Cultural Translation of a Subject in Transit: A Transcultural Critique of Xiangyin Lai’s “The Translator” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

And whether I write as an American or an Indian, about things American or Indian or otherwise, one thing remains constant: I translate, therefore I am.

—Jhumpa Lahiri

寫我們全都生活在一個翻譯的過程裡，不只是語言，連行 為連價值連理想，我們全都說不出來自己的心意.

(I want to write that we all live in a translation process through not only language but also behavior, values, and ideals, yet we all cannot convey our minds clearly.)

—Xiangyin Lai

The two epigraphs above are respective responses from Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967)¹ and Taiwanese writer Xiangyin Lai (b. 1969)² to inquiries on their writing. The first quotation regards translation as a way to claim one’s existence, and the second views life as an ongoing translation process. Both imply that translation in context is not only interlingual or intercultural decoding, but also a way of defining the self and life. Such translation is no longer perceived as a copy inferior to “the irretrievable origin,”³ or “a process of power” in “institutionalized practice given the wider relationship of unequal societies.”⁴ Nor is it only “a strategy of resistance” to “the problematic of the translation” inscribed with imperial or humanistic “civilizing” ideologies in colonial contexts.⁵ Instead, it is closer to what Tejaswini Niranjana states in Siting Translation: “for a richer complexity, a complication of our notions of the ‘self,’ a more densely textured understanding of who ‘we’ are.”⁶ After what Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere called “the cultural turn” of translation theories,⁷ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak further adds that cultural translation “becomes incredibly different from the theoretical stuff that we have so far discussed.”⁸ Thus, cultural translations are important in comparative literature studies in an age of globalization because a major concern is to address ongoing changes from various viewpoints, including those of emerging hybrid and new generations.⁹

Although Lai and Lahiri are regarded as “native returnees,”¹⁰ they claim that they are of a new generation, different from previous nationalist or nativist generations. To them, social maladies no longer lie in public spheres for unrecognized subjectivities, but in private homes that become the “uncanny sites” of social conflict or personal trauma. Their concerns have moved beyond outmoded cultural translation of identity politics to reconstruct new cultures of their own by creative writing. However, most critics of the selected texts still focus on identity politics without considering the subtly “differentiated cultural differences” of new generations.¹¹

This paper first explores the cultural translations in Lai’s short story “The Translator” and then Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” because the texts reveal the authors’ stances. The texts also address the role of the translator and the tension between translatability and untranslatability, which may shed some light on the task of the cultural translator. Exploring the translator as “a subject in transit”¹² in the literary texts from a transcultural perspective is also of major concern. This perspective does not refer to “embracing transnationalism”¹³ or simply compares texts from different cultures, but also refers to the “trans-valuation of problematic cultural beliefs” in the light of the “Nietzschean Ubermensch [over-man].”¹⁴ It further considers different peoples, time, and spaces while stressing the need to transcend problematic cultural mentalities revealed in the texts in their historical and cultural contexts.¹⁵ In other words, transcultural and transnational are not the same. The former stresses transcending biased cultural mentalities that may include those entailed in the latter. A transcultural critique is “an ongoing dialectic and dialogical process of transformation for new possibilities after taking the three dimensions into consideration.”¹⁶

The following exploration first focuses on closely reading the texts for instances of untranslatability when translators interpret their perceived “others” in different “transcultural contact zones.”¹⁷ Then I analyze possible reasons and implications, such as the causes of translators’ misreading objects and whether these instances occur because of “the deferred nature of cultural mentalities synchronically and diachronically.”¹⁸ I also explore whether the translators show the characteristics of “a subject in transit”¹⁹ and the potential to locate “a line of flight...