Review

Abstract

As Susan Xu Yun describes in her latest book Translation of Autobiography, even though in Singapore “many people have had the practical experience in translation,” “translation has never been thought of as a respectable pursuit” (14–15). It is a common problem that people do not treat translation seriously, thus translated text sometimes shows awkward deviation or distortion. Inspired by the different “feels” (210) in reading the English and Chinese versions of Lee Kuan Yew's autobiography, Xu explores the worlds created by translation's source text and target text. Borrowing from multiple disciplines, Xu establishes her own interdisciplinary theoretical framework exclusively for autobiography, with which she discovers stylistic differences between the English autobiography Lee Kuan Yew, My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore Bilingual Journey (Challenge hereafter) and the Chinese counterpart 《李光耀, 我一生的挑战 :新加坡双语之路》 (Li Guang Yao, Wo Yisheng de Tiaozhan: Xinjiapo Shuangyu zhi Lu, Tiaozhan hereafter) by comparing the linguistic indicators in both texts. In doing so, Xu not only adopts a comprehensive approach to analyzing autobiography and its translation, but also exposes a ubiquitous problem about the translator's manipulation of the author's original ideas.Xu follows a careful process in forming her stylistic methodology. Every step has its powerful theoretical basis, able to stand scrutiny. To begin with, she presents the background of the simultaneous publishing of Challenge and Tiaozhan. People usually believe that Lee Kuan Yew wrote both himself, while Xu presents strong evidence showing Tiaozhan is a translation worked out by a group of translators and editors. Thus, she explicitly “posit[s] Tiaozhan as the assumed translation of Challenge” (12), setting the premise of her research. As theoretical preparation, she first devises four pairs of opposition to affirm autobiography's “multi-dimensioned nature” (205) and addresses its social function in conveying a particular ideology. Then she narrows down and borrows from several linguistic schools to build the most appropriate framework for her stylistic analysis of autobiography, in which deviant linguistic features are the central element for formal and functional study of the sociocultural context. In addition, she adopts a fable-plot-text narrative structure for autobiography to clarify its narrative communicative model. The linguistic features would serve as key evidence in detecting the narrator's and character's “point of view” (51), and they also function as signals of the interaction between the narrator's consciousness and the reader's consciousness, helping to perceive the emotional and ideological effects on the reader. With a completed framework, Xu analyzes and compares Challenge and Tiaozhan as critical cases displaying the translator's manipulation of the narrative situation.Xu's research sets out from a redefinition of autobiography, which “is not a simple, unitary genre” (39). Autobiography, in Xu's comparison with other types of life-writing, possesses four pairs of binary oppositions—“objectivity and subjectivity, comprehensibility and exceptionality, public and private, truth and myth” (29), but in varying degrees. Xu investigates the mainstream theoretical strands in autobiography study and addresses the dearth of “a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary framework” (39). In the second chapter, she offers a possible solution by establishing an integrated framework. A central notion of the framework is the formalist term “foregrounding,” meaning formal distinctiveness in the language of autobiography. Xu zeros in on the defamiliarization effect of “foregrounding” and turns to Geoffrey N. Leech and Mick Short's checklist to pinpoint specific “deviant linguistic features” (47) and their functions. The checklist consists of four subcategories of linguistic features—“lexical categories,” “grammatical categories,” “figures of speech,” and “context and cohesion” (48), each with illustrations connecting specific linguistic aspects to specific sociocultural contexts. Another tool is Hallidayan meaning-oriented functional grammar, in which the textual, ideational, and interpersonal functions of language coexist to satisfy users' “communicative needs” (49). Similar to Leech and Short's checklist, Halliday and Matthiessen's theory focuses on linguistic features and their reflection of one's personal or social relationships, with the ideational function playing a prominent role in research for the ideological significance of autobiography. Further exploration of the typology of “point of view” in autobiography is based on Roger Fowler's enquiry into public or personal discourse in linguistic usage, which aims to discover the emotional impacts and aesthetic effects on readers. The integrated framework is then applied to “foregrounding” in Challenge to show its particular defamiliarization effect and social meaning.The third chapter steers the research into narratological study. After comparing and analyzing four types of narrative structure, Xu chooses to employ a “fabula-plot-text” model for her research to avoid possible confusion (69). Each of its three layers has corresponding participants of discourse, namely implied author and implied reader for narrative text, narrator and narratee for plot, and characters for fabula. Xu agrees with Leech and Short's three-level discourse structure developed from Seymour Chatman's narrative-communicative situation (real author&#ξ2192;implied author&#ξ2192;narrator&#ξ2192; narratee&#ξ2192;implied reader&#ξ2192;real reader) and combines it with her “fabula-plot-text” narrative structure. Leech and Short's discourse structure fuses author–reader and implied author–implied reader into the top level, corresponding to text in narrative structure; the second level contains the discourse of narrator and narratee, which happens in plot; and the bottom level, the discourse of character, is placed within fabula. She points out that autobiographical readers often take it for granted that the author, implied author, first person narrator (I-narrator), and I-character share one “point of view.” To correct the misconception, Xu notes that the implied author of autobiography is a persona portrayed by the narrative text while the real author “does not have a direct appearance” (76). The implied author holds the complete information and “tricks the readers by withholding information” (79), but the I-narrator, restricted by his or her perspective, sometimes “reveals a lack of precision and assertiveness” (79). The I-character in the story world suffers even more restrictions in focalization and mind state. As protagonist, an I-character might be limited by his or her age and experience in the story time, easily distinguished from the retrospective I-narrator with more superiority. Regarding the four distinctive communication roles in autobiography, Xu proposes two hypothetical models of narrative situation for them. One is an “ideal narrative situation” (83) where each role's “point of view” is completely included in its superior's (e.g., I-character's “point of view” is part of I-narrator's, I-narrator's is part of implied author's, implied author's is part of real author's) and each inferior role can reliably represent part of its superior. Another model is that each role has only the main part of its “point of view” embedded in the superior's, with the remaining part deviating from the superior's “point of view,” and might give rise to “significant deviation from the real author's attitude and belief” (83). In later chapters, the hypothetical models will be tested in the case study to show how the translator alternates the real author's attitude.After Xu's discussion of the roles in narrative situations, the book's focus shifts to specific linguistic indicators reflecting each particular role's “point of view.” Xu reviews “point of view” theory from psychological, visual, ideological, and linguistic aspects. Among the diverse theoretical approaches to these issues, she selects for her autobiography study several “important narrative devices or linguistic features that function to ascribe ‘point of view’ to the character or the narrator” (95). The methodology is amplified in chapter 4. This study of “Point of view” is complemented by Monika Fludernik's reader-oriented cognitive model, which is about how narratorial consciousness resorts to particular language schema for ruling the reader's consciousness. According to Xu's study of three key linguistic indicators, the reader's consciousness is activated by deixis (e.g., person deixis—I and you, temporal deixis—now and then); the speaker's subjectivity is exposed by modalities like can, will, and ought to; whereas speech and thought presentation implies that the narrator's and character's consciousness “intermingle” (132)—the narrator's consciousness is indicated by narrative report of speech/thought act and indirect speech/thought, and the character's consciousness can be perceived in direct speech/thought and free indirect speech/thought. Regrettably, the concept of “consciousness” and its relation with the whole stylistic framework is not fully explicated, causing a little ambiguity in the book's logical structure. The end of this chapter comes to the final stage of Xu's whole stylistic approach, presenting two specific effects created by the interplay of the character's and narrator's consciousness: empathy and irony. In her analysis of linguistic indicators in Challenge, different roles in narrative situation have no discordance in consciousness. They convey consistent ideological and emotional effect and form a “seamless conflation of I-character, I-narrator and implied author” (132), fitting well into Xu's first hypothesis—“ideal narrative situation.”The last two chapters are applications of Xu's stylistic approach to the Chinese version of Tiaozhan. Inspired by Giuliana Schiavi's concept of implied translator as a moderator of the fictional world, Xu defines the “implied translator” of Tiaozhan as “the voices of editors, journalists, translators and proofreaders who work for the Press and share a set of presuppositions with regard to the target readers and culture” (139). Chapter 5 first delves into Lefevere's concept of rewriting, which is “adaptation and manipulation of the original works” (143) to fulfil an ideological and poetical purpose. Translation is considered by Lefevere as the most influential type of rewriting. “Rewriting” consists of two control factors, one of which is “professional” (143), including identities within the literary system like translators, critics, and reviewers. “Professionals” usually have to sacrifice principles, such as accuracy or authenticity, to meet the requirements imposed by another factor, “patronage”—persons or entities like a religious body, a political party, publishers, and media who are “more interested in the ideology than the poetics” (143). Such a phenomenon is typical in Singapore; therefore, we can better understand the poetics chosen by Tiaozhan's translator. Analysis of Tiaozhan is carried out through Toury's Descriptive Translation Studies model—concentrating on translations first and then “map[ping] them onto their assumed sources in order to identify the shifts and translation relationship” (138). Chapter 5 then concerns itself with Tiaozhan's similarity to Challenge and explores how the implied translator manipulates the text to make it politically correct. Xu classifies the degrees of similarities between Challenge and Tiaozhan into three types: zero to low (Type I), moderate (Type II), and high (Type III), among which Types I and III are the focus of her analysis. Type I texts in Tiaozhan usually have some deviant features that are absent in Challenge, like overlexicalization, syntactic foreignness, circumlocution, and so on. The implied translator has introduced some semantic differences, which “laboriously and passionately construct a positive image of the protagonist” and meanwhile lead to “confusion among the readers” (156). Translation of Type III text, even though faithful, transmits the distinctive voice from narrator or character as well. The translation reveals “passive” (157) voice when the implied translator makes efforts to “mitigate the harsh tone” (158) of the narrator or when he or she shows “minor intervention” (158) in building his or her positive impression. “Active” voice appears in the rewriting or reorganizing of the original text to please the possible readers of the target text. Both voices show the implied translator's strong intention to “ensure political correctness and minimize any imminent negative impact on the protagonist's image” (164). It is very helpful to introduce the concept of implied translator in analyzing the translation, although Xu's interpretation seems to mix the use of “implied translator” and “translator,” which might lead to misunderstanding of the communication model.Chapter 6 delves further into the “point of view” effect of irony and empathy in Tiaozhan. Xu adds the translator's role to narrative situations as a mediating factor. She also introduces the notion of unreliability put forward by Wayne Booth and developed by Chatman: a narrator is unreliable when he or she does not follow the norms of the work. Unreliability can be “distinguished between two forms of ‘untrustworthiness’ with different ironized targets” (170), from which two types of translator's manipulation arise. The first type “fallible filtration” happens in the narrator's layer, where the irony or empathy is created, retained, or erased by the conscious-translator's manipulation of the narrative voice. Mapping examples in Tiaozhan with their source texts, Xu argues that the “fallible filtration” appears only as “minute factual discrepancies” (184). Another type of “unreliable narration” (170) is the manipulation of the implied author so that he or she conveys ironic messages to the implied reader “at the expense of the narrator” (170). Compared with “fallible filtration,” this second type of unreliability is a significant misrepresentation made by an unconscious translator. In complying with ideological requirements, the translator unintentionally creates a discordant narration and evokes negative results like factual discrepancy, attitudinal inconsistence, and ideological discordance. Xu has a clear attitude toward what she regards as the “unreliable narration” of translated text: even though the translator is making such changes to maintain the protagonist's positive image or to get on well with the target culture, ironizing the narrator is not an effective choice. Readers would feel uncomfortable in front of the attitudinal inconsistence and emotional contradictions, and they may begin to doubt the trustworthiness of the narrator. Consequently, the autobiography treated this way cannot realize its social function well. Seen from a theoretical perspective, both types of unreliability interrupt the “reader's access to the protagonist's and narrator's consciousness,” “representing an image that deviates from the real author” (202). In Tiaozhan, Xu finds out that the implied author, narrator, and character respectively have part of their “point(s) of view” deviated from the real author's. She concludes that Tiaozhan does not fit the ideal narrative situation of Challenge, because the translator has “effected a significant transformation” (202) in “point of view.”As an outgrowth of Xu's PhD thesis completed in 2014, a flaw of Translation of Autobiography might be the lack of timeliness. The narrative communication model of Chatman, one of the bases of Xu's hypotheses of autobiographical narrative situation, has recently been proved insufficient. In 2017, rhetorical narratologist James Phelan has brought up a rhetorical revision of narrative communication. Phelan's new model moves beyond classical narratology for various resources other than narrator and character. He claims a two-way “actual/implied author&#ξ00AΧ;&#ξ00AE;resources&#ξ00AΧ;&#ξ00AE;authorial and actual audience” model, in which resources can be occasion, paratexts, narrator(s), characters/dialogue, free indirect discourse (FID), and so on (Phelan 7). Chatman's model, according to Phelan, is just a “special case” (5) of Phelan's rhetorical model, in which “the implied author outsources just about everything to the narrator or to the nonnarrated mimesis” (10). With Phelan's model, Xu's study of translator manipulation could be extended to more types of resources other than narrator. However, as a type of nonfiction, autobiography has to “exclude fictionality and encompasses only historical facticity and authorial subjectivities” (26). Phelan's model may not perfectly fit the particular genre. Modifications are inevitable. For example, Harry E. Shaw's response to Phelan casts doubt on the necessity of “two-way dialogue between authors and readers” (74). The problem seems more salient in autobiographical narrative, where readers are more likely to be receivers and are not required to cooperate with author. Therefore, the opposite direction in the model may not be necessary in autobiography study. In a word, to improve Xu's model, Phelan's revision would be an imperative reference, while the unique genre of autobiographical narrative should also be considered. I believe with the tool kits from rhetorical narrative, research on translation of autobiography could be further amplified.“Future historians may one day characterize ours as the era of Everybody's Autobiography” (DiBattista and Wittman 1). Autobiography study is receiving increased attention, but Xu is among the few forerunners who have considered the narrative deviance introduced by an autobiography's translator. Translation of Autobiography makes this contribution through its excellent attention to linguistic textual signals and narrative framework. The book offers a comprehensive approach with a strong theoretical basis, opening a new research path for translation, literary study, and linguistics. It can be highly recommended to scholars in these fields. They may not only learn Xu's keen insights on a new topic but also benefit from her rigorous construction of methodology.