Doloughan, F

Language and Intercultural Communication

University of Surrey

Translating the Self: Ariel Dorfman’sBilingual JourneyTo some extent, one has to rewrite the past in order to understand it(Hoffman, 1991a: 242).To mouth foreign terms without incorporating their meanings is to riskbecoming bowdlerised. A true translation proceeds by the motions ofunderstanding and sympathy; it happens by slow increments, sentence bysentence, phrase by phrase (Hoffman, 1991b: 211).Multivalence is no more than the condition of a contemporary awareness,and no more than the contemporaryworld demands (Hoffman, 1991c:274).In Making Signs and Making Subjects: The English Curriculum and Social Futures,Gunther Kress sets out a justification for a broad, rather than narrow, view of textwhen he writes: ‘A text, any text, is a microcosm of the social world in which it ismade. It encapsulates in an irrefutable form a cultural truth about the individ-ual/s who produced it – be it a film, a letter, any text written in a place of work, anewspaper editorial’ (Kress, 1995: 24). He goes on to suggest that what is neededis ‘an overarching textual theory which accommodates texts of all kinds, anddoes not separate the mundane from the aesthetic’ (Kress, p. 28). Such a textualtheory, he continues, must take account of the fact that text is ‘the product ofmany voices’ and comes from ‘many places in society’ (p. 30). It is ‘an object witha multiple producership and a multiple readership’ (ibid.). While it is doubtfulthat in writing these words, Kress was thinking specifically about notions of(cultural) translation and (social) transformationas articulated by post- colonial-ist theorists such as Homi Bhabha, the issues raised challenge a hierarchical viewof text which would separate them according to strict notions of period, prove-nance and genre. Rather, Kress appears to see texts, whether they be culturallysalient, aesthetically valued or mundane, as (interdependent) sites of social,cultural and linguistic production. By studying both individual texts and theirrelationship to other textual products, it is possible to come to understand thedynamics of (meaningful) representation.This is the context in which I wish to place Ariel Dorfman’s lucid memoir oflife as a bilingual (Spanish and English) and bicultural (American and LatinAmerican) writer of text. Heading South, Looking North relates Dorfman’s experi-ence of living in ‘translated’ worlds: America as seen first through the eyes of ayoung boy whose initial rejection of Spanish and adoption of English is troubledonly by his growing recognition of his family’s difference as Jews and Commu-nist sympathisers in McCarthyite America. Their subsequent journey to Chileunsettles the young Dorfman for whom English and American culture haveprovided a kind of anchor in an otherwise changing and uncertain world. Withtime and the re-learning of Spanish, however, he begins to view Chile throughLatin American, rather than American, eyes. Then, as a student of Latin Ameri-can Studies at Berkeley, comes a renunciation of English and of American1470-8477/02/02 0147-06 $20.00/0 ©2002 F.J. DoloughanLanguage and Intercultural Communication Vol. 2, No. 2, 2002147Reviews and Criticismcultural domination and a desire to re-assert his identity in Spanish. Somewhatironically, it is with the publication of a book denouncing Donald Duck thatDorfman is lent the status he has been seeking as a Chilean writer. Later,however, in the Argentinian embassy in Santiago de Chile, where as an ardentsupporter of Allende he has been forced to seek refuge, he finally comes to recog-nise what history has declared for him – life as a bilingual. ‘[I]t is in that embassy’,he writes, ‘that I first explore the possibility of living in two languages, using eachone for a different community. It is there that I set out on the road to this hybridmongrel of language [my italics] who writes this so many years later’ (Dorfman,1998a: 269).What this potted biography brings to the fore is Dorfman’s discomfort grow-ing up as a bilingual. It is not until his early 30s that an accommodationis reachedbetween his Spanish-language and his English-language self. The journey whichhe narrates towards acceptance of what he calls his ‘schizophrenic, adulterousexistence’ (p. 132), an existence which he comes to celebrate rather than todenounce, is a long and arduous one in the course of which he develops anunderstanding of the ‘complexity of cultural interchange’ (p. 252). It is a journeywhich is both personal and political, incorporating a search for cultural identityand a place in the social world from which to speak and act in a meaningful way.Dorfman’s personal odyssey is at the same time the story of Latin America ‘as itsearched for a language with which to express its hybridity’ (p. 191). Dorfmanrefers to the attempts both by Europeans and by North Americans to ‘translate’Latin America, that is to understand it and articulate it in their own terms. As amestizo, ‘part Yankie, part Chilean, a pinch of Jew’ (p. 220), Dorfman begins tosee the possibility of using his bicultural, binational status to mediate betweentwo continents and to tell the story of Chile in a language ‘without any need oftranslation‘ [the italics are mine] (p. 196). His memoir, written in English for a (inthe first instance) largely North American audience, constitutes an attempt tocome to terms both with his personal history and with that of the social and polit-ical world into which he was born, a world characterised by wars, revolutionsand migrations. It is language in its relation to the construction of a cultural iden-tity and of a social and political consciousness which is at the heart of Dorfman’snarrative. Language is the medium which shapes and transforms his existenceand which causes him pain and joy in equal measure. For it is through thelanguages available to Dorfman, namely Spanish and English, that he views andconstructs the world. His experience of reality is mediated by the narratives –historical, political and social – circulating around him and in relation to whichhe tries to locate and position himself.That language is central to our perceptions of the world around us and to theways in which we act upon it is one of the main themes of Heading South, LookingNorth. At the heart of the book is a concern with the possibilities and limitationsof language and how use of a particular language in a historically and cultur-ally-specific moment helps define our response to it. The politics of representa-tion, that is the question of who gets to speak, which stories are told (and bywhom), using which representational resources and for which purpose, is thecentral issue motivating Dorfman’s narrative. His text constitutes a site for theexpression of the value(s) of difference. For it is through writing, he comes torealise, that the tensions and contradictions of his (bilingual) existence can be148 Language and Intercultural Communicationmapped out and located. As he puts it: ‘ …I found myself able to contact in mywriting an ambiguity and a turbulence that had not till then been allowed expres-sion’ (p. 131). In representing his concerns in textual form, he is able to give voiceto his different selves and in so doing ‘translate’ both for himself and for hisreader the experience of ‘being bilingual and binational at a time when every-thing demanded that we be univocal and immaculate’ (p. 220).And so Dorfman first rejects the idea of being what he calls ‘a young man inbetween, no longer knowing his own name, adrift in a world torn by the twoAmericas inside and outside him’ (p. 221). ‘I was not even willing, at that point’,he continues, ‘to ask myself how the two languages differed, how each of themmight complement or oppose the other, the subtle way in which English mademe one kind of writer, one kind of person, and Spanish somebody else’ (ibid.).Accordingly, he changes his name first from Vladimir (Vlady) to Edward andthen from Edward to Ariel. This act of re-naming becomes a way of creating anidentity with which Dorfman feels comfortable at particular moments in his life.The detested Vlady, given him at birth by his father in remembrance of Lenin, isgiven up for Edward, the very Englishness of the name aimed at separating himfrom his Latin American contemporaries. Yet while Edward as an index ofEnglishness permitted Dorfman to enjoy a measure of distinction at the Britishschool, which he attended as an adolescent in Santiago de Chile, he begins to findit onerous as a university student in the Latin America of the 1960s and adoptsinstead his neglected middle name, Ariel, which he sees as a way of translatingexactly his ambivalence with respect to his Spanish and English selves. ‘For me, itbecame a way of defining my own growing disaffection with the land whoseextreme materialism I had cherished and coveted, while at the same time subtlyasserting my affiliation with the language that continued to be my constantcompanion and best friend, the English that had been elevated to its supremepinnacle in the works of Shakespeare’ (p. 160).For Dorfman this process of re-naming is akin to a process of ‘situating myselfon the border between the continent of my birth and the world outside’ (p. 161), aprocess of ‘redefining my identity’ (ibid.). Identity, then, is bound up in theprocess of naming and appropriating. ‘I ate up that name and gave it the meaningthat I so desired. I was Caliban the savage, cannibalising Ariel, the Hebrew Lionof God, for my own purposes’ (p. 160). Language for Dorfman is not a (more orless) neutral means of representation but a culturally embedded system of signi-fication which meets those it encounters carrying historical and politicalbaggage. In order to create something new, the individual subject must ingest it,chew it, digest it, transform and transubstantiate it (see p. 161).Almost as a survival tactic, Dorfman spends his early life suppressing onelanguage in the interest of the other. Yet the Spanish which he had rejected as ayoung boy growing up in New York begins to re-assert itself, as does the Englishwhich he later vows to give up in order to attach himself more closely to Chile, adetermination which he fails to achieve as English makes a comeback – the returnof the repressed – even before he leaves Chile. Faced with the prospect of a longexile outside his country in a world where English has time and history on itsside, Dorfman comes to acknowledge the possibility of co-existence for his twolanguages. He becomes what he calls a ‘bigamist of language’ (p. 270), sharingReviews and Criticism 149them and being shared by them as he heads North and looks ‘to the South where Ican no longer live …’ (ibid.).Dorfman’s life is circumscribed by a series of migrations, dislocations andrelocations. Indeed his birth in Argentina was to parents who were in turn thechildren of Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe. Dorfman’s parents hadconceived him in Spanish, a language which they had acquired rather than learntat birth. Yiddish was the language with which his mother first came into contact,a language which she would later abandon for Spanish. By contrast, his father’sadoption of Spanish was not at the cost of his native Russian, perhaps, Dorfmanspeculates, because his grandparents were polylingual and because his fatherhad prior experience of Spanish, having emigrated not once but twice to Argen-tina. Dorfman contrasts his father’s determined bilingualism with his mother’sself-inflicted monolingualism, suggesting that his mother’s abandonment ofYiddish had to do with the fact that Yiddish ‘occupied no territory, possessed noname on the map of nations, had never been officially promoted by a state’ (p.21), unlike his father’s native Russian which ‘contained within its words the fullforce of its nationhood and literature and vast expanses’ (ibid.). Past and presentwere, for Dorfman’s father, able to co-exist, while for his mother the past becameirrelevant to her present.It is perhaps in this connection that Bhabha’s notion of cultural translation canbe understood. As he puts it: ‘The transnational dimension of cultural transfor-mation – migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation – makes the process ofcultural translation a complex form of signification’ (Bhabha, 1994: 172). In ArielDorfman’s case, as in that of his parents, culture can be seen as ‘a strategy ofsurvival’ (ibid.). That his own story is underwritten by the stories of those whocame before him, is something of which Dorfman is consciously aware.Reflecting on his migratory existence from his adult perspective, he wonderswhether such an experience might not have been fated. ‘Maybe this was the fateof my family’, he writes, ‘maybe this was a curse I couldn’t escape. Twice I hadmade the attempt to settle down, twice I had adopted a country and a culture anda language, and both times I had found myself fleeing, I had found myself home-less in spite of all my efforts, and now I was going to begin again, all over again.Except that this time I was no longer innocent’ (Dorfman, 1998b: 275). WhatDorfman takes away with him is a sense of exile, an exile contemplated throughthe dual lens of the myth of an eventual return to his place of origin and, simulta-neously, an acknowledgement that his fate may be that of the wanderer, expelledfrom his native land and forced to find a future elsewhere.And so Dorfman comes to the realisation that he is uniquely well placed byvirtue of his bilingualism and biculturalism to tell not only his own story but alsothat of Chile and of those Chileans whose voices have never been heard. ‘Thestory of their lives had never been told, the words had belonged to someone else…Since their birth, those men and women had been told the limits they could notcross, the questions they could not ask’ (pp. 243–4). Dorfman senses that he isultimately in the privileged position of being able to give voice to a period ofChile’s history from the perspective of an insider insofar as he participated in itspolitical and cultural life at a moment of change and transformation;at the sametime, however, as an adopted homeland and one which he was forced to aban-don, he is also able to view Chile from the outside and to represent it at a distance,150 Language and Intercultural Communicationboth temporal and geographic. He is thereby able to situate himself in relation tohis Chilean past from the vantage point of his American present and to use hisbiculturality to express ‘the mysterious center that unifies me in spite of language‘[the italics are mine] (p. 221). His journey ends at the point where his twolanguages and their attendant cultures are able to co-exist. The youthful segrega-tion and indeed suppression of one language by the other has given way to arecognition of the value of co-existence and complementarity. Indeed Dorfman’smemoir embodies his attempts through revision and reinscription to ‘translate’cultural and linguistic difference into a language which occupies a third space,located as it is at the meeting point of his Spanish and English selves.Thus the English used by Dorfman is infused with the spirit of Latin Americaand of the Spanish which he came to master at the Grange, his English boardingschool in Santiago de Chile, which he characterises as ‘rememorating an oldempire that no longer existed’ (p. 113). The neologism, ‘rememorating’ is notsimply a (mis)translation of the Spanish ‘rememorar’ but consciously combinesthe English notions of commemoration and remembrance in a term freshlycoined for the occasion and available to Dorfman because of his bilingualism. Hissyntax and choice of vocabulary, therefore, can be seen to reflect the needs of hismaterial and of his narrative rather than conforming to the dictates of grammar,narrowly construed. When he writes, for example, of the Spanish which ‘wasbeginning to speak me’ (p. 114), it is in the context of a discussion of howlanguage infiltrates our habits and forms our perspectives. This seeminglytransgressive grammar – we speak a language rather than are spoken by it inEnglish, though the passive form is common in Spanish – is in fact a way ofrendering more precisely the process by which a language comes to implant itselfin our minds and grow to be a (cultural) habit.As individual languages vie with and, in certain contexts, displace oneanother, it is possible to reflect on their relative merits and potential limitationsand to come to understand the basis on which one dominates or subjugates theother. So when Dorfman talks about ‘creating a territory from which to think thephenomenon’ (pp. 115–16), he is referring to the possibility of constructing aspace, be it textual, emotional or ideological (see p. 220), which permits one to beboth inside and outside of language. In such a space, the structures of onelanguage are free to interrogate and influence those of the other, rather thanhaving to remain in watertight compartments. It is this cross-fertilization (see p.115), to use Dorfman’s term, which brings into existence a new (means of)representation.To conclude, then: Heading South, Looking North is a text which relates the expe-rience of living in translated worlds. It tells of Dorfman’s attempts to come toterms with his bilingualism and biculturalism and to see them not as constrain-ing but as empowering. His initial desire to anchor himself to one language andculture at the expense of the other fails to be realised for historical, political andfinally personal reasons. Migration, both voluntary and enforced, has givenDorfman the possibility of crossing not only national but also cultural andlinguistic borders. While as a child and adolescent he tried to secure himself tothe mast of one culture and one language and saw his dual status as undermininghis sense of self, as a young man he begins to understand that his identity is notpredicated solely on ideas of nationhood and national heritage. Rather he beginsReviews and Criticism 151to see through his writing the possibility of having a ‘dialogue with languagewhich could be deepened regardless of where that body happened to be, whatcontingent geography surrounded me’ (p. 84). What is essential, ‘the bedrock ofwho I am’ (p. 263) cannot be equated to geographical boundaries or ring-fencedby a specific language or culture. Indeed it is access to the linguistic and culturalresources of both English and Spanish, America and Latin America which give toDorfman the necessary resources for creating alternative worlds with alternativewords. His subjectivity is not co-terminous with his experience in and of one orother language but is constituted by dialogue between them. It is in this sensethat we can speak of ‘translating’ the self.Fiona J. DoloughanInstitute of EducationUniversity of LondonNote1. A version of this article was given at the second annual conference of the InternationalAssociation for Languages and Intercultural Communication, Leeds 2001.ReferencesBhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture (p. 172). London: Routledge.Dorfman, A. (1998a)HeadingSouth, Looking North (p. 269).London: Hodder & Stoughton.Dorfman, A. (1998b)HeadingSouth, Looking North (p. 275).London: Hodder & Stoughton.Hoffman, E. (1991a) Lost in Translation (p. 242). Reading: Minerva.Hoffman, E. (1991b) Lost in Translation (p. 211). Reading: Minerva.Hoffman, E. (1991c) Lost in Translation (p. 274). Reading: Minerva.Kress, G. (1995)Making Signs and Making Subjects: The English Curriculum and Social Futures(p. 24). London: Institute of Education.152 Language and Intercultural Communication

Translating the Self: Ariel Dorfman's Bilingual Journey

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