This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Aboulela L

Achebe C

Al Shaykh H

Ashcroft B

Ashe L

Bachner A

Barlas A

Bhabha H

Butt N

Cariello M

Chambers C

Chikwava B

Cook M

Dingwaney A

Emecheta B

Foster L

Guo X

Guth S

Kellman SG

Malak A

Mehrez S

Mignolo W

Quinn B

Rachael Gilmour

Rao R

Ross M

Rushdie S

Said E

Salih T

Selvon S

Seyhan A

Shaogong H

Smyth B

Sollors W

Spivak GC

Thiong’o N wa

Tymockzo M

Tymoczko M

Ungar S

Whorf BL

Yeh D

Zangwill I

English

GILMOUR, RH

Queen Mary Research Online

A Dictionary of Maqiao,

Aboulela's description of bahdala suggests the kind of crisis which precipitates, in different ways, the spiritual journeys of the Muslim immigrant women protagonists of her first two novels, The Translator

Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading patriarchal interpretations of the Qur'an.

calls such writers, who have published literary work in two or more languages, “ambilinguals” – although the “ambi-”, for Guo, appears more in the sense of “ambivalent” than “ambidextrous”.

For Aboulela’s views on being regarded as a “British Muslim writer” see Chambers

For discussion of the role of religion in the novel as “substitute for parental care”, see Chambers

For discussion of translation and Islam in The Translator, see Hassan

many of Aboulela's other female protagonists, Najwa rejects the kind of critical engagement central to many strands of Islamic,

She has since published the novel UFO In Her Eyes

Subsequent references to A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers are to this edition and will be cited by page number in the text.

Subsequent references to Minaret are to this edition and will be cited by page number in the text.

The Empire Writes Back: Postcolonial Literatures, Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Ashcroft B

The examples are too numerous to list exhaustively, but we might for example think of Sam Selvon's creolization of the city in The Lonely Londoners

The majority of the world’s Muslims do not speak varieties of Arabic, although most read the Qur’an in Arabic.

we could go back a lot further than Zangwill. Leonard Foster's survey The Poet's Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature

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

 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. </jats:p

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The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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

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

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