Lost and Found in Translation

Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity

Martha J. Cutter

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807876824
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Starting with Salman Rushdie's assertion that even though something is always lost in translation, something can always be gained, Martha Cutter examines the trope of translation in twenty English-language novels and autobiographies by contemporary ethnic American writers. She argues that these works advocate a politics of language diversity--a literary and social agenda that validates the multiplicity of ethnic cultures and tongues in the United States. Cutter studies works by Asian American, Native American, African American, and Mexican American authors. She argues that translation between cultures, languages, and dialects creates a new language that, in its diversity, constitutes the true heritage of the United States. Through the metaphor of translation, Cutter demonstrates, writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, and Richard Rodriguez establish a place within American society for the many languages spoken by multiethnic and multicultural individuals. Cutter concludes with an analysis of contemporary debates over language policy, such as English-only legislation, the recognition of Ebonics, and the growing acceptance of bilingualism. The focus on translation by so many multiethnic writers, she contends, offers hope in our postmodern culture for a new condition in which creatively fused languages renovate the communications of the dominant society and create new kinds of identity for multicultural individuals.

1

An Impossible Necessity

Translation and the Re-creation of Linguistic and Cultural Identities in the Works of David Wong Louie, Fae Myenne Ng, and Maxine Hong Kingston

The transformations that take shape in print, that take the formal
name of “translation,” become their own beings, set out on their
own wanderings. Some live long, and some don’t. What kind
of creatures are they?

— Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz,
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

IN THE TITLE story of David Wong Louie’s collection Pangs of Love, the English-speaking narrator tries to communicate with his mother, who speaks mostly Chinese and has learned only a few English phrases from the television she watches constantly. But the protagonist fails: “I know what I want to say in English. My mind’s stuffed full with the words. I pull one sentence at a time from the elegant little speech . . . and try to piece together a word-for-word translation into Chinese. Yielding nonsense” (95). “Poetry,” Robert Frost has said in a famous formulation, “is what gets lost in translation,” ¹ and some authors have argued that the poetry of any literary form is decimated by translation. The narrator of “Pangs of Love” seems to share the view that translation of his “elegant little speech” is impossible. And so mother and son remain locked in separate linguistic and cultural worlds.

Yet, eventually, some of the characters in Louie’s collection learn to translate. To some, translation may seem “impossible” in a pure sense — but it is also absolutely necessary. Susan Bassnett observes that while some theorists perennially lament translation’s impossibility, still, “in spite of such a dogma, translators continue to translate” (135). This formulation of translation as “an impossible necessity” enables an understanding of the linguistic and cultural reconciliation enacted by certain works of contemporary Chinese American literature. In these works, the words of the foreign language or “source text” (the various dialects of Chinese) literally must be translated into the new tongue or “target text” (American English) so that parents and children, first and second generation, can communicate with each other. As a symbolic trope in these texts, however, translation evokes the concept of a crossing of borders, a permeation of barriers erected between what seem to be separate and contradictory cultural and linguistic entities.

Louie’s Pangs of Love, Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior portray the difficulties of translation, of reaching across borders that appear to be impenetrable by language, by cadences, by culture.² Second-generation characters in these texts all confront what appear to be irresolvable translation dilemmas, and they articulate the sense that Chinese culture and language (which are initially configured as “foreign” and “other” for the second generation) are untranslatable. To succeed as translators these characters must move from a literal to a metaphorical understanding of the process of translation. Following Roland Barthes’s theory that some texts are more writerly than readerly, translation theorist Willis Barnstone speaks of writerly translations that involve an active participation with the source text. A writerly translation would be creative and imaginative, rather than passive, literal, and constrained; it might also evoke the notion of coauthorship (230). In these Chinese American texts, then, the characters must become writerly translators who understand how their dual and at times conflicting cultural heritages as Chinese Americans can be mediated and transcoded. Through acts of writerly translation the protagonists learn to transcode the source text — the parents’ linguistic and ethnic heritage — and disarticulate Chinese ethnicity from a discourse that labels it alien and useless in the “modern” world of the United States. They also learn to transcode the “target text,” their own cultural and linguistic horizons as “Americans”; they must understand themselves as Chinese Americans possessed of multiple ethnic heritages. These characters finally realize that it is precisely their divergent cultural/linguistic heritages that engender the ability to produce new meanings, new stories, writerly translations that break down the binary opposition between the ethnic and the American, enriching and finally re-creating both cultural terrains.³

ALTHOUGH MANY ETHNIC WRITERS employ the trope of translation in their works, this trope is extremely pronounced in Asian American literature. Perhaps this is because, as Shih-Hsiang Chen observes in a discussion of Chinese-to-English translation, the extreme differences between these languages focalize the question of “the translator as creator” (254). Chinese, in particular, is a language with a high degree of syntactic ambiguity (Aaronson and Ferres 152). The various dialects of the Chinese language differ from those of English in numerous ways. Bernhard Karlgren reports an average of ten different word meanings corresponding to each Chinese syllable in a small dictionary; therefore, Chinese words (depending on how a word is defined) may have three to sixteen times as many meanings as English words (20). Also, as Doris Aaronson and Steven Ferres explain, word meanings in Chinese are radically polysemous; homographs for a word such as “wen,” for example, can mean such diverse things as “hear,” “smell,” or “news” (146). In Chinese, function words, prepositions, and articles are often omitted, and pronoun forms are few and optional. This leads Aaronson and Ferres to conclude that “the extent to which context determines the exact meaning will be far greater in Chinese than in English” (147). Therefore, an ability to understand context is required to disambiguate, to create a meaningful translation of a particular word, sentence, or phrase.

Chinese American writers such as Louie, Ng, and Kingston often configure the difficulties inherent in Chinese-to-English translation as both linguistic and cultural problems of context sharing between generations. “Pangs of Love” and “Inheritance,” two short stories from Louie’s collection, demonstrate that given the extreme differences between the linguistic systems of China and America, language can easily function as a barrier between what is Chinese and what is American. Yet these stories also point toward the healthy context sharing and interpermeation of cultures that the trope of “translation,” in its broadest sense, evokes.

The title story, “Pangs of Love,” depicts a literal breakdown in communication that symbolizes a more problematic loss of generational and cultural connection. The narrator cannot tell his mother that his American girlfriend, Amanda (or Mandy), has left him for a Japanese man, and his brother (called Bagel) cannot tell his mother that he has no intention of marrying a Chinese woman because he is homosexual. Gaps between the language of the mother (Cantonese Chinese) and the children (American English) seem at first glance to be the source of these characters’ inability to communicate. The protagonist informs the reader, “My mother has lived in this country for forty years and, through what must be a monumental act of will, has managed not to learn English” (75). For his part, the narrator speaks little Chinese: “Once I went to school, my Chinese vocabulary stopped growing; in conversation with my mother I’m a linguistic dwarf” (78). The mother and son inhabit the same physical space (they share an apartment), yet they are trapped in separate linguistic terrains, and little genuine conversation occurs.

Although these examples seem to illustrate a literal problem in translation (the sons speak mostly English, the mother only Chinese), they actually represent a metaphorical problem, symbolic of these characters’ refusal to cross the borders that separate the seemingly contradictory cultural terrains of America and China and to transcode the corresponding ethnic identities these terrains represent. Willis Barnstone suggests that translation includes the notion of transportation (15), so when the narrator calls his mother a “linguistic dead-end street” (84) he implies that her refusal to learn English signifies an unwillingness to transport herself to an American context; she views Americanness as a negative ethnicity and refuses to transcode it. Her insulation from American culture is so complete that she “seems out of place in a car, near machines, a woman from another culture, of another time, at ease with needle and thread, around pigs and horses” (86). Mrs. Pang embodies the traditions of the Chinese past, dreaming her son will marry “a Chinese girl who will remember [her] grave and come with food and spirit money” (88). These values have become transmuted in the United States, yet she fails to comprehend this. Therefore, there is little communication, as her final words in the story demonstrate: “How can I be your mother if nobody listens to what I say?” (98). First- and second-generation individuals remain in their separate and mutually inaccessible cultural universes, and the binary divisions between languages and cultures, between what is “Chinese” and what is “American,” remain intact.

As Octavio Paz has argued in a famous formulation: “Each civilization, as each soul, is different, unique. Translation is our way to face this otherness of the universe and history” (159). Yet neither Mrs. Pang nor her sons can face “this otherness of the universe and history,” this otherness of the world they do not inhabit, or refuse to inhabit. Clearly, Mrs. Pang sees “otherness” in her sons’ world. For example, with tears in her eyes she asks the narrator about Bagel’s lifestyle: “Ah-Vee-ah, all the men in this house have good jobs, they have money, why don’t they have women? Why is your brother that way?” (97). Here Mrs. Pang does try to translate her sons’ world into terms she can understand. But as Paz also argues, a successful translation must be an act of love and participation, reflecting both a respect for the source text and a desire to share the source text with the world (153). Mrs. Pang has no respect for her sons’ world, calling the narrator a “crazy boy” when he tells her Mandy no longer loves him (96) and calling Bagel a “hammer-head” when he tries to explain that he does not want a girlfriend (97). Mrs. Pang desires comprehension of her sons’ lives, but her lack of respect for their choices and perspectives impedes a successful transmission of information, a successful translation.

Yet if Mrs. Pang fails as a translator because she cannot participate in her sons’ world, her sons also fail because they devalue her world. The narrator describes his interactions with his mother as “putting in time” (76), as if he is on a chain gang. He also calls conversation with her “a task equal to digging a grave without a shovel” (78), an entombment for which he lacks both the language and the patience. Albrecht Neubert and Gregory Shreve explain that “if a translation is to succeed, there must be a situation which requires it. There must be a translation need. Many academic examples of so-called ‘untranslatability’ are actually examples of texts for which a receptive situation does not exist” (85). Similarly, to illustrate the idea that there is no such thing as “untranslatability,” Willis Barnstone uses the examples of the translation of Moby-Dick in Poland (where there is no whaling industry) and of the biblical translation of the phrase “lamb of God” for Eskimos who had never seen a lamb. In each case, the translator invented words or found analogies within the culture that made these “untranslatable” words coherent for his or her respective audiences (41). “Untranslatability,” then, is a product not of words but of an unmotivated situation. Because the narrator of “Pangs of Love” does not see any need to translate his mother’s world, he fails as a translator. Although “love” appears in the story’s title, the love and receptive motivation that might enable translation are figured as conspicuously absent from the text.

Louie also demonstrates that translation is a matter of motivated situations, rather than linguistics per se, through the narrator’s former girlfriend. Although she is an English-speaking Anglo-American, she manages to communicate with Mrs. Pang: “[Mandy] spoke Chinese, a stunning Mandarin that she learned at Vassar, and while that wasn’t my mother’s dialect Mandy picked up enough Cantonese to hold an adult conversation, and what she couldn’t bridge verbally she wrote in notes” (80). Beyond “bridg[ing] verbally” the barriers that appear to separate her language from Mrs. Pang’s, Mandy also manages to cross the borders between their two cultures: Mandy and Mrs. Pang “conspired together to celebrate Chinese festivals and holidays, making coconut-filled sweet-potato dumplings, lotus-seed cookies, daikon and green onion soup, tiny bowls of monk’s food for New Year’s Day” (80). Unlike the narrator, then, Mandy is receptive to Mrs. Pang’s worldview and diligently translates their cultural and linguistic differences into positive signs of intercultural connection. Louie’s text therefore demonstrates that language can be either a bridge between cultures or a barrier; translation can either maintain or destroy cultural divisions. Louie does not hold to a monolithic view of translation; he sees the multiple social, cultural, and linguistic functions it can serve.

Through the character of Mandy, the story also illustrates that translation should be a writerly process of actively and imaginatively bridging gaps between languages and cultures. Yet this lesson is not transmitted to the narrator, who cannot succeed as a translator both because he refuses to transcode his mother’s Chinese culture and because he remains trapped by a readerly conceptualization of translation. The narrator’s translations are literal and constrained, as the “transcription” of his translation process quoted at the beginning of the chapter shows. In trying to “piece together a word-for-word translation into Chinese” (95), the narrator takes a literal approach to the process of translation. Rather than thinking metaphorically about how he might convey his sentiments, he becomes formulaic and simplistic: “I abandon this approach and opt for the shorter path, the one of reduction, simplicity, lowest common denominator” (95). The narrator sees translation as a reduction, rather than an expression, of his experience, and ultimately he conveys nothing. The narrator also constantly devalues his mother and his mother’s Chinese traditions, seeing them as “alien” and “other.” Consequently, he never transcodes them or disarticulates them from the negative cultural baggage with which they are associated in the United States. The narrator seems to long to become “American,” and so translation as trope functions in this text to show how tongues are not transmigrated, how ethnic identity is not transcoded, when the ethnic remains separated from and devalued by the American.

Louie’s story “Inheritance,” on the other hand, depicts Chinese American characters who engage in a more positive, active, and metaphorical process of translation, for the central character, Edna, moves from a readerly attempt to translate her mother’s life to a writerly one. She also moves beyond seeing her metaphorical “inheritance” as a Chinese American in a purely negative light; finally, she finds a way to transcode this ethnicity. Edna’s deceased mother (who initially is the strongest representative of Chinese traditions) seems to have been lost in translation. Indeed, Edna wonders if her bitter and reclusive mother has transmitted anything positive: “Had I inherited my mother’s hand, which was warm only after she hit her little girl, which for comfort reached for angry fistfuls of her child’s hair?” (224). As in “Pangs of Love,” language at first seems to be the source of the problem. Edna explains: “Once my sister started school and infected our home with English, I stopped learning Chinese, and after that my mother . . . who masterfully avoided linguistic accommodation of any form — spoke to me as to a little child” (207). Yet the mother’s refusal to learn English — her avoidance of “linguistic accommodation” — also reflects her cultural identity: she lets her husband, Edsel, “negotiate this American life for her” (207), staying at home to perform traditional Chinese ceremonies she does not explain to Edna (202). She sees Americanness itself as negative and refuses to transcode it, opting instead for a “pure” Chinese identity. Once again, parent and child inhabit the same physical space but remain in separate linguistic and cultural terrains.

What cannot be translated may be lost in a kind of cultural and linguistic silence, an isolation or physical death that betokens a more symbolic loss. Edna’s mother does not explain the Chinese traditions or her own life to her daughter, and so Edna has no access to them as an adult. However, Louie depicts the necessity for adaptation and some degree of linguistic and cultural accommodation through Edna’s father, who does begin transcoding his ethnic identity in ways that his daughter eventually comprehends. Edsel is described as being “very old-world Chinese” (202), but after the death of his wife and his other children, he begins to communicate with his only surviving child. His conversations reflect an adaptation to the American world in which he and Edna live: “He started to talk to me a lot — something Chinese fathers aren’t predisposed to do. . . . He pronounced us friends and demanded that I call him Edsel, straying again from Chinese-father orthodoxy” (202). Edsel does not abandon “traditional” Chinese values, for he pressures Edna to have a large Chinese wedding and give birth to many children. Yet, to find a translation between his daughter’s universe and his own, he adapts his language and behavior to the new world she inhabits. Edsel is willing to engage in a metaphorical translation of his own system of values into his daughter’s world, and he is willing to transcode his own ethnic identity as “Chinese” so that it is not separate from the Americanized context his daughter inhabits. Language therefore becomes a symbolic bridge that allows a syncretic fusion and permeation of cultures.

Edna’s mother, on the other hand, refuses translation of the seemingly binary opposite cultures of China and America to the very day of her death. Louie demonstrates this symbolically through the character of Mrs. Woo, an elderly woman who reminds Edna of her deceased mother. Like Edna’s mother, Mrs. Woo speaks no English and is purely Chinese, castigating Edna for being “not quite the real thing, neither Chinese nor American” (208). The protagonist can find no response to Mrs. Woo’s vision of “cultural purity”; Edna believes that if she “said what was on my mind in the language I thought it in, that would simply confirm what [Mrs. Woo] thought” (208). Standing in for Edna’s dead mother, Mrs. Woo illustrates symbolically that Edna has found no way of communicating with her mother, of translating her maternal inheritance. Edna’s incomprehension of her mother causes her to see her inheritance negatively: “How could I be sure that I’d tamed my hand, that I’d taught it to be patient and soothing? For years I feared my mother in myself, for things do run in the family. We died young; who could guarantee the safety of my children?” (224). Who can guarantee that Edna will not be lost in translation to her children, just as her own mother was lost?

Louie portrays Edna as having stark options: she must either learn to translate her mother’s life or face the possibility of her own death. After Mrs. Woo’s children send her to a nursing home, Edna wanders into Mrs. Woo’s apartment. She turns on all the stove’s gas burners and thinks, “All I wanted was warmth. One match now and I could solve every problem” (224). Faced with her inability to understand her maternal legacy, Edna considers suicide — she considers being lost in translation. Yet Edna does not kill herself. Instead, she finds a more writerly notion of translation that allows her to transcode her ethnicity and transmigrate her mother’s tongue. Edna has been thinking rather literally of what she inherited — her mother’s hands, her mother’s cruelty, her mother’s linguistic and cultural rigidity — but she must think more metaphorically. Looking out the window of this American apartment, Edna imagines seeing “limestone mountains in mist, birds in wooden cages, women in rice paddies whose legs were spread wide. Scenes of South China I knew from calendars Edsel hung in our home,” and she realizes that “this was the mystery wound in my DNA, this the very color of my genes, this my inheritance” (224-25). Edna’s heritage is not just her mother’s bitterness, lack of cultural accommodation, and violence but the entire history of China as well. Edna inherits a vision broader than the limited perspective her mother’s life has given her: “I looked out at the yard again, but now, instead of the smallest things, I saw over impossible distances” (224). Despite her mother’s recalcitrance, Edna finally translates her heritage into something vast and powerful, rather than something c...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 - An Impossible Necessity
• 2 - Finding a “Home” in Translation
• 3 - Translation as Revelation
• 4 - Learnin — and Not Learnin — to Speak the King’s English
• 5 - The Reader as Translator
• 6 - Cultural Translation and Multilingualism in and out of Textual Worlds
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited