Translating One's Self

By Mary Besemeres, Bern: Peter Lang, 2002, 295 pages, paperback, . Reviewed by Richard Freadman in the April 2004 issue.

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This fine book makes a substantial contribution to several domains of academic inquiry, including autobiography scholarship, translation studies, comparative literary studies, the philosophy of language, genre criticism and theory, cultural studies and literary theory. Its critical discussions of texts from various genres--autobiography, fiction, poetry--are consistently subtle and intricate, and yield some memorable formulations: 'Pnin's narrator turns out to be a simulacrum of Nabokov, a kind of glittering snakeskin the author sloughs off by the end of the narrative' (p. 86).

Translating One's Self is an inquiry into the linguistic and existential lives of 'language migrants' (p. 9) -- those who migrate from a native language and its associated cultural world to an adoptive language-world. The pivotal concept of 'self-translation' (p. 30) applies to language migrants who fashion narratives that try to encompass both the inaugural and the re-located cultural-linguistic self. Such writers, working in their migrant tongue, must narratively 'translate' the self that took shape in the native language in order to render it intelligible to an adoptive language readership.

The 'self' of the title resonates in several ways. Besemeres wants the term's inclusiveness: its reference to the person's 'whole inner life', as opposed to the acts of merely conscious auto-conceptualisation she associates with the oft-used (and often oppositional) term 'identity' (p. 21). She acknowledges that her use of 'self' reflects the book's ' Anglo cultural freight' (p. 22)--a point she elaborates in a fascinating discussion of ways reflexive pronouns operate in various languages. Does this 'freight' constitute a flaw in Besemeres' project? Surely not. She knows that narrative can only emanate from some linguistic-cultural location, however hybridised that location may be, and that narrative will therefore reflect perspectival values, assumptions, practices. Besemeres' admission of her own academic positionality mirrors her preference for self-translation narratives that contain similar acknowledgements and that work creatively with the implications of cultural transition. Here, as in other respects, Eva Hoffmann's Lost in Translation, with its scrupulous weighing of translation's losses and gains, and its commitment to the possibilities of translingual selfhood, epitomises 'self-translation' as Besemeres understands it.

Like all forms of self-characterisation, 'self-translation' effects a kind of split in the self whereby it becomes both the fashioner and the object of its own narrative. For some, that split confirms Lacanian and other postmodern claims that the self (or subject) is constitutively divided, even fragmented. Postmodernists may also see in translation's slippages and imprecision evidence for Derrida's deconstructive account of language in general. Besemeres airs and makes constructive concessions to such views, but differentiates her own position from them. Her assertion that 'the self is constituted partly by natural language' (p. 12) implicitly distinguishes between natural language and the generalising abstraction of Derridian grammatology. The qualifier 'partly' insists that human beings operate as agents--albeit constrained agents--in their language worlds. One of this book's great strengths is its refusal of the tired, pompous, binaristic pronouncements about language and the self/subject that have dogged literary studies in recent decades. In effect, Besemeres demonstrates that both the humanist who says 'we speak language' and the post-Saussurean who insists that 'language speaks us' are missing the point. Selves (here understood as substantial reflective and deliberative individual entities) take shape in but also use language; the language-self relation is dynamic, reciprocal, dialogical. Hence the self-translator receives and takes shape in language but must actively, agentially, fashion a story of language migration and selfhood in language. Besemeres refers approvingly to 'Hoffman's own reflexive metaphor of self-translation, where the self is understood as both struggling agent and elusive object of the enterprise' (p. 60). For Besemeres, as for Hoffman, the autobiographical storying of the self's psychic and circumstantial discontinuities can help heal its rifts, harmonise its hitherto divergent aspects. Hence Besemeres' rejection of generalised ontological characterisations of the self as radically discontinuous or fragmented.

The principal authors discussed in the book are Eva Hoffman, Czeslaw Milosz, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, Andrew Riemer, and Kazuo Ishiguro. In her final summation Besemeres sketches a 'typology of possible cross-cultural and translingual selves' (p. 275) -- a typology that both derives from and helps to place her chosen authors. On this typological assessment Nabokov and Milosz unduly privilege their first language and culture; Riemer and Rodriguez write as if 'the self of their native language were buried and their own histories had begun with learning English'. Hoffman, Kingston and Ishiguro are superior self-translators because their writing embraces 'both linguistic sources of the self'(p. 275). As this evaluative appraisal suggests, Translating One's Self is not just a work of descriptive scholarship. It is informed by a central ethical premise -- that 'something is owed in translation to the self who was wrought through participation in a native language and cultural environment -- and to the particular people who brought that self up' (p. 279). This commitment, with its deep roots in humanistic notions of authenticity, and its eschewal of pseudo-scientistic accounts of language and culture, is both welcome and intellectually productive: it helps give this densely scholarly book emotional warmth and nuance, as in the rich discussions of embarrassment (Riemer), relationalism (Kingston), 'self-unwriting' (Milosz), compulsive irony (Nabokov) and Hoffman's ultimately productive feelings of alienation.

Translating One's Self is a PhD become book and as usual in such cases there are places where the 'translation' of thesis into monograph leaves too much of the original in view -- the PhD's typically excessive citation of academic authorities; a surfeit of recapitulation; traces of anxiety where confident grace has good reason to go. One could wish for further elaboration of Besemeres' 'taxonomy' (not so much its contents as its epistemological status), more about the specific challenges that confront the author whose self-translation is into English, and perhaps further consideration of matters of genre: what constraints and possibilities confront a poet self-translator like Milosz, as opposed to autobiographers 'proper' and novelists? What of the sub-title's use of 'autobiography', where the term seems to designate a linguisticised structure of self-relatedness rather than a narrative or literary genre? And what of the genre-related choices involved in electing to self-translate in this genre rather than that, or, like Nabokov, Hoffman, Kingston and others, in more genres than one?

These are minor reservations about an outstanding and generally elegant work of scholarship which addresses issues of urgent importance in an increasingly globalised world. The bright thread of hope that runs through these pages is the conviction that, like Eva Hoffman, language migrants can be 'aware of the relativity of the languages in which they live yet open to the possibility that each language may render fully and in some sense absolutely, a particular, unrepeatable world' (p. 50).

Citation

• Richard Freadman. 'Review: Translating One's Self by Mary Besemeres' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), April 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 22 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• This study explores ways in which a person's inner world may differ from one language and culture to another, and how immigrants into a new language are challenged to become different persons. The book's focus on cross-cultural autobiography allows it to challenge some influential theoretical approaches in literature to the relationship between language and identity, through a close study of contemporary experiences of 'language migration'. Each of the seven chapters considers the work of a major contemporary bilingual author. Life-writing by 'migrants into English' such as Eva Hoffman, Andrew Reimer, Maxine Hong Kingston and Vladimir Nabokov shows that entering a new language involves 'translating one's self', losing part of one's emotional and conceptual world in the process. This translingual and transcultural experience is an increasingly important feature of the modern world. This book gives full attention to this experience. It provides the first in-depth study of Eva Hoffman's trailblazing Lost in Translation, and connects cross-cultural memoirs by authors like Richard Rodriguez and Andrew Reimer to the work of translingual writers as distinct as Kazuo Ishiguro and Czeslaw Milosz.

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