Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation

1. Literacy Narratives

41 Chapter 1 Literacy Narratives Mary Antin and Laura Goodman Salverson For some strange reason, I still use my old tattered Hungarian–English dictionary which I bought in Winnipeg in the summer of 1957.…The book became a symbol of freedom to me when I bought it on that hot summer day many years ago. This dictionary has helped me to speak English. This dictionary has helped me to write. And I have many things in my mind to write about. As I put them down on paper, I still use my faithful dictionary. (Ibolya Grossman, An Ordinary Woman in Extraordinary Times) Locating Early Paradigms of Immigrant Women’s Life Writing Homage to a dictionary—in immigrant families an object of everyday use elevated to the status of an heirloom—is a poignant image of writing an immigrant life as translation. This image is a visual reminder of the power of literacy to bestow significance on a seemingly ordinary existence. However, by pointing to the freedom gained through translation , this passage attests that language transfer is only the first, or fundamental , level of exchange in the traffic between a minoritized source culture and a dominating receptor culture. For immigrant women writing in English, two-way cultural translation “takes place whenever an alien experience is internalized and rewritten in the culture where that experience is received” (Carbonell 81). And since no culture is monolithic, we must expand this binary model to account for multi-level translations that each subject is called on to perform within different cultures she inhabits . In this chapter, I examine the role of translation in the context of linguistic and cultural pressure for assimilation and the bearing of various 42 Borrowed Tongues translation practices upon the formation of immigrant subjectivities in two early texts, Mary Antin’s The Promised Land: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant (1912) and Laura Goodman Salverson’s Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter (1939). These two texts have a special symbolic, historical, and heuristic value for my project. First, Antin and Salverson symbolically demarcate my field of inquiry in terms of location and generation , as an American and a Canadian writer, respectively, representative of first- and second-generation immigrant authors. Furthermore, they allow me to historicize the genre of immigrant women’s life writing, taking us back to the beginning of the twentieth century when the autobiographical tradition was still largely male-defined. Antin and Salverson also send us back to the rhetoric of assimilation that dominated discussions about immigration early in the century, before the turn to multiculturalism in the 1960s revitalized ethnic literatures. Theorizing today’s discourses of multiculturalism against the background of these early narratives, we can fully realize the persistence and continuity of assimilationist patterns of immigrant acculturation. Finally, as paradigmatic examples, The Promised Land and Confessions embody (although not necessarily exhaust) different possible approaches to translation in immigrant women’s life writing , ranging from monolingual and monocultural, to bilingual, bicultural, polyvocal, and multicultural, or any combination thereof. Translation theorists such as Antoine Berman or Paul Ricoeur often quote Franz Rosenzweig’s famous adage that to translate “is to serve two masters” (Berman 3). The source text, the author, and the source language are the “first master” whereas the translated text, the public, and the target language are the “second master.” If in the process of translating emphasis is put on the source, we have the case of what after Friedrich Schleiermacheriscalled “leadingthereadertotheauthor.”Amongtherisksinvolved in this approach to translation is that of producing an unintelligibile text, or, alternately, of “robbing” the source culture of its “proper” content. If translation is moving in the opposite direction, in Schleiermacher’s words, we speak of “leading the author to the reader.” It may result in “a conventional adaptation of the foreign work” (Berman 4), which constitutes another form of “betrayal” of the source culture through a denial and suppression of cultural specificity. This “test of the foreign,” which according to Berman is at the heart of translation, creates an impossible quandary: Every culture resists translation, even if it has an essential need for it. The very aim of translation—to open up in writing a certain relation with the Other, to fertilize what is one’s Own through the mediation Literacy Narratives 43 of what is Foreign—is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture, that species of narcissism by which every society wants to be a...