Translation/Transnation Series
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Pages 189
Azade Seyhan's diverse intellectual
pursuits are reflected in the book Writing Outside the Nation.
She seeks to highlight the complexities attending the notion of
culture and identity in the contemporary world through the lens
of transnational literature, which she in consonance with Arjun
Appadurai's usage of the term, defines as writing operating outside
the national canon to engage with issues confronting "deterritorialized
cultures" seeking to articulate the concerns of "paranational
communities". In the book under review Azade Seyhan focuses
in particular on the diasporic writing by women. She undertakes
a comparative study of contemporary Chicano/a and Turkish-German
writing as examples of the dominant 'minor literatures' in the
U.S.A and Germany, not with the purpose of highlighting the similarities
and differences in the writing of marginalized peoples writing
in the language of their host country,viz. the major language
as 'outsiders' but rather with the objective of generating a dialogue
and discourse on the politics of emergent identities that challenges
the hitherto accepted notion of the monopoly of monolingual writing
and celebrates the heterogeneity of community, beyond language
and homogenous culture.
The remarkable feature of all such
writing is said to be the straddling of two cultures and languages
with memory and representation as the focal points. The writing
is distinctive also in that it is "creative and experimental,
self-reflexive and theoretical" transcending the confines
of the conventional categories of defining the nation as bounded
by territory, language, ethnicity, history and religion. Consequently
the markers of identity also become mutable and malleable, and
democratic and egalitarian participation is seen as the key in
the forging of an emergent identity.
This entails translation both at
the metaphorical and linguistic levels. The two levels are closely
interlinked and enmeshed because even the abstract notions of
history, culture, community and self are ultimately articulated
through language that facilitates the translation of these concepts
into the materiality of texts. The translation of the past involves
the recall of myths, legends and rituals which are then rendered
in the acquired language, and resituated in a "hyphenated
culture" because as Seyhan succinctly puts it, this process
reflects the transformation of a complex semiotic map of a given
culture into another. At another level it is the translation of
memory and representation, and again this process is really a
reconstruction of the past, enabling omissions and silences of
officially documented history and chronology to be questioned
and an alternate script to be fashioned which also addresses issues
of gender and suppression. Closely connected with this is the
issue of translating silences into 'voice' for, as Seyhan points
out, "mastery over language is the passport to visibility,
presence and power". This voice is a powerful vehicle to
not only restructure the inherited cultural legacy of fragmented
consciousness and history of the transnational but to also challenge
the dominance and hegemony of both the major language and the
myths woven by it of the marginalized existing on its peripheries.
It is thus an instrument to contest the representational validity
of the sterotypical 'Other' created by dominant voices in the
major language. It provides a platform for projecting a critical
public identity of the self and community.
Finally at the linguistic level translation
is reflected in the experimental use of language, typical of which
is code switching and code mixing, resulting in innovative aesthetics
and poetics, renewing and enriching the repertoire and inventory
of the linguistic and literary tradition of the host country.
Concretely this is achieved by the redefinition of existing genres,
where for example as in the case of autobiographies, these no
longer are centred on the life testimonies of one individual but
reflect multiple voices across generations, geographies and time,
chronicling the life of a community in transit. Intertextuality
is an inherent feature of such texts. Typical stylistic devices
of such writing are the use of forgotten idioms and grammar, metaphor,
allegory, irony often a deliberate mismatch of language, the literal
translation of proverbs and culturally loaded phrases, and the
use of bilingualism/multilingualism inscribing the major language
with the accents and inflections of transnationals. The resulting
hybridity calls for a knowledge of two or more cultures for the
text to be appropriately understood.
The book is extremely useful from
a translator's perspective since the stylistic devices it describes
as typical of transnational writing are precisely the tools used
by the translator to ply his/her trade. Moreover the challenge
of facilitating the border crossing of complex semiotic maps without
effacing the cultural particularity of the original while at the
same time ensuring that the original is not appropriated by the
receiving culture is precisely the central issue in translation
studies today. The book offers valuable insights in addressing
this challenge. The book, which is divided into two parts, (the
first offering a theoretical framework that is applied to the
writings of amongst others Ana Castillo,Gloria Anzaldua, Aysel
Özakin and Emine Sevgi Özdamar), concludes with an 'Afterword'
entitled Pedagogical Gains, where Seyhan engages at length
with Walter Benjamin's essay The Task of the Translator
to convincingly present a case for the resonance of the original
in translation, that it might be granted a meaningful and significant
'afterlife'.
Reviewed by
Chitra Harshvardhan Ph.D
Senior Lecturer, Dept of German
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Mehrauli Road,
New Delhi
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