An other tongue: language and identity in translingual writing

PhDAbandoning one‟s mother tongue for another language is one of the most profound aspects of exile experience, often fraught with feelings of loss and alienation. Yet the linguistic switch can also be viewed as an advantage: the adopted language becomes a refuge, affording the writer creative distance and perspective. This thesis examines the effects of this switch as reflected in the works of two translingual Jewish authors, Stefan Heym (1913-2001) and Jakov Lind (1927-2007). Both were forced into exile after their lives in Germany and Austria were shattered by the rise of Nazism, and both chose English as a medium of artistic expression at certain periods of their lives. Reading these authors‟ works within their post-war historical context, the thesis argues that translingualism is associated with a psychic split as the self is divided between its languages. This schism manifests itself differently in the writing of each of these authors, according to their distinct perceptions of their identity and place in the world: in Lind‟s work, it is experienced as a schizophrenic existence, and in Heym‟s – as an advantageous doubling of perspective. The first chapter focuses on autobiographical writing in a foreign language, exploring how self and language are bound together in Lind‟s English-language autobiographies. The second chapter draws on Bakhtin‟s notion of dialogism as it considers the relationship between narration, ideology and propaganda in Heym‟s war novel The Crusaders. The third chapter examines Lind‟s and Heym‟s representations of the writer in their fiction, and how their translingualism defines their perception of their own identity and role as writers. The final chapter shows how the two authors reinterpret the figure of the Wandering Jew to construct different visions of a humanistic Jewish identity that correspond to their own diasporic existence

Back Home: Translation, Conversion and Domestication in Leila Aboulela's The Translator

The Sudanese-born author Leila Aboulela describes the position of the non-western Anglophone writer as a translator by default, moving ‘back and forth’ between languages and cultures. This essay argues that Aboulela’s novel The Translator (1999) calls into question conceptualizations of translation that grow out of western religious and philosophical traditions. The central metaphor of translation seems paradoxical: the only successful act of translation in the novel is a religious conversion into Islam, and is linked with the untranslatability of the core of Islam itself. The essay shows how this process, the rewriting of a secular westerner into Islamic faith, problematizes and reworks notions of equivalence, transparency, invisibility and domestication dominant in Anglo-American models of translation. Moreover, when The Translator is considered in relation to Aboulela’s other works, the popular representation of the translator as a neutral cultural mediator is subverted: this author-translator’s task is not to facilitate bi-lateral cultural exchange, but to act as an ideological agent of cultural change. Her works translate Islam for the western reader while making an argument against the translation of Muslims into a western value system. Thus Aboulela, addressing the reader in English, employing the rhetoric of translation in her work, and referring to her own role as translator, undermines the culturally conditioned expectations these terms raise and challenges western paradigms of translation

Translingual Identities: Language and the Self in Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind

The works of translingual writers-those who write in a language other than their native tongue-present a rich field for study, but literary translingualism remains underresearched and undertheorized. In this work Tamar Steinitz explores the psychological effects of translingualism in the works of two authors: the German Stefan Heym (1913-2001) and the Austrian Jakov Lind (1927-2007). Both were forced into exile by the rise of Nazism; both chose English as a language of artistic expression. Steinitz argues that translingualism, which ruptures the perceived link between language and world as the writer chooses between systems of representation, leads to a psychic split that can be expressed in the writer's work as a schizophrenic existence or as a productive doubling of perspective. Movement between languages can thus reflect both the freedom associated with geographical mobility and the emotional price it entails. Reading Lind's and Heym's works within their postwar context, Steinitz proposes these authors as representative models, respectively, of translingualism as loss and fragmentation and translingualism as opportunity and mediation

'In Other Words: Jakov Lind’s Translingual Autobiography'

This is a collection of papers presented at the conference «Anglo-German Linguistic Relations», held at Queen Mary, University of London in November 2007. The papers cover a wide variety of topics about the relationship between the English and German languages or relate to cultural and literary contacts between English-speaking and German-speaking regions. Individual papers discuss Anglo-German linguistic interplay and affinities both as contemporary phenomena and from a historical perspective. Themes include codification, translation and discourse production from the 17th century to the Second World War; shared metaphors in English and German; political propaganda in English and German; and authorial positioning and perspective in a selection of autobiographical and literary works

Introduction

The current state of globalization is daily questioning—through the expansion of capital, new financial circuits, technoglobalism, and massive migrations—national ideals and principles about the purity of language, the homogeneity of literature, and the distinctiveness of national cultures