English as a Literature in Translation

Fiona J. Doloughan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628922226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For many writers writing in English today, English is but one of a number of languages, and by extension cultures, to which they have access. The question arises of the impact of this sometimes latent, sometimes explicit, multilingualism on generic and other literary forms and conventions. To what extent is English literature today a literature in translation in the sense that it is formed at the confluence of different literary and cultural traditions and is mediated or brokered by multilingual individuals? And to what extent might literary creativity today be premised on access to more than one language and/or set of cultural and literary traditions? English as a Literature in Translation examines the complexities of writing in English and assesses the extent to which language practices in English have been localized and/or culturally inflected, even as English has become a global medium of communication.

1

Introductory Chapter

This is a book about translation and contemporary literature in English and the ways in which shifting notions of translation can be charted in literary works characterized by their focus on relationships between and among language, culture and identity and on translational processes as central to the constitution of self and other. Taking as my starting point a thoughtful and provocative article by Alastair Pennycook (2008), ‘English as a Language Always in Translation’, in which he points to the consequences of the fact that English does not in reality operate in isolation in the world today but always in the context of other languages, I want to suggest that a shift has taken place in our conceptions of translation and that this shift is reflected in writing in English. By looking at a series of case studies – from Eva Hoffman’s 1989 memoir Lost in Translation to Xiaolu Guo’s early twenty-first-century work, including her 2007 novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers as well as her recently published novel I Am China (2014), via a number of other works, across a 25-year time-span – that thematize translation and reflect on what it means to move across languages and/or cultures, I want to suggest that the prototypical notion of language as loss, and translation of self and other as a predominantly painful and traumatic experience, have given way to a greater sense of what is to be gained, both at the individual and societal levels, through access to different languages and cultures.

As well as being informed by changes in attitudes to the cognitive and cultural benefits of bilingualism and multilingualism, these shifts can be seen to mirror a changing politics of language or at least a greater awareness of what is at stake in what Pennycook (2008: 43) calls ‘translingual activism’, whereby the role that English plays in the world is unsettled through recognition of the complexities and inequalities of translation and understanding of the ways in which meanings are diversified through language crossing and mixing. Inevitably, this raises questions not just for writers but also for readers of text where traces of the presence of other languages and cultures are part of the fabric of the work. A monolingual reader may well react differently from a bilingual or multilingual reader of an ‘accented’ English text, preferring perhaps to see linguistic inadequacies or grammatical deficiencies rather than playfulness, inventiveness or critique at work in a text that does not conform to that reader’s view of ‘standard’ English. How to evaluate the creativity of a bilingual or multilingual writer, even in the case where that writer is writing predominantly, if not exclusively, in English, becomes an issue where the institutional gatekeepers are themselves monolingual. As Sherry Simon (2012: 1), in her Introduction to Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory, reminds us: ‘Accents, code-switching and translation are to be valued for the ways in which they draw attention to the complexities of difference, for the ways in which they interrupt the self-sufficiencies of “mono” cultures.’

The ‘self-sufficiencies of “mono” cultures’ (Simon 2012: 1) may seem overdone in the present era of increasing connectivity and mobility, yet political rhetoric, in the United Kingdom, in the course of the elections to the European Parliament in May 2014, about stronger border controls, capping immigration, limiting migrants’ access to benefits, and keeping British jobs for British workers is reflective of a set of discourses that signal a closing down rather than an opening up of borders and boundaries. Such discourses characterize migrants as interlopers and scroungers who come either to deprive British citizens of jobs that are rightfully theirs or to live on welfare and housing benefit at great cost to the British taxpayer. Preserving Britain for the British and keeping it free of ‘foreign’ influence has certainly been part of this particular campaign, at least on the part of extreme right-wing parties and some Conservatives. Whereas in the past such rhetoric might have been written off as political posturing, the rise of the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the election of two of its members to Parliament mean that it is no longer possible to dismiss their anti-immigration and anti-European discourse as coming from the fringes of British politics. Rather, it is, regrettably, becoming more mainstream.

The political and rhetorical backdrop informing debates about immigration and Britain’s relations with the rest of Europe may appear to have little to do with contemporary writing in English but arguably attitudes to language – ‘English […] as a language that operates only in its own presence’ (Pennycook 2008: 44) – are part and parcel of the same kind of parochialism and national defensiveness. Translational writing in English, that is writing that depends on the co-presence of other languages and cultures in either a marked or non-marked manner, puts pressure on ideas of linguistic and cultural stability and creates a ‘plurality of codes, a thinking through and with translation, a continual testing of the limits of expression’ (Simon 2012: 6). These ‘translational’ practices then go to the very heart of what we understand ‘creative’ writing in the twenty-first century to be and the extent to which English is seen not as a bounded and monolithic linguistic entity rooted in a particular geographic area or areas but as a relatively fluid and porous material base situated at the confluence of other languages and other varieties of English.

Thus my reading of the works selected, while focusing on the centrality of issues of translation, will necessarily be set against larger societal developments, including globalizing tendencies that have permitted English to extend its reach, at the same time as increased possibilities for mobility and migration have brought diverse cultures into contact. Technological developments too have meant that it is not always necessary to move physically to another location to experience or partake of different languages or different worlds. This can be done remotely or at a distance. In addition, the fact that English is now used by more people for whom it is one of a number of languages rather than the sole language of communication allows for the possibility of a diversity of meanings as ‘English is always a language in translation, a language of translingual use’ (Pennycook 2008: 34). This ‘global traffic of meaning’ (33) has the potential to open up communicative spaces, as languages operate alongside one another and come into close contact, generating new meanings.

As Pennycook (2008) points out, the traffic in meaning is neither one-directional nor does it apply only in the international or global arena. Regional and local usages of English also operate in the presence of other Englishes and in the light of other languages and often find themselves subject to evaluation in respect of some notional idea of standard English or ‘English as a language with a core’ (40). Both within the various Englishes spoken and written today and between English/es and other languages, the need to recognize the extent to which translation is at the heart of communication has never been greater. Translation, then, becomes ‘the key to understanding communication’ (40). But it is not just communication in a pragmatic sense – getting one’s meaning across – that is implicated here. Insofar as literature is a product of the cultural, linguistic and technological know-how of a particular society or group within society, it is also subject to the changes and possibilities generated by new or different conditions for social individuals. While what we understand literature to be or to include evolves in line with social changes and the affordances of new technologies (e.g. the networked novel), it is still the case that literature in print depends to a large extent on a particular shaping and use of its primary material: language. Increasingly, this primary material itself can be seen to consist not of some unadulterated core of English (or indeed of any other language) but to reflect already a certain multi-dimensional substance and shaping, depending on its provenance and particular blending. For as Pennycook (2008: 42) indicates, ‘this flow of languages in and out of each other is the norm across the world’.

Moreover, I will argue that while not a sufficient condition for creativity, access to more than one language and/or culture can enhance creativity, given the ways in which plurilingualism can serve to extend the range of linguistic and cultural possibilities. I will also argue that what we are witnessing is a shift in attitudes to the cognitive and creative benefits of access to more than one language, even as in some parts of the English-speaking world such as the UK, there appears to be a retrenchment in relation to the politics of language. Of course, as we will see, with respect to literary texts the somewhat abstract idea of a shift in representation from a dynamic of language as loss to that of language as gain is, in reality, much more complicated and needs to be grounded in the particulars of the works under examination and contextualized in relation to the rise of English as a lingua franca, changing attitudes to language/s globally and changing patterns of migration.

In this introductory chapter, I wish to set the scene for later discussion and analysis of individual authors and works by looking at some of the key ideas and areas on which an understanding of such a shift depends. This will involve reviewing some of the relevant literature in a variety of domains, including Translation Studies, English as a Lingua Franca, Applied Linguistics and Bilingualism/Multilingualism. By relevant here, I mean relevant to the focus of the book and to the object of study and enquiry. This is not a book that purports to be a specialist work of language study; rather, it is motivated by an interest in literature and the possible consequences of the fact that literature in English is increasingly being produced by bilingual and multilingual, rather than monolingual, writers. These consequences include issues of readership as well as authorship, insofar as it may be the case that bilingual readers of say Spanish and English read bilingual texts differently to monolingual readers of those same texts. Certainly, in my own case, with a level of Spanish that is high intermediate at best, I cannot claim to be able to access all the nuances of a work like Borderlands/La Frontera. If I have included it nonetheless, it is because it has been an influential work in Anglophone circles and has been written with a non-Hispanic audience in mind. In some ways, it provides a kind of test case in a book that otherwise deals with texts written almost exclusively in English, or a variety thereof, in the sense that its inclusion of Spanish alongside English passages and its embodiment of translation in a broad, as well as a narrow, sense helps to make visible and concrete some of the issues that may otherwise be glossed over in relation to a work seemingly exclusively or predominantly in English. Of course Borderlands/La Frontera is already an established work, even if at the time of publication in 1987 it was breaking new ground by mixing languages and fusing cultures in its re-articulation of the history of the Mexican-American borderlands from a lesbian Chicana perspective. However, it is a forerunner of much Chicana literature and is a kind of Bible of Chicana Studies; Anzaldúa’s influence is readily acknowledged by other Chicana writers including Sandra Cisneros, to whose work I also refer.

In addition, the world of 2014 is not the same as that of 1987, 1989 or 2007 (publication dates of just three of the works I discuss); nor can work by a Chinese-born British citizen (Xiaolu Guo) be put alongside work by a writer now resident in the UK (Eva Hoffman) whose Jewish parents left Poland for Canada when she was 13 without recognition of the differences in circumstances and histories. Insofar as context is a determinant of meaning, it will be important to bear in mind the temporal and geographic components of the works in question, while framing them within the locus of the evolving argument. While I do not wish to suggest that literature can be reduced to the context out of which it emerged, I am interested in moving between close textual analysis and more distant readings that set works against a variety of contexts (not just societal but also theoretical) and permit patterns and connections to surface that might not be so clearly visible in isolation. In other words, the topics and aspects surveyed will serve as a series of lenses through which to view the works discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters. These will include: Translation and Translational Writing; The Rise of English as a Lingua Franca; and the Translingual Imagination.

As a trained comparatist who has worked across disciplinary boundaries and has, at various times, taught in Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies as well as in English Literature and Creative Writing contexts, my approach is necessarily somewhat eclectic. What ties the various elements together is a focus on changing conceptions of translation alongside recognition of the diversity of writing in English today. As will become apparent, new modes of writing in English, partly a consequence of cultures in contact, challenge conventional ways of reading, demanding greater attention to the multi-dimensionality of text, the porosity of linguistic borders and the affordances of genre mixing and blending. The corollary of this potential for linguistic and generic pluralism is concern with what Emily Apter (2013: 43) terms ‘the self-defeating parochialism of English-only policies, and the blindness to the socioeconomic advantages of English Plus in the world economy’. For while the notion of English Plus is a reality for those who have had to acquire English as a second or additional language and who function effectively in multilingual environments or across linguistic and social contexts, there is still a resistant minority for whom learning other languages, while perhaps desirable, is seen as unnecessary, given the rise of English speakers across the globe and the seemingly privileged position of English in world affairs. Indeed, the most recent report on Language Trends 2013/14 in primary and secondary schools in England points to disparities between Continental Europe and England in terms of language learning, concluding that there is a growing gulf between ‘language education policies in this country […] and those of other advanced economies’ (123). It goes on to say that ‘English alone is not enough, either as a first language or as a second or foreign language’ (123) (http://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/britishcouncil.uk2/files/language-trends-survey-2014.pdf).

Part of what this book is exploring is the cost of failing to acknowledge the power of language/s and culture/s as material resources that underpin the development of aspects of cognition and affect and that impinge upon creative potential. The economic losses of failure to compete in the global export market, through lack of linguistic skills and cross-cultural capability, are regularly pointed up by organizations in the UK such as the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The Education and Employers Taskforce, for example, produced a report in November 2011 in which the negative effect on exports due to what it termed language complacency was estimated in numerical terms to be between £7.3 and £17 billion in lost opportunities for investment and trade (http://www.educationandemployers.org/media/14563/ll_report_1__for_website.pdf).

While these losses are not insubstantial, my concern here is with, in some ways, less tangible, but nonetheless, powerful cultural goods: the circulation of ideas, of modes of expression, of representations of human experience and of the repertoires available both socially and individually to writers as they draw on available generic, linguistic and cultural modes to construct their imaginative universes.

In her recent lecture in honour of W. G. Sebald, founder of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), writer Margaret Atwood spoke about growing up in rural Canada in a non-immersion environment yet being aware, through some distant French on the radio, road signs in French, bilingual cereal boxes and suchlike, of there being another linguistic universe to parallel her own. To grow up with the presence of another language around you, she maintains, is a reminder that words need transcribing and can be puzzling and that all writing is an act of translation. For Atwood, the job of the writer is not simply to stay within the bounds of (a particular) language or to use language as a tool but to try to expand the linguistic universe and to search for answers to various mysteries. As an avid reader, she had access at home to murder mysteries and science fiction; she and her brother compiled home-made books set in other universes complete with space aliens and other languages containing high-value Scrabble letters such as q, x and y. In a sense, this awareness of the presence and co-existence of other languages, including what she calls a ‘penumbra of French’, since it was Québécois and joual (‘colloquial, urban, English-inflected French’ [Simon 2012: 122]), rather than Parisian French, on her horizon, attuned her to the possibilities as well as to the mysteries of language. Nor was she a stranger to the politics of language in that one of her own books set in northwest Canada and translated by Gallimard, the French publisher, spawned discussion about how best to translate some local references and word choices. The setting, after all, was rural Canada, not metropolitan France. So, for Atwood, translators are exceedingly careful readers who, like other writers, deal in words and sometimes words without obvious meanings, both in the sense that writers may expand or complicate conventionalized word meanings and in terms of their cross-cultural and cross-linguistic renderings. At the same time, in attempting to render into another language the words of a particular writer and her universe, translators, according to Atwood, permit readers to ‘hear voices that would otherwise remain silent for us’.

Of course, acknowledging the need for and the power of translators and literature in translation is not the same as making claims about ways of writing today that emerge from a translational culture or which suggest changes in the linguistic and literary landscapes. What Atwood was pointing to in her lecture, however, was the importance of understanding the co-presence of other languages and the effects, albeit sometimes subliminal, of this co-presence on writers writing in English. Arguably her interest in writing and creating other worlds through language was nourished by her awareness from an early age of the expressive and translational possibilities of living in other linguistic universes. In what follows, I shall chart some of the ways in which understandings of translation and translational processes have been changing and discuss how writing in English has benefited from interaction with other languages and cultures.

Translation and translational writing

Within Translation Studies both in the UK and the US, there is evidence to suggest that views of translation are changing in line with real-world changes as populations shift and the ‘multilingualism from within’ (Apter 2013: 43) in countries previously perceived as monolingual becomes evident in particular cities or immigrant communities and indeed in the writing produced by members of those communities. For Susan Bassnett (2012: 15), a leading UK Translation Studies scholar, Translation Studies is now at a crossroads and needs to think carefully about its future direction in the wake of what she calls ‘innovative and exciting research’ emerging from other disciplines such as Comparative Literature and Post-colonial Studies. Pointing to a general translational turn in the Humanities, Bassnett issues a kind of a warning to Translation Studies scholars to ensure that there is engagement with transnational research and that they ‘come out of the enclave that we [in Translation Studies] have defined and controlled but which has had very little impact outside its borders’ (23). She goes on to suggest that: ‘We need new circuits, that encompass more disciplines, more ways of reading the ever-more intercultural writing that is being produced today’ (23). Here then is recognition, from a Translation Studies insider, of a changing landscape in relation to issues of translation today and acknowledgement of the challenge to Translation Studies on the part of those in neighbouring disciplines who are taking translation seriously. Bassnett seems to be suggesting that...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Toc
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introductory Chapter
• 2. Lost in Translation
• 3. A Wandering Bigamist of Language
• 4. Lives in Translation
• 5. Migration and Mobility
• 6. Border-Crossing and Literary Creativity
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page