Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers  

Oleh:

Gilmour, Rachael

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 47 no. 2 (Jun. 2012), page 207-227.
Topik: Leila Aboulela; Xiaolu Guo; language; London; multilingualism; translation; translational literature
Fulltext: Living between languages-The politics.pdf (601.75KB)

Isi artikel

This essay examines the notion of “translational writing” – literary texts which bear the traces of multiple languages, foregrounding and dramatizing the processes of translation of which they are both product and representation – through detailed examination of two recent novels set in London: Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005), and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). Both novels are narrated by their female protagonists, whose movement between linguistic planes defines a distinctively feminized, translingual identity. Each works to destabilize the assumed relationship between language and national belonging, in part by recasting London as a space of translation: a city of immigrants defined by its polyglossia, and a node in a deterritorialized transnational linguistic order. Yet, while both novels explore the possibilities, risks, and limitations of a life lived between languages, they also demonstrate that translational literature, like translation theory, offers no consensus on the practice of translation. Their divergent conclusions – about the relationship between languages, about the nature and purposes of translation, about the connections between language and truth – reveal much about the complexities of translational writing.

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