A Vocabulary of Thinking: Gertrude Stein and Contemporary North American Women's Innnovative Writing

5. Found in Retranslation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . five Found in Retranslation Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE Perhaps not any one really is a whole one inside them to themselves or to any one. Perhaps not every one is in pieces inside them and perhaps everyone has not completely in them their own being inside in them.—Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans U nlike the other authors in this study, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha may not have been familiarwithStein’sworkingeneral,much less with any of Stein’s work in particular. AccordingtoConstanceLewallen,ChawasdrawntotheworkofStéphane Mallarmé and Samuel Beckett, writers who are fixtures in the avant-garde canon. Cha’s work, particularly her performance pieces and films, do seem to reflect these influences: Lewallen traces, for instance, Cha’s use of unconventional typographic design to Mallarmé (especially his Un Coup de Dés) and her penchant for stripped-down settings to Beckett (2). Other criticshavelinkedCha’sworktothelongpoemsofCharlesOlson,William Carlos Williams (Wong 138–139), Robert Duncan (Cheng), Ezra Pound (Wong 138–139; Park; Cheng) and Charles Baudelaire (Park). But these writers are privileged figures in Western literary tradition, and as I have argued in previous chapters, we cannot position contemporary experimental literature solely in relationship to white male predecessors. While it’s impossible to ascertain whether Cha knew Stein’s work, it is nevertheless fruitful to consider the two authors’ works in tandem—specifically Stein’s The Making of Americans and Cha’s DICTEE—as a means not only to understand the place of women writers vis-à-vis both the experimental and the epic literary traditions but also to consider the role of the immigrant in relationship to these traditions.1 For both writers, the work of re- 126 . . . Found in Retranslation covering and replacing their own stories specifically and women’s stories more broadly, of marking these stories’ centrality to history, is carried out through their reimagined epics. One way to think about what’s going on in both texts, in terms of language and genre, is to view each text as a kind of translation, one that departs from traditional understandings of translation as an essentially direct and transparent move from one language or set of codes to another, represented as equivalent. What Stein and Cha highlight in their reworkings of the epic, and what Cha points to through her uses of linguistic translations , is a double project of careful replication and unavoidable and even desirable revision. Though it is possible to read the polyphonia of languages in DICTEE as an attempt to work toward reconciliation with some kind of “mother tongue” (as both Rob Wilson and Stephen-Paul Martin do), Cha and Stein use the limits of translation—not only of language but also of genre and narrative—as a means to liberate themselves and their readers from the myth of origins. Anne Anlin Cheng explains that as a Korean American woman immigrant, Cha “occupies the multiple positions of religious, colonial, post-colonial, and feminist subject(s)” (121); as I have discussed in other chapters, Stein, too, occupied multiple subject positions, including those marked by national, religious, and sexual differences . Through their emphasis on the act(s) of retranslation, Stein and Cha point to the instability of origins, to the idea that there is no unproblematized “original” or single subject position to which they (or anyone else) can connect. A traditional practice of translation that seeks to position itself as a transparent representation of some original text (that is, as a faithful copy of the text) can be used as a strategy of containment because, despite the pretense of symmetry, there is in fact a power relationship at the heart of translation. Lisa Lowe highlights its coercive aspects when she argues that translation can “level and minimize linguistic differences [and] its presumption of equivalence masks the hierarchy of cultures operating in any differentiated linguistic relationship” (Immigrant 134). However, in “The Politics of Translation,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out that the practice has the potential to undermine hierarchical power relationships . “Translation is the most intimate act of reading” (181), she argues, as it requires a kind of permissiveness and care between reader/translator and text. Spivak frames the issue in terms of a feminist ethical relationship between text and translator: “Logic allows us to jump from word to word by means of clearly indicated connections. Rhetoric must work Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE . . . 127 in the silence between and around words in order to see...