversed time and space from the departure point into a new cultural context and received or produced a new understanding or repercussions; three, the context in which the theory is accepted or resisted or even misunderstood; and four, cultural transplantation where the ideas have undergone partial or complete transformation or appropriation (Said, 226–7).

To Said, traveling theory has become a trope for migration or diaspora in the postmodern context and a sign of human displacements. It debunks the fact of subjective fragmentation in the postmodern world and challenges the binary discussion of displacement and the essentialized way of thinking in that the relationship between the center and the periphery, home and diaspora, and past and future is a dialectic one, and human migration has become a cultural code in the understanding of the interaction among different cultural groups.

James Clifford combines traveling with cultural translation, thinking that translation is a kind of cultural traveling in which input and output happens at the same time, and it is difficult to trace the cultural source according to traditional translation definitions because cultures have hybridized. With the appearance of globalization and the concept of the global village, the interaction between people from different cultures becomes increasingly frequent, and people move from one place to another and form a unique culture, which is diaspora culture. They leave the ancestor home and come to a new cultural environment, and in this cultural context, cultural translation has become a means of survival to them.

For Clifford, traveling is preferable to people in diaspora as it carries a neutral meaning to diasporic writers. Through the traveling discourse, writers may represent their departure, loss, a sense of relocation and a sense of return, and express, through a metaphorical language, their journey and a desire of return. On the one hand, they still carry their own traces of culture, tradition, history, language, and belief; on the other hand, they have to communicate with the host culture in order to get recognition and reconciliation. So, the diasporic subject must necessarily be the product of different cultures who are engaged in “dwelling-in-traveling and traveling in dwelling” (Clifford 1997, 36). In this continuum “roots always precede routes” (Clifford 1997, 3) (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Roots and routes. (Based on Clifford and Tu Wei-ming)

Traditionally, translation theory emphasizes the unidimensional route of translation in which the translation process starts from author, goes through translation, and then to the reader. The roots and the routes, or the centrifugal and the centripetal continuum, show the dynamic interaction between ancestor culture and home culture on the part of diasporic writers. Roots, as a focal point, provide the pre-text for translation or recontextualization in a new context by diasporic Chinese writers, and the translated text in turn travels back to the ancestor culture or the roots culture in Chinese translations.

In this diagram, roots and routes correspond to home and exile, to dwelling and travel. Clifford’s stress on movement indicates that it is the people who are on the move, that are the real agents of cultural production, rather than those remaining in the localized communities. Roots impose emotional bonds on the people who stay in a localized community and share cultural environments. A route, on the other hand, sets the localized community into motion and brings creativity and vitality. Routes can be understood as roots on the move or the roots moving into nodes.

In Clifford’s account, roots and routes are not mutually exclusive but rather “intertwined” (Clifford, 4), and represent the true relationship between people, culture, and place. Roots and routes form a real dialectic, in which they coexist and complement each other. Root is the fountain, and the route is the locomotive. In their discursive expressions, “the processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and dis-unification, intersect in the utterance” (Bakhtin, 272), which is not the act of disavowal but a “blending together” of “roots and routes,” of “multi-local attachments, a traveling within and across nations” (Clifford, 251). In this multi-directional interaction, one may engage oneself freely in different directions but may also return constantly to one’s ancestor cultures or imaginary homeland for inspiration and survival, and this return is no longer an act of nostalgia but one of more “re-inscription” (Bhabha 1994/2004, 324) that frees people from the prison of location and engages them in translation against monological authority or Manichaeism.

1.1 Writerly Translation for Re-inscribing Roots and Routes

For diasporic Chinese who have left their ancestor home and started on their journey to other countries, the displacement, temporal, spatial, and linguistic, is strongly felt in their lives in their new-found land, and one way of survival is by way of translation, which “marks their stage of continued life” (Benjamin, 73). Ha Jin, an immigrant writer in America, reflects that

for the creation of literature, a language of synthesis is necessary to make sure that one’s work is more meaningful and more authentic. One principle of this language is translatability. In other words, if rendered into different languages, especially into the language spoken by the people the author writes about, the work still remains meaningful. (Ha Jin, 59)

Translation frequently alerts him of his dual identities: Chinese American. He uses Solzhenitsyn and Lin Yutang as examples to talk about his own situation, admitting that he is basically a Chinese writer who happens to write in English. To him, what decides a writer is not the language he writes in but the subject matter or the content of the book. In translating the imaginary homeland, the diasporic writers, who already felt displaced, are caught in a wrestle between betrayal and fidelity and fall prey to the debate.

Kingston, the second-generation diasporic Chinese writer, states during an interview that “in my first two books, the English that I was inventing was a way to translate the dialogue of the characters who spoke Chinese” (Blauvelt, 78). What she faces is that she has to cope with the very reality of Chinese Americans living and surviving in America which is dominated by the Caucasian culture that has no place for Chinese Americans. Her translation of Ts’ai Yen by the end of The Woman Warrior , for example, is an indication of her own effort for survival. Ts’ai Yen, like the narrator, is just an ordinary Han girl before being taken in by southern Hsiung-nu, and she would have remained anonymous like No Name Woman at the beginning of the novel, but her exilic experience in a foreign land gives her access to the strange tunes and the language of the other, and this discovery coincides with her yearning for home, for the mother tongue in a strange language. The accidental discovery of the other in a language other than her mother tongue enables her name and her works to survive through translation. As a result, “she brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of the three that has been passed down to us is ‘Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe’, a song that Chinese sing to their own instruments” (Kingston, 243).

This translation process of Ts’ai Yen traces the roots/routes of Chinese diaspora: first leaving their ancestral homeland and then trying to find a dwelling or home to survive in an alien land through diasporic translati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Translator Translated: Concentric Routes (Roots) of Cultural Identities of Diasporic Chinese Writers
• 2. Writer as Translator: On Translation and Postmodern Appropriation in Nicholas Jose’s The Red Thread: A Love Story
• 3. The Chinese Poetess in an Australian Setting: Cultural Translation in Brian Castro’s The Garden Book
• 4. Translating Fragments: Disorientation in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing
• 5. Translating Intersemiotically: Photographing West and East in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing
• 6. Against Untranslatability: Rethinking World Literatures
• 7. Afterword
• Back Matter