My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography by Genaro M. Padilla (review)

94Rocky Mountain Review makes for compelling reading. Through careful analysis of technical features , such as the use of monologues and dialogues, strategies of comedy, the depiction of character, and the rationale for omissions, additions, and the reordering of scenes, Mengel elucidates the many problems of interlingual translation. These problems may be due at times to the age of the German plays or result from differing cultural traditions. His discussion illustrates the difficulties in embedding German plays into a new literary context with its different repertoire of theatrical conventions. Making use of lengthy and well chosen quotes to illustrate the transpositional strategies of the English translators and adapters, Mengel demonstrates how they often used their translations and adaptations to realize their idiosyncratic artistic aims or to actually give voice to their own philosophies. Mengel examines both comedies and tragedies that are arranged chronologically , following the publication dates of the English texts. It is an arrangement, as Mengel points out, that emphasizes the idea that a translation or adaptation, all too often viewed as an inferior hybrid-text, has to be analyzed and valued as a text in its own right. Individual chapters take up Schiller's Maria Stuart, translated by Stephen Spender; Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen (Ironhand), adapted and changed considerably by John Arden; and Zuckmayer's Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (The Captain of Köpenick), adapted by John Mortimer. Büchner's Woyzeck is next compared to Charles Marowitz's transliteration, followed by analysis of Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), translated by Edward Bond. Discussion follows of Schnitzler's Das weite Land (Undiscovered Country), adapted by Tom Stoppard; Brecht's Leben des Galilei (The Life of Galileo), translated by Howard Brenton; and Nestro/s Einen Jux will er sich machen (On the Razzie), adapted freely by Tom Stoppard. The last two chapters explore Büchner's Dantons Tod (Danton's Death), translated by Howard Brenton, and Schnitzler's Liebelei (Dalliance), adapted by Tom Stoppard. The book concludes with a well chosen bibliography which promises to be of interest to students and scholars of translation criticism. Mengel expresses his hope that his elucidation of the relationship between the dramatists belonging to different languages, cultures, and eras, and his detailed analyses of their plays, will serve as means to further intercultural communication and exchange. It promises to do so. TIIU V. LAANE Texas A&M University GENARO M. PADILLA. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. 296 p. Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography Series, under the editorship of William L. Andrews, has enriched itself significantly with Genaro Padilla's research on cultural autobiography, and specifically on Chicano Book Reviews95 studies. Charting his own territory, problematizing self-representation, and consulting archival material to reveal the "breaking bones of memory" are some of the analytical procedures Padilla undertakes. In his search for the hidden ethnic subject, he reveals the other side of History, decolonizes knowledge, experience, and the culture of the Other(s), and listens to silenced voices embedded in autobiographical writings from the nineteenth century. Positioning himself in between two cultures, and two languages, while he reads/writes voices located in a multiplicity of times and spaces, Padilla creates an intercultural site for the reader to inhabit the autobiographical borderlands. The Chicano scholar contests the notion of a "naive model of representation" as he reflects upon the social, political, and discursive forces which conditioned, affected, buried, or limited the formation of an ethnic cultural subject after the war between the United States and Mexico in 1846-48. Awareness of the social complexity of the past and of his position in this new field of literary and cultural studies marks Padilla's exploration of diaries , letters, family histories, epistolary collections, personal poetry, oral poetry, and personal documents. Padilla deconstructs his own story as a scholar giving up temporarily the research on contemporary Chicano autobiography as he starts listening to the voices of his ancestors and grasps in their writings a world characterized by displacement and an identity, memory , and history threatened by erasure. He discusses nostalgia as an auto/bio/grapheme, as a trace of resistance writing that conveys the longing for...