Notes
229 Notes Notes to Introduction: Migrations of Theories 1 The theoretical possibilities of bridging autobiography and translation studies began to be explored only recently. In fact, the 2008 International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference had translation as its theme. I have found three booklength studies, beginning with Mary Besemeres’s pioneering Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography, Martha Cutter’s Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity, and most recently, Bella Brodzki’s Can These Bones Live? Translation , Survival, and Cultural Memory. Besemeres’s title is, however, a little misleading since in addition to autobiography, she also examines modernist fiction and poetry written by “language migrants.” She is overly suspicious of poststructuralist approaches to language and self, which inform my own perspective, and her overall concern is “how a particular self at any time depends for its expression on a particular natural language” (10). Cutter’s book applies translation to American ethnic writing and Native American writing, including a few autobiographical texts. Her approach, however, differs from mine in that she focuses less on questions of translation and subjectivity than on the politics of multilingualism in the context of US multiculturalism. Finally, Brodzki grounds her argument in the poststructuralist theories of translation elaborated by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, focusing on translation’s links to cultural survival and memorialization, trauma and memory, whereas I focus more on issues of power and subjectivity. Moreover, in the European context, the interest in globalization and its effects has spurred several attempts to rethink the connection between translation and identity, most notably in Michael Cronin’s Translation and Identity, which links translation to migration and new forms of cosmopolitanism. Similarly, Translating Identity and the Identity of Translation , edited by Madelena Gonzalez and Francine Tolron, uses the problematic of translation to examine the changing politics of identity in its local and global manifestations in postcolonial societies, in search of “a new postnational form of literary studies better equipped to take into account the interculturalism of contemporary life and its altered identities” (viii). 230 Notes to Introduction 2 My choice of the term “life writing” over “autobiography” is consistent with a longestablished tradition in autobiography studies where “life writing” has been used to encompass non-canonical or hybrid forms of autobiographical practices. See, for example, Donald Winslow’s dictionary (1980); Evelyn Hinz’s “Speculative Introduction : Life-Writing as Drama,” in a special issue of Mosaic (1987); K.P. Stich’s 1988 definition of “life-writing” as “a hybrid form [which] blurs the distinction between autobiography, autobiographical novel, and fictional autobiography” (Reflections 16); Shirley Neuman’s entry on “Life-Writing” in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (1990); and Helen Buss’s “Writing and Reading Autobiographically ,” Introduction to Prairie Fire’s 1995 “Life Writing” Issue. More recently, Margareta Jolly explains that she chose life writing for the title of her encylopedia “because of its openness and inclusiveness across genre, and because it encompasses the writing of one’s own or another’s life” (ix). Also Cynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons assert that from the 1980s onwards, “autobiography studies was redefined as ‘life writing,’ in order to accommodate … the emergence of new testimonial forms” (ix). 3 Note the ambivalent construction of “host” that places the immigrant as a parasite or, in a more benign way, a recipient of hospitality. 4 Derrida’s earlier engagement with Jakobson can be found in “Des Tours de Babel,” where he critiques the presupposition of “the unity and identity of language” in Jakobson ’s theory of translation (173). 5 As part of decentring translation studies, Maria Tymoczko advocates “broadening the definition of translation and breaking the hold of Eurocentric stereotypes of translation” by including “forms and modes of cultural interface that are related to translation but distinct from it” such as postcolonial literature (“Reconceptualizing” 27). Immigrant life writing can obviously be included in this interface. She critiques Eurocentric assumptions of monolingualism built into translation studies, premised on the equation of nation with language; privileging of written literacy over orality; individualistic rather than collective models of meaning production; and the ahistorical assumption that cultural mixing and hybridity are contemporary phenomena resulting from globalization. 6 I use close reading following the example of feminist narratology, that is, as a more contextual than formalist approach. See Warhol. 7 Lefevere prefers to talk of a “conceptual grid” and a “textual grid.” For example, cultural differences and specificities belong to the former...
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