Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration and Translation by Eva Karpinski (review)

The study of translation as the preferred, if not unavoidable, vehicle of communication between languages and cultures has benefited from increased academic interest in the past years. Not only have contemporary philosophers such as Derrida and Ricoeur had their say, but academics from the humanities and many social sciences are also aware of the effects and uses (and abuses) of translation in their disciplines and in the subjects they address. Questions around gendered identity continue to garner attention in these times, and when brought together with translation as representation and interpretation, they raise new and intriguing ways of “seeing things.” In its exploration of women’s autobiographical accounts of immigration to the United States and Canada this book by Eva Karpinski adds the additional element of migration to the interest in gender and translation.

Her introduction usefully explores “life writing” and various other concepts and terms newly coined for women’s autobiography and presents this long-overlooked genre as translation – as the translation, interpretation, and representation of gendered experiences of yet another form of translation, namely, migration, immigration, and exile from a home/ source culture into foreignness. The many theoretical approaches that study translation as an encounter with and construction of alterity provide a fluid, flexible, and multi-faceted approach to this diverse writing by and about “different” women.

In chapter 1 the focus is on Mary Antin and Laura Goodman Salverson, immigrant women writers who translate, to some extent, the Yiddish/ Russian and Icelandic immigrant communities into English for North America. Writing in the early twentieth century, they start from the “premise of assimilability.” Salverson, who had literary ambitions, imposes a kind of idealized equivalence on her narrative, whereas Antin “manages to mobilize the creative possibilities of difference.”

Chapter 2 studies the work of women academics Akemi Kikumura and Apolonja Maria Kojder, who write about the immigrant communities they hail from, and more specifically their mothers. Introduced with references to Derrida’s “gesture of appropriation” that is inherent in any translation, this chapter looks at immigrant daughters’ rewriting of their mothers’ experiences. In terms of praxis, Kikumura translates a text written by her mother and accompanies it with annotations, a preface, and other materials, while Kojder recasts her mother’s memories in a third-person narrative. Karpinski points out how these different methods cast doubt on the truth value of oral history (as translation), which demands “attention to self-reflexivity manifest in the processes of telling, transcribing, translating, retelling and editing of oral history narratives.”

Chapter 3 examines work by two “self-translators” – Eva Hoffman and Smaro Kamboureli – who seem to subscribe to a rather negative view of translation in their autobiographical accounts of migrating to North America from Poland and Greece respectively. “Loss” and the limits of translation preoccupy these writers, and while Hoffman engages with linguistic and cultural displacement in the search for some “essence,” Kamboureli distrusts translation for the danger it presents of imposing finality and closure.

In chapter 4, the focus is on immigrant women writers from the Caribbean, who translate between different Englishes, deliberately “creolizing” English, to recount situations inflected with post-coloniality. In their work writing as translation becomes a “strategy of deconstructive mimic-ry” but also a way to translate colonialism into life writing. Both writers are strangers in their own language, and their work of translation is presented as a form of creative transformation and resistance to the position of alterity assigned to them.

Borrowed Tongues finds many ways to expand on the truism that women’s writing is always already translation into the dominant idiom. In the very diverse examples Karpinski develops here, this metaphor proves all the more useful in its application to women migrants and the narratives of their migrancy.