An impossible necessity: translation and the recreation of linguistic and cultural identities in contemporary Chinese American literature

Criticism, Fall, 1997 by Martha J. Cutter

I know what I want to say in English. My mind's stuffed full

with the words. I pull one sentence at a time from the elegant little

speech . . . and try to piece together a word-for-word translation

into Chinese. Yielding nonsense.

--David Wong Louie, Pangs of Love

I have a whole different vocabulary of feeling in English than in

Chinese, and not everything can be translated.

--Fae Myenne Ng, Bone

You say, "You have tainted my house with sick medicine and

must remove the curse with sweetness!" He'll understand.

".... I won't be able to say it right. He'll call us beggars."

"You just translate."

--Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

In a recent book on translation theory, Susan Bassnett-McGuire observes that while some theorists perennially lament translation's impossibility, still, "in spite of such a dogma, translators continue to translate."(1) This figuration of translation as "an impossible necessity" facilitates a comprehension of the linguistic and cultural reconciliation enacted by certain works of contemporary Chinese American literature. In these works, the words of the foreign language or "source text" (the various dialects of Chinese) literally must be translated into the new tongue or "target text" (American English) so that parents and children, first and second generation, can communicate with each other. As a symbolic trope in these texts, however, "translation" evokes the concept of a crossing of borders, a permeation of barriers erected between what seem to be separate and disjunctive cultural and linguistic entities. David Wong Louie's Pangs of Love, Fae Myenne Ng's Bone, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior each portray the difficulties of translation, the impossibility of reaching across borders that appear to be impenetrable by language, by cadences, by culture.(2) A translation, these writers instantiate, always reflects an arduous process, a compromise between what have previously been seen as hostile forces, for the real difference between languages, as translation theorist Elsa Gress observes, is not one of sounds and signs, but of world views.(3) But translation, though impossible in a pure sense, is also necessary to these Chinese American writers, for what cannot be transplanted or transported is imperilled and may disappear into a linguistic and cultural void. For Louie, Ng, and Kingston, then, translation as trope suggests the conflicted necessities of both compromise and bridging, yet also more than this. Translation theorists posit that a good translation is a new work of art, something that both voices and exceeds the original text. In the works of Louie, Ng, and Kingston, the translator does the impossible, articulating a unique cultural and linguistic formulation in which the "Ethnic" and the "American" have permeated each other, a cultural and linguistic formulation that is distinctly Chinese American.(4)

In these Chinese American texts, then, translation is not just a specific theme, but is in fact the plot of the works as a whole. As my epigraphs indicate, the second generation characters all confront what appear to be unresolvable translation dilemmas, and they articulate the sense that their Chinese culture and language is untranslatable. Yet to succeed as translators, the protagonists of these texts must move from a literal to a metaphorical understanding of the process of translation itself. Following Roland Barthes's theory that some texts are more writerly than readerly, translation theorist Willis Barnstone speaks of writerly translations that involve an active participation with the source text, an active attempt to understand its complexities. A writerly translation would be creative and imaginative, rather than passive, literal, and constrained; it might also evoke the notion of coauthorship.(5) In these Chinese American works, the protagonists must learn to interact with, and finally recreate, the "source text," the parents' linguistic and cultural heritage, and they must also learn to recreate the "target text," their own cultural and linguistic horizons. In so doing, they become writerly translators who understand more clearly how their dual and at times conflicting cultural heritages as Chinese Americans can be mediated. In fact, these characters finally realize that it is precisely their antipodal and divergent cultural/linguistic heritages that engender the ability to produce new meanings, new stories, writerly translations that break down the binary opposition between "the Ethnic" and "the American," enriching and finally recreating both cultural terrains.

The field of translation theory has evolved rapidly in the past thirty years, along a parallel track with literary theory. Like the movement from New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Reader-Response theories of textuality--which reflects a shift from the concept of a text as a stable, self-referential icon toward the notion of a text as contradictory, open, ambiguous, and created by both its culture and its readers--translation theory has evolved from a concern with transferring the literal meaning of a foreign (or source) text into a target text, to a broader understanding of the ambiguity of texts themselves. This development is embodied by many translators' endorsement of the concept of "free translation." Recognizing the impossibility of a literal translation of a text, theorists argue that translation is about finding metaphors or analogies, about choice and freedom of interpretation, and about the creation of a coauthored literary text.(6) Moreover, since translation is an encounter with "otherness" (as Octavio Paz has argued), a translator must have the ability to participate in not simply the language system of the source text, but also its world view.(7) Translators who cannot share the world view of the source text will be unable to translate it in a meaningful way.