The Question of Authenticity in Migrant Self-Translation

Paola Bohórquez

doi:10.12681/syn.17284

Abstract

Through the reading of Smaro Kamboureli’s and Ariel Dorfman’s translingual memoirs, this essay examines how the trope of authenticity figures in migrant narratives of self-formation in-between languages. With attention to the strategies of self-translation through which each text navigates the disjunction between mother tongue and foreign language, speech and writing, narrated and narrating selves, the essay argues that while both texts do away with mimetic notions of self-representation, each rearticulates the ethos of authenticity as constitutive of the process of writing the self in translation.

Highlights

Contemporary cross-cultural writing and criticism identifies translation as an overarching trope that articulates the production of textual and cultural difference in-between dominant and subordinate cultures, global and local placements, mother tongues and foreign languages.1 In approaching translation as a wider practice “of cultural representation and interchange, a concrete textual practice of transcoding and constructing meanings cross-culturally” (Karpinski 22), these texts articulate the potential of translation to destabilise the primacy of nation, organic belonging and languages of origin, while simultaneously problematising the production of unequal cross-cultural exchanges between hegemonic and marginalised languages and cultures
Questions of authentic representation and referentiality become pressing in translingual self-writing, a form of intercultural memoir that traces thesubjectifying effects of the process of second language acquisition in migrant, diasporic and postcolonial contexts. These texts, which provide us with a unique view of the complex trajectory of subject formation in-between languages, raise crucial questions regarding the possibilities and limits of self-narration in conditions of linguistic displacement that disrupt the monolingual grounding of the self in language
Language choice is always cumbersome for translingual writers undertaking a project of self-narration, for who is the ‘I’ that speaks in translingual self-narration? How can this ‘I’ testify to experiences lived in another language? And more importantly, in which language can the subject authentically narrate the process of becoming translingual? In attempting to fulfill the autobiographical promise ‘to tell the truth of the self,’ the translingual writer is often arrested by conflicting loyalties, anxieties of representation and dilemmas of origin and genealogy that trouble the very act of self-enunciation

Summary

The Self as a place of language

Kamboureli’s journal, in the second person, is an experimental work of poetic prose that traces the narrator’s journey to theUnited States to pursue graduate studies in American Literature, a return visit toGreece and her migration toCanada as she marries a Canadian writer and becomes a landed. As her body is read through often rigid categories that codify her as “ethnic woman,” or as “Greek-Canadian migrant,” Kamboureli attempts to resignify her accented voice as an embodied marker of displacement, a corporeal reminder of the historicity of her linguistic attachments Even if her accent serves as “a reminder of [her] geography,” of “the being that was nourished by the mother tongue” (second 10), this audible difference is a purely transitional and nonsubstantial phenomenon that emerges in and through the encounter between languages and it belongs neither to her Greek nor her Anglo-Canadian selves. Discontinuities and impasses which have given “[her] self its shape” (second 11), Kamboureli’s “broken English” becomes a “minoritized language” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986) through which she can authentically trace the movements that shape her ephemeral, partial and unstable self-in-progress

Trauma in translation

Works Cited