Translation and Transaction in American Immigrant Phrasebooks

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue amadiemze d'hude.s amertcames Volume 26, Number 2, Spnng 1996, pp. 139-161 Translation and Transaction in American Immigrant Phrasebooks Laura ]. Murray 139 Think about the phrasebook-perhaps one of those infuriating and handy guides you've taken along on a holiday. A phrasebook stages an encounter between two people speaking different languages. It is a script, an ideal scenario, for courteous and intelligible cross-cultural dialogue. The script of the phrasebook may be a product of the cultural and linguistic patterns of either of the languages it includes, or it may represent an attempt by an author from one of the cultures to guess the conversational norms and topics of the other. The phrasebook's downfall is, of course, that it presupposes that the unsuspecting partner in dialogue will also know the script, and agree to follow it. If this does not happen-that is, if the interlocutor, instead of cooperating by saying, "Oui, Monsieur, le train va partir asept heures mains quart," goes off on a diatribe about the railway strike-then the phrasebook user is stranded. If the interlocutor does cooperate (unlikely as it may be outside of the language classroom), the resulting conversation is not in fact a significantly cross-cultural event, but a trivial or at least controlled encounter on a small piece of shared ground. Either way, the phrasebook represents a very precarious and limited sort of interaction. And this is what interests me. Phrasebooks, to the extent that they display or enable scripted, blocked, or uncomprehending encounters, may serve as a productive metaphor for scripted, blocked, or uncomprehending encounters between different peoples. 1 140 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'hu.des ame11cames My interest in phrasebooks began with two literary texts widely divergent in period and style, but both concerned with staging relations between newly arrived and established Americans. Roger Williams'sA Key into the Language of America ([1643] 1973) consists in large part of conversations rendered m Narragansett and English, and Shawn Wong's novel Homebase (1979) uses a sequence of English phrases from an 1875 Chinese-English phrasebook as an evocative epigraph. In both cases, the phrases struck me as richly poetic in their cross-cultural and cross-linguistic ambiguity. 2 Similarly, several of the vocabularies of Native American languages collected by Peter Du Ponceau 111 the early nineteenth century contain what can only be called "found poems" of phrases. 3 These dialogues represent a great degree of complexity in the interchange between the established American-in this case the aboriginal American-and new arrival. They skip oddly and insistently from topic to topic: in a French-Pian/Illinois/Mi vocabulary, "notre pere faites nous la charite"-our father have pity upon us-is followed directly by "qu'as tu a vendre"-what do you have to sell. The "conversation" proceeds with a tense mixture of warmth and hostility (English translations are mine): Allons ensemble ala chasse. (Let's go hunting together.) Dinons ensemble. (Let's eat together.) Pourrais-je rester chez vous cette nuit? (May I stay with you tonight?) Combien voulez-vous de cela? (How much do you want of that?) C'est trop cher. (It's too expensive.) Tu es avare. (You are greedy.) Je vous remercie. (Thank you.) Mamaoue naton amaouikane. Mamaoue micitaou1. Ouahi nine paeala inoki? Tami lassu calamehmana. Ouissa Kinantotah. Issoukire. Ouaouahinou Ckitaeamc1. Va-t-en. (Go away.) Laura]. Mumrv I 141 Man-ciarou. At this point, the list of phrases takes an abrupt turn into discussions of mortality and baptism. Its most remarkable moment is the claim of an unspecified speaker (a trader? a priest? a Pian man?} that he is "white, red, yellow, black, blue and green.JI After this apparent dismantling of racial categories , the list ends with the phrase "the wind from the south" or the "south wind," enigmatically suggesting some preoccupation from elsewhere blowing into the catholic catechism and trade negotiations. A Menominee-English vocabulary from the same collection also dramatizes relationships quite erotic in their intimacy and potential for violence: before its cosy discussions of drinking tea and boiling eggs, the vocabulary presents terminology for describing injuries-such as...