English as a Literature in Translation by Fiona J. Doloughan

Abstract

DOLOUGHAN, FIONA J. English as Literature in Translation. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 179 pp. $100.00 hardcover; $89.99 e-book. Fiona J. Doloughan's new study is an examination of contemporary novels in English through the prism of translation. Taking her departure in the translational turn in Humanities, Steven G. Kellman's influential concept of literary translingualism, and English's role as lingua franca for non-native speakers worldwide, Doloughan sets out discover how writers who have found English as opposed having been born into it (e.g., Eva Hoffman, Ariel Dorfman, Xiaolu Guo) and bilingual writers or writers for whom non-standard variety of English is the starting point (Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, James Kelman) are changing the expression of literature in English. Doloughan's interest lies with what she coins as narratives of translation, that is, that thematize, narrativize and/or are structured around, questions of language, cultural identity and what it means translate oneself or one's culture (79). The main focus of the study is not primarily the way the examined writers are changing the English literary language of today's globalized world; rather, it is the thematic aspects that dominate--that is, how experiences of switching languages and/or moving through are expressed in the chosen works. It is an optimistic narrative Doloughan is writing. She wants to suggest that the prototypical notion of language as loss, and translation of self and other as predominantly painful and traumatic experience, have given way greater sense of what is be gained, both at the individual and societal levels, through access different languages and cultures (1). She regards this development as correlating with more positive understanding of bi- and multilingualism in linguistic research as well as in society. While literary multilingualism undoubtedly is vehicle for renewing literary expression, question already extensively explored in literary scholarship (e.g., Doris Sommer's Bilingual Aesthetics 2004 and Hana Wirth-Nesher's Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature 2006, just mention couple of works), the narrative of from loss gain is problematic. Firstly, the chronology of the chosen works contradicts it. The most radical argument for linguistic and cultural hybridity as gain, not loss in the study, Anzaldiia's classic Borderlands/La Frontera 1987, is actually the oldest of the works, preceding Hoffman's story of language learning as the loss of another language in Lost in Translation (1989) by two years. It also precedes, by over decade, Ariel Dorfman's memoirs with their eroticization of language ties in terms of bigamy--itself an excellent illustration of the monolingualist conception of the mother tongue as a family romance described by Yasemin Yildiz in Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012). Secondly, the transformation of literature in English by writers with background in other languages is not new phenomenon. Multilingual modernists like Beckett. Conrad, and Nabokov that Doloughan briefly mentions (162) were not exceptions monolingualism; instead, translingualism, exile, and textual multilingualism are constitutional traits of European literary modernism (cf. Languages of Exile, eds. Englund & Olsson, 2013). …