Times of Mobility: Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation 9789633863305

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Transnational Literatures and Cultures in/and Translation
Contributors
FROM TRANSNATIONAL TO TRANSLATIONAL
Translational Migrations: Novel Homelands in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
Theorizing Women’s Transnational Literatures: Shaping New Female Identities in Europe through Writing and Translation
Crossing Borders in Perilous Zones: Labors of Transport and Translation in Women Writers of Exile
Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquidity and Transnational Women’s Literature: Nancy Huston and Assia Djebar as Case Studies
Traveling Theory as Theory in Translation: Transnational and Transgenerational Perspectives
READING ACROSS BORDERS
Translation into Dance: Adaptation and Transnational Hellenism in Balanchine’s Apollo
Stories from Elsewhere: The City as a Transnational Space in Doris Lessing’s Fiction
The Mobile Imagination in European Women’s Writing: Parallels Between Modern and Postmodern Times
Romanian Women’s Migration: Online Versus Offline Stories
From Traveling Memoir to Nomadic Narrative in Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name and Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story
Through the Looking-Glass: On Recurring Motifs and Devices in the Prose of Dubravka Ugrešić
TRANSNATIONAL IN TRANSLATION
It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
Translating Folktales: From National to Transnational
Transnational Rivalry and Consecration: Croatian and Serbian Writers in Translation
China Comes to Warsaw or Warsaw Comes to China: Melech Ravitch’s Travel Poems and Journals
Notes on the Contributors
Index

Citation preview

TIMES of MOBILITY Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation

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Transnational Perspectives in Gender Studies Series editor: Jasmina Lukić Editorial Board: Vita Fortunati, Susan Stanford Friedman, Francisca de Haan, Adelina Sánchez Espinoza, Azade Seyhan

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TIMES of MOBILITY Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation

EDITED BY JASMINA LUKIĆ AND SIBELAN FORRESTER WITH BORBÁLA FARAGÓ

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© 2019 the editors Published in 2019 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-386-329-9 ISSN 2677-0830 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lukić, Jasmina, editor. | Forrester, Sibelan E. S. (Sibelan Elizabeth S.) editor. | Faragó, Borbála, editor. Title: Times of mobility : transnational literature and gender in translation / edited by Jasmina Lukić and Sibelan Forrester with Borbála Faragó. Description: Budapest, Hungary : Central European University Press, 2019. | Series: Transnational perspectives in gender studies ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019042191 (print) | LCCN 2019042192 (ebook) | ISBN 9789633863299 (hardcover) | ISBN 9789633863305 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Literature and transnationalism. | European literature--21st century--History and criticism. | European literature--Women authors--History and criticism. | European literature--Translations--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN56.T685 T56 2019 (print) | LCC PN56.T685 (ebook) | DDC 809/.93355--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042191 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042192 Printed in Hungary

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

Jasmina Lukić, Sibelan Forrester and Borbála Faragó Introduction: Transnational Literatures and Cultures in/and Translation

1

FROM TRANSNATIONAL TO TRANSLATIONAL

Susan Stanford Friedman Translational Migrations: Novel Homelands in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

19

Eleonora Federici and Vita Fortunati Theorizing Women’s Transnational Literatures: Shaping New Female Identities in Europe through Writing and Translation

47

Azade Seyhan Crossing Borders in Perilous Zones: Labors of Transport and Translation in Women Writers of Exile

79

Sonia Fernández Hoyos and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquidity and Transnational Women’s Literature: Nancy Huston and Assia Djebar as Case Studies

95

Jasmina Lukić Traveling Theory as Theory in Translation: Transnational and Transgenerational Perspectives

117

READING ACROSS BORDERS

Grace Ledbetter Translation into Dance: Adaptation and Transnational Hellenism in Balanchine’s Apollo

139

v

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Ágnes Györke Stories from Elsewhere: The City as a Transnational Space in Doris Lessing’s Fiction

155

Vera Eliasova The Mobile Imagination in European Women’s Writing: Parallels Between Modern and Postmodern Times

171

Madalina Nicolaescu Romanian Women’s Migration: Online Versus Offline Stories

193

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru 207 From Traveling Memoir to Nomadic Narrative in Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name and Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story Dejan Ilić Through the Looking-Glass: On Recurring Motifs and Devices in the Prose of Dubravka Ugrešić

225

TRANSNATIONAL IN TRANSLATION

Michael Kandel It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing

239

Sibelan Forrester Translating Folktales: From National to Transnational

257

Ellen Elias-Bursać Transnational Rivalry and Consecration: Croatian and Serbian Writers in Translation

281

Kathryn Hellerstein China Comes to Warsaw or Warsaw Comes to China: Melech Ravitch’s Travel Poems and Journals

303

Notes on the Contributors

329

Index

336

vi

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Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Central European University, Swarthmore College, and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for their generous support throughout the making of this book. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Melissa Dune for her painstaking work with copy editing, Krisztina Kós for her unwavering support of this book and the series in its early stages, and Linda Kunos for all her work on its current version. We dedicate this collection with love to all our children: Yelena, Mislav, Raian, Luka, Jelena, Lorka, Liadh and Imre.

vii

vii

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Introduction Transnational Literatures and Cultures in/and Translation J A S M I N A LU K I Ć, S I B EL A N FO R R E S T ER a n d B O R B Á L A FA R AG Ó

Writers who have either chosen to live in the ON-zone, or been forced to seek its shelter, need more oxygen than provided by translation into foreign languages alone. For a bloody literary life, such writers need, inter alia, an imaginary library—a context in which their work might be located. Because more often than not, such work floats free in a kind of limbo. The construction of a context—of a literary and theoretical platform, a theoretical raft that might accommodate the dislocated and de-territorialized; the transnational and a-national; cross-cultural transcultural writers; cosmopolitans, neo-nomads, and literary vagabonds; those who write in “adopted” languages, in newly-acquired languages, in multiple languages, in mother tongues in non-maternal habitats; all those who have voluntarily undergone the process of dispatriation—much work on the construction of such a context remains. Dubravka Ugrešić, “ON-zone,” in Europa in Sepia, translated by David Williams, 222.

In the name of writers who live in the ON-zone, Dubravka Ugrešić speaks for those who live and work outside given, clearly regulated literary domains, which for the most part coincide with the borders of national literature. Recognizing them as those who write “outside the nation,” Azade Seyhan has used the term “transnational literature” to designate the fast growing body of writing by those who live “in between” languages and cultures: “I understand transnational literature as a genre of writing that operates outside the national canon, addresses issues facing deterritorialized cultures, and speaks for those in what I call ‘paranational’ communities and alliances” (Seyhan 2001, 10). In this first extensive volume on transnational literature, Azade Seyhan

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brought together some of the most important aspects of the subject: deterritorialization, migration, language, and translation. In her use of the term “transnational,” Seyhan relies on the work of Arjun Appadurai, who prophetically, already in the late 1990s, recognized mass migrations as a phenomenon which, together with the new technologies, is profoundly changing the world we live in (Appadurai 1996).1 And Appadurai said it in the late 1990s, before the war in Iraq, and before the war in Syria, at a time when it was unimaginable that the war in Afghanistan would continue for another twenty years without an end in sight; and long before the latest migrant crisis hit the Mediterranean countries and Europe as a whole, provoking new debates on the role of the (nation) state in the new unstable world. What the consequences of these latest migration waves will be is not a question that concerns only politics or economy; it is a question that concerns, among other fields, literary studies as well, since the experiences of these people who are now travelling the world in search of some kind of security from war, or famine, or any form of serious oppression, will soon shape the literary scene. For almost two decades following the publication of Azade Seyhan’s study, the concept of transnational literature has proven its theoretical relevance and its usefulness in practical criticism. Theoretically, it was most often discussed in relation with the both competing and corresponding concept of world literature, which re-emerged as a useful tool in addressing processes of globalization and their influence upon literary studies. Existing studies (Thomsen 2008, Jay 2010, Chean 2016) also relate transnational literature to postcolonialism as the situation that brings together the national and the transnational, recognizing a situation in which one does not exist without the other. The corresponding problematization of the conceptual framework upon which colonialism was built, together with the deconstruction and the destabilization of categories of identity, borders, and the nation-state, opened space for a

1

Since then, both migration and technology have grown in scope and in significance, confirming further the profound relation between the two. Technologies of war continue to produce bigger and bigger migrant waves, and surveillance technologies keep them more and more efficiently under control, while technologies for everyday use, like mobile phones, manage to offer at least some minimal consolation to those who are separated by ongoing events. 2

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Introduction

new term in literary studies, which would be able to address new complexities and inevitable ambiguities. Transnational literature seems to be such a term. It does recognize the existence of national literatures, but puts the concept of national literature in a critical perspective revealing its inadequacy in a number of ways. It also speaks to the new world of mobility, offering a kind of taxonomy that can help us organize new phenomena we would not be able to address otherwise. The present volume is an attempt to contribute to current discussions on transnational literature. It recognizes the concept’s starting point in literary criticism and scholarship and the need to address the specific issue of writers today, who are crossing borders as never before, in an age of global migration that is taking more and more writers far from home. Furthermore, it recognizes the specific nature of new technologies of media and communication that allow instant creation of virtual immigrant communities and constant possibilities for interaction with the people and discourse of home. For this volume, it is important that many of the new transnational writers are women (as are many of the scholars who work on the topic), which makes their position with regard to national and linguistic boundaries even more problematic and marginal. Hence, the question of gender is one of the central points in the collection. Most of the articles originated at two conferences that addressed the closely connected issues of transnational literature and translation—be it “translation proper,” by which works of literature are brought across linguistic boundaries and enter new polysystems, or the self-translation of a writer who can mobilize the discourse of a new place of residence from a strikingly different historical and cultural position. Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe

The first conference was held at Central European University in May 2013 under the title “Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe,” organized by Jasmina Lukić, who was at that time an Associate Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, and Borbála Faragó, a Marie Curie Fellow at the Department. Theoretically, one of its main aims was 3

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to discuss the potentials of the concept of transnational literature for rethinking the concept of European literature, and to do this from a gendered perspective. The organizers thought that, apart from being interesting in and of itself, the topic was also one that the times demanded: the ongoing crisis of the European Union challenged us to examine concepts that can help in rethinking its various aspects. Looking back at development of the so-called “transnational turn” from the current perspective, where calls for revival of the power of nation-states in Europe are a strong and worrying growing trend, it looks as if the rise and development of transnationalism in theory was related to a period of hope, beginning in the 1990s, when globalization was thought able to transform the world profoundly into a better place. By now this hope has been seriously challenged, together with the European Union itself, the biggest attempt until now to create a new transnational structure as an alternative to the traditional nation-state. And although the concept “transnational” is neither simple nor unproblematic in itself,2 its rise would be impossible without rethinking other related concepts such as identity and border, the globalization and migration that occurred with postmodernism and the rise of cultural studies and postcolonial studies, as well as the development of feminist theory. The conference in Budapest hoped to offer a contribution to these continuing processes, bringing together transnational theory and literary criticism within a feminist interpretative framework. In that sense it followed Elizabeth Grosz’s claim that [f]eminist theory makes a difference to theory, to the world of knowledge, the production of discourses and truths that may disavow their grounding in theory but nevertheless implicitly rely on theoretical assumptions, whether unacknowledged or conscious. This difference is palpable, measurable in the types of research now undertaken, the questions asked and the methods guiding research. But further, this difference will continue to matter in less tangible but equally



2

For a more elaborated discussion of some of these complexities, see Goebel and Schabio 2014. 4

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Introduction

powerful ways in directing thought into regions it has not fully explored before. (Grosz 2010, 94)

As already stated, the concept of transnational literature was supposed to contribute to rethinking European literature within a larger framework of Europe beyond the borders of nation-states. Thus we find a particular value of the conference in its further application of this interpretative framework to Central and East European literatures.3 We hope this value is also visible in the volume at hand. Azade Seyhan and Dubravka Ugrešić were keynote speakers at the conference, and many other authors from the first and second parts of this volume participated: Vita Fortunati and Eleonora Federici, Adelina Sánchez Espinosa and Sonia Fernández Hoyos, Ágnes Györke, Vera Eliasova, Mădălina Nicolaescu, and Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, whose articles in this volume have been updated to reflect ongoing scholarship in the field. Transnational Literature and Translation

Although the question of translation was not foregrounded in the Budapest conference, it soon became one of the focal points of the event. So it was quite logical for the second conference, on transnational literature, organized by Jasmina Lukić as Visiting Cornell Professor at Swarthmore College in 2014–2015, and Sibelan Forrester, Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College, to focus on this critical intersection of two growing fields of studies, transnational studies and translation studies. The conference “Transnational Literature and Translation” was held at Swarthmore College in February 2015; it brought together guests from out of town (Susan Stanford Friedman and Michael Kandel as keynote speakers, and Ellen Elias-Bursać from the United States, and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Vita Fortunati and Eleonora Federici from Europe), as well as local scholars (Azade Seyhan, Kathryn Hellerstein and Grace Ledbetter), who explored various aspects of interrelatedness

3

Two volumes that address transnational literature in Central and Eastern Europe were edited by Elka Agoston-Nikolova in 2010 and by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Mădălina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith in 2014. 5

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between the two fields, with particular emphasis on their effects on literary studies, addressing a combination of more theoretical propositions and readings of exemplary texts, the transformations they enact as authors, the texts themselves, and whether the ideas on which they are based cross geographical and linguistic borders. Translation is one of the oldest literary practices. Literary texts demand particular approaches to translation, which is sometimes the practice that turns a text into literature. There is the obvious need to get something into another language, and many of the articles in this collection look not only at migrant or exiled authors who follow the linguistic vectors of the geographical movements in their own lives and writing careers, but also at the relationship of languages and their relative cultural power, reflected in the world status of their literatures. Self-translation can emerge as a way not only to enact the transnational journey, but also to address these differences in power and status. Translation theory, now part of the growing discipline of translation studies, has a similar transnational dimension in which ever broader groups of scholars and writers pick up the issues raised by theory and practice across different vectors. Paying attention to gender in translation is not only a way to expose and clarify common metaphors of authority (for example, prioritizing authorial intention versus the translator’s power), but also as a way to track particular writers and translators. How long does a migrating author need to reside in a place and take on its social and political concerns before the writer is accepted as “one of ours,” and how is this transformation connected with translation? The role of national governments in funding and promoting translations of their authors, and the processes of selection involved in these moves, have an impact on the outcome. Translation also offers access to different texts for readers and scholars—especially now, when no specialist in comparative literature can possibly know all the languages necessary to embrace all the relevant texts of her project, and yet when the availability of all kinds of texts in major world languages tends to elide the process of translation and the systems of production and reproduction that favor texts of certain kinds. (Not to mention the shifting status of literature itself, as new verbal and verbalvisual genres appear and provoke their own questions about translation.) 6

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From Transnational to Translational

The first section of articles in this volume prioritizes transnational theory, addressing a number of literal and literary movements: authors who have themselves crossed borders in their lives or in their works and the literary movements in which they participate or which their work serves to define. Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Translational Migrantions: Novel Homelands in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane” investigates what she terms the translation cultural space of the twenty-first century with a careful analysis of Ali’s novel about the life of a Bangladeshi family. Following a succinct and convincing theoretical reflection on the transnational, translational, and transcultural, Friedman argues that Ali’s work, in its engagement with British and Irish modernist precursors (Joyce and Woolf), transculturates the contemporary British novel, “re/ forming it into a re/newed literary tradition, one that is national, transnational, and translational.” The literary traces of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway create a space within the novel where the personal stories of a Bangladeshi family echo the lives of familiar modernist protagonists, and also where questions of individual and national belonging (and unbelonging) are played out. This cultural translation of modernist classics into an immigrant narrative affirms a continuity between different literary periods and cultures, and offers a “novel homeland” that facilitates a “new kind of belonging to a national tradition that has been redefined as inherently transnational and translational.” Eleonora Federici and Vita Fortunati, in “Theorizing Women’s Transnational Literatures: Shaping New Female Identities in Europe through Writing and Translation,” strive to define the complex notion of transnational literature at the intersection of Comparative and Translation Studies. Taking into account recent debates on world literature, transnational literatures and theories regarding women’s transnational literatures, they address three major issues: 1) transnationalism challenges our ideas about literary and cultural works in a national framework, 2) translation has become an hermeneutical category, helpful for understanding literary production enriched by migrant writers in the global age, and 3) we witness in the literary production of women writers the phenomenon not only of plurilingualism but also of self7

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translation. In an age of intensified migration in Europe, transnational women writers are an enriching and challenging factor in many European literatures thanks to the many issues discussed in their novels: identity, nationality, ethnicity, gender and language. The essay by Fortunati and Federici means to investigate new women’s voices in the Italian literary panorama, voices that make visible how the notions of nationality, literary canon and mother tongue should be re-discussed. Their case studies in this analysis are Ornela Vorpsi and Lilia Bicec, two very interesting writers in the Italian literary panorama, who illustrate the need for new discussions and definitions of nationality, literary canon and mother tongue. In “Crossing Borders in Perilous Zones: Labors of Transport and Translation in Women Writers of Exile,” Azade Seyhan focuses on selftranslation, particularly in Turkish women’s writing about the experience of exile, and connects the strategies they employ in new literary contexts with practices of censorship in their countries of origin. Seyhan approaches the subject from two major perspectives: while the first outlines the role of censorship in translation, the second argues that empathy is a driving force in these works. Censorship is a significant motivating force for exilic writers, whose history of being silenced in their country of origin drives them towards developing strategies to regain agency. The memory of stifled linguistic expression induces selftranslations that are indirect, quirky and open to risks; as the author demonstrates through the writings of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, they enrich and enhance the target language and successfully reflect the complexities and traumas of the diasporic experience. This linguistic free play and “translational subterfuge,” in turn, create an empathetic solidarity that reflects the truth of human experience in these works. Sonia Fernández Hoyos and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, in “Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquidity and Transnational Women’s Literature: Nancy Huston and Assia Djebar as Case Studies,” investigate the concept of liquidity in the works of Nancy Huston and Assia Djebar. They argue that Zygmunt Bauman’s project—which posits the world as transient, in flux, uncertain and ambivalent—and transnationalism’s goal of viewing the geography of a book’s whole production process, offer useful frameworks from which to approach the social phenomena of globaliza8

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Introduction

tion. In their insightful analysis of Nancy Huston’s non-fiction, they concentrate on travel, exile, and bilingualism/self-translation as key concepts that define her work. Assia Djebar’s work is discussed mainly from the perspectives of linguistic privilege and the author’s ambivalent relationship with her “public” and “private” languages—French and Arabic, respectively. Fernández Hoyos and Sánchez Espinosa convincingly term this Djebar’s feminist “translanguage of solidarity” and argue for a solidity of societal solidarity that will counteract the liquidity of exile, offering hope in the paradigms of transnational writing. Jasmina Lukić’s article “Travelling Theory as Theory in Translation: Transnational and Transgenerational Perspectives” raises the question of the multiple critical approaches demanded by responsible reading. She finds in Tena Štivičić’s prizewinning recent drama Three Winters rich evidence of the impact of generational paradigms on the lives of a number of women in Zagreb, Croatia, and thus proof of the need for attention to transgenerational changes and connections. Using the concept of transnational literacy as developed by Susan Stanford Friedman, Lukić argues for a concept of generational literacy as a tool to understand and interpret the traveling of theory across symbolic generational borders. Three Winters is both a transnational and a locational text, demonstrating the travel of concepts and related misunderstandings between three generations of women who have lived in the city of Zagreb since the 1920s. Each of them experiences different political and gender regimes, which leads them to different interpretations of the main concepts defining their personal and social identities. Reading across Borders

The second section of this collection continues the application of literary and transnational theory with focused readings of indicative texts. Grace Ledbetter’s “Translation into Dance: Adaptation and Transnational Hellenism in Balanchine’s Apollo” discusses Balanchine’s use of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as a form of translation that elicits new views of Apollo and thus advances development of the myth in the form of dance. In her sensitive analysis of the well-known émigré choreogra9

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pher’s use of classical sources in his 1928 ballet piece Apollo, Ledbetter takes an interdisciplinary approach. The author investigates how and to what end the ballet transforms, translates, or adapts the original, classical  Homeric Hymn. Pointing out that in the case of classicism a discussion of fidelity is meaningless, since these sources are often themselves re-workings of earlier versions, Ledbetter argues that Balanchine’s ballet is a “step in the evolution of the myth of Apollo.” Hence she is more interested in the process of “transmediation”—adapting the verbal medium to dance—and chooses to focus on the new layers of meaning that dance offers to the Apollo narrative. The ballet is choreographed to demonstrate the birth, development, and prioritizing of dance over other art forms: rather than emphasizing Apollo’s frightful might, it displays the god’s playfulness and creativity. The medium of dance offers dimensions of meaning that are not manifest in the original story. Thus issues of historicity and nationality are imbued with ambiguity and plurality that invite multiple, yet cogent interpretations.  Ágnes Györke finds that the transnational and transitory nature of London offers a performative space to women in Doris Lessing’s later work in her article, “Stories from Elsewhere: The City as a Transnational Space in Doris Lessing’s Fiction.” Györke argues that while Lessing’s early work, including In Pursuit of the English, The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City, engaged with urban space through the nostalgic lens of transnational memories of Southern Rhodesia, in London Observed, published in 1991, the transnational metropolis is portrayed as a future-oriented and joyful space, which seems to offer a unique opportunity for women to explore their subjectivities. However, as Györke deftly demonstrates, these transitory, multi-ethnic locations fail to offer long-term empowering positions, since they refuse to allow an engagement with painful experiences that continuously lurk behind the surface. In “The Mobile Imagination in European Women’s Writing: Parallels Between Modern and Postmodern Times,” Vera Eliasova advances a politicized reading of mobility in works by Virginia Wolff and Katherine Mansfield that offers possibilities for later works by Iva Pekárková (on New York) and Dubravka Ugrešić (on Berlin). Thus Eliasova investigates the concept of mobile imagination in the work of four women writers, 10

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Introduction

two modernist and two contemporary. She argues that the writing of mobility goes beyond the fixed and familiar not only spatially, but also temporally. Through a careful reading of home and the city, Eliasova argues for a politicized reading of mobility in these works. She describes how for Virginia Woolf, walking in the city is a prerequisite for the creative imagination, while for Mansfield the home itself becomes an unsettled imaginary. In a temporal and spatial leap, Eliasova reads Czech writer Pekárková’s engagement with New York as an intensification of the mobile imagination, as the city itself becomes an unsettled, animalistic character in the novel. Finally, in her reading of Ugrešić, Eliasova describes Berlin as a city of conversations that connects diverse modalities of mobility across time and space, and concludes that these four women writers engage with a sense of wonder that accompanies the enlivened mobile imagination. Mădălina Nikolaescu compares the images of immigrant life presented in novels by Romanian women with those in the new genre of online stories in “Romanian Women’s Migration: Online Versus Offline Stories.” She argues that the two different genres offer markedly dissimilar perspectives on migration. While both genres are written in Romanian for Romanian audiences, online stories are geared towards transnational communities of migrants, Nicolaescu argues, while fictional stories are aimed at contemporary readership in Romania. This is significant since the online forums face considerable (interactive) audience expectations to fashion their stories within a successful assimilation narrative, whereas novelists have a freer rein in articulating their migrant characters’ restricted agency and subaltern positions. On the other hand, however, online stories show a greater sense of empowerment and networking among female migrants, and seem to suggest that the isolation described in novels is a thing of the past. Nicolaescu offers a careful comparative close reading of Ioana Baetica Morpurgo’s novel Imigrantii and stories posted on UK diaspora forums to bring her arguments to life.  Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru’s article, “From Traveling Memoir to Nomadic Narrative in Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name and Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story,” examines Kassabova’s trans­ positions of diasporic experience taking her readers on a journey of 11

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discovering what spatial and psychological belonging means to the Bulgarian-born artist. Arguing that this author is best understood from the perspective of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadism, she outlines how Kassabova transposes her diasporic experience not only into a second language, but also into dance. The “new language” of tango successfully translates the author’s story of displacement, as the formal, universal framework of this dance creates space for any and every personality, language and expression. Tango, Draga Alexandru argues, provides a useful metaphor for the fluidity of perception in today’s patterns of relocation, dynamic and nomadic, as witnessed by Kassabova’s work.  Dejan Ilić employs the metaphor of the mirror to examine evolving points of view and political/moral positions in Dubravka Ugrešić’s work in “Through the Looking-Glass: On Recurring Motifs and Devices in the Prose of Dubravka Ugrešić.” He takes the motif of Lewis Carroll’s Alice as the central piece of investigation in his analysis and argues that the mirror defamiliarizes reality in phenomenal, linguistic and moral terms. Ugrešić uses this topos to focus attention on the abrupt and fundamental changes her world underwent after the collapse of Yugoslavia, and also through her exile and migration. Rather than depicting difference, Ugrešić—in Ilić’s reading—presents an identical world viewed through different eyes. In this new reality everything is only almost the same, however. Through decontextualization, the author sheds light on the grotesque and the immoral, provoking the reader to take a stand. Interestingly, as Ilić points out, in her later work Ugrešić turns the mirror metaphor upside down; thus staying behind becomes a moral act of resistance, from which the grotesque nationalist fall into the barbaric is laid bare. As an expansion of this argument, Ilić traces the motif of the “fool” in Ugrešić’s novels, that of the ignorant hero whose intelligence lies in making forthright moral decisions. Transnational in Translation

The final section of articles looks closely at the practice and significance of translation itself. Celebrated translator Michael Kandel opens the discussion of the craft of translation. He offers a series of vivid meta12

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Introduction

phors for the translator’s work, underlining connections with other popular arts in his title, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.” Kandel begins his article with an appreciative discussion of Polish poet Julian Tuwim’s translations of Alexander Pushkin’s poetry from Russian. The article discusses his work as a translator (most wonderfully, of the Polish science fiction author and philosopher Stanisław Lem) and editor—both of these serving as the basis for his opinions on translation in theory and in practice. Kandel appreciates the attraction of a series of examples in writing about translation but instead assumes a practical and general orientation, comparing the translator to a stagehand, an editor, or a literary critic. He offers witty metaphors for what the translator does and for how certain traits of an author must be prioritized to achieve a successful translation. Like an editor, a translator benefits from knowing a little bit about many things—and from putting the author at center stage rather than demanding the reader’s attention for the translator. Sibelan Forrester’s “Translating Folktales: From National to Transnational” addresses the oral and thus mutable nature of folklore with regard to the high status of folktales in European Romantic nationalism, finishing her discussion with statements of intention from several contemporary translators of folktales into English. Folklore, as a body of oral utterance and knowledge that constantly crosses national and linguistic borders, is the original transnational discourse. Forrester looks first at the oral nature of folklore and underlines that any written or printed version of an oral narrative is already a translation. In the nineteenth century, thanks to Romantic nationalism, folktales became a prestigious form of folklore for both collectors and folklore theorists. Contemporary translation theory contrasts the strategy of domestication with that of foreignization, and this opposition might seem to map onto oral retelling (adopting local standards for storytelling, and thus domesticating the narrative) versus the written translation of texts that originated as folktales and are intended to convey the traits of another nation’s outlook. In fact, however, written translations too often prove to be highly manipulated (censored or embellished), but because they are identified as folklore readers may assume that they in fact represent spontaneous and pure oral production, tightly bound to the nature of a 13

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particular nation or ethnic group. After citing a number of contemporary translators or theorists of folklore, the article concludes by pointing out the connection of misreading written folklore works as autochthonous resources with attempts at restoratively nostalgic neo-patriarchal discourse in the post-socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Ellen Elias-Bursać, in “Transnational Rivalry and Consecration: Croatian and Serbian Writers in Conflict and Translation,” suggests a taxonomy of writers based on their attitudes toward political power and their eventual success (or not) in translation. Herself an accomplished translator, Elias-Bursać begins her article with some observations of Pascale Casanova about the way national rivalries are expressed in translation. She then turns to how translations of Croatian, Serbian and Yugoslav writers (mostly prose authors, but also a few poets) into English have confirmed or reduced their presence in the realm of world literature, with subsequent further impact on their status and prestige at home. Elias-Bursać divides the novelists into three groups, each represented by several exemplars: “critical nationalists” (Dobrica Ćosić, Vuk Drašković, Antonije Isaković [Serbian] and Ivan Aralica [Croatian]), “critical intellectuals” (Danilo Kiš [Serbian, Jewish, Hungarian], Borislav Pekić [Serbian], Antun Šoljan, Slobodan Novak [Croatian]), and “postmodernists” (Dubravka Ugrešić and David Albahari). The critical nationalists, Elias-Bursać points out, did not try to appeal, and did not appeal, to readers outside their own contexts and thus met with little success even when translated into English. Milorad Pavić was something of an exception, read in translation as a fantasist rather than a nationalist, but his popularity waned when western readers learned of his support for the Milošević regime. The critical intellectuals have had a greater impact through translation. Elias-Bursać concludes that the transnational and postmodern writers Dubravka Ugrešić and David Albahari, writing from a position of displacement, have proven the best equipped to describe the current situation and to appeal to a broad audience of readers; their prominence has also opened the way for a number of younger writers from the region to move into world literature. Kathryn Hellerstein examines the contents and import of poems and a travelogue by one of the best-known Yiddish writers in interwar Warsaw, in “China Comes to Warsaw or Warsaw Comes to China: 14

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Introduction

Melech Ravitch’s Travel Poems and Journals.” Hellerstein finds that Ravitch infuses Yiddish with Chinese, expanding the Yiddish dictionary and worldview. Her article is drawn from a larger project on Yiddish writings—poems, translations, fiction, travelogues, journalism, and memoirs—about China, with the working title China through Yiddish Eyes: Translating Culture in the Twentieth Century. Ravitch, one of Warsaw’s most influential literary figures in the interwar period, visited China in 1935. Hellerstein discusses poems on China and Asia in Ravitch’s 1937 collection, Kontinentn un okeanen (Continents and Oceans), and touches on his travelogue typescript, portions of which he published as journalism in Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw, Melbourne and Johannesburg. Through these disturbing, vivid writings, Ravitch engages in a form of cultural translation that brings both China to Warsaw and Warsaw to China. With his observations, his stories, and his very words, Ravitch infuses Yiddish with Chinese, expanding the Yiddish dictionary and worldview. While conveying to readers his own sense of wonder at the novelty of traveling to these fabled places, at the same time he attempts to make the “exotic” quality or “otherness” of der vayter mizrakh (the Far East) comprehensible and even familiar to his Yiddish readers. Thus Ravitch’s works about China engage in a dual process of foreignizing the Yiddish in which he writes and familiarizing the Chinese culture and society that he describes. References Agoston-Nikolova, Elka, ed. 2010. Shoreless Bridges: South East European Writing in Diaspora. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics 55. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina, Mădălina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith, eds. 2014. Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millennium. Vienna: LIT Verlag. 15

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Goebel, Walter and Saskia Schabio, eds. 2014. Locating Transnational Ideals. London and New York: Routledge. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2010. “The practice of Feminist Theory.” d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 1, 94–108. Jay, Paul. 2010. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Lukić, Jasmina. 2014. “The Transnational Turn, Comparative Literature and the Ethics of Solidarity: Engendering Transnational Literature.” In Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millennium, 33–51. Edited by Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina, Mădălina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith. Vienna: LIT Verlag. Seyhan, Azade. 2001. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton and Oxford: Prince­ton University Press. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literature. New York: Continuum. Ugrešić, Dubravka. 2013. Europe in Sepia. Translated by David Williams. Rochester: Open Letter Press.

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From Transnational to Translational

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Translational Migrations: Novel Homelands in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane S U S A N S TA N FO R D F R I ED M A N

Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (73) A translation constantly undoes and disperses the authority of the original. […] The meaning of the original always shifts by the very process of being translated. Translation becomes a permanent debt, and hybridity an endless search. Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration (144)

Twenty-first-century images of refugees streaming across Europe’s eastern and southern borders in the wake of the Arab Spring dominate the mediascapes of an intensely mobile era—hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the violence and chaos of their homelands; seeking asylum, safety, a life in future-time. As sociologist Nikos Papastergiadis writes, “Migration, in its endless motion, surrounds and pervades almost all aspects of contemporary society. As has often been noted, the modern world is in a state of flux and turbulence” (2002, 2). It may seem to us today as if migration—especially of refugees—has increased dramatically in our century. But in reality, the human species has always been on the move, with various forms, degrees, and causes of perpetual species mobility being the norm, not a departure from it. Whatever their cause, such mobilities intensify the search for “home” and “homeland” in the face of the strange, the foreign—that is, in the context of intercultural and intracultural encounters across difference. Encounters produced by migration are, I will argue here, fundamentally translational, as people from one culture meet others from another culture and attempt to translate its unfamiliar semiotics into meanings

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that can be understood in their own context. Fictions of mobility unfold around plots of translational encounters. Identities in motion are formed in the translational spaces in between, what Azade Seyhan in Writing Outside the Nation calls “an alternative space, a third geography”—“on the hyphen” (Seyhan 2001, 15). “This is the space,” she continues, “of memory, of language, of translation.” It is the “terrain (of) writing.” The borderlands between cultural difference generate narrative, I have argued, rather than serving as mere descriptive background for it.1 Broadly understood, literature of all kinds—from familiar genres to the new media—have a special role to play in helping us to understand the translational dimensions of migration. As texts that stage mobility and encounter, they enact the negotiated processes of resistance, assimilation, and transculturation in what feminist anthropologist Avtar Brah calls “diaspora space,” that is, the cultural arena in which both “natives” and “migrants” change each other and thereby hybridize both homeland and hostland. In this essay, I will reflect on the relationship of the transnational, translational, and transcultural before turning to the example of Monica Ali’s best-selling migration novel, Brick Lane (2003). Brick Lane, I will argue, is more than a migration tale featuring a Bangladeshi ethnic enclave within the heart of London, thereby existing only on the fringes of British literature; it is more than a derivative instance of colonial mimicry or writing back to empire. Instead, Brick Lane’s pervasive and uncanny echoes of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) provide a test case for how a twenty-first-century migration narrative transplants Bangladeshi migrant experience into the heartland of British and Irish modernism from the early twentieth century, thereby claiming a central place for migrants within the translational cultural space of the twenty-first-century novel, and in consequence redefining what it means to be “British” and what constitutes a transnational British literary tradition.



1

See Friedman 1998a, Chapter 5. 20

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Reflections on the Transnational, Translational and Transcultural

Beginning in the 1990s in conjunction with heightened globalization, the “transnational turn” has involved various efforts to move beyond the exceptionalist national paradigm in literary studies, not to deny the significance of the nation for a fully situated and contextualized methodology, but rather to recognize that the national has always existed within a larger temporal and geographical scale of transnational and cross-border interaction and cross-fertilization. As Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell argue in their introduction to Shades of the Planet, a “nation-centered mapping” of literature produces distortions that suppress global networks within which the literatures of any nation are produced (Dimock and Buell 2007, 3). The discipline of comparative literature and the more amorphous field of world literature have both opened up the horizons of literary studies by refusing the strait jacket of national borders and by basing their explorations on cosmopolitan ideals going back to classical Greek notions of the cosmopolis and Enlightenment re-inventions by Kant, Goethe, Marx and Engels, among others. In the past two decades, the concept of cosmopolitanism itself has undergone significant revision in planetary terms—no longer (if it ever was) a notion of universal sameness emerging from a European epistemology of self-other, but now a concept of “situated” or “rooted” cosmopolitanism produced through the late twentieth-century phenomenology of exiles, refugees, asylum seekers, diasporics, economic migrants, guest workers and the like.2 This new cosmopolitanism represents forms of hybridization that both engage with and move beyond difference. The transnational does not erase the national; it engages dialogically with it, a process evident in twenty-first-century competing forces of globalization, nationalism and nativism: borders that break down, borders that are reconstituted, often accompanied by terrible violence. The universalizing gestures of a Kantian cosmopolitanism have been subject to critique from many perspectives. But what interests me here

2

For concepts of “situated” cosmopolitanism, see for example Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms”; Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms.” For the concept of the “cosmopolitan patriot,” see Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” 21

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is the relationship of the cosmopolitan transnational to the translational.3 What is the place of language in the efforts to move beyond the national paradigm for literary studies? To echo Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone, in what way is language simultaneously translatable and untranslatable? To what extent, as Apter asks in Against World Literature, is the untranslatability of language (especially literary language) a deterrent to the study of literature across national borders? Is the translational even possible? Or is an ideal of translation even worth pursuing? Translation itself has been a flashpoint of conflict in literary studies— e.g. the famous debate between Franco Moretti’s advocacy of “distant reading” through translation and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak insistence on “close reading” in the original languages. Apter’s somewhat ambiguous stand “against world literature” is a critique of too easy assumptions of translation, a forgetting that translation can never fully capture the nuances of the original language. In my view, Apter’s move in Against World Literature, for all its complexity, is regressive. What I have found most exciting in the development of translation studies as a field since the 1970s has been the increasing move away from privileging the original language, downgrading the translation, and promoting a binary system that posits the source text as pure and the target text as impure, diluted, never the equal of the original. As Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere point out in their many summaries of the field’s evolution, the translator and the act of translation have become ever more visible as a site of interpretation and creativity. Lefevere argues that all (textual) translation involves some form of “rewriting.” For some, translational interpretation or rewriting is a form of manipulation, even a form of treachery; for others, it is a site of creativity.4 Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (2002, xv) credit Homi K. Bhabha for inventing the term “translational” in his discussion of cultural translation in The Location of Culture (212–35). 4 Susan Bassnett dates the beginning of translation studies as a field/discipline from a 1976 conference of the Leuven Group and the 1978 volume that ensued, including André Lefevere’s manifesto. Since 1980, she has produced multiple editions of her introduction to the field, the most recent of which is Translation: The New Critical Idiom (2014), and she often works conjointly with Lefevere, as in their Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (2002). Similarly, Lawrence Venuti has published multiple editions of his The Translation Studies Reader, with his summaries of the field’s evolutions. See also Alessandra Riccardi’s Transla3



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Like many phenomena, attitudes towards translation exist on a spectrum from dystopic to utopic. Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay, “The Task of the Translator,” remains especially influential for its utopianism. As the epigraph from his essay suggestions, the space of the translation— between two languages—is charged with creative energy as a site in which both languages are transformed by exposure to the other. Nikos Papastergiadis develops Benjamin’s concept even further by seeing translation as “a dynamic interaction within which conceptual boundaries are expanded and residual difference respected” (Papastergiadis 2000, 131). Translation, in his view, creates an “energy that comes from conjunction and juxtaposition.” Translation is a “hybrid” that is “not found in the sum of its parts but from the power of the hyphen” (ibid., 143). The very gap between languages is a creative space in between—on the hyphen. It is a space for intercultural encounter, for the crossing over, even for the productive transgression of purity. In short, translation from one language to another invites the fraught, difficult, but potentially enriching process of cultural translation. Translation is more than the “crossing over” from one language to another; it is also the crisscrossing, the intersections, the intermingling of different cultural values, belief and affect systems, and modes of understanding and communication. In this hybrid borderland, new understandings mingle with misunderstandings; communication incorporates miscommunication. As Papastergiadis writes, “Translation is always an encounter with the resistance of the untranslatable. From this tension there emerges both a haunting sense of irresoluteness and the driving energy for further translation” (ibid., 139). The utopianism of such a view of translation is not so much the hope of universal world peace. Rather, it is the way in which the space of translation brings differences into some kind of relation or conversation, out of which the potential exists (not always fulfilled) for the pursuit of greater understanding and co-existence. In this sense, the translational is a site of dynamic, situated cosmopolitanisms. Because language is not only constitutive of culture but also a reflection of culture’s wider dimensions, linguistic translation inevitably tion Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline (2002) for other assessments of debates in the field. 23

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engages with cultural translation. For Bassnett, Lefevere, and others like Lawrence Venuti, Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, translation is never a purely linguistic act; it always exists within a larger context of power at all levels of society: political, economic, institutional, religious, intellectual, aesthetic, familial, sexual, and so forth.5 For them, the translational engages with the national and transnational, including the effects of colonialism, racism, sexism, and so forth. In agreement with this view, Papastergiadis considers “how culture works like a language” (2000, 124). He uses “the concept of translation as a metaphor for understanding how the foreign and the familiar are interrelated in every form of cultural production,” including not only spatial but also temporal forms of the “duel” between the familiar and the foreign (ibid., 123). He asks that we “expand the conceptual reach of the trope of translation to incorporate the processes of transculturation” (ibid., 127). Transculturalism, a concept developed in the 1940s in anthropology and now widely used in migration/diaspora studies, focuses on the contact zones between cultures and the resultant processes of interculturalism. What happens when two cultures meet—in whatever arenas, from the economic and political to the cultural or aesthetic? Transculturalism is the notion that both cultures change as an effect of encounter, even in colonial contexts. The colonizer is transformed through contact with the colonized just as the colonized is affected by the colonizer, processes which are heavily structured by the inequalities of power. The nation that absorbs immigrants becomes a different nation as a result of immigration into it: traditions are always in the process of being reinvented. Anthropologist Avtar Brah characterizes the transcultural effects of migration as the creation of “diaspora space.”6 Migrants not only “assimilate” to their new homelands but also change those hostlands profoundly. Diaspora space within the nation is the site of its transcultural cosmopolitanism. The translational as a metaphor for transculturation is especially useful for understanding the cultural contact zones created by transnaFor an overview of the growing analysis of power in translation studies, see also Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler’s introduction to their Translation and Power. 6 For Brah’s discussions of diaspora space, see Cartographies of Diaspora, 16, 180–81, 208–10.

5



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tional migration from former colonies into the colonizing hostland in the post-World War II era. In the waning days of the British Empire, migrants from the newly liberated or still liberating colonies flocked to Britain in large numbers to help replace the labor force lost in the war. Among others, Papastergiadis calls this phenomenon the “new migration,” one characterized not so much by push/pull factors of early twentieth-century migrations but rather by what he calls “the turbulence of migration,” the “journey” of a new modernity as the product of the intensified globalization of the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries (2000, 11). These conditions, he argues, have produced human mobilities of all kinds—from the physical and geopolitical to the psychological, philosophical, and spiritual. Unmoored from the certainties of stasis, people on the move confront the strangers they meet in the elsewhere of travel and the stranger they find within themselves. Out of such displacements emerges a complex phenomenology—the despair of disjuncture and uncertainty, the nostalgia for lost traditions and homes, and the exhilarations of new openings and synergies. As anthropologist James Clifford writes, “Diaspora consciousness lives loss and hope as a defining tension” (Clifford 1997, 257), and the “empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes a solidarity and connection there” (ibid., 269). For Clifford, the “cultures of displacement and transplantation are inseparable from specific, often violent, histories of economic, political and cultural interaction—histories that generate what might be called discrepant cosmopolitanisms” (ibid., 36). The translational functions as both condition of and metaphor for the space of such discrepant cosmopolitanisms. Translational Cosmopolitan Literatures in Britain: Then and Now

While Papastergiadis and Clifford address the diasporic consciousness engendered by the current period of globalization, I am struck by how apt their formulations are for early twentieth-century cosmopolitan modernity and for the transnational mobilities of many American, British and European modernists—for wandering expatriates like Ezra 25

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Pound, James Joyce, H. D., Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy; for migrants like Joseph Conrad, Henry James and T. S. Eliot; for restless travelers like E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and even Virginia Woolf, to name but a few. What can we make of this continuity between different halves of the century, especially in the face of the obvious differences of privilege and relations to past histories of colonialism? Such differences are paramount to proponents of the “new cosmopolitanism,” a cosmopolitanism “from below” that many sharply contrast to the cosmopolitanism “from above” evident in early twentieth-century flânerie and voluntary travel.7 But like Rebecca Walkowitz in Cosmopolitan Style, I think the continuities are worth exploring. While Walkowitz finds the continuities in style, I locate the ongoing connection in migration, broadly understood as all forms of human mobility. In my view, the massive migrations of late twentieth-century postcolonials to the metropoles of their former colonizers represents not a postmodern break from early twentieth-century modernity, but rather the continuation of the symbiotically linked modernities that connected the West and its colonies as constitutive of the earlier modernity. As I have written elsewhere, I object to the periodization of modernism that announces an endpoint—e.g., 1945—just at the beginnings of emergent postcolonial modernities (Friedman 2015, 83–96). The modernisms that accompany these interlinked modernities across the globe cover a longer span of time than the conventional datings of modernism (e.g., 1890– 1945) and should include the post-1945 period of the “new migration” (ibid., 215–310). Migration and its effects—translational contact zones; traveling, transplanting and indigenizing cultures; hybridizations; and diasporic longings—have been central to narratives of colonial and postcolonial modernities since 1945. For writers like Aimé Césaire, Tayeb Salih, Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, radical representational ruptures characterize their migration narratives, directly linking their texts in aesthetic as well as epistemological terms to earlier writers in the West.

For current debates on cosmopolitanisms “from above” and “below,” see Friedman, “Wartime Cosmopolitanism.”

7

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Here, however, I focus on Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, a predominantly realist novel of migration short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2003. Its publication—after a reputed £200,000 advance—and later film adaptation in 2007 were the occasion of considerable controversy, even protests against it on the grounds that it was not a realistic portrayal of the Bangladeshi community around Brick Lane, that it reinforced stereotypes of Muslim immigrants, and that its focus on an individual woman’s emergence from an oppressive marriage played into the colonial narrative of the white colonizer’s burden to save “brown” women.8 Its formal attributes echo the Victorian novel and such postcolonial descendants as Naguib Mafouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1956–1957) in its nuanced ethnographic social history with a large cast of characters. While not openly allied with the high modernist mode of Joyce or Woolf, Brick Lane shares formalist qualities with less experimental Western modernists such as Lawrence, Conrad, and Forster. Moreover, a closer look at its narrative strategies suggests ruptures in its ties to realism: its use of epistolary interludes; motifs; free indirect discourse; occasional interior monologue; interruptive flashback memories, dreams, and hallucinations; allegorically weighted names; intertextual allusion; and citational strategies. Brick Lane’s engagement with earlier, Western forms of modernism is more translational than formalist, I will show. The novel is written in English—it is not “translated” in the strictly linguistic sense of the term. But it is translational in the metaphorical sense of the term, at a metalevel of reflexivity that exists as a secret communication between writer and reader, unbeknownst to the characters in the novel. Brick Lane stages hidden encounters with its precursors—namely, Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—to create a “diaspora space” in which the literary traditions of the early twentieth-century “classics” and an early twentyfirst century migration narrative intermingle, transculturate, and transform each other. Brick Lane exists on the translational hyphen in For debates about the novel’s “realism,” see Upstone, who proposes a category of “utopian realism” in defense of the novel; and Hiddleston, who argues that attacks on the novel’s lack of realism miss its self-conscious artifice. For controversies about the reception of the novel and the film, see Ahmed, Benwell et al., and Perfect. In 2006, The Guardian printed a column by Germaine Greer (23 July 2006), which produced a kaleidoscope of views about Ali, her novel and the film.

8

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more ways than one: not only the hybridizing experience of Bangladeshi migrants in London, but also the literary interstices between early twentieth-century English and Irish fiction and the early twenty-first-century Bangladeshi/English novel. In so doing, Ali transculturates the British novel, thereby re/forming it into a re/newed literary tradition, one that is national, transnational, and translational. Brick Lane’s Transculturation of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway

In telling the story of a Bangladeshi family’s migration to London from the 1970s through 2002, Brick Lane deliberately imports elements of Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway into its narrative as a form of cultural translation, indeed a transplantation and hybridization that inserts a contemporary novel by the half English/half Bangladeshi novelist into the modern twentieth-century British/Irish novel.9 The echoes of the precursor texts are both playful and serious. They are not implanted, I would argue, as instances of the empire writing back against colonial dominance, of belatedness or colonial derivativeness, or of postcolonial mimicry.10 Rather than rely on these older models of postcolonial resistance and angst, I prefer to read Ali’s transplantations of Joyce’s Dublin and Woolf’s London through a lens based on transculturation as an effect of migration. Brick Lane performs cultural translation by linking its contemporary migration narrative with Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses at the same time that it insists on its difference, its creative incommensurability. The first clue to Ali’s intertextual project is the name of Chanu’s boss, Mr. Dalloway (16); this link to Mrs. Dalloway gives the reader permission to see a host of cultural/textual translations centered on names, issues of masculinity and social standing, motifs of depression and suicide, and mysteries I borrow here from Edward Said’s “Traveling Theory” and “Traveling Theory Revisited,” and James Clifford’s “Traveling Cultures,” seminal essays for a theory of circulating and indigenizing texts and cultures, also discussed at length in Planetary Modernisms (62–69, 167–72, 215–21). 10 See Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back and Bhabha’s The Location of Culture for theories of postcolonial strategies of resistance, ones that insufficiently explain (in my view) Brick Lane’s relationship to its precursors. 9



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of human character. Updating the ambitions of Septimus Warren Smith for social mobility in the context of migration, Chanu arrived in London in the 1970s from Bangladesh with his English major, a love of English poetry, and a university certificate in hand, his heart full of dreams, and his head full of schemes for advancement in the metropole. He even spouts Shakespeare like Septimus and attends Morely College (27), the same London night school where Woolf taught working men and women, in 2005–2007 (Lee 1993, 218–20). While the Great War interrupts Septimus’s advance, Chanu comes up against Mr. Dalloway, whose refusal to promote Chanu leads to a series of retrenchments from middle class to working class status, from desk job to taxi cab, a descent that he experiences as a series of humiliations, initiated when he sees Wilkie, his white co-worker with less education, get the promotion he believes he deserves. Ali’s choice of the boss’s name conjures the Richard Dalloway of Woolf’s novel, a Member of Parliament of sufficient class and political standing to have the Prime Minister attend his wife’s dinner party. He may also invoke Dalloway’s earlier, more sinister incarnation in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, in which Mr. Dalloway defends the British Empire just before he sexually assaults the novel’s young protagonist, Rachel Vinrace. Ali’s cultural translation of Woolf’s Richard Dalloway into a late twentieth-century migration narrative echoes the power and privilege associated with the Englishman and highlights the humiliation of the postcolonial subject embedded in that masculine privilege. British nativist racism, embodied in Brick Lane’s Mr. Dalloway, holds out the promise of a better life to its former colonial subjects but then refuses systemic assimilation to Bangladeshi men. To counter the shame of what he considers his own failure, Chanu succumbs to nostalgia, to a defensive pride in a pre-colonial Bengali past, and to what he had mockingly called the “Going Home Syndrome” (18–19). Near the end of the novel, he himself exhibits the syndrome and returns home in 2002, only to discover that Dhaka is no longer home, if it ever was; success is as elusive in Dhaka as it was in London, though for different reasons. The novel’s closing implies that he will rejoin his wife and daughters in London, having learned that home is where the family he loves is, not in a geopolitical homeland. 29

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Chanu’s emasculation in London also represents a cultural translation of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, the wandering Jew who is both of and not of the land of his birth, Ireland. Translated into the twenty-first century, South Asian Muslims are the new Jews in London, as I will discuss in more detail later. Ali layers her characterization of Chanu with richly textured evocations of Bloom set within a narrative that “translates” Joyce’s triangulated tale into the Bangladeshi enclave of London. As the novel unfolds, Chanu is revealed to be more and more like Bloom, as a modern hero both mocked and admired, even loved for his generosity of spirit, insatiable curiosity, dignity in the face of humiliation, and deep love for his family. As readers, we are not aware of these parallels at the beginning. We meet Chanu as the forty-year-old man who has sent for a village wife whom he can order around and for whom he can play “Big Man.” Nazneen is only nineteen, terrified by the turbulence of her journey. Her culture shock is mapped onto her obedience to Chanu as her fate. His bulging belly and hardened yellow toenails she must cut serve as metonyms for his unmanliness, repulsive physicality, and the disgust she feels. Her rebellion against him and against fate grows the more he determines to keep her in the slot of traditional village girl—by denying her desire to learn English, to go out in the streets by herself, to associate with more assimilated Bangladeshi friends and to attend college. Nazneen’s acculturation to London life is measured in her growing disillusionment with Chanu’s grand talk of promotion and endless schemes for advancement. When he borrows money from Mrs. Islam to purchase himself a computer and her a sewing machine, the breadwinner/wife roles begin to reverse. While his computer gathers dust and he sinks into idle despair, Nazneen learns how to sew and acquires significant income from her piecework at home. Nazneen is the one who figures out that Mrs. Islam is a hypocritical usurer and then confronts her to break the woman’s hold over the family. Increasingly independent economically, Nazneen forms a clothing business with her Bangladeshi friends, doing the designing herself.11 She inflates as Chanu deflates; she acculturates where Chanu becomes increasingly lost in fantasies of Nazneen’s sewing venture is a direct echo, indeed a transplantation of, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, in which the initially passive and frightened Celie gains

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Bengal and a grand return home. She blends many of her Bangladeshi cultural practices with London ways of being, a cultural blending symbolized by the novel’s final scene: the image of Nazneen ice skating in a sari. But in systemic terms, London can absorb women migrants more easily than men, who are kept in their place. In this plot that seems so significantly different from Ulysses, where is the cultural translation? It is there as a kind of metempsychosis (to echo a Joycean motif), as a transportation from past to present, and as an uncanny presence of the familiar within the unfamiliar that becomes more visible as the text progresses. The conflation of Chanu’s repulsive physicality with his ineffectual schemes recalls the blending of Bloom’s abject corporality and his grandiose fantasies in episodes like the Lestrygonians (124–50). The emasculated and cuckolded body of the Irish Jew morphs into that of the Bangladeshi Londoner, gaining a charge from the layering of antisemitism and racism within the Irish and British national imaginaries. Chanu, like Bloom, is an impotent figure whose wife seeks pleasure elsewhere in a sullied marriage bed. Evoking and conflating Molly’s affair with Blazes Boylan and her fantasies of an affair with Stephen Daedalus, Nazneen has a torrid affair with Karim, a charismatic young leader of angry Muslim youths, the second generation Bangladeshi on the estates who are disillusioned with their immigrant parents’ hard work and efforts to achieve some level of acceptance in a hostile hostland. Much as Blazes Boylan brings Molly music for her singing career as a precursor to adultery, Karim brings Nazneen the cloth that she sews. After she defies Chanu to attend a political meeting where Karim speaks, the affair begins with scenes of lovemaking that match Molly’s sexually explicit memories of her day with Blazes. Chanu, unlike Bloom, seems unaware of his wife’s betrayal, but Nazneen’s rising empowerment and independence bear uncanny resemblances to the Circe episode of Ulysses, the enactment and projection of Bloom’s fears and humiliation into the petticoat government of Bella Cohen, the protean form Molly confidence and starts a successful clothing line as a necessary step in becoming independent. Like The Color Purple, Brick Lane is an epistolary novel in which the correspondence between forcibly separated sisters constitutes an emotional core in the novels. 31

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takes in his fantasies in Nighttown (350–497). Ali’s realist representation of Chanu’s humiliation is not experimental like the Circe episode, but the feminization of the (post)colonial man is quite similar. Chanu reincarnates Bloom in his more positive aspects as well. Chanu has Bloom’s endless curiosity and restless zest for life—even his despairing refusal to work is short-lived, after which he starts driving a cab, reading about the past glories of Bengal, and dreaming of a return home. His diasporic longing for an imagined Bengal echoes Bloom’s fascination throughout the day for Israel, stimulated by the Zionist flyer he carries with him. Unlike Chanu, who actually returns to Bangladesh, Bloom has no intentions of joining the Zionists in Israel. But both men are deeply diasporic figures. Additionally, Chanu is a nurturing figure much like Bloom, who begins the day by bringing Molly breakfast in bed and ends it by bringing the homeless Stephen to 19 Eccles Street, a substitute for his lost son. Like Bloom, Chanu too has lost an infant son, and when Nazneen falls apart at the death of their son, Chanu is there to pick up the pieces, cooking and feeding her, caring for her. Again, we see this motherly side of Chanu when Nazneen suffers a complete mental breakdown haunted by the ghost of her mother’s suicide and tormented by her deceit and the conflicting demands of both Karim and Chanu for her loyalty (268–80). Nazneen, however, is no Molly Bloom. One of the differences is a representational one. While Molly can be read as the feminine ventriloquized by a writer who was ambivalent about feminists and feminism, as much as he detested what Irish religion and culture had done to his mother,12 Nazneen is a protagonist who moves away from a characteristically Bangladeshi feminine fate epitomized by her mother and into a form of subjectivity based in agency. Mirroring her rebellious and independent sister Hasina back in Bangladesh, Nazneen breaks free from the fate of Bangladeshi femininity by asserting a self that both participates in and exceeds sexual desire and the body’s corporality. But in spite of these differences, the humanism that underlies Joyce’s portrait of a marriage, where love exists in spite of impotence and betrayal, is reborn in Ali’s representation of the love that develops over time in 12

For a discussion of Joyce’s ambivalence about feminism, see my “Reading Joyce.” 32

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Nazneen’s arranged marriage. As she sees evidence of battery, drugs and alcoholism among the Bangladeshi men in both London and Bangladesh, as she comes to understand Chanu’s fundamental kindness and tolerance, as she becomes disillusioned with the Islamist machismo of the Muslim youth, Nazneen realizes that her father chose well for her in picking an “educated man.” When Chanu confesses to her his dream of “going home a Big Man,” Nazneen says: “‘What is all this Big Man?’ She whispered in his ear. Sadness crushed her chest. […] ‘What is all this Strong Man? Do you think that is why I love you? Is that what there is in you, to be loved?’” (402). Nazneen refuses his plea to return “home” with him, because for her, home is newly relocated. But she has come to recognize her love for him and for the family they made together. Ali joins a long line of women writers who imagine the independent woman’s lover/husband as somehow maimed or abjected—like Rochester in Jane Eyre or Achilles in H. D.’s Helen in Egypt, both examples of wounded men who rely on women they love for strength and whom the women come to love in return. Such men—whether imperial, colonial, or postcolonial subjects—have greater capacity for nurturance and companionship than the he-men like Blazes Boylan and the citizen in Ulysses or like Karim and the Questioner in Brick Lane. While Nazneen’s story departs significantly from Molly Bloom’s, her capacity to survive and thrive—to bend not break—and to interlace love and independence is reminiscent of Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway, as are her links to Woolf’s representations of madness and suicide. Karim’s smothering love for Nazneen and demand that she marry him are reminiscent of Peter’s overpowering love for Clarissa, while Nazneen’s decision to reject Karim’s proposal and accept Chanu on her own terms echoes Clarissa’s choice of autonomy in marriage with Richard Dalloway, even at the price of the excitement she feels with Peter or with the more forbidden but even more enticing sensations she felt with Sally Seton. Doppelgängers in Mrs. Dalloway and Brick Lane

Woolf’s original plan for Mrs. Dalloway to feature the suicide of a society lady who “accidentally” falls down the stairs, morphed into a novel with 33

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a single psyche split into two protagonists who never meet—Septimus and Clarissa.13 In spite of their obvious differences of gender and class, they share a special bond signified by overlapping motifs and by a psychic similarity of moving rapidly through the extremes of ecstasy and despair. Ali’s uncanny cultural translation returns to Woolf’s original plan by having intense psychic suffering, madness and suicide center in the stories of women in both Bangladesh and Britain. One of Nazneen’s first experiences in London is learning about the woman on the sixteenth floor of the estate “accidently” falling to her death in a suspected suicide (26). Just as Clarissa imagines—uncannily relives—Septimus’s suicide and finds in her bond with his assertion of freedom the will to live her life fully (184–86), Nazneen stands at the window and “suddenly […] was sure that she had jumped”—“a big jump, feet first and arms wide, eyes wide, silent all the way down and her hair wild and loose, and a big smile on her face because with this everlasting act she defied everything and everyone” (26). Like Clarissa, who meets the gaze of the mysterious old woman in the window across the way right after her epiphanic identification with Septimus’s suicie (186), Nazneen’s reverie ends in connection with the tattoo lady “across the way.” Ali transports the old woman Clarissa twice sees through her window into the tattoo lady who sits naked “across the way,” smoking and drinking beer, a woman with whom Nazneen regularly exchanges gazes, nods and waves in the early sections of the novel—until the tattoo lady is removed, much as Septimus was removed (6–7, 23, 26, 31, 37, 66). Nazneen’s uncanny bond with the depressed woman on the sixteenth floor foreshadows her own two descents into madness, which come after she has defied her fate as a woman: first, by attempting to will her baby son back to health, and second, by taking a lover. In both cases, madness descends with the hallucination of her dead mother come back to life to chastise Nazneen for her sin of resisting fate—much as Stephen’s mother haunts him for not serving God properly in the Circe episode of Ulysses. Nazneen is finally freed from her madness when a letter from her sister Hasina confesses the dreaded secret that impelled her own rebellion. Hasina had witnessed their mother deliberately killing herself 13

See Lee 1993, 160–61. 34

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by falling on a spear in the granary, making it look like an accident to maintain her reputation as a sainted woman who never complained about her husband’s affairs. Amma’s death by spear translates into Bangladeshi terms Septimus’s death by spear on a Bloomsbury fence. Septimus’s spear is a metonym for the bayonet deaths of trench warfare that killed millions of young men, while Amma’s spear evokes women’s particular suffering within conservative Islam, the demand that she accept her destiny and her husband’s desires without question. Once Nazneen realizes that Amma chose her own fate in the end, even against the prohibitions against suicide in Islam, she frees herself from a socially induced madness and exercises a defiant agency without guilt. She chooses not to marry Karim; she chooses to support her daughter Shahana’s desire to excel in school (like her father) and remain in London; and she chooses not to accompany Chanu back to Bangladesh. Nazneen has redefined “home” on her own terms, independent of the demands of both lover and husband. Woolf’s adaptation of the Doppelgänger motif in the twin figures of Clarissa and Septimus reappears in yet another form in Brick Lane in the paired fates of the two sisters: Nazneen and Hasina, who also echo the letter writing sisters in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. At their core, Clarissa and Septimus are quite similar, as their shared motifs repeatedly suggest, but their differences of gender and class lead their twinned souls into different destinies: marriage/war; life/death. Clarissa accepts “proportion” and “conversion” to society’s conventions, marrying a “safe” man, tucking away the desire she feels for Sally Seton as a stolen moment (32–33), not one to base a whole life upon. Septimus commits suicide in defiance of “proportion” and “conversion,” the values of Sir William Bradshaw who would lock him away in the rest cure (98–100, 148–49). It is a suicide that ironically preserves “life,” a contradiction that Clarissa intuits and with which she nourishes herself (184–86). Hasina and Nazneen are set up as opposites who are nonetheless uncannily linked. As doubles, each lives out a destiny the other could have; each represents a life path for Bangladeshi women, one based on resistance, the other based on acceptance. Hasina challenges her fate, refuses to have her father arrange a marriage for her, runs off to the city and chooses her own mate, a love marriage, an assertion of her own 35

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sexual desire. Nazneen obeys her father, accepts her fate, accepts the marriage he arranges for her with an older man she has never met, and is forced to travel far from home to make a home with a man she finds repulsive, in a land she finds foreign. In the course of the novel, Hasina, the figure of freedom, becomes entrapped—the female body whose free sexuality she chose eventually imprisons her. Nazneen, the figure of acquiescence, becomes the signifier of freedom, growing ever more confident as she makes friends, leaves the house, chooses a lover and forms a business. This reversal of the Doppelgänger fates plays dangerously with the familiar narrative of the oppressed third world woman who migrates to the West and becomes free. Ali’s treatment of Hasina—from her stereotyped life story to the awkwardness of her letters written in pigeon English (why would she write to her sister in English anyway)— has been much criticized.14 However justified these criticisms, the pairing of Hasina/Nazneen means something different in the context of the Clarissa/Septimus doubling. Like Septimus, Hasina refuses to do what is expected of her; while her life becomes a living death in many ways, she has also struck out for freedom, specifically sexual freedom, the freedom of her body. In this way, she foreshadows Nazneen’s own sexual freedom later in the novel, when she takes a lover. As the only letter writer in the novel (Nazneen tries but can hardly write a line), Hasina is also something of an artist figure, just as Septimus, with his wild jottings and visionary dreams. He fails to communicate, but tries, an effort linked to his capacity to feel the war everyone tried to forget. Hasina also tries, and her fumbling English signifies the stress of that attempt, an effort that makes her the novel’s second narrator. In spite of the descent of her life from choice to entrapment, Hasina is a figure of agency who keeps seeking freedom. Like Clarissa, Nazneen’s acceptance of a conventional fate produces a life with less Sturm und Dram, a life in moderation and proportion, but a life that is ultimately life-affirming, in part because of the defiance her sister lived out more fully. As for Woolf, the Doppelgänger narrative allows Ali to delineate two sides See for example Hiddleston 2005, 62–63; Perfect 2008, 113–18. Perfect also demonstrates how Ali drew from Naila Kabeer’s The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka in her rendering of Hasina’s difficult life.

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of the same personality, two divergent life paths nonetheless linked narratively. By the end of her journey, Nazneen bears an uncanny resemblance to Clarissa, as dramatically different as they are: Clarissa, the wife of an MP, the hostess of a Mayfair party for the elite; Nazneen, the wife of a “failed” immigrant whose first boss bears the name of Clarissa’s husband, the resident of Brick Lane. Their Londons are not the same, but each woman has achieved a certain psychological freedom and life-affirming relationship to others in their milieux. Woolf and Ali mark that status through constructions of what Woolf called a “moment of being,” in Joycean terms, a moment of epiphany, revelation. In Brick Lane, this moment occurs in the final sentences of the novel, when Nazneen’s friend Razia and her daughters Shahana and Bibi surprise her by bringing her to a skating rink, where Nazneen chooses to skate on the shimmering ice in a full flowing sari. The significance of this choice returns us to Nazneen’s early culture shock in London when she saw images on TV of women in short skirts and sequins twirling freely across the ice, an image that encapsulated all the freedoms she did not have. Throughout her acculturation to life in London, the motif of skating as an image of the female body, free in motion and speed, recurs in Nazneen’s mind (22–23, 27, 71, 112, 302, 414–15). The novel’s epiphanic conclusion has its distant echo in Clarissa’s appearance in her sea-green dress at her life-affirming party in the final section of Mrs. Dalloway: They stood her up and turned her around. Shahana untied the knot at the back of her head. “Go on. Open them.” She opened her eyes. In front of her was a huge white circle, bounded by four-foothigh boards. Glinting, dazzling, enchanting ice. She looked at the ice and slowly it revealed itself. The cross-cross patterns of a thousand surface scars, the colors that shifted and changed in the lights, the unchanging nature of what lay beneath. A woman swooped by on one leg. No sequins, no short skirts. She wore jeans. She raced on, on two legs. “Here are your boots, Amma.” 37

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Nazneen turned around. To get on the ice physically—it hardly seemed to matter. In her mind she was already there. She said, “But you can’t skate in a sari.” Razia was already lacing her boots. “This is England,” she said. “You can do whatever you like.” (Brick Lane, 414–15) And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seems, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned; caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. (Mrs. Dalloway, 174)

The differences between Nazneen and Clarissa do not need repeating. But it is the trace, the faint echo that lies hidden in the difference that interests me. At the novel’s end, Nazneen grasps at something intangibly incandescent—the freedom of movement across the ice, her sari marking her ties to her origins, but her skates on the ice signifying what she has made of her enforced migration. Clarissa, caught in the web of the conventional “Mrs. Dalloway,” finds a mermaid spirit, a lolloping freedom in an imaginary sea. “What is this terror? What is this ecstasy?” Peter wonders as he sees Clarissa appear in the final words of the novel: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was” (194). And to her friend Razia and her daughters Shahana and Bib, it is Nazneen. There she was, too. National Un/Belonging: Ulysses and Brick Lane

Up to this point, I have stressed the ways in which Brick Lane inserts the personal life stories of a Bangladeshi immigrant family into two classic narratives of early twentieth-century British and Irish modernism, Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. At another level, however, Brick Lane retells the story of the nation, of national identity, of national belonging and unbelonging. Can an immigrant ever find “home” in the hostland? Can an immigrant ever belong? 38

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Without doubt, Brick Lane echoes the familiar tropes of immigration narratives of both Britain and the United States: leaving the homeland full of high hopes for a better life; the shock of arrival15 and the difficult acculturation in the new home, exacerbated by hostland hostilities and discrimination; longing and nostalgia for a homeland that is increasingly imaginary; generational conflict over degrees of cultural retention and assimilation; success stories counterbalanced by failure stories; and so forth. Brick Lane bifurcates these conventional plots along gender lines, having Nazneen increasingly become the figure of flexible adaptation to the new homeland while Chanu progressively suffers from the “Going Home Syndrome” he originally mocks (18). Challenging gender conventions, Nazneen becomes a figure of adaptive hybridity in London while Chanu ends up feeling dislocated in both London and Dhaka, lost in unfulfilled desires in both hostland and old homeland. However, the subterranean echoes of national identity issues in Ulysses in Brick Lane add another dimension to the conventional migration narrative. As the prototypical “wandering Jew,” Bloom is a figure of perpetual homelessness; or, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, he is “homeless at home” (“To the bright eyes”). Although born in Ireland, he is never perceived as fully “Irish.” In the Cyclops episode, the Irish nationalist dubbed “the citizen” and his pals in the pub spout antisemitic sentiments to Bloom’s face and behind his back, denying that a Jew can also be “Irish.” Bloom challenges this view, saying, “A nation? […] A nation is the same people living in the same place” (272). When the citizen sneeringly asks, “What is your nation?” Bloom answers simply, “Ireland. […] I was born here. Ireland” (272). Although critics debate Joyce’s relationship to the Irish nationalist movement of his day, Ulysses challenges British imperial hegemony in countless ways at the same time that it satirizes an essentialist Irish nationalism based on notions of blood and Celtic purity. Like Bloom, Chanu can never be accepted as fully British because, as Paul Gilroy famously quipped, “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack.” Bloom as Europe’s Jewish pariah figure is reborn in Brick Lane in I borrow this phrase from Meena Alexander’s The Shock of Arrival. See also my “Bodies in Motion.”

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Chanu, the “black” immigrant from the former British colony. Unlike Bloom, he was not born in Britain. Like Bloom, however, he hopes to define the nation as “the same people living in the same place.” But to the nation based on the imagined community of white Englishness, he can never belong. His experiences of unbelonging in Britain—starting with Mr. Dalloway refusing to give him the promotion he deserves—are what produce his retreat into a sharp and historically based critique of British imperialism (261), idealized notions of Bengal’s great history, and his final decision to go home. “Back home,” he tells Nazneen, “we’ll really know what’s what” (390). What he finds in Dhaka, however, is a shock of another arrival, the realization that he is homeless at home. In the world of Brick Lane, immigrants of color are the new Jews, not fully at home anywhere. Brick Lane’s narrative of white racism against immigrants of color and the rise of jihadist resistance to it also contains traces of, even as it updates, the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. Published in 2003, Brick Lane was most likely written in the midst of the racial conflict that swept northern England in 2001, culminating in confrontations between white National Front/neo-Nazi gangs and British South Asians in Bradford, just before the cataclysm of 9/11. The final third of the novel reflects the impact of white gang violence against the inhabitants of Tower Hamlets, where Chanu and Nazneen live, as well as the entrance of global Islamist jihadism into their community. Karim, the young man who becomes Nazneen’s lover, helps organize the Bengal Tigers movement to resist white gang violence through locally oriented activism. But a figure mysteriously called “the Questioner,” whose namelessness uncannily recalls the unnamed citizen in the Cyclops episode, challenges Karim’s focus on local leafleting by invoking global jihad, the responsibilities of all Muslims to defend the umma, even if violence is necessary to do so (230–37). Unlike Joyce’s “citizen,” his essentialist identity is transnational, based in a religion, not an ethnicity. But like the citizen, his worldview is binary, us versus them, believers versus infidels. And like the citizen, the Questioner’s concept of identity is essentialist, fundamentalist—evident in his rough dismissal of women at the meeting. “The Qur’an bids us to keep separate. Sisters. What are you doing here anyway,” he glares at the two

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women in burkas (235).16 By the end of the novel, however, we learn that Karim too has become a jihadist, abandoning London activism for Bangladesh, where he cannot speak the language or understand the cultural codes (409). Like Joyce, the implicit moral code of Brick Lane rejects essentialist identity and advocates the messy ambiguity and creative tensions of cosmopolitan multiplicity. Much as Bloom insists on making a home for himself in Ireland, in spite of the antisemitism of Irish nationalism, Nazneen claims London as her home, in spite of the anti-immigrant hostilities. Without sentimentalizing the nation-as-home, both Ulysses and Brick Lane envision a hard-won cosmopolitanism in which outsiders nonetheless claim a form of belonging others would deny them. Conclusion

What then is the purpose and effect of Monica Ali’s uncanny evocations and revocations of Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses in Brick Lane? I suggest that this affiliation between Brick Lane and its modernist precursors is not a case of dominating influence; of the postcolonial novel as derivative of its modernist precursors; or of colonial mimicry in Homi Bhabha’s sense of the term. Brick Lane is not a diluted form of Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses; nor is it a parody of its precursors that unseats their hegemony—indeed its predominantly realist form belies those kinds of affiliation. Rather, Brick Lane transports elements of the earlier novels—particularly their gendered and imperial plots—into a new place, into diaspora space, the site of transculturation, where immigrants and natives alike undergo major transformations resulting from global migrations. Brick Lane accomplishes a cultural translation of modernist classics into contemporary London filled with migrants from the former British Empire. Like Joyce’s Ulysses with The Odyssey, like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with Ulysses, and like Derek Walcott’s Omeros with both the Odyssey and Ulysses, Ali uses the earlier analogues of her text to refuse the marginalization of a Bangladeshi story and to insert that story into the 16

The novel’s jaundiced view of pious Islam is evident in the allegorical portrait of the novel’s one truly evil character, the usurer Mrs. Islam, who extorts vast sums of money from poor immigrants, ostensibly to build mosques in Bangladesh. 41

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epical tradition of Western culture and more specifically British literature. “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack,” to cite Gilroy once again. But a significant effect of Brick Lane’s modernist analogue—the uncanny familiarity and unfamiliarity of its narrative—is to re-color the Union Jack in the diaspora space of late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century British modernity. This cultural translation affirms a continuity between the cosmopolitanisms of the early and late twentieth century, between the world-changing cataclysms of World War I and 9/11. It also fosters a twenty-first-century rereading of Joyce and Woolf through the lens of Ali’s migration novel in which the turbulence of migration is constitutive of different and recurrent modernities. Brick Lane invites us to return to Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway to read them anew. The transculturation that Brick Lane establishes at a meta-fictional level is a “novel homeland” in multiple senses of the term—a new Britain as homeland for its multiracial, multi-religious and transnational citizens; a new homeland in which fiction (the novel) has transformed a hostile nation into a place where home might be possible; a new novelistic tradition in which stories of transnational migrants are as much a part of the national culture as the modernist classics like Joyce and Woolf. What is “novel” in this novel is Brick Lane’s use of uncanny literary echoes of a new kind of belonging to a national tradition that has been redefined as inherently transnational and translational. Narratives of Bangladeshi experience are not add-ons, not peripheral to British literature, but at its very center in the twenty-first century. To return to the epigraphs with which I began, Brick Lane is a “translation” of its precursors that undoes the authority of the original at the same time that it honors them in the echo. The spaces between Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway and Brick Lane—temporal, cultural, racial, religious—are creative sites in which what Benjamin calls the “birth pangs” of a hoped-for new form and what Seyhan terms a “third geography” are given novel form. We can only wonder what Monica Ali thinks of Brexit, of Britain’s return to “Little England,” its nostalgia for an old homeland so at odds with the realities of its peoples in the twenty-first century. In the face of Britain’s removal from the European Union, Brick Lane’s seeming realism appears more utopian than ever. As Papastergiadis suggests, a transcultural hybridity is not an endpoint; it is an “endless search.” 42

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References Ahmed, Rehana. 2010. “Brick Lane: A Materialist Reading of the Novel and Its Reception.” Race & Class 52, no. 2: 25–42. Alexander, Meena. 1996. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Boston: South End Press. Ali, Monica. 2003. Brick Lane. New York: Scribner’s. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1998. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, 91–116. Edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 1994. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Bassnett, Susan. 2014. Translation: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge. ———, and André Lefevere. 1998. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Task of the Translator (1923).” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 69–82. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Benwell, Bethan, James Procter and Gemma Robinson. 2011. “Not Reading Brick Lane.” New Formations: 90–116. Bhabha, Homi K. 1993. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Brontë, Charlotte. 2010. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847). New York: Penguin. Clifford, James. 1997. “Diasporas.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 244–78. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. “Traveling Cultures.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 17–46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dimock, Wai Chee, and Lawrence Buell, eds. 2007. Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dickinson, Emily. 1976. “To the bright eyes east she flies,” # 1573. In The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Back Bay Books. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2004. “Bodies in Motion: A Poetics of Home and Diaspora.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 23, no. 2: 189–212. 43

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———. 2009. “The ‘New Migration’: Clashes, Connections, and Diasporic Women’s Writing.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 3, no. 1: 6–27. ———. 2015. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1998a. Mappings. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998b. “Reading Joyce: Icon of Modernity? Champion of Alterity? Ventriloquist of Otherness?” In Joycean Cultures/Culturing Joyce, 113–33. Edited by Vincent J. Cheng, Kimberly J. Devlin and Margot Norris. Newark: University of Delaware Press. ———. 2013. “Wartime Cosmopolitanism: Cosmofeminism in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32, no. 1: 83–52. Gilroy, Paul. 1987. ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Routledge. Greer, Germaine. 2006. “Reality Bites.” The Guardian, 23 July [last accessed March 3, 2012]. H. D. [Hilda Doolittle]. 1961. Helen in Egypt. New York: Grove. Hiddleston, Jane. 2005. “Shapes and Shadows: (Un)Veiling the Immigrant in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40, no. 1: 57–72. Joyce, James. 1986. Ulysses (1922). Edited by Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage. Kabeer, Naila. 2000. The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso. Lee, Hermione. 1993. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage. Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge. Mahfouz, Naguib. 1990. The Cairo Trilogy, 1956–1957. New York: Doubleday. Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review, 2nd series: 54–68. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2000. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity. Perfect, Michael. 2008. “The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43, no. 3: 109–20. Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge and Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2002. “Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmpolitanism, 1–14. Edited 44

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by Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Riccardi, Alessandra, ed. 2002. Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Bruce. 1998. “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, 246–64. Edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, Edward. 1983. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic, 226–27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2002. “Traveling Theory Reconsidered (1994).” In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 436–52. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Seyhan, Azade. 2001. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Upstone, Sara. 2012. “Representation and Realism: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.” In Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing, 164–79. Edited by Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin. London: Routledge. Tymoczko, Maria, and Edwin Gentzler, eds. 2002. Translation and Power. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 1992. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London: Routledge. ———, ed. 2012. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Walcott, Derek. 1990. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Walker, Alice. 1982. The Color Purple. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1981. Mrs. Dalloway (1925). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 2000. The Voyage Out (1915). London: Vintage.

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Theorizing Women’s Transnational Literatures Shaping New Female Identities in Europe through Writing and Translation1 EL EO N O R A F ED ER I C I A N D V I TA FO RT U N AT I

1. A Transnational Perspective on Literatures and Translation

In the first section of this chapter, we would like to outline the specificity of women’s critical contributions to transnational literatures and translation debates. As we have already underlined in a recent critical overview (Federici and Fortunati 2013, 1–10), comparative studies and translation studies are undergoing a phase of methodological rethinking and discussion of disciplinary borders. It is a moment of great change implicit in a new perspective that wants to take into account a “global” vision on the state of art of these two research areas. This awareness is born from the idea that the canonical division between literary/cultural studies and translation is not acceptable anymore, because translation nowadays is a hermeneutical category important for understanding the complexity of the world. A research area that seems to unite this new notion of comparativism and translation is that of “transnational literatures/cultures,” where the term “trans” outlines not only the passage among cultures, literatures and languages, but also the overcoming of national borders. Sociologists have pointed out that the nation state category needs to be reconceptualized in the era of globalization. According to William Robinson (1998, 565), the “nation state” must be seen as a “specific social relation inserted into larger structures that may take different, and historically determined, institutional forms.” In her book Sociology of Globalization (2007), the Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen studies the ways global institutions, such as the World Trade 1



The essay was written by both authors: Vita Fortunati wrote part 1 and 4; Eleo­ nora Federici wrote part 3; and part 2 has been written by both authors.

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Organization, intersect with the set of processes that occur on the national and local levels, in such a way that the nation state is modified. Sassen (2007) proposes an analysis through the theory of re-scaling: globalization crosses the various institutions established by the different “nation states.” The various hierarchies do not disappear, but they intersect thanks to the presence of “new scales,” which condition and change the old institutions (Benvenuti and Ceserani 2012, 70–74). The crisis of the concept of nation in literary studies has eroded the category of national literature, while in translation studies it has enlarged the same meaning of translation. The new idea of translation permits investigation of complex problems characterizing the contemporary world, such as migratory flows, the hybridization among cultures, and a new concept of identity and citizenship. That explains why this new area of research analyzes the migrations of writers not only within Europe, but also in the rest of the world. From this perspective, the term “transnational” recovers the possibility of exchanges with extra-European countries, underlining people’s movements and writings about new configurations of geographical and cultural spaces. The transnational perspective permits us to re-analyze the global cultural/literary scene not only from an economic or sociological point of view, but also from a literary and cultural one. On the one hand, transnational studies have criticized the homogenization of cultures derived from capitalist and neoliberal logics and, on the other, has unveiled the complexity of migratory fluxes and how these have changed the idea of translation itself. Furthermore, the “transnational turn” in comparative studies has provoked a critique of Eurocentrism from other perspectives that have enlarged and deepened the scope of postcolonial studies in the European context. 2. Ethics and Politics in Women’s Transnational Literatures

In this section we will analyze women scholars’ critical writing about “Transnational Feminisms,” trying to underline their main issues. The first one of these goals is to combine theoretical analysis with political praxis and teaching; in fact, as Silvia Schultermandl has stressed (2013, 48

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271), “[…] in feminist politics, the ultimate goal is to establish theories and practices which refute prevalent power structures of patriarchy, empire and globalization.” Women scholars also have tried to unveil the new power dynamics originated by global capitalism “which reposition women’s lives through migration, diaspora, transnational labour, and the resulting influence on identity, mobility, family and kinship ties” (267). For these reasons, at the beginning of the new millennium Chand­ra Talpade Mohanty said that: […] we—feminist scholars and teachers—must respond to the phenomenon of globalization as an urgent site for the recolonization of people, especially in the Two-Thirds World. Globalization colonizes women’s as well as men’s lives around the world […] Activists and scholars must also identify and revision forms of collective resistance that women, especially, in their different communities enact in their everyday lives. It is their particular exploitation at this time, their potential epistemic privilege, as well as their particular form of solidarity that can be the basis for reimagining a liberatory politics for the start of this century. (2003, 236)

In a seminal article, Grewal and Kaplan (2000) draft a sort of decalogue on the features of transnational feminism, lucidly aware that the relationship between gender and nationhood is so complex that we must avoid oversimplification and generalization: By paying attention to the interactions between women from different nations, we can understand the nature of what are being called “transnational” relations, i.e. relations across national boundaries. By such a transnational analysis, one can get a quite different picture of the relations of feminism to nationalism. This kind of analysis contradicts the popular belief that feminism exists in an antagonistic relation to nationalism. The complexity of nationalism is that, although nationalism and feminism are often opposed, such oppositions cannot be seen simply as resistance to nationalism because often one cannot exist without the other and often one is constructed only through the other. (2000, online) 49

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The second issue is to encourage a transdisciplinary methodology and stress the necessity of finding innovative knowledge paradigms and a new terminology. Women scholars are deeply aware that migratory flows and the new economic and financial situation have determined new issues of discussion after the postcolonial studies phase, such as, for instance, the general applicability to and accountability of transnational feminist theory in relation to the race-gender nexus and to the new European geopolitical situation. Furthermore, feminist scholars are deeply aware that one of the main dangers of transnationalism is its monopolization along “a first/third axis” (Schultermandl 2013, 274), excluding entire groups of feminists in the so called countries of transition. The third issue is that we need to highlight the problem of ethics and responsibility. In the Introduction to the volume Minor Transnationalism, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih underline that in order to study what has been defined as “minor transnationalism,” it is necessary to abandon a vertical perspective, where a group was hierarchically put in a higher position and, instead, to find a transversal perspective. We should no longer think about binary oppositions such as center versus periphery, but we need to underline the relationships among minor transnationalisms. Today it is urgent to discuss the relationship among different “margins,” different ethnic communities: “There is a clear lack of proliferation of relational discourses among different minority groups, a legacy from the colonial ideology of divide and conquer that has historically pitted different ethnic groups against each other. The minor appears always mediated by the major in both its social and its psychic means of identification” (Lionnet and Shih 2005, 2). In this perspective, the “transitional space” becomes a fertile ground open to new, fruitful potentialities: “The transnational […] can be conceived as a space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur and where it is still possible for cultures to be produced and performed without the necessary mediation by the centre” (ibid., 8). In order to describe the new planetary geography born by different communities, migratory flows and diasporas, the two scholars retrieve the figure of the rhizome, which encourages the building up of lateral “networks” among minority groups. The new planetary geography is not built on hierarchy, on a vertical structure that implies the incorporation of a 50

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minor community into a major one in order to get citizenship or recognition. For historical reasons, the politics of resistance has prevailed over solidarity among ethnic communities, and it has prevented a politics of “international minority alliances.” With regard to literary and comparative studies, this concept of “minority transnationalisms” has not only questioned the monolithic notion of “national literature,” but has also provoked a rethinking of the political meaning of “minor literatures” and “minor languages.” Feminist scholars like Azade Seyhan and Jasmina Lukić re-discuss the pioneering and stimulating idea of the two French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, who affirm: Minor literature does not come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization […] Minor no longer designates specific literatures but revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 18–19)

Lukić finds the example of Kafka and that of black American writers very useful, describing the subversive use of language and the existential condition of contemporary migrant writers: “[S]subversion occurs through appropriation of a language which is not one’s own. For Deleuze and Guattari, subversion comes from within the language and the way one uses it.” (Lukić 2014, 45.) Women writers and scholars feel responsible for underlining the importance of transnational encounters and dialogues among ethnic communities. It is not an easy task because in order to study minor transnational literatures/cultures, we need a transdisciplinary methodology and an awareness that transnationalism is not homogeneous but is characterized by heterogeneity. Women scholars need to re-discuss the paradigms of Western culture and listen with humility to women who have had other experiences and lived different life-stories. This willingness is evident in Susan Stanford Friedman, who hopes that women will not only find new transnational theories and methodologies, 51

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but also open up their archives: “I ask that we widen the archive out of which we theorize about narrative, that is, move outside our comfort zones, engage with narratives and narrative theories from around the world.” (Friedman 2011, 24). The concept of solidarity implies the deep awareness that cultural differences exist, but without any essentialist definition of them. As Koebena Mercer emphasizes: “Solidarity does not mean that everyone thinks the same way, it begins when people have the confidence to disagree over issues of fundamental importance precisely because they ‘care’ about constructing common ground.” (Mercer 1990, 66). The construction of a common ground implies “a transnational sensibility” (Schultermandl 2013, 5) which presupposes a new philo­sophical mode of enquiry, which begins by looking at life in and on borders, yet it goes beyond these inarguably contested subjects. It involves looking at the person who is looking, and can be fruitfully applied to hybridized subjects as well as to those whose identities are presumed to be fixed. As such, this transnational sensibility sees a lack of fixity as simultaneously inevitable and rich in possibility. A transnational sensibility is both a methodology and a mode of enquiry: a way of seeing and deliberately not knowing, a way of living within the spaces between questions and answers. For this reason, ethics in transnational relationships among women of different geographical and political contexts is very important. The relationship with the Other comes back, in even more complex terms, because migratory flows have stratified and complicated the concepts of ethnicity, race and citizenship. As Shu-mei Shih writes: “The fluidity and complexity of our transnational moment, where migration, travel, and diaspora can no longer be clearly distinguished by intention and duration, nor by national citizenship and belongings.” (Shih 2005, 74). From a methodological point of view, what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih say about “the affect” resulting from the meeting with the Other is very important, namely, “the prominence of affect as a subjective expression of desire, feeling, and emotions in discursive and political encoding of difference” (ibid., 75). This “prominence of affect” has a direct effect on the relationship with the Other: 52

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The key to transnational communication is the ability and willingness to situate oneself in both one’s position and the other’s position, whether on the plane of gender, historical context, or discursive paradigms. […] The challenge before us is how to imagine and construct a mode of transnational encounter that can be ethical in the Levinasian sense of non-reductive consideration of the other, for which the responsibility of the self (be it Chinese or Western) towards the other determines the ethicality of the relationship (ibid., 100).

In discussing the centrality of ethics, feminist critics refer to certain ideas and enter into a discussion with Levinas, the philosopher who stressed the supremacy of ethics over philosophy (Levinas 1969). The concepts of responsibility, justice and proximity to the Other are taken up by women critics who have underlined how, in dialogue with women who belong to different political and historical contexts, attention to the Other is central, implying as it does a different way of being. Being responsible means not only being willing to answer the other, but also answering for the other in a disinterested inter-relationship. Then talking to the other immediately becomes something more than simply talking, speaking to the Other; it becomes seeing otherwise. As Levinas states in his illuminating pages on the iconicity of the face, the word and being aware of the other, speaking and the face, are all anchored to each other. Answering is becoming responsible, and becoming responsible is to respond. In this sense, and only in this sense, speaking becomes dialogue. Women must highlight not only the importance of being humble when approaching the Other, but also the willingness they need to have in order to understand the other. Women, that is, stress how fundamental the new way of relating to the other is, where feelings and the sphere of affection acquire great value. The thought of “how” to relate to the other compels us to open up and thus forces constant and thorough reassessments. The thought of “how” to relate obliges the remembrance of forgotten thoughts and encourages the emergence of both implications and misunderstandings embedded in daily thoughts and actions. In this perspective, the thought of “how” means not only to know things, 53

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but also to perceive and to feel them, that is, to practice them with affection. Women critics emphasize that in the dialogue with women belonging to other cultures, it is not sufficient to know them, but a new ethics is of paramount importance. This is indeed an innovative aspect, since by a new ethics they mean not being focused on themselves, but a willingness to listen to the other, not to impose their own thought, but to understand others. In fact, the concept of proximity relies on feelings, which are the fundamental ingredients in building up this new dialogue among different feminisms. If in the past women critics in dialogue with other feminisms used to stress the concept of “situated knowledge,” today there is an increased attention to ethics and to the sphere of affection. In this sense, the features of the production of feminist thought and its scholarship are re-visited, or better, re-visioned: it is not enough to know or simply to read. But, as Levinas underlines, the true reading should always presuppose a new mode of being, no longer focused on itself, but ready to open to the Other, to the emergence of other thoughts, other voices, different from its own. Reading must in fact usher in the world of others into our own. Only then can reading subvert from its very foundations the assumption that the world is one, and only then will reading avoid limiting itself to an exterior and functional relationship. Women scholars refer to Levinas’s thought because there the Other is never reduced to a mere object of knowledge and subjectivity is defined in terms of the heteronomy present in the other. These same scholars underline and stress the importance of a dialogue that takes into consideration the history of colonization and imperialism and the political-social spaces where it unfolds. Only in this way we can think about a transnational politics based on interaction, communication and representation. The importance in ethics of the behavior we should assume towards the Other can make women aware that one of the limits in this dialogue and exchange is to adopt “a monistic perspectival narrowness in scholarship” (Shih 2005, 101). Women propose a “transversal and transpositional politics,” where to be ethical is to be able to shift position to those of the other and many others beyond the binary logic of First World hegemony and Third World nationalism. This politics is sustained by the idea that the Third

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World should have a predominant role in political, social and cultural transformations. Many scholars have affirmed that after the dreadful tragedy of 9/11 a new phase began, in which, contrary to the tenets of postmodernism, a new narrative prevails, marked by a sense of responsibility. After 9/11 a certain kind of postmodernism—with its jocular manner, its ostentatious irresponsibility, its deconstructive frenzy—suddenly appeared frivolous against the enormity and terrible novelty of this tragedy (Ascari 2011, 5–37; Burn 2008). A “new era” emerged, focused on the concept of responsibility. Thus, what emerged was “a narrative of responsibility.” With this term, as Maurizio Ascari affirmed, we want to identify not a literary genre but rather a trend whose specificity consists of its performative dimension. The relationship that this type of narrative sets up between the author and the reader requires them to answer both cognitively and emotionally to the ethical and aesthetic complexity it lays down. These “narratives of responsibility” offer a significant reading model in the era of globalization because they explore conflicts and traumas. They underline the importance not just of literature, but also of language as a tool for communication and an instrument of mutual understanding, atonement and reconciliation. They also furnish the reader priceless psychological tools for relating to the Other, implying that we have to keep the boundaries of our ego permeable and flexible. Finally, these narratives suggest that each and every one of us must play an active role in the establishment of ethical values in our contemporary society. Another central concept in women’s criticism is that literature in a period where the logic of capitalism prevails can become a place where ethical values are produced. Literature stands against the logic of global financial capitalism and American pragmatism (Palumbo-Liu 2005). From this perspective, what Azade Seyhan affirms in her introduction to the volume Writing Outside the Nation, following the line of Appadurai (1996), becomes central: that literature and the imagination are fundamental tools to understand “displacement, disorientation and agency in the contemporary world” (Seyhan 2001, 7,10). Writings by migrant women become testimony, because through autobiographical

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forms (life narratives), women talk about feelings, experiences in exile, and new lives in another country. Women critics have thus spotlighted the important function of literature as a trigger to our imagination, opening us to alternative worldviews. “Narratives of responsibility” often take the form of life narratives, or autobiographies, because these are a useful documentation for explaining the complexity of our current situation, characterized not only by rapid evolution, but also by a new geographical configuration, where the European space is marked by a proliferation of micro-contact zones between intra- and extra-European cultures that have been brought into contact by migration. These narratives recount the present by means of the memory, because without memory there is neither identity not future. This is true not only on the individual level, but also on the collective one, since controversial, divided memories— those of people who have experienced a conflict from opposite sides—risk replicating, if they have not been elaborated, the vicious circle of destruction. The importance of the “narrative of responsibility” also foregrounds the important role played by emotions at the cognitive level and their impact at an ethical level.2 As Rosalia Baena writes, life writings follow a complex dynamic of cultural production “where aesthetic concerns and the choice and manipulation of form serve as signifying aspects to experiences and subjectivities.” (Baena 2007, vii.) Autobiographical writings are forms of identity construction and a negotiation of “transculturality.” 3. The Translator’s Positionality and Agency in Transnational Studies

A major issue in dealing with translation studies today is the circulation of texts worldwide, their transmigration from one linguistic/cultural

2

Drawing on her own experience, Martha Nussbaum (2003) describes the death of her mother in a New York hospital while she was lecturing in Dublin. This news caused Nussbaum a crushing grief and a deep sense of guilt due to her absence from her mother’s deathbed. This autobiographical passage marks the beginning of the reappraisal of emotions as a fundamental factor in our lives and as a guiding light that direct our ethical judgements. 56

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context into another. This question is one of the many questions connected to the globalization process. Starting from the economic meaning of the term within the field of translation studies, what is taken into account are the economic and material conditions at the foundation of the publishing market, together with the practices of translation, which have influenced the circulation of texts. There are two main points in this discussion: 1) the role of translating practices in literary/ cultural representations, and 2) the importance of the translator and his/her cultural competences. These issues have been strongly debated by feminist scholars in translation studies, who have widely outlined the ideology behind translating practices and the power of translation in representing “the other,” together with the necessity of gender awareness in translation, that is, a recognition of the importance of the context in which the translator lives and the inherent historical, social and political implications of this fact (Simon 1996; Santaemilia 2005; Flotow 1997; Godard 1985; Bassnett 2005; Godayol 2000; Federici 2011). Translating as a feminist means working while keeping in mind differences among women, their diverse “positionality” in terms of race, class, ethnic group and social and cultural context; in other words, practicing “situated knowledge” (Rich 1987; Haraway 1988; Johnson 1989; Braidotti 1994). Feminist translators have made their role as interpreters of texts clear and have explained their translation choices and strategies utilizing paratextual elements such as footnotes, prefaces, glossaries, or the technique of “supplementing” in the text. Intentionality and agency have become more and more evident in the work of feminist translators and, if translators have always known that a translation carries the voices of the original but also those of the translated text, they have demonstrated that translation can be considered an heteroglossic, multivoiced practice, a social act for which the translator is responsible and through which she or he becomes a cultural agent. With their use of paratextual elements, these translators have unveiled a dialogic relationship between ST (source text) and TT (target text) and claimed a new authority over the source text. The traditional notion of fidelity as objective, transparent and definite truth has been replaced with more problematic concepts such as experimentation, 57

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relativity and subjectivity (see Federici 2011). Rewriting in the feminine has meant to affirm the translatress’s critical difference while re-reading, interpreting and transforming/re-writing the ST. With the awareness that translation is a discursive act, the translatress should subvert the linguistic codes of the text and transmit a different cultural value where the question of gender becomes central. Such is the importance of visibility for feminist translators or translators in the feminine that the signature of the translator is given authority equivalent to that of authorship. The translator becomes a co-writer and the faithfulness to the text passes through her own reading and translating choices. Translating in the feminine has meant to take an anti-dogmatic position, an awareness of the work of translation and its influence on the reader according to the choices made. Moreover, feminist translators have pointed out the importance of the issue of textual interpretation. In fact, talking about a “woman-identified approach,” Carol Maier affirms that “it is the responsibility of translators to reflect on their thinking in political terms, to reflect on their motives and on the effect their work might have on the reader” (Maier and Massadier Kenney 1996, 228). A woman-identified translator declares responsibility for the text and the community it is destined for; she takes a position and is aware of her responsibility as a cultural agent. This debate on the translator’s awareness and agency is even more urgent in the present, given the issues that globalization implies. Already in the mid-1980s, in her work on cultural translation, Susan Bassnett discussed the process of the transmigration of texts from one culture into others through the act of translation itself, and recently she identified a “transnational turn” in translation studies (Bassnett 2011, 34). Today, reflections on translations and the circulation of texts take place by means of a new methodology that discusses the issue of migration and the reproduction of texts. Discussing the reception and reading of translated texts, Valerie Henitiuk, in her essay on translation and world literature, talks about a “transcultured reader”/“translated reader” (Henitiuk 2012, 30–34). On the one hand, globalization implies an internationalization of texts. On the other, translation as a means of movement and re-adaptation to other cultures is a very important issue, all the more so when 58

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we are dealing with bilingual writers or processes of translation of different cultures in the same geographical area. According to Henitiuk, translation is a powerful instrument for the internationalization of texts. Through “re-packaging,” the text is translated for other markets: it is “re-written.” Referring to the comparativist Azade Seyhan, Henitiuk underlines how the text cannot be simply detached from the source culture and absorbed into the target culture. She underlines the positive aspect of the meeting and crossbreeding of cultures implicit in the internationalization of literary texts, because new readers can produce new interpretations and enrich the translated text. Translation also brings enrichment to the new reader, as texts from other cultures can bring her or him to new reading practices or make her or him an agent of creation/recreation of texts. Translation opens us to the rest of the world; it is a poetic journey into otherness. In her study on translation in a globalized world, Henitiuk converses with Seyhan, demonstrating how women scholars from different fields meet within a discussion on interpretation and the re-adaptation of texts. The dialogue among women scholars and disciplines is very fruitful and helps us to map out new problems with textual interpretation and translation. In this age of globalization it is important to keep in mind that, being part of an economic process, translation is also a socio-economical phenomenon. From this perspective, translation from or into English is strictly connected to the debate on English as a global language. There is controversial debate among scholars on this issue. In his text Translation and Globalization (2003), Michael Cronin dedicates one chapter to this issue of global English and minority languages, underlining how the colonial language can function as “a killer language,” globalizing cultures and erasing less commonly spoken idioms. The spread of English means a threat to multilingualism, and translation becomes the ultimate act of linguistic/cultural homologation. Certainly the massive use of English in various domains, and mainly on the web, has changed our perception of translation (Schäffner 2000). Mary Snell Hornby (2006) has talked of a “Mc Language” used for utilitarian reasons and presenting different characteristics. Clearly this debate on global English and its use takes us to a rethinking of translation in terms of users, readers, and translators. The speakers’ social class, education and gender have changed the use 59

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of English worldwide and, consequently, its translations from and into other languages. The global use of English, or, more accurately, Englishes, has highlighted even more the importance of translation and the fact that English is a major language from and into which works (not only literary but pertaining to many different domains) are translated. This is why scholars have emphasized the importance of the social role of translation. The field of translation studies has underlined the importance of the translating process and the publishing choices connected to the market (Pym 2004), and has stressed the necessity of political engagement in translation studies due to the geopolitical shifts and social changes occurring in the world (Tymoczko 2005). These new dynamics of geopolitics necessitate new theoretical and methodological models for culture and translation. An important text for translation scholars has been The Translation Zone (2005) by Emily Apter, who has proposed a model of comparative transnationalism acting against the idea of a monoculture that globalism and the logics of capitalism have perpetuated. In her study, Apter connects practices and processes of translation to the global market, underlining that the logics of capitalism, marketing strategies and the role of the Internet have led to the dangerous idea of a “monoculture” that erases vernacular traditions with the aim of proposing a translation practice not sensitive to the specificity of each cultural context. We cannot escape globalization, but as women scholars we need to be aware of the complexities of translating texts from one cultural context to another, our responsibility as cultural agents, and the fact that English has a prominent position in global communication and that this fact entails both negative and positive aspects. A positive aspect of the internationalization of texts is the idea of “cultural enrichment” through translation, that is to say, the practice of translation as a means of meeting among cultures. Through a “globalized” translation, we (Europeans) can read works we could not access without a translation into a European language. If translation has always led to a re-elaboration of texts from one culture to another, overcoming national borders, today the circulation and reception of texts should be linked to new methodological tools that examine the concepts of circulation, migration and the reproduction of texts. It is important for 60

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translators to be aware of cultural diversities and to unveil the ideology hidden behind translation practices. The issues of ideology, power, institution and the manipulation of translated texts were already explored by André Lefevere (1992) in his well-known study on translation as the rewriting of cultures. His discussion on editorial and marketing techniques of translations is an excellent basis for an analysis of translation in the age of globalization. What we need to do is to link studies on translation and globalization to a gendered perspective. The same reflection should also take place in a new approach to translating transnational texts by women. Within the debate on transnationalism, Michael Cronin has referred in his study on Translation and Identity (2006, 23) to a “transnational history of translation,” where “it is no longer possible to limit histories of translation to literary phenomena within the boundaries of the nation-state.” Similarly, Alvstad, Helgesson and Watson (2011) have mapped out “alternative geographies” of translation studies where translation is no longer an instrument to overcome national borders but a way to analyze the multiplicity of writing, languages and cultures in one nation. The hybridization of languages and cultures is present today in the same geographical space, and this is a great change for an updated discussion within the field of translation studies. An analysis of the role of women writers and translators in a European context is necessary today in order to visualize a gendered perspective on translation studies in a multilingual and multicultural Europe. Moreover, theories and practices of translation need to be revised and scrutinized in this period of great changes around the idea of nation, identity and mother tongue. In recent years the necessity of a new cartography for knowledge transformation has been foreseen by non-Western scholars, who have subjected Western and European theories of translation to critical discussion. The binary comparison of “the West and the Rest” needs to be deconstructed for a fruitful multivocal dialogue, an equal relationship among cultures. The perception of European models and methodologies outside the Western world has revealed new insights, which have demonstrated how established Anglo-American translation theories and postcolonial critical models that have been so powerful in the last few decades seem today to be inadequate and outdated. More61

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over, these insights have outlined the urgent task of de-Westernizing translation theories and practices. Through a postcolonial approach to translation studies, one of China’s foremost scholars, Wang Ning, has observed that the process of globalization is positively influencing the development of the Humanities, and that a dialogue between China and the West can constitute a new course of this development. He has argued that translation studies can remove the boundaries between the centre and the periphery and pointed out that the field is undergoing great changes, from literal translation on the linguistic level to cultural interpretation and representation. Since translation is an act of dialogic practice among author, translator, text and reader, it is important to build up national identities and literatures that can cross national borders. The translator becomes “a dynamic interpreter” (Ning 2010, 7), who renders the work canonical in another language, realizing the “travelling of literature” (Ning and Yifeng 2008, 85) from one context to another. Translation becomes part of a cultural transformation encouraging a “transnational spirit” for the consumption of texts abroad. According to Ning, globalization does not necessarily homogenize national cultures, but it brings about the diversity or plurality of culture: “In the age of globalisation, along with people migrating from one place to another, their national and cultural identity will also split into multiple and different identities” (Ning and Yifeng 2008, 85). Ning affirms that “world literature denotes literary works with ‘transnational’ and ‘translational’” meanings (Ning 2010, 3). In his idea of a “dynamic function of translation,” Ning outlines that globalization has brought homogenization and diversity and that translation has been vital in building up national identities. The Asian context has been enriched by women’s voices on translation, which have deepened the question of the translation and the internationalization of texts. For example, Martha Cheung’s work on the history of translation in China has helped to open the debate of what it means to translate cultural difference and to realize how important the tradition of translation studies is in this geographical area (Wang 2010; Wang 2008; Cheung 2003). Moreover, Zhongli Yu (2011) has analyzed the translation of feminist works (for example Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex) in China, dem62

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onstrating the complexities of translating feminist theories and issues in a totally different cultural context, while Theresa Hyun (2003) has done archival work on Korean writers in the colonial period following the important area of feminist translation and archival work (the search for women writers and translators), and Xuefei Bai (2009) has reflected on the myth of Europe widening our perception of “center” and “periphery.” Asian scholars have demonstrated how this rethinking of translation theories and practices from a critical perspective can accompany the dismantling of the notion of “nation,” its ideological and discursive construction. The dialogue on this issue among translation studies and comparative studies has been fruitful, and translation as part of the idea of the nation has been analyzed from a critical perspective. The Japanese scholar Naoki Sakai has deconstructed the notion of nation in his famous essay “Dislocation in Translation,” outlining how translation is part of a “political global process” that envisions the nation as a “geobody,” a fixed, homogeneous, closed entity. But translation can become a way to trespass borders and travel among nations to unite different cultures and make them communicate with each other. Referring to the schematism of co-figuration—also used by comparative scholars in order to deconstruct the East/West dichotomy—Sakai talks about a global shared vision of the world where the translator is “a subject in transit” (Sakai 2009, 87) who renders difference representable. Co-figuration and “transculturality” are two important issues that demonstrate how translation is born from social relationships. This is why we can analyze concepts such as nationality, ethnicity and race through the study of translation practices. Today the presence of cross-cultural texts, linguistic creolization and multilingual situations has highlighted the importance of transnational writing, emphasizing the necessity of redefining theoretical approaches. As we are outlining, new perspectives in translation theory and comparative criticism have emerged in the last two decades, inviting a decentering of world literary systems and a discussion more open towards non-European approaches, together with the need to de-Westernize existing theories and practices. This new wave in translation studies began with the publication of volumes such as Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre’s Changing the Terms (2000) and Marilyn Gaddis Rose’s Beyond 63

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the Western Tradition (2000), which envisioned an international frame for translation studies. In Italy, Rosamaria Bosinelli and Elena Di Giovanni edited a volume collecting new voices in translation studies, Oltre l’Occidente. Traduzione e alterità cultural (2009), choosing to translate lesser-known scholars in Europe. Maria Tymoczko also called for the de-Westernization of translation studies, affirming that the field’s existing presuppositions are markedly Eurocentric and “grow out of a rather small subset of European cultural contexts based on Greco-Roman textual traditions, Christian values, nationalistic views about the relationship between language and cultural identity, and an upper-class emphasis on technical expertise and literacy” (Tymoczko 2005). All these theories have made us aware of the importance of an ethical positioning for scholars in translation studies, which starts with an opening up to new models of translation practice and to a nonWestern reservoir of conceptualizations about translation. One of the positive aspects of globalization is that it makes us able to communicate cross-culturally, widen our perspective on theory and practice and, subsequently, think about the creation of a transversal methodology in translation studies that goes beyond hierarchical frameworks of comparison and universalizing models to create a fruitful international dialogue. The issue of ethics in translation is not a new one, but during the last decade scholars have begun to underline the problems linked to the work of the translator and her or his capacity to transpose a culture into a new cultural context. A translator is responsible for the final work and its reception (Baker 2005; Baker 2006; Bassnett and Bielsa 2009). While Barman and Wood (2005) analyzed the connections between nation, language and translation, Spivak outlined that the translator should be an interpreter between two socio-political and cultural worlds. Similar to the ethical position of writers and critics, translators should also follow an ethical-political direction, as Spivak argued, being aware of the difficulty of translating cultural specificities. Spivak called for a “third ear,” which can expand the reader’s capacity to listen and transcend limitations of hyphenation and hybridity to create new meanings that open up possibilities of community and culture beyond boundaries. (Spivak 1992, 180). 64

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The notion of cultural translation should be widened to transnational translation, where the awareness of cultural differences makes clear that we need to mediate and relocate ourselves as critics. Another important issue to be analyzed in this age of migrations, multilingualism/multiculturalism and the emergence of transnational studies, is the question of mother tongue. Why do authors decide to use another language, an acquired one and not their own, for writing? If postcolonial scholars have debated this issue within a discussion of the colonial language and its uses and abuses, today the situation is even more complicated, with cases of authors who decide to publish in English and not in their native language, such as the Turkish writer Elif Shafak or others, as we will see in the fourth part of this chapter, who decide to adopt and adapt the language of the country of migration (in our examples the language is Italian). The issue of the mother tongue is central also in Seyhan’s study, since a central problem in transnational literature written by women is that of identity, considered not as a monolithic entity but as fluid, an identity that overcomes painful experiences, but that can be rebuilt through writing in a different language, not the mother tongue. Seyhan affirms that national identity is not founded on the mother tongue: If language is the single most important determinant of national identity, as many have argued, and narratives (specifically, epics and novels) institute and support national myths and shape national consciousness (e.p., the Finnish epic Kalevala), what happens when the domain of national language is occupied by non-native writers, writers whose native, mother, home, or community language is not the one they write in? (Seyhan 2001, 8)

Moreover, Seyhan declares that the old terms of literary criticism are not adequate to describe a modified reality: adjectives such as “exilic,” “ethnic,” “migrant” or “diasporic” are not sufficient to explain the complexity of linguistic processes and the nuances in writing that emerge from geographies, stories and cultural practices by women who choose to write in a language other than their “mother tongue.” It is thus important to be aware that we do not possess an adequate language for our 65

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task and that we are responsible for a reflection on and a problematization of the terms we use. From this perspective, Seyhan agrees with Appadurai’s statement: “No idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations, and post–national identities” (Appadurai 1996, 166). If the issue of mother tongue and the appropriation of another language, i.e. the reshaping and remolding of a second language, has been the focus of many postcolonial scholars, writers have written about their use of English and how they possessed it, changing and subverting it (Talib 2002; Walder 1994; Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Niranjana 1992). Discourses about mother tongue have also been connected to the debate about the relationship between writing, reading and translating. This question has been discussed by feminist scholars who have noted that it is possible to retrace women’s subjectivity, identity and creativity through the relationship among these acts. One of the main scholars in the field, Sherry Simon, considers translation a “fluid production of meaning similar to other kinds of writing” (Simon 1996, 12), and refers to a writing project in which both writer and translator participate. However, it is important to remember that the connection between writing and translation is certainly not born with the discussion of translation and gender. Many writers, in fact, have compared their work to that of translators and have connected the notions of identity and translation in a metaphorical way. Salman Rushdie affirms we are all “translated beings living in translated worlds” (1991, 13); José Saramago asserts that “to write is to translate […] we transfer what we see or feel into a conventional code of symbols” (Saramago 1997, 85); and Michèle Roberts explains in detail how she feels “translated” between the French and English cultural worlds through metaphors of crossing, moving and displacing (Roberts 1998). Eva Hoffman talks about loss in translation and a “life in a new language” where translation is a “therapy” that offers “instruments and the vocabulary of self-control” (Hoffman 1989, 273–74). Scholars have also underlined the strict relationship among writing and translation (Bassnett and Bush 2006), and the issue of self-translation (Hokeson and Munson 2007; Cordingley 2013). Moreover, various publications have been dedicated to the issue of bilingualism, and the term “translingual” has been chosen to envision 66

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this switching of languages (Kellmann 2004), while the imagination has been connected to “translingualism” (Kellmann 2000 and 2004). Bilingual writers have been considered as translators of an identity in between (De Courtivron 2003; Lesser 2004). Bilingualism or the use of an acquired language, code-switching and code-mixing, linguistic interferences and calques can be considered as forms of a “translational writing,” where authors resort to more than one language to build their narrative worlds. What is important to see today is how writers, especially women, decide to write in their mother tongue or in the language of the country of migration, and to see how much this choice changes the notions of nation, identity and the language the writers utilize, a language hybridized by foreign sounds and interferences. Authors choosing to write in more than one language, or even utilizing one while being aware of the many influences and interferences of the other, define themselves as living in the overlap of two languages. One language overlaps another, partly coincides with the second one; they are enmeshed and intermingled. To live in-between two languages and use them to communicate means to “switch, shift, alternate not just vocabulary and syntax but consciousness and feelings”(De Courtivron 2003, 4). This is strictly correlated to what Susan Bassnett has recently stressed about self-translation, that is, “translating one’s own writing involves more than interlingual transfer” (Bassnett 2013). Emotions and feelings are at stake, and writers express themes such as the loss of the language of childhood, nostalgia and the adoption of the “step-mother,” as we will see in the fourth part of this chapter. 4. Exiled in Language: Identity, Dislocation and Nostalgia in Ornela Vorpsi and Lilia Bicec

The two case studies are Ornela Vorpsi and Lilia Bicec, two migrant writers who left their countries, Albania and Moldova, which are not far from Italy but quite unknown to the Italian reader. They migrated for different reasons, Vorpsi due to the political regime, Bicec for economic reasons. Both chose to write their novels in Italian, and they are 67

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two emblematic examples of women’s transnational literature. In their novels, transnational themes such as identity, dislocation and nostalgia acquire different nuances in relation with the authors’ cultural and historical backgrounds. Ornela Vorpsi was born in Tirana in 1968, when the regime of Enver Hoxha was becoming increasingly harsh. She is a writer but also a photographer. She left Albania for political reasons and studied at the Accademia di Brera and later in Paris, where she lives now. She chose to write her novels in Italian, and her writing can be defined as “a gift of migration,” the result of an inspiration strictly linked to it.3 Also, Vorpsi can be considered an “ex-centric writer” in the etymological meaning of the word: being and feeling herself to be outside the consolidate norm that considers the Western world as the center—both geographical and cultural—as regards the country of origin. Her ex-centricity is born from migration, from her continuous movement from one place to another with the consequent change of her point of view: “Travel makes people hope that they will find in another country, another climate, and another language what they lack in the place where they are born. […] Because freedom is always somewhere else. Until this place becomes your homeland. Then the travel towards the elsewhere that does not exist begins again.”4 Migration implies a detachment from the country of origin and the search for a new personal balance between one’s motherland and one’s new identity that in many cases is forbidden, since the people, the “true inhabitants” of this place, refuse to accept migrants or grant them opportunities, “new people” who remain in a kind of limbo. Vorpsi feels “ex-centric” in the Western world, in Rome, Milan or Paris, because she is considered “different,” weird, someone to avoid, but, because of her migrant condition, she also feels “ex-centric” in the Eastern world. This paradoxical situation is the main theme of her novel The Hand You Don’t Bite (The title in Italian is La mano che non mordi, 2007), which narrates a return not to the motherland Albania, but to Sarajevo, in the Balkans, to

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Interview in Ravenna, May 2–12, 2007. The original reads: “Il viaggio spinge le persone a sperare che in un altro paese, in un altro clima, in un’altra lingua troveranno quello che manca là dove sono. […] Perché la libertà sta sempre dall’altra parte. Finché l’altra parte non diventa la tua dimora. Allora il viaggio verso l’altrove che non esiste ricomincia.” (Vorpsi 2007, 7–8). 68

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the geographical area of belonging. Vorpsi feels this double ex-centricity because Albania is in a marginal position with regard to both the Balkans and other European countries: “Albania on our shoulders is a burden, often we must explain things: which language do you speak in Albania? […] What was the name of your dictator? I can’t remember the name! […] Albanians are terrible! Really cruel people! They push their sisters out on the streets!”5 But Albanians are also considered much too Westernized, people who sold themselves to an external and foreign ideology: Now I have become a perfect foreigner. When we become foreigners, we look at the world in a different way from someone who is inside. […] It is like going to a family dinner without participating in it; it is as if there is a cold window in between […] They peer at you, they recognize you, they make you signs so that you can get in and join them, you also see them and reply with the same gestures, but the dinner is over, it is eaten like that. After a while they do not invite you anymore.6

The detachment from the motherland permits one to view the country that was abandoned for political reasons from a critical perspective. Through memories and a child/adolescent’s point of view, Vorpsi remembers in The Country Where You Never Die (The title in Italian is Il paese dove non si muore mai, 2005). the years of her childhood and adolescence in Albania, a sunny but also violent country, hard to live in, dominated by the dictatorship’s abuses of power. A machistic Albania, obsessed by sex. Being a

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“[…] l’Albania sulle spalle non è un peso facile, spesso si devono spiegare un sacco di cose: ‘Che lingua si parla in Albania? […] Come si chiamava il vostro dittatore, mi sfugge il nome! […] Tremendi gli albanesi! Che popolo crudele! Hanno messo le loro sorelle sul marciapiede!’” (ibid., 21). Ormai sono una perfetta straniera. Quando si è così stranieri, si guarda il tutto in modo diverso da uno che fa parte del dentro. […] È come recarsi a una cena di famiglia e non poter partecipare ; si frappone una gelida finestra…: loro ti scrutano , ti riconoscono, ti fanno segni perché tu entri e li raggiunga, pure tu li vedi e rispondi con gli stessi gesti, ma la cena si consuma qui, si consuma così. Dopo poco tempo smettono di invitarti….” (ibid., 19). 69

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woman in a male chauvinist country relegates her to a marginal position; she is not a man and therefore possesses less right to be free, to live freely. However, she finds herself in the same position when she goes abroad. She finds the same repetitive stereotype, which has become almost a rule, of the Albanian woman as a prostitute: “Mother Teresa, even if she was Albanian, could not save us, because there have been more Albanian prostitutes than Saints.”7

In her narratives, Vorpsi underlines the necessity to create a distance (cultural but also geographical) in order to survive her past: “Because I don’t know whether I make myself clear, but I survive only through distance […] today (you know, to live I need to set a distance).”8 Vorpsi’s relationship with Albania is ambivalent, one of both hate and love. Hate because for Vorpsi, Albania is a country of abuses, injustices and the pain she suffered as a child during her schooling under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha; a country she left because she could not develop her artistic potential under a State art of propaganda. On the other hand, she feels a deep nostalgia for her country, its food and its drinks (raki: Albanian grappa, called salep); a nostalgia that comes upon her when she walks around the shops of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis: One day wandering through the little shops in Rue du Faubourg Saint Denis where among Polish, Jewish, Turkish and Indians immigrants breathing the air I looked for (and sometimes I found) the smell of Albania, I ran across salep, which I had completely forgotten. I remembered with nostalgia and tenderness that the infusion of this powder had an exquisite smell, worthy of The Thousand and One Nights.9 “Madre Teresa, pur essendo albanese, non ci ha potute salvare, perché le prostitute albanesi sono state molto più delle sante” (ibid., 67). 8 “[…] perché non so se sono chiara , ma sopravvivo solo con e tramite la distanza […] oggi ([…] sai, per vivere ho bisogno di distanza)” (ibid., 66). 9 “Un giorno girando per i negozietti di rue du Fabourg Saint Denis, dove tra polacchi, ebrei, turchi e indiani cerco nell’aria (e a volte trovo) l’odore dell’Albania, mi sono imbattuta nel salep di cui avevo scordato l’esistenza. Con nostalgia e tenerezza mi sono ricordata che l’infusione di questa polvere aveva un delizioso profumo, degno delle Mille e una notte” (bid., 25).

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Her use of the technique of the fragment highlights Vorpsi’s ex-centricity. Her novels are fragments—almost photographs (she is a photographer)—moments of her life in a non-chronological order of her past and her country. Since the general perspective from which the individual can look at things is difficult, the fragment is Vorpsi’s privileged way to look at reality, but it is also a means of getting a stereoscopic vision, which means looking at the same thing from different perspectives, thus rendering a twisted and contorted but more complete vision. Her writings seem to be born from a “click” of the past: they are constructed through visual memories. The narrating voice sees, before she understands what is happening or what has already taken place. Vorpsi adds to this narrative technique the themes of the Gothic fairy tale genre in a surreal and absurd atmosphere. In an interview, she affirmed: “I recognize myself in a little process of wonder for the world. An amazement we feel in our childhood and that I still strongly feel.”10 The title of the first novel, The Country Where You Never Die (Vorpsi 2005), seems to refer to a fairytale world, an absurd reality that shapes her characters. It is not magical realism, but a sense of wonder for an extraordinary reality outside of the ordinary, far from what the reader expects; it is a world where cities are made of smells and flavors and where the past comes back unexpectedly when one eats a particular food or looks at objects in drawers. It is an excessive reality (according to one connotation the adjective “ex-centric” can acquire): it is excessive for the migrant who is looking for a reality made of evident things, because having lost her original country she is looking for a new one; it is excessive because it is made of excessive characters that must be excessive in order to survive. A deep red seems to color all her stories (in many cases we are told about little girls’ passage from childhood to puberty). This Albania is a black fairytale where the wolf and Bluebeard have the faces of Albanian men hardened by life, and where witches have the faces of cruel teachers. Vorpsi’s photographs are also ex-centric; they show women, often nudes, displaced from the centre, as if they want to escape. They are “Mi riconosco in un piccolo processo di stupore nei confronti del mondo. Stupore che si ha in infanzia e che mi sembra che lo porto stretto ancora adesso.”

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never shown frontally; their faces are not visible as they are on the covers of the two novels analyzed here. They are always portrayed in anonymous places and seem to lean against something, a surface, in search of contact, of stability, of a base, a point of reference, a place to take root. In an interview, Vorpsi affirmed: “My characters really love loneliness, they attract through loneliness in order to find a dialogue, girls are shown from behind so that the reader wishes to turn them around, to go towards them and see their eyes.”11 They seek a dialogue, as do her characters in the novels. The epistolary novel Dear Children, I Write to You (2013), which Lilia Bicec published in Italian, takes the form of letters that Bicec wrote to her children but never sent. These are letters she writes to try to find relief from the solitude she feels in Italy, without the children she had to leave behind. She describes her difficult and painful experiences in Italy when she arrived as an illegal immigrant. She feels alien in a country that at first is hostile, since she is there illegally and has difficulty communicating with others because she cannot speak the language. Bicec is a woman who does not let herself be overwhelmed, because she has decided to build another life for herself and her children. This is why, once she finds a job, she starts studying again, teaches herself Italian, and above all, reads in her free time. She reads and writes to her children and tells them the story of their grandparents, who endured dreadful deportation to Siberia when the Russians ruled Moldova. In these letters, we get acquainted with Moldova’s history, practically unknown to the Italian public, which is important for understanding the current situation of this country. Bicec’s novel is an example of writing as bearing witness, which has a therapeutic value for the writer, enabling her to understand how, through her experience of migrating to Italy, her identity has undergone a profound process of transformation. Distance has enabled her to understand how her relationship with her husband was not founded on mutual esteem, and how, in her case, hard work meant the possibility of reconstructing herself. This reconstruction was built on pain and hard work: a year after her two sons finally came to Italy, one of her sons was killed when a car ran over him. Interview in Ravenna, May 2–12, 2007.

11

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The pain was immense, but Bicec has survived, found a new Italian companion, and is now working in Brescia helping women immigrating from Moldova. We mentioned the importance of these books from an ethical and political point of view. Ethical, because these are books that show how the prejudices existing in Italy against migrant women arise from an ignorance of their culture and their history—in these cases, of Albania and Moldova. This ignorance influences readers’ attitude towards them, conditioning the dialogue we have with migrant women. In these books, the central issue is that of an identity that is at least double, sometimes multiple. Consequently, it can be seen as a processual identity, passing through painful experiences, which can be subversively remolded in a strange twist, by writing in a language other than the mother tongue. So, the relationship between mother tongue and the so called “stepmother language” is revealed as extremely fruitful, since the “stepmother” changes and is enriched with the echoes and interferences of the writers’ mother tongue. Cultural nomadism does not mean the cutting our roots of belonging, but rather the idea that, by passing through more cultures, identity may be strengthened in order to access the critical capacity of building up a new future. References Alvstad, Cecilia, Stefan Helgesson, and David Watson, eds. 2011. Literature, Geography, Translation: Studies in World Writing. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Apter, Emily. 2005. The Translation Zone: a New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ascari, Maurizio. 2011. Literature of the Global Age. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland Company. Baena, Rosalia. 2007. Transculturing Auto/Biography. Forms of Life Writing. Mahwah: Taylor and Francis 73

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Bai, Xuefei. 2009. “Woman and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa.” In Translation Effects: Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in Translation Studies, edited by O. Azadibougar. http://www.kuleuven.be/ cetra/papers/papers.html [last accessed: February 5, 2018]. Baker, Mona. 2005. “Narratives in and of Translation.” SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 1, no. 1: 4–13. ———. 2006. Translation and Conflict. London: Routledge. Barman, Sandra, and Michael Wood. 2005. Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi, eds. 1999. Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Bassnett, Susan. 2005. “Translation, Gender and Otherness.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 13, no. 2: 83–90. Bassnett, Susan, and Peter Bush. 2006. The Translator as Writer. London and New York: Continuum. Bassnett, Susan, and Esperança Bielsa. 2009. Translation in Global News. London: Routledge. Bassnett, Susan. 2013. “The Self-Translator as Rewriter.” In Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, 13–26. Edited by A. Cordingley. London: Bloomsbury. Benvenuti, Giuliana, and Remo Ceserani. 2012. La letteratura nell’era globale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Bicec, Lilia. 2013. Miei cari figli, vi scrivo. Torino: Einaudi. Bosinelli, Rosamaria, and Elena Di Giovanni. 2009. Oltre l’Occidente. Traduzione e alterità culturale. Bompiani. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press. Burn, Stephen J. 2008. Jonathan Franzen and the End of Postmodernism. London: Continuum. Cheung, Marta. 2003. “From ‘Theory’ to ‘Discourse’: The Making of a Translation Anthology.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, no. 3 (University of London): 390–401. Cordingley, Anthony, ed. 2013. Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Courtivron, Isabelle de. 2003. Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cronin, Michael. 2003. Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. 74

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Federici, Eleonora, and Vita Fortunati. 2013. “Convergenze e Sinergie tra traduzione e studi comparati: una rassegna critica.” Transpotcross 3, no. 1, special issue on “World Literature e Nuovi Media”: 1–10. Federici, Eleonora, ed. 2011. Translating Gender. Bern: Peter Lang. Federici, Eleonora. 2011. “The Visibility of the Woman Translator.” In Translating Gender, 79–91. Edited by E. Federici. Bern: Peter Lang. Flotow, Louise von. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of Feminism.” Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Gaddis Rose Marilyn.ed. 2000. Beyond the Western Tradition:Essays on Translation Outside Standard European Languages. Translation Perspectives XI. Binghamton: Center for Research in Translation, State University of New York at Binghamton. Godard, Barbara. 1985. “The Translator as She.” In In the Feminine: Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots, 193–98. Edmonton: Longspoon Press. Godayol, Pilar. 2000. Espais de frontera. Gènere i traducció. Vic: Eumo Editorial. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. 2000. “Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Feminist Practices.” Jouvert 5, no.1, http:/English.chass.ncsu. edu./jouvert/v5i1/grewal.htm [last accessed: January 9, 2018]. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3: 575–99. Henitiuk, Valerie. 2012. “The Single, Shared Text? Translation and World Literature”. World Literature Today, (86)1, 30-34. Hoffman, Eva. 1989. Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language. London: Penguin. Hokeson, Jan Walsh and Marcella Munson. 2007. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Hyun, Theresa. 2003. Writing Women in Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Johnson, Barbara. 1989. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kellman, Steven, ed. 2004. Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on their Craft. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

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Kellmann, Steven. 2000. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska. Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of the Literary Fame. London: Routledge. Lesser, Wendy, ed. 2004. The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on their Mother Tongue. New York: Anchor Books. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961). Translated by Alphonso Lingi. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih. 2005. “Introduction.” In Minor Transnationalism, 1-26. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lukić, Jasmina. 2014. “The Transnational Turn, Comparative Literature and the Ethics of Solidarity: Engendering Transnational Literature.” In Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millennium, 33–52. Edited by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru et al. Vienna: LitVerlag. Maier, Carol, and Francoise Massadier Kenney. 1996. “Gender in/and Literary Translation.” In Translation Perspectives, IX Gaddis Margaret Rose, ed. New York: State University of New York. Mercer, Kobena. 1990. “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, 43–71. Edited by J. Rutheford. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ning, Wang, ed. 2003. “Translation Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches.” Perspectives Studies in Translatology 11, no. 1 (special issue): 7–10. Ning, Wang and Yifeng Sun. 2008. Translation, Globalisation and Localisation: a Chinese Perspective. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters. Ning, Wang. 2010. Translated Modernities: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Globalization and China, New York: Legas. Niranjana, Teswajni. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2003. The Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palumbo-Liu, David. 2005. “Rational and Irrational Choices: Form, Affect, and Ethics.” In Minor Transnationalism, 41–73. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 76

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Pym, Anthony. 2004. The Moving Text, Localization, Translation and Distribution. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Rich, Adrienne. 1987. “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.” In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979−1985. London, Virago. Robinson, William I. 1998. “Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization, Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies.” Sociological Forum 13, no. 4: 561-594. Sakai, Noaki. 2009. “Dislocation in Translation” in TTR vol. 22, no.1, 167-187. Santaemilia, José, ed. 2005. Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Sassen, Saskia. 2007. The Sociology of Globalization. New York: W.W. Norton. Schäffner, Christina, ed. 2000. Translation in the Global Village. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Schultermandl, Silvia. 2013. “Transnational Sensibility in Feminist Theory and Practice.” Contributions to Transnational Feminism 4, no. x: 271–277. Edited by E. Kenny and S. Schultermandl. Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. 2001. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2005. “Toward an Ethics of Transnational Encounters, or ‘When’ does a Chinese Woman Become a Feminist?” In Minor Transnationalism, 73-108. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. Simon, Sherry, and Paul St-Pierre. 2000. Changing the Terms. Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Snell-Hornby, Mary. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1992. “The Politics of Translation.” In Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, 177-200. Edited by M. Barrett and A. Phillips A. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stanford, Susan Friedman. 2011. “Towards a Transitional Turn in Narrative Theory: Literary Narratives, Travelling Tropes and the case of Virginia Woolf and the Tagores.” Narrative 19 (1):1–32. Stanford, Susan Friedman, and Silvia Schultermandl, eds. 2013. Contributions to Transnational Feminism 4, no. x.Stanford, Susan Friedman. 1996. “Beyond

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Gynocriticism and Gynesis: The Geographics of Identity and the Future of Feminist Criticism.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15, no. 1: 13–40. Talib, Ismail S. 2002. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Tymoczko, Maria. 2005. “Enlarging Western Translation Theory: Integrating non Western Thought about Translation.” [http://www.soas.ac.uk/ literatures/satranslations/tymoczko.pdf [last accessed: February 8, 2018]. Vorpsi, Ornela. 2005. Il paese dove non si muore mai. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2007. La mano che non mordi. Torino: Einaudi. Walder, Dennis. 1994. Postcolonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Zhongli, Yu. 2011. “Gender in Translating Lesbianism in The Second Sex.” MonTi 3: 421–46.

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Crossing Borders in Perilous Zones Labors of Transport and Translation in Women Writers of Exile AZADE SEYHAN

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to. (Danticat 1994, 234)

These lines toward the end of Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat’s thinly veiled autobiographical novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, stand as testimony to the urgency of remembering, when exile and displacement create a sense of permanent loss. In an age of human movement within and without national borders on an unprecedented scale, questions of belonging, exclusion, otherness, hybrid idioms, and the need for cultural translatability confront us with increasing urgency. The crosscurrents of diverse cultures in today’s globalized world, their different ports of entry, and their multiple destinations shape and reshape our notions of critical inquiry and demand appropriate strategies of reading. While postcolonial theory and discourses of identity politics have contributed greatly to a reevaluation and critique of cultural encounters, the diversity and complexity of diasporic narratives that emerge from transit points between languages, cultures, and belief and value systems resist facile classification. The vertigo of separation from language and the experience of displacement thrust the subject into stutter, if not silence. The first signs of emergence from silence appear in the autobiographical writings of women in exile, which I have elsewhere called “autoethnographies.” Exile autobiographies, veiled or revealed, emerge as scriptable voices in the space of silence and function as a form of anamnesis recoverable in the imagination. Autobiography always entails self-trans-

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lation, and autobiography in a second language entails double translation. As writing affords access into a past necessarily erased by traumas of dislocation, it rises to the challenge of speaking beyond the episteme of mere otherness. Women writing outside the nation sound the silences of memories scattered in the shuffle of history’s chaotic turns. In Danticat’s memory, the past survives, but in transfigured form—women as butterflies, stars, or larks; the living as ghosts; French as Creole; and lived experience as recurring nightmare. Writing is silent, but it becomes audible in self-translation. Translation Contra Censorship

What silences voices even before any experience of displacement and exile is censorship in the home country of the exiled. Of particular critical interest to me is the contiguity of censorship, exile, and translation. Many a writer is driven into exile because of censorship in her country, and once in exile, she regains her voice almost always in translation. In many instances, translation takes the form of self-translation. Samar Attar, a Syrian writer who was born in Damascus but has lived in Canada, Germany, Algeria, Turkey and the United States, writes that she started to translate her own work, because she had a hard time getting her novel Lina: A Portrait of a Damascene Girl, written in Arabic, published (2005, 133). She sees the act of self-translation as a “response to continuous attempts to stifle and silence my voice as a novelist. The act of self-translation has made me visible and has given me a voice which I was denied as a writer in Arabic” (134).1 Self-translation also helps her keep her Arabic alive, but overall “censorship was and still is the reason that forced me to use translation as a strategy to assert my voice as a writer” (141). Discouraged by the continuing repression she has suffered, Attar saw her future as a writer in producing books in

1

By self-translation, Attar means that she translates her work herself. She also seems to use this term to indicate that she writes directly in English. In other words, she does not translate from a written text but from a virtual unwritten language, which is usually one’s native language or mother tongue. In this chapter, I use the term in the latter sense. 80

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translation “both to a readership of expatriate Arabs living in the West as well as to Western readers” (133). Attar adds that she translates her own work not out of vanity or as an exercise in bilingualism à la Samuel Beckett, “but in response to continuous attempts to stifle and silence my voice as a novelist.” And if she succeeds in producing a good translation, she owes this in no small measure to the censors (134). Here she echoes the renowned German poet Heinrich Heine, who spent almost all his life in Parisian exile and was famous for his despairing comment “But how am I ever going to be able to write again?” upon hearing that censorship on writing had been lifted in his native Germany. The condition of real exile (not chosen or temporary) places an existential, even metaphysical burden on certain dimensions of human experience, including language, history, community, and resistance against the erasure of identity and memory. While language needs to be forged and kept alive for a community, that community often exists only in memory. This may explain Attar’s choice to write in English (translation) for the Arab ex-patriotic community in the West. In translation, pain and loss as well as cultural idioms and practices under erasure are transformed into the consolation of remembrance and more. When writers write in a language not their own, they write in and as translation, be this literal, metaphorical or cultural. While the symbolic force of the original may not come across in its entirety, translation reveals, as Walter Benjamin noted in his much-quoted “Task of the Translator,” what was unsayable in the original. The repressed could be an overextended idiom that had lost its currency (as in Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphor of the overuse of metaphor resulting in the loss of its exchange value like coins which had lost their currency, because the images on them were erased in time by overuse [1980, 314]), or a history under erasure that reclaims a new life in translation. This “messianic character of translation,” Jacques Derrida remarks, referring to Benjamin’s essay, is not a result of translation’s success, because “[a] translation never succeeds in the pure and absolute sense of the term. Rather, a translation succeeds in promising reconciliation” (“Roundtable” 1985, 123). It also reconciles the self-translating writer with what muted her speech in her original language.

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The roster of writers in exile and writing in the language of the host country has steadily grown in the last decades. Maghrebi writers have formed the avant-garde on the list, among them the late Assia Djebar (1936–2015), Tahar Djaout (1954–1993; assassinated by Islamist extremists), Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009), and Yasmina Khadra (1955–; pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul), who not only write in French but also use their translated language to articulate truths censored in both the private and the public sphere. On the list are also writers, such as SAID, an Iranian exile in Germany ([1947– ]; he simply goes by this pen name, written in capital letters, for fear of assassination) and Shahriar Mandanipour (1957–) and Marjane Satrapi (1969–), both also of Iran, whose works could only be written in exile and in translation and selftranslation or duplicate translation. Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story could not be published in Iran and was only available in English translation, before it was translated into Italian, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Polish, Greek and Korean. Satrapi, a multilingual writer like Attar, has self-translated Persepolis into French. It was subsequently translated into English and several other languages. A personal account of the reign of terror of Iran’s Islamic regime as a graphic novel, Persepolis is also a translation of words and testimonies into a visual medium. It came as no surprise that this autobiographical comic novel was then adapted into an animated film. I would like to supplement my overview of the conceptual field by viewing the actual experience of translation, self-translation, and cultural translation in the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who, after immigrating to Germany from Turkey, began writing in and as translation; in other words, in German translation of her native language. In the case of writers, whose work was or may have been banned in their own land and language, a salient feature of such self-translation is the liberation of the repressed language, a form of anti-cathexis that not only releases the energies of the source language’s expression but also enhances the target language, as the Romantics envisioned it.

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Exile in German Translation In der Fremdsprache haben Wörter keine Kindheit. (In the foreign language, words have no childhood.) E. S. Özdamar (1990, 42)

Since the end of the Cold War, the reunited Germany has been an active site of fiery debates where stakes in immigration, patriation, and national and ethnic identity politics are very high. Approximately seven million residents of non-German origin are now permanently settled in Germany. Close to three million of them are Turkish-Germans. Three generations of women of Turkish ancestry have experienced the challenges of living as doubly exiled in Germany. Women migrants comprise the majority of the global workforce and are also the greatest dispensable resource of multinational firms and concerns. They are confined to a cultural vacuum, often separated for years from their families and children, and trapped in jobs and social contexts that offer no security. From the ashes of former homes have arisen narratives that herald a pioneering aesthetics by women writers and filmmakers, an aesthetics forged from their experience of exile, which, in turn, was necessitated by fear of persecution and censorship in their home countries. Their work articulates the relationship between censorship, exile and translation and, at the same time, stands as an eloquent testimony to issues of loss, witness, identity, and exclusion. While translation necessarily involves an arguably enriching change in and exchange between individuals and communities, it also awakens innate and often subconscious fears of invasion and impurity. A telling example of such deep-rooted anxiety of being overrun by the “foreign” is a fairly recently coined German word, “Überfremdung” (literally, overforeignization) in response to the large number of people from nonWestern countries who have settled in Germany during the last decades. It is perhaps no coincidence that the German word for translation, Übersetzung, not only rhymes with Überfremdung, but also reads and sounds almost like it. At the same time, the German verb übersetzen (to translate) has also the double meaning of translate and transport (more specifically, ferry over), depending on whether the verb is used as a 83

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separable or an inseparable one.2 The coincidence of these two meanings, of translation and transfer, is, of course, not unique to German, and their linkage and, by extension, the relationship of translation to migration, movement or displacement is not necessarily a recent “trope.” The embeddedness of translation in transfer in diverse languages generates both hope for change and fear of invasion, death and contagion (Überfremdung). Translation, therefore, opens up a terrain where critical stakes concerning the future of an increasingly globalized world with its attendant problems will be played out. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a first generation Turkish writer and actress, writes in German, which, as her second and third language, is already a translation. She came to Germany at nineteen as a factory worker. She is one of the best-known non-native writers of Germany, the poster girl of women writers of non-German descent. In a career spanning several decades as a novelist, playwright, stage director, and movie actress, she has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize in 1991 for her manuscript Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei. Hat zwei Türen. Aus einer kam ich rein. Aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life Is a Caravanserai. Has Two Doors. I Came in One. I Went Out the Other), which at the time of the award was not yet in print. It was the first time that the prize was awarded to a writer whose native language was not German. While, at the time, not a few critics raised the question of whether the prize was awarded for reasons of political correctness, Özdamar has since gained considerable critical cachet, especially among American scholars of German literature. Her success as a writer is neither politically enabled, nor is it accidental. Although “Orientalist” readings of Karawanserei were commonplace, some critics touched on an important point that Goethe had articulated and the early German Romantics had confirmed. Translation enriched and expanded the target language, regenerated it “not only on the cultural or social level, but in its own speaking” (Berman 1992, 7). Özdamar’s conscious translation of the metaphoric world of Turkish into an exoticized German was seen as a picturesque transformation 2



If the verb is not separated, as in übersetzen, it means to translate; however, if the verb is separable, as in über-setzen, then it means to transport, usually over a body of water, e.g., er hat uns übergesetzt. (he ferried us over). 84

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of German. What is always not evident, and often purposefully so, is that translation says what may be unsayable, repressed or censored in the original. Although Özdamar never claimed to have been a political refugee or professed an ethnic minority identity (as a Kurd), it is probable that some of her work would have been subjected to censorship had it been written in Turkish. Translation reveals something that censorship or fear of persecution holds back or hides. Furthermore, writing in and as translation or through a process of seeking the most appropriate idiom for expressing the original in the target language, the writer can reveal an experience that may have been repressed in the first language.3 At times, Özdamar’s work reads like a compact archive of censored stories smuggled across borders in translation. While any mention of her ethnic origins is either a veiled or a fleeting allusion in Özdamar, her scathing criticism of the persecution of political dissidents in Turkey (but also in Germany) is unmistakable, though couched in black humor. While the linguistic innovations Özdamar has introduced into German through her ingenious translations of Turkish—though, at times, she has to resort to supplying an annotation of sorts—infuses her German with a picture-like quality, the endurance of her work rests on issues that have a larger appeal beyond the exoticism of a TurkishGerman “remix.” The impetus that has led to my longstanding engagement with Özdamar’s writing has all along been guided by these questions: how has her work endured for more than three decades, become for a while a staple topic of doctoral dissertations, mostly in German departments at American universities, and continued to be the subject of academic articles on transnational literatures? Although her work is positioned between only two linguistic milieus, literary traditions and cultural discourses, it has claims to the status of worldly literature, for it has succeeded in shifting the Greenwich meridian on

3

In this context, Antoine Berman supplies an interesting historical reference about a medieval Dutch poet who after the death of his beloved wife wrote a series of epitaphs in his native Dutch, then in Latin and Italian, and some time later again in Dutch. In Berman’s words, it is “[a]s if he needed to pass through a whole series of languages and self-translations in order to arrive at the right expression of his grief in his mother tongue” (1992, 2). 85

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Pascale Casanova’s map.4 In other words, it has emerged on a transnational stage, neither originating in a literary metropolis (Paris), nor settling within its habitus. Rather, Özdamar’s work resonates with writers and readers of narratives that constitute the epic of our age, an epic that sweeps over national borders, remapped territories and displaced homes. This transnational epic, in its plurilinguality, can only be framed in translation in the broadest sense, i.e. linguistically, culturally, mnemonically and performatively. Both in text and in performance, Özdamar’s work catches this Zeitgeist as it comes in conversation with discourses of translation, un/translatability, silence, censorship and writing against censorship, performing identities while questioning our clichéd notions of other identities. In its various stages of transit, from travail to translation, Özdamar’s literary output has traversed through various idioms, generic fields, borders, detention points and sites of multiply centered memories. In the following, I trace the interlinked routes of her writing in three mixed genres: the novel as uncensored autobiography; the short story as city portrait; and the essayistic story as an exercise in solidarity against political oppression. However, beyond and above Özdamar’s facility in mixed genres and languages, it is the interlinkages of her work with the concerns of other bi- and multilingual and transported and “translated” writers that transform her writing into an emblem of our globally peripatetic cultures. In her self-declared favorite novel, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, Özdamar tells the translated and simultaneously self-censored history of an earlier regime of repression in Turkey (1950–1960), which she witnessed as a child and later as a young woman in fragmented experiences of her immediate world, her family, and the many towns where her father found temporary employment. In Karawanserei, she reconfigures these shards of memory in a narrative that is in the first instance a trans In The World Republic of Letters, Casanova proposes a literary equivalent of the Greenwich meridian (a literary capital, which in her account seems to be first and foremost Paris). It is from this center that the novelty, modernity and power of other national literatures are measured. However, she also acknowledges that a literary movement emerging away from the “meridian” can move to a center stage and assume metropolitan power, as was the case with German Romanticism.

4

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lation of her mother tongue and further a retelling which, cloaked in folkloristic wisdom and accented with echoes of One Thousand and One Nights, resists any external censorial intervention. Such a translation represents a virtual traveling archive that accompanies the peripatetic writer who checks out books, journals and newspapers; reads, revises and annotates them; and returns them into circulation in translated form.5 In Özdamar’s novels, short stories, and play, Karagöz in Alamania, the metaphor of the mobile world library, where works in many languages are at the writer’s disposal as aide-mémoire and translational aid, becomes a trope of exile in (self-)translation. For authors exiled or displaced from their respective nations, any national affiliation, whether with the homeland or the host land, poses the threat of obedience to exclusionary practices. The metropolis, be it New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin or Istanbul, where capital and transnational movements are spatially concentrated and citizenship is not one of the state but of the city itself, has become the preferred destination of moving populations in search of refuge and/or opportunity. Moving in and out of Istanbul as well as Berlin, Özdamar finally identifies Berlin as her artistic space and home, which emerges in her work not only as its inspiration but also as a self-generating signifier that drives the narratives. For this Turkish-German writer, Berlin’s cityscape, which is not merely an agglomerate of asphalt and concrete and parks and monuments, but a palimpsest of images of Istanbul and Berlin, forms the backdrop for the diasporan’s confrontation with the past and the lost home. Her fascination with the histories and memories of both cities finds its expression in tales of her frequent visits to sites of remembrance—mosques, churches, libraries, ruins of former East Berlin, and, most significantly, cemeteries. As she has indicated in many of her works, Özdamar saw Istanbul’s cemeteries as the only peaceful sites in the city, since the Turks were not in the habit of making cemetery visits—“Die Friedhöfe sind leer, es sind In Karawanserei, Özdamar reproduces, seemingly through the eyes of the child narrator, yet in uncannily journalistic detail, the events following the 1960 military coup, including the trials of the deposed leaders of the state. Interweaving her archival sources with her “library” of Bertolt Brecht’s and Karl Marx’s works, she gives the German reader sketches of Turkey’s embattled experience of modernity.

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die einzigen ruhigen Orte in der Stadt” (“The cemeteries are empty, they are the only quiet places in the city”) (“Mein Istanbul” in Der Hof im Spiegel, 72)—and the stillness of the dead amidst the soothing green of the cypress trees provided for her a space for reflection and the connection to departed and beloved lives. The Arabic inscriptions on the gravestones have always fascinated Özdamar, as she makes clear in the story “Großvaterzunge,” where she expresses her lament for the loss of the Arabic script with the conversion of the Turkish alphabet to the Roman one. In the story “Mein Berlin,” in Der Hof im Spiegel, she tells of her frequent visits to Berlin’s cemeteries that recall those of Istanbul. In Berlin, the communication she seeks is not with departed family members, as in Istanbul, but with members of what she sees as her literary and intellectual family, Hegel, Heinrich Mann and, most significantly, Bertolt Brecht. In a telling episode, during one of her visits to Brecht’s grave, memories of her family and Istanbul overlap with the present moment, as she recalls how her grandmother always planted the same flowers “KÜPELİ” (capital letters in the original; 60)6 that now cover Brecht’s resting place. In “Mein Istanbul,” Özdamar tells of visiting an Istanbul cemetery as a young girl with a poet, who was copying down the inscriptions on the gravestones to use in his poems. He tells Emine, “Das sind die letzten Sätze der Menschen. Da gibt es keine Lügen” (“These are the last sentences of people. There are no lies there”) (72). By Brecht’s grave, Özdamar marks the words that are inscribed on the headstone, “Er hat Vorschläge gemacht, und sie wurden angenommen” (“He made recommendations, and they were accepted”) (“Mein Berlin,” 60). In her Istanbul/Berlin stories, memories and dreams of her artistic life at Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin and the trauma of her persecution by the police in Turkey converge. As she rides through the streets of Berlin, she reads the graffiti on the walls about the brutality of the German police, “Gott ist tot, die Henker nicht […] Wir brauchen kein Tränengas, wir haben genug Grund zum Heulen” (“God is dead, but not the executioners; we don’t need tear gas, we have enough reason to howl”), and a resounding plea for remembering the forgotten, “Alles 6



Küpeli, which is the word for fuchsia in Turkish, literally means “wearing earrings.” She translates the word into German as “mit Ohrringen.” 88

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Vergessene schreit im Traum um Hilfe” (“All that is forgotten cries out for help in dreams”) (58). Thus, by superimposing images/stories of Istanbul’s geography and memories on Berlin’s backdrop in Der Hof im Spiegel, Özdamar engages in a cross-cultural memory work and creates an interpretive model for understanding the algorithm of diaspora in the tale of two cities. In the memory sites of cityscapes, Özdamar sees a repeated performance of trauma; and this rehearsal of distress intensifies her empathy for the affected. Writing in the Name of Empathetic Solidarity

This writerly empathy is another intersection where Özdamar’s writing joins that of writers censored in their own lands and languages, both in Germany and elsewhere. In the linguistic space of free play and translational subterfuge—which favors no native speaker but rather signals empathy for those outside the comfort zone of their own language—is where Özdamar meets other masters of linguistic “cross-fertilization,” such as the Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré,7 the German-Japanese author Yoko Tawada, the Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston and other writers writing/riding on the hyphen from spaces without access to the literary Greenwich meridian to spaces beyond the national. While their writing has emerged in specific temporal and geographical spaces, it has expanded to take into its purview issues that transcend terrestrial and temporal borders, such as the relation of history and memory, loss and melancholy, censorship and resistance to silencing, and theory and practice of translation, among others. The works of these authors underwrite two conceptual translational paradigms. In the first instance, the activity of self-translation represents the necessary third term of the ever more common destiny of exiled writers, that is, the chain of events that starts with censorship and persecution and often leads to exile and the

7

Ferré not only writes with equal facility in Spanish and English but also translates whatever she writes into the other language. In her English-language novel, The House on the Lagoon, she sketches a powerful portrait of the cost of language politics in Puerto Rico and ties language suppression to politically enforced erasure of national, ethnic, and regional identities. 89

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necessity of translation or self-translation. Writing in the transnational and translational mode, in bi-and multilingual registers, resists the power of censors and control over linguistic heterogeneity. In the second instance, these works have generated a conceptual metaphor, namely, that of translation without the original, the homeless wandering text that settles in receiving languages. In choosing to translate their hi/stories into the language of the host land, many writers in exile hold the censors at bay. Or they restate what was censored, either by censors or through self-censorship, in the protective membrane of translation. Özdamar’s experience of political persecution in her country, her witnessing of what practically amounted to a civil war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish insurgency caused a linguistic amnesia, recovered only in translation. She reportedly was afflicted by a condition that prevented her from using her native language. Translation can tell the story of a traumatic past indirectly without necessarily taking away from the effect of the experience. Özdamar has used translation as a self-censoring tool to both comic and devastating or devastatingly comic effect. In one of the stories in her collection, Mutterzunge, the narrator recalls seeing in the prison where she was held the brother of a young man tortured to death during a police interrogation. She remembers how many such young men and women were repeatedly arrested and jailed by brutal police forces who “pumped the milk that their mothers breast fed them out through their noses” (“man hat ihnen die Milch, die sie aus ihren Müttern getrunken haben aus ihrer Nase rausgeholt” [1990, 12]). In the translation of this idiom, the brutality of the event is masked, because the meaning cannot be conveyed in its nakedness and has almost a comical effect, as it suggests a medical procedure—pumping the stomach after food poisoning. At the same time, in the German context, her stories gain resonance by her ability to read them against German memories; in the juxtaposition of these parallel national pasts (Turkish and German), she sees a repeating trauma that can only be brought to a level of consciousness in writing in and as translation. This translation represents a virtual traveling library, a bookmobile, which accompanies the peripatetic writer Özdamar, who checks out volumes of Heine, Marx, Engels and 90

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Brecht and translates, against the larger narrative of German political history these texts provide, Turkey’s trials with modernity and its traumas for the German reader. Like Özdamar, Yoko Tawada, who is well known both in her native Japan and in Germany for her critical fictions, has shown that questions of translation and bi- or multilingualism confront prejudices that go beyond problems in cultural communication. By remapping the territory of translation, both writers initiate a conversation above and beyond nationality and race and provide novel forms of linguistic identity to travelers between languages. Their writing is informed by an uncanny resemblance in terms of an alienating/foreignizing translation of their respective idioms that jolts German readers into reflecting on the biases of their own language use and how this in advance condemns the foreign. In his Introduction to Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, Doug Slaymaker names the artistic markers of Tawada’s work as “parody and tongue-in-cheek joking, non-sequiturs that hide surreal punches, winks at myths and folktales, and persistent toying with national identities and linguistic traditions” (2007, 1). Özdamar employs almost identical writing strategies. In a certain sense, Tawada and Özdamar share a Nietzschean sensibility that sees the truth of human experience as embedded in metaphor. For these two cultural translators, metaphor metamorphosizes the world and our experience of it in a way that defies constriction and conscription. Metaphor reminds us of a time before the emergence of logical thought. In Tawada’s view, under the dominance of language that claimed reason and truth, the metaphorical force of language was repressed. Its purchase now survives only in literature and dreams. In translating German and Japanese—and also English— into the terms of the other, Tawada shows how cultural difference is performed in linguistic space. This space is both that of a lost language and its circuitous transport into a new idiom. Tawada and Özdamar alienate the reader by language games whose rules are not given and invite them to cross the bridge that simultaneously connects and separates the original and the target languages. In Özdamar, Tawada, Ferré, Djebar and many other women writers of diaspora, narrative memory confronts the theft of history, and writing enables alternative remembrances and histories to emerge. By 91

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inscribing itself in language as well as in the physical body, items of clothing and objects, memory tries to claim the experience of another time and place. The work of commemoration remains the only access to forgotten and erased stories and pasts. Remembering shards/fragments of memory is a process of translating the imperfect past into the present progressive. In the final analysis, translation marks an entry point into another language and culture. It also implies disassembling and reassembling language. In every reassembly there is the danger of a gap caused by parts that may be missing or are misaligned. These gaps can be read as sites of irreducible untranslatability; but they can also be placeholders for emergent idioms that defy censors. Ultimately, the questions of how we assemble our versions of the self, how we translate ourselves, lie at the core of our identity, our forms of being and seeing and facing the brave new world. The tales of transnational Scheherazades like Özdamar recover the centrality of fiction and self-translation to our understanding of how cultures get interpreted as they move from geography to geography and generation to generation. References Attar, Samar. 1994. Lina: A Portrait of a Damascene Girl. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press. ———. 2005. “Translating the Exiled Self: Reflections on Translation and Censorship.” Intercultural Communication Studies XIV, no. 4: 131–147. Benjamin, Walter. 1977. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” In Illuminationen, 50–62. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2007. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Danticat, Edwidge. 1994/1995. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho Press; New York: Vintage.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Roundtable on Translation.” In The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, 93–161. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Edited by Christie McDonald. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Ferré, Rosario. 1996. The House on the Lagoon. New York: Plume. Mandanipour, Shahriar. 2010. Censoring an Iranian Love Story. Translated by Sara Khalili. New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn.” In Werke, Band 5, 309–322. Edited by Karl Schlechta. Munich: Hanser. Özdamar, Emine Sevgi. 1991. Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei. Hat zwei Türen. Aus einer kam ich rein. Aus der Anderen kam ich raus. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 2001. Der Hof im Spiegel. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 1990. Mutterzunge. Berlin: Rotbuch. Satrapi, Marjane. 2007. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon. ——— . 2001, 2002, 2003. Persepolis. Paris: L’Association Slaymaker, Doug, ed. 2007. Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

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Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquidity and Transnational Women’s Literature Nancy Huston and Assia Djebar as Case Studies S O N I A F ER N Á N D E Z H OYO S a n d A D EL I N A S Á N C H E Z E S P I N O S A

Liquidity

From Marshall Berman’s critique on modernity with his All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982), we have travelled so far in the twenty-first century as to reach a society characterized by a new condition of “being liquid.” Evanescence becomes an asset in an ever-changing society. Zygmunt Bauman’s project on liquidity should be explained as a return to modernist themes, a sort of reaction to the failure of postmodernism, which had shown its limitations when it came to explaining the significance of social action and change. This has been so for several reasons. One of these reasons is its reductive view of the social as a simplistic system of differences or as the subject of a mere illusion of individuality. In short, postmodernism could not propose alternative structures precisely because it defined itself as anti-foundational. But the social world kept changing, and it had, indeed, already transformed into a different reality from what postmodernism had intended to describe. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Bauman, who had written widely on postmodernity during the 1990s, prompted by his consciousness and alert awareness to all those problems and limitations, began searching for an alternative, which he finally found in the concept of liquidity.1 He conceived of the future as “uncertain,” fully pervaded by the “fluid world of globalization, deregulation and individualization” (Bauman 2002, 19). Bauman’s liquid modernity metaphor offers a useful Both Modernity and Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) start exploring the ambivalence between the appeal of “the different” (as new) and its abjection (as “the stranger”) experienced in modern global societies. Bauman moves further into the analysis of exclusion and “liquidation” in Intimations of Postmodernity (1992).

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framework from which to approach and understand the social phenomena that characterize globalization. Bauman’s “Liquidity” Concept

According to Bauman, liquidity is a trait of the world we live in. It is a rapidly changing order that undermines all notions of durability (Bauman 2000). Everything is in flux, constantly changing. Nothing is the same as we used to know in the past, and we must act accordingly. In other words, our way of relating to the world, to others, needs to be reevaluated. The concept of “liquid modernity” implies in particular “a sense of rootlessness to all forms of social construction” (Lee 2005, 61). Durability no longer applies to this situation. The only durable element is transience. According to Bauman: Transience has replaced durability at the top of the value table. What is valued today (by choice as much as by unchosen necessity) is the ability to be on the move, to travel light and at short notice. Power is measured by the speed with which responsibilities can be escaped. Who accelerates, wins; who stays put, loses. (Bauman and Tester 2001, 95)

Bauman poses a dichotomy between the solid modernity of the past and our current liquid modernity. After the turning point from the former to the latter, the salient features become uncertainty and ambivalence. Nomadism, previously viewed with horror by the sedentary citizens of solid modernity, now becomes a most valued trait. In the old solid modernity, not belonging to a state was tantamount to being an outcast, an outsider to the community (Bauman 2004). Now, nomadism has turned into a way to cope with the basic feature of liquid modernity and its fluidity, and the recognition of this new trait has become essential in order to fight the modern fears towards “the stranger” within current globalization. Fluidity, according to Bauman (2001), is only possible after barriers are eliminated. It demands freeways for nomadic traffic and the elimination of controls and frontiers. 96

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Among the many changes brought about by liquid modernity, one strikes us as the most useful tool both for the understanding of the current situation and for the analysis of the works by transnational writers. It is, using Bauman’s words, “the renunciation, phasing out or selling off by the state of all the major appurtenances of its role as the principal (perhaps even monopolistic) purveyor of certainty and security, followed by its refusal to endorse the certainty/security aspirations of its subjects” (2000, 184). The consequences deriving from this loss, from the absence of certainties and the lack of sureties, play a pivotal role in the construction of the works we choose here as case studies. Transnational Studies

Since Homi Bhabha (1994) began questioning the disciplinary models of comparison and distinction in the light of new community forms, it has become evident that literary studies need reformulation and that transnational studies could be the space for this. Literary studies must rethink its goals and methodologies. It must even rethink itself. The study of cultural manifestations within the current global world can no longer be restricted by old-fashioned geopolitical boundaries since it, indeed, trespasses national frontiers. And when it comes to the location of literature (Walkowitz 2006), we must bear in mind the wide range of actors taking part in the act of communication. Thus, we must no longer ascribe works to the places where they are written, but also to those places where they are classified, published, read, etc. As other critics have remarked (Manguel 1996 and 2004; Price 2002; Saussy 2015), the work must now be studied with a full critical awareness of the production processes involved. This is what Price calls “the geography of the book,” which often includes simultaneous dissemination through multifarious literary milieus. In a global society marked by permanent change, the concept of “transnationalism” becomes fundamental since it proposes horizontal relations in clear preference to the verticality of traditional disciplines, prioritizing a national focus. The hierarchy is now substituted by transversality, and lateral/rhizomatic connections (following Deleuze) 97

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become the relational mode. Fluidity, constant change and mobility demand a new approach toward literary criticism (also understood as cultural in its widest sense). It implies writing outside the nation (Seyhan 2001), which, therefore, demands a reading beyond (or “à côté de,’ i.e. “alongside”) the nation. Thus, as Susan Stanford Friedman puts it, it is necessary to make the “shift from nation-based paradigms to transnational models, emphasizing the global space of ongoing travel and transcontinental connection” (Friedman 2006, 906). Transnationality is a useful analytical framework since it allows for the simultaneous multiplicity of exchanges and adaptations. It works on several levels since it contemplates the national alongside what happens within and outside the constraints of national borders. Transversality becomes the leitmotiv, relinquishing, once and for all, the binary oppositions (center versus margin or periphery, among many others), in other words, the very polarities that were the weakest points within postcolonial theory. Comparativism is, thus, fed by an approach that implies the revision of the concepts of nation and state, the role of cultural productions across multiple geographies and literary systems, and the need for metatheoretical reflection on the practice of the discipline itself in the making. This new approach raises new questions to be answered, such as how much of the one literature we bring into the analysis of the other. The Case of Nancy Huston

Born in Canada and exiled in Paris since 1973, Huston is justly recognized for both her fiction and non-fiction. An Anglophone by cultural heritage, Huston has used French, the language she learnt as an adult, to write most of her work. Later in life, she started self-translating her work. She is particularly relevant as a transnational contemporary writer. Let us concentrate on her non-fiction and, in particular, on those works that define her poetics: Parisian Letters: Autopsy of Exile [Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l’exil, 1986/1999] and Lost North [Nord perdu, 1999]. These works constitute a reflection on three aspects that are essential 98

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to transnationalism and liquid modernity: travelling, exile and bilingualism/self-translation. Regarding travelling, in both works Huston starts from her personal experience (the personal is political), to later meditate on how this activity has become a defining feature of contemporary experience. Rather than a choice, travelling is a modus vivendi for Huston. As she states in Lettres parisiennes: Why is it that I am always in transit, always setting off for some foreign country or another? [...] The journey, whatever the means of transport, has been the main plot of my dreams and nightmares from childhood. Pourquoi alors est-ce que je suis toujours en transit, toujours en partance pour un pays étranger quelconque? [...] Le Voyage, par tous les moyens de transport possibles, forme la trame centrale de mes rêves heureux et malheureux depuis l’enfance. (Huston and Sebbar 1999, 183)

Since she was a child, travelling was part of her life. In her essays, travelling features prominently: changing places as the beginning of hope, the forking out of the path into two parallel lives. Moving from one place to another allows oneself the strange fiction of testimony, of potentially living several lives simultaneously. The reasons for departure are diverse, and, at any rate, inconsequential. Deep inside, there is still “la haine de soi” (the hatred of oneself): At departure, the hatred of onself. No matter why. // Many behaviors may be inspired by self-hatred. One can become an artist. One can commit suicide. Change one’s name, country or language. Au départ, la haine de soi. Peu importe pour quelle raison. // Bien des comportements peuvent être inspirés par la haine de soi. On peut devenir artiste. Se suicider. Changer de nom, de pays, de langue. (Huston 1999, 11)

It means an escape: abandoning everything in order to, paradoxically, find oneself. This is the paradox of hoping for self-survival, hoping for the survival of others as a sort of anti-destiny or fate. 99

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Travelling is linked to exile. Both in travelling and in exile, there is a constant game being played between orientation and disorientation, a constant exchange of life-texts. Disorientation, so typical of liquid societies, is due to various circumstances in Huston’s view: either from living in various places at the same time, speaking several languages, biculturalism, the migratory experiences, exile or a change in social class. Jacques Derrida (himself an example of a transnational writer, a Jew born in Algeria, living between two different cultural universes, France and the United States), together with Catherine Malabou, wrote La Contre-allée (Side Lane, 1999), a meditation on travelling understood as a unique activity consisting of distancing oneself from chez soi (from oneself) and choosing the unknown territory as the destination. This journey involves opening up to the thrilling pleasures of discovering what is to come but also facing the dangers and risks of the unknown, one of them being the risk of never returning. Along similar lines, we find Rosi Braidotti’s nomadism (the fundamental feature of liquid societies) with its immediate positive effects on creativity: In between zones where all ties are suspended and time stretched to a sort of continuous present. Oases of non-belonging, spaces of detachment [...] Maybe this is why these open, public spaces of transition are privileged sites of creation for contemporary artists. (Braidotti 1994, 18–19)

This “non-belonging,” in combination with the idea of suspended time, generates ideal paradises for creation. And, indeed, to Huston and Sebbar, this consciousness operates as an agent that is fully realized in their works. In Huston’s case, it is the journey that makes the old single truth fan out into a multiplicity of truths. It triggers continuous dialogic oppositions between falsity/authenticity and non-belonging. Hence, Huston often insists on her will not to become fully integrated in French society lest she should fail to preserve the unique privileges of biculturalism. That is why she states: “I don’t suffer the distance, I look for it” [“Je ne subis pas l’écart, je le cherche”] (Huston & Sebbar 1999, 195). Because, as Richard Sennet puts it (1976, 138), belonging or longing to 100

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belong to a community is a defensive act. It aims at self-protection by bringing to the surface the fragments of experience which escape the system of “the real” to resemble dreaming. It shows what is no longer possible in liquid societies. Opting out of non-socialization, of nonintegration, accepting or generating ambivalence ... all these are traits of exile that Bauman highlights in Liquid Modernity. And these traits are also the defining features in Huston’s work, as we can see. Art and exile are to Huston ways to run away from what she hates in herself, to make it vanish. Technically, as Bauman points out (2000, 207), the exiled is he or she who lives in, but is not from a place. And this condition of being re-adjusted or re-situated grants the exiled a privileged space in which truths are constructed and deconstructed (thus getting rid of their “natural” appearance). The mother tongue becomes an enriching tool that establishes a series of exchanges between different traditions and cultural universes. Huston states that: In short, we need one country and the other one; we need the difference between the two of them; we are not interested in the mixture, it frightens us. The danger of reunification, as you said a long time ago... No doubt you have understood it before I have. Exile is the fantasy allowing us to work, and especially to write. En somme, nous avons besoin d’un pays et de l’autre; de la différence entre le deux; le mélange ne nous intéresse pas, il nous effraie. Danger de réunification, comme tu disais il ya déjà longtemps... Sans doute l’avais-tu compris avant moi. l’“exil” n’est que le fantasme qui nous permet de fonctionner, et notamment d’écrire. (Huston and Sebbar 1999, 193)

The experience of exile, of being the stranger in a new context, means an “enigma,” the reaction of unsettlement to the echoes, a most necessary experience in Huston’s case (1989 and 1999), since, through it, one becomes aware of what Julia Kristeva refers to as becoming strangers to ourselves (nous sommes étrangers à nous même) (1988). In Huston’s words: “That is, the exile. Mutilation. Censorship. Culpability” [“L’exil, c’est ça. Mutilation. Censure. Culpabilité”] (Huston 1999, 22). Indeed, exile represents above all a distance from the place of our childhood (what 101

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Huston and Sebbar call Une enfance d’ailleurs, 1993). The split gives way to loss, but it also means something positive since it unveils the basic: what used to look real is no longer so. Identity, Huston verifies after this experience, can only be fragmented, piecemeal and multiple: “We are two persons, each one of us, at least two, it’s just a matter of discovering it!” [“Nous sommes deux, chacun de nous, au moins deux, il s’agit de savoir!”] (Huston 1999, 37). It is only by running away from it all that we can get to know ourselves in all our facets. Getting to know a different culture with its own cultural differences is to Huston an essential, albeit painful, exercise. As Jorge Calderón (2007) points out, Huston establishes a typology of exiles: first, there is a double absence: a real absence (that of the place left behind) and a symbolic absence (the place one lives in but never fully inhabits). Second, there is temporary exile: returning is possible at least in theory, although it is not possible to return to times gone by, to the past, which makes it look as if time has stopped for the person who returns, while it has continued for the rest (those who stayed put, whom Huston calls impatriés, a term she coins to contrast with expatriés). Finally, there is social exile (the kind experienced by Huston), which involves a change of social class, also experienced as a type of exile. Bilingualism, which is becoming a common trait of transnational writing, should be understood within the wider context of bicultural conditions. Serenela Ghuteanu (2013) analyzes the issue in her study of Huston’s construction of identity and distinguishes between those writers who are bilingual by cultural heritage—i.e., those who have learned the second language in childhood—and those who, like her, have learned the language in adulthood, the latter being a learning process that involves full consciousness. The distance implied by bilingualism in relation to the native language, Bauman’s gaze from the outside, is, ultimately, invigorating to the construction of the prose (both in French—the borrowed language—and English—the mother tongue), and allows Huston to transcend the present in its permanent disappearance/vanishing. Much has been said about the emancipatory potential of speaking a second language. In fact, Huston herself translates her works into English after having lived in another language for so long. Thus, her relationship with her mother tongue is, to a certain extent, foreign—i.e., 102

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it forces her to reflect on the language itself from a very peculiar perspective. And it is this peculiarity that eventually creates a privileged space. Huston’s self-translation practice may be defined by double linguistics and by a series of cultural palimpsests. In Ioanna Chatzidimitriou’s (2009) words: “The double palimpsest—horizontally from tongue to tongue and vertically from linguistic palimpsest to text—destabilizes meaning and deterritorializes both source and target tongue, both major languages undergoing a process of minorization” (25). Here, we may be dealing with a process from which we cannot escape within this transnational context. It may be better to approach it from the actions that appertain minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari 1975, 29–33)—i.e., the deterritorialization of the major language, the disappearance of the subject behind the collective, and the politicization of personal labor. In this deterritorialization-reterritorialization game, the conscience of selftranslation revitalizes writing in both languages and, thus, manages to create a new space for the transnational writer. The Case of Assia Djebar

One of the most discussed issues about Assia Djebar is her controversial rapport both with Arabic, her mother tongue, and French, the language in which she wrote all her novels. French, the language of power, the patriarchal language of the colonizers, had granted her entrance into the exclusive club of a privileged few: she was the first Maghrebian member of the Académie Française and the recipient of some of the most prestigious French literary prizes. Arabic is the language of the underprivileged Algerian sisters back in her homeland, those deprived of the power of writing, their orality the only way to counteract their imposed silence. Djebar’s testimonies clearly show that she is fully conscious of her privilege. As Mildred Mortimer (1997, 102) points out: “The day that Assia Djebar’s father, a teacher in the French colonial educational system, first escorted his daughter to school, he set her on a bilingual and bicultural journey that resulted in her development as an artist and an intellectual […]. More than four decades after the event, Djebar considers her personal experience an ambiguous one. Liberated from the female enclosure 103

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of her Algerian sisters, she reached maturity haunted by the weight of exile […].” The sentiment of exclusion led Djebar to her “Quatuor algérien,” a writing project to reestablish links with the maternal world from which she felt distanced—but in fact a realm she never lost. Indeed, the four novels which form The Algerian Quartet are semiautobiographical polyphonic texts where Djebar’s voice joins those of the previously silenced community of Algerian women.2 Before paying attention to how she attains this feat, let us focus briefly on her feelings about her own bilingualism. In a 1985 interview with Margarite Le Clezio on her writing in a foreign language (“Ecrire dans la langue adverse”), Djebar states: At home I write in a foreign tongue, in fact in the tongue of the former occupying power […] in the tongue which I call the adverse tongue […]. So, to sum up, the first exile occurs in a tongue which is opposite to me […]. French becomes the public tongue […]. Thus, my relationship with Arabic is a dual one. (Murdoch 1993, 92)3

On the other hand, her relationship with French is just as complicated, as evidenced by her famous words in L’Amour, la fantasia (214; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade), terming the French language her “stepmother tongue” (“langue marâtre”), as a way to signify her alienation from her The Algerian Quartet is comprised of four novels: L’Amour, la fantasia 1985 (Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade); Ombre sultane 1987 (A Sister to Sheherezade); Vaste est la prison 1995 (So Vast the prison); and Nulle part dans la maison de mon père 2007 (No Room of My Own in My Father’s Home). 3 This conflicting relationship with her mother tongue is further manifested in “The Eyes of Language,” where she states: “I discover once again these words inside me, words that tear me apart: ‘You should say no to that displaced language.’ The father who does not want to let go sends you this language, like a slap in the face, a blow to your shoulders, your guilty shoulders. Why this language? It is the language in which women are disinherited, in which the daughters lose their past. The language that devours. The language whose distance from you up till now allowed you to be able to live freely with neither veil nor shroud, far away, always farther. To say no to these eyes? To your eyes, Berber language?” (1996, 786). See also Soheila Ghaussy’s discussion on Djebar’s linguistic ambiguity for which she recalls the following passage in Fantasia: “Ever since I was a child the foreign language was a casement opening on the spectacle of the world and all its riches. In certain circumstances it became a dagger threatening me” (cf. Ghaussy 1994, 457). 2

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mother tongue. She is thus placed in a limbo that, nevertheless, will prove most advantageous to her writing project. As an exiled writer, Djebar can use the indeterminacy of her third space to take possession of the weapons of the oppressor and put them to good use. The French language can become the vehicle to compensate for the aphasia of her Algerian sisters if conveniently Arabicized. As Katherine Gracki states: “By throwing herself into the battlefield and appropriating the colonizer’s weapons, she is able to turn these same weapons against the adversary” (1996, 836). French is thus reshaped (Murdoch 1993, 17) and modulated into a “disruptive language” (Ghaussy 1994, 460). “She is not writing in the language of the Other,” adds Abdelkader Cheref, “because she has artistically manipulated the French language […] she has ‘translated’ French into her mother tongue,” (2010, 90), while Anne Donadey (2000, 29) describes Djebar’s bilingualism as “radical” since it allows her to inscribe oral Arabic within it and, thus, create a “bilingual palimpsest.”4 Djebar solves her ambivalence to both languages by creating a translation of sorts in which French is deprived of its oppressive colonizing power and made the accomplice of her resistance on behalf of, or rather, alongside her Algerian sisters. We could thus term it as a feminist “translanguage of solidarity.” By using this “translanguage,” Djebar constructs a symbiosis of self and community, a solidity that counteracts the liquidity of the exiled woman writer and the indeterminacy of her third space. This language of Djebar’s own is thus unique since it is conceived from a feminist transnational standpoint: its content being the search for the voices of the previously silenced Algerian sisters and its intertextual form fitly subserving the solidary networking between self and others, the construction of a new community beyond both homes. It is conceived from the continuum that joins Djebar and her sisters outside, as Azade Seyhan would put it, the Algerian nation. And yet they are very much joined within it. In Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (2007), Suzanne Gauch devotes one of the chapters to a study of Fantasia in which she talks about Djebar’s

4

See also Katrien Lievois’s 2013 study of historiography and autobiography in Fantasia. She calls it a “multilingual palimpsest” with as many translational stages as languages represented in it. 105

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paradoxical position as a transnational woman writer, part of and still outside from the collectivity she wants to represent. “The narrator’s bilingualism” she concludes, “draws her into a search for an elusive language in which she can triumphantly embody herself, rejecting the role of victim yet without glossing over the suffering of her sisters” (84). Gauch concludes that the term “fantasia,” in the title of the novel, aptly describes this collage of the historiography of anonymous women, through the translation of the rural Algerians’ oral histories and Djebar’s own autobiographical reflections on her enculturation (98). This elusive, disruptive use of bilingualism is essential in order to, as Djebar herself puts it, “resurrect so many vanished sisters” (1993, 204). Soheila Ghaussy links this type of language to “feminine language, ecriture feminine,” a representation of female embodiment through her writing. To her, the act of translating Arabic into French represents the transcription of “kaalam” (the female) into “écriture” (the male), and positions Djebar as the interpreter who has the power to eradicate clearcut boundaries. It becomes a means by which we are made aware of the existence of Arabic in the novel through French,5 a most effective translation of the orality of the Arabic subjects into the French articulation (1994, 459–60). Donadey picks up the “ecriture feminine” baton, concluding that each of Djebar’s works focuses on one aspect of the language of the female body: [W]hispers, ritual ululations, and the grandmother’s trances in Fantasia; the rewriting of what I call her gene/elle/logie (female genealogy), especially in Loin de Medine and Vaste; music and the pleasure of dancing alone in Vaste; the female gaze in Femmes d’Alger, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, and Vaste; desire, sexual pleasure, and violence, especially in Ombre sultane and Vaste; and throughout the entire oeuvre, female voices and silences. (2000, 29)

This act of translation is transgressive because of its gendering of language, as female embodiment, and also in what it represents of the 5

In Romancier Djebar herself had stated: “We must Arabicize French” (cf. Dona­dey, 27). 106

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subversion of the colonial power of the French language by its Arabization. It undermines the power of the colonizer by, as Donadey puts it, offering a defamiliarization to native speakers and making the language much more hospitable to Arabic ones.6 The transnational standpoint from which Djebar writes brings critics to relate it to Homi Bhabha’s interstitial spaces of linguistic indeterminacy (Zimra 2004, 152), Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization (Donadey, 29), and nomadic aesthetics (Siassi 2008, 56). Clarisse Zimra makes a point which we find most relevant here: it is not so much about deterritorialized but rather “a-territorialized” identities, “the better to invest in the only space that is fully theirs: writing” (ibid.). If, as Guilan Siassi phrases it—in what sounds very much like Bauman’s liquidity—“exile and displacement—as either physical or psychological conditions of being—have become the rule rather than the exception of contemporary life” (56), then Djebar’s writing project is an act of resistance to her own displacement. As Seyhan puts it (2003, 160–61), Djebar is at the end of the day the displaced “I” outside the nation, translating herself through autobiography: Autobiography has often been defined as a form of self-translation. Writing about one’s culture in exile or as a member of a minority group within a dominant culture requires a labor of cultural translation in the widest sense of the term. The speaking subject needs to translate not only voice into writing and the mother tongue into the other one but also one cultural idiom into another.7



For a thorough study of the linguistic devices used by Djebar to Arabicize French in her writing, see Donadey (op. cit.). 7 See also Siassi, who states: “As an Algerian woman, the narrator-author does not feel fully at home in the spaces designated for her by either colonial or patriarchal power. In this sense, she is exiled both from traditional women’s spaces (by virtue of her literacy and partial liberation from constraints) and from the public sphere (by virtue of her status as a woman and colonial subject). The autobiographical act, embedded in her historical inquiry into the forgotten role of women in the Algerian resistance, thus performs a fundamental desire to redefine and recuperate (or more precisely, to construct and appropriate) antagonistic and elusive surrogate homes” (57–58). 6

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Autobiography becomes essential as a form for Djebar. Her search for her self both as woman and as writer can only be attained by the presence of so many other voices.8 Her writing is intentionally palimpsestic, since Djebar searches for herself as a writer and as a woman in the connection with others. The insertion within networks of writers establishes the solidity of writing as a new territory versus the liquidity of the deterritorialized exiled self. Hence, we cannot detach Djebar’s disruptive use of language from its relational complicity with other writers. Siassi, following Balibar and Said, refers to “transnational civility” and “humanism”: One’s exilic disposition would enable a humanistic form of critical engagement with the world […]. From this perspective, Djebar’s weaving together of autobiography and history gives rise to what we might call an ethical mode of representing—and thus relating to, or seeking recognition from—the Other. (67)

Also along these lines, Gregory Castle (2013, 644) refers to Virginia Woolf’s trope of the “community of feeling” to describe The Algerian Quartet as such.9 In his opinion, the multiplicity of languages, stories and selves makes it possible for writing to transform personal desire into social responsibility, where the self links with the community. Ethical commitment to others is a key issue here since it functions as the solid antidote against the liquidity of deterritorialization and isolation. As Bauman puts it: The challenge we all face now is being, so to speak, on the same boat. We share the same destiny and our survival depends on whether we choose to cooperate or fight with each other […]. We need to develop, learn and practice the art of accommodating differences, of cooperating without making others lose their identities, Djebar writes: “Je me suis plongée dans cette auto-analyse, moi comme femme, également comme écrivain” (cf. Zimra, 156). 9 In To the Lighthouse, Woolf talks of a “community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically […] it was all one stream” (cf. Castle, 644). 8

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of benefitting from each other not in spite of but thanks to these very differences. (2009, our translation)10

This disruptive language of solidary resistance must, of course, be intertextual, not only because it is collective but also because, as Salman Rushdie (1982) and Bill Ashcroft et al. (1989) put it, it must write back and challenge institutional literary hierarchies (cf. Gueydan, 89).11 Djebar links herself with the two communities she feels she belongs to in her twofold belonging as a transnational writer and as a woman. On the one hand, she establishes a connection with the group of writers she defines as “passeurs”: other transnational writers, exiles just like her, translators across languages and cultures who find their territory in writing, just like she does. This is what Djebar (The White of Algiers, 145, cf. Murdoch 18) would refer to as “algerianité”: I use the word “Algerianity,” a far broader notion than the “Algerian identity” recorded on official papers; just as in the past it included Camus and Roblès alongside Ferraoun [sic] and Kateb, it would now link Derrida and Mohammed Dib, or Hélène Cixous and myself.

On the other hand, there is the network of women. The translation is, ultimately, a feminist transcription of the experiences of the colonized subaltern by Sheherezade. This alter ego of Djebar as a woman writer also places her in the company of other Arabic writers such as Fatima The original version in the Spanish source reads: “[E]l desafío que enfrentamos es que estamos todos, por así decirlo, en el mismo barco; tenemos un destino común y nuestra supervivencia depende de si cooperamos o luchamos entre nosotros […]. Tenemos que desarrollar, aprender y practicar el arte de vivir con diferencias, de cooperar sin que los otros pierdan su identidad, beneficiarnos unos de otros no a pesar de, sino gracias a nuestras diferencias.” 11 Gueydan comments: “Just as intertextual practices become a strategy to overwrite the silencing of the oppressed in colonial texts, so the multilingual aspects participate in the debunking of normative French” (93). She ascribes this thought to Donadey (29–31), who establishes parallels between intertextuality and multi­lingual practice, since the interpenetration of different texts favors the incorporation of different voices and hence different languages. 10

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Mernissi, Nawal al Saadawi or Leila Sebar, all of whom represent themselves next to their less privileged sisters through the re-appropriation of the sensual heroine of Arabian Nights, now transformed, in their hands, into the emblem of the resisting sister. This is beautifully epitomized by A Sister to Sheherazade (Ombre sultane, 1987), where the “liberated” exiled woman, Isma, speaks for Hajila, the woman who takes her place as wife to the same man she was married to in Algeria. It appears that Isma has the voice that Hajila lacks. However, their rapport is much more complex. It is only through the symbiosis of their sisterhood that they can resist the patriarchal oppression represented by the husband, just like the Arabian Nights subtext, where Sheherezade could only tell her stories thanks to the help of her sister Dinazarde, both surviving because of their mutual collaboration, which, in turn, subserves the survival of many other doomed sisters. As Anjali Prabhu (2002) points out, it is not only that the subaltern cannot speak, as Spivak would put it, but also that the powerful cannot speak without the subaltern (87). And thus, as Van Rosk (2001, 74; cf. Steadman, 197) states, by writing about these women, Djebar gives agency not only to the subaltern but also to herself as the alienated postcolonial writer she is.12 Moreover, Sheherezade can only help her sister from the space of the transnation, from the deterritorialized, or rather, a-territorialized space of writing. Indeed, to Djebar, the translanguage of solidarity and sisterhood can only be spoken “à côté de.” The paradoxical and simultaneous in and out condition of this space allows Djebar to attain her ultimate intention to write “à côté de” rather than “for” her sisters. As she outlines in her “Overture” to Women of Algiers: “Don’t claim to ‘speak for’ or, worse, to ‘speak on,’ barely speaking next to, and if possible, very close to: these are the first of solidarities” (2; cf. Zimra 156).13 Also Hiddleston talks about the need for the blurring of self and other in Sister in order to get power for collective action. 13 Also significant in this respect are the following words in Le Blanc de l’Algérie: “[Some speak of Algeria, describe it, and question it […] Others know, or ask themselves […] Yet Others write ‘on’ Algeria, on her fertile misfortune, on her reappeared monsters. I, on the other hand, I have simply found myself, among these pages with a few friends. Me, I decided to bring myself closer to them, to the border […].” / “D’autres parlent de l’Algérie, la décrivent, l’interpellent […] D’autres savent, 12

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To summarize, the solidity of solidary sisterhood finally imposes itself on the liquidity of the exiled individual and the aphasia of those long forgotten sisters. Djebar has transformed the strangeness of a “stepmother tongue” into a new “translanguage of sorority.” In Djebar’s hands, the French and Arabic languages become plasticine, to be modulated into this communitary self-translation of sorts. By calling on multilingual polyphony, collective autobiography, on other lives, other texts, other exiled writers and other women to represent herself, Djebar becomes Sheherezade, the storyteller who can assemble the powerful chain of solidarity against the liquidity of the transnational writing self. Conclusion

Bauman (2000, 204) illustrates his discussion of Jacques Derrida by bringing to mind Alfred de Musset’s dictum that great artists do not belong to any country. Derrida, a true cultural hybrid (métèque), is defined by Bauman as a man without a state from the perspective of culture. Lacking a state is not a loss; it means belonging to more than one homeland and thus being able to construct a place of one’s own on cultural crossroads, just as Derrida had done with language, according to Bauman’s analysis. But, above all, it has a direct impact on language just as in Huston’s or Djebar’s case. Bauman maintains that: Building a home on cultural crossroads proved to be the best conceivable occasion to put language to tests it seldom passes elsewhere, to see through its otherwise unnoticed qualities, to find out what language is capable of and what promises it makes [it can never deliver]. (Bauman 2000, 206)

Like many other transnational writers, Nancy Huston and Assia Djebar are fully conscious of this. Their case studies can be extended to many ou s’interrogent […] D’autres écrivent ‘sur’ l’Algérie, sur son malheur fertile, sur ses monstres réapparus. Moi, je me suis simplement retrouvée, dans ces pages avec quelques amis. Moi, j’ai décidé de me rapprocher d’eux, de la frontière […].” (Le Blanc de l’Algérie 231–32; cf. Gueydan, 85). 111

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other writers who inhabit multifarious linguistic universes (as George Steiner would put it). This is why we can finish this chapter by saying that it is not exactly that art has no homeland; it is that it has many, and that they coexist simultaneously. At the end of the day, the exile-journey, the mistrusted displacement, and the despair of the evanescent self within a liquid world can signal hope in the paradigms of transnational writing. References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back. London and New York: Routledge. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2013. “El Estado benefactor volvió para los ricos.” Interview by Victor Pavón, Ñ. Revista de Cultura (2 May), http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/ ideas/Entrevista-Zygmunt-Bauman_0_908909125.html [last accessed: April 20, 2016]. ———. 1992. Intimations of Postmodernity. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1989. Modernity and Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2002. Society under Siege. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———, and Keith Tester. 2001. Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berman, Marshall. 1982. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Calderón, Jorge. 2007. “Où est l’Ouest dans Nord perdu de Nancy Huston?” Cahiers franco-canadiens de l’Ouest 19, no. 1: 9–25. Castle, Gregory. 2013. “My Self, My Other: Modernism and Postcolonial Bildung in Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet.” Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3: 628–48. 112

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Chatzidimitriou, Ioanna. 2009. “Self-Translation as Minorization Process: Nancy Huston’s Limbes/Limbo.” SubStance 38, no. 2: 22–42. Cheref, Abdelkader. 2010. Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women’s Literature. London and New York: Tauris. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1975. Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit. Derrida, Jacques, and Catherine Malabou. 1999. La Contre-allée. Paris: Quinzaine Literaire. Djebar, Assia. 1993. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. Translated into English by Dorothy S. Blair. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Djebar, Assia. 1996. “‘The Eyes of Language.’ From the Novel in Progress La fin du royaume d’Alger (Arabic versus French Language).” Translated into English by Pamela A. Genova. World Literature Today 70, no. 4: 785–86. Donadey, Anne. 2000. “The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s Algerian palimpsest.” World Literature Today 74, no. 1: 27–36. Friedman, Susan S. 2006. “Migrations, Diasporas and Borders.” In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages Literatures, 899–941. Edited by David Nicholls. New York: MLA. Gauch, Suzanne. 2007. Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Geesey, Patricia. 1996. “Collective Autobiography: Algerian Women and History in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia.” Dalhousie French Studies 35: 153–67. Ghaussy, Soheila. 1994. “A Stepmother Tongue: ‘Feminine Writing’ in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Calvalcade.” World Literature Today 68, no. 3: 457–62. Ghiteanu, Serenela. 2013. Nancy Huston et Nina Bouraoui: question d’identité. Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitara Clujeana.  Gracki, Katherine. 1996. “Writing Violence and the Violence of Writing in Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet.” World Literature Today 70, no. 4: 835–43. Gueydan-Turek, Alexandra. 2011. “Homeland Beyond Homelands: Reinventing Algeria Through A Transnational Literary Community: Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc De L’Algérie.” Cincinnati Romance Review 31: 85–102. Huston, Nancy. 1999. Nord Perdu. Arles: Actes Sud. ———, and Leïla Sebbar. 1986/1999. Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l’exil. Paris: Barrault. 113

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———. 1993. Une enfance d’ailleurs. Paris: Belfond. Kristeva, Julia. 1988. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Fayard. Lee, Raymond L. M. 2005. “Bauman, Liquid Modernity and Dilemmas of Development.” Thesis Eleven 83, no. 1: 61–77. Lievois, Katrien. 2013. “La traduction dans L’Amour, la fantasia d’Assia Djebar: une tunique de Nessus.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 2, https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANSTTS/article/view/78 [last accessed: April 20, 2016]. Manguel, Alberto. 1996. A History of Reading. New York: Viking. ———. 2004. Vicios solitarios. Lecturas, relecturas y otras cuestiones éticas. Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez. Mortimer, Mildred. 1997. “Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography.” Research in African Literatures 28, no. 2: 102– 17. Murdoch, H. Adlai. 1993. “Rewriting Writing: Identity, Exile and Renewal in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, La fantasia.” Yale French Studies 83: 71–92. Orlando, Valerie. 1999. Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb. Athens: Ohio University Press. Prabhu, Anjali. 2002. “Sisterhood and Rivalry in-between the Shadow and the Sultana: A Problematic of Representation in Ombre sultane.” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 3: 69–96. Price, Leah. 2002. “The Tangible Page.” London Review of Books 24 (October 31): 36–39. Rushdie, Salman. 1982. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times (July 3): 8. Saussy, Haun et al. 2015. Introducing Comparative Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Sennett, Richard. 1976. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf. Seyhan, Azade. 2003. “Enduring Grief: Autobiography as Poetry of Witness in the Work of Assia Djebar and Nazim Hikmet.” Comparative Literature Studies 40, no. 2: 159–72. ———. 2001. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Siassi, Guilan. 2008. “Itineraries of Desire and the Excesses of Home: Djebar’s Cohabitation with ‘La Langue adverse.’” L’Esprit Créateur 48, no. 4: 56–68.

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Steadman, Jennifer Bernhardt. 2003. “A Global Feminist Travels: Assia Djebar and Fantasia.” Meridians 4, no. 1: 173–99. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2006. “The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer.” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 4: 527–45. Zimra, Clarisse. 2004. “Hearing Voices, or, Who You Calling Postcolonial? The Evolution of Djebar’s Poetics.” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 4: 149–59.

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Traveling Theory as Theory in Translation Transnational and Transgenerational Perspectives J A S M I N A LU K I Ć

In this chapter, I would like to discuss the traveling of theory, and consequently, the traveling of concepts, as important aspects of the transnational perspective in feminist thought. Understanding traveling theory as a particular form of translation, I consider some conceptual tools that can help us better understand these processes as they occur in specific contexts. Starting with the idea of transnational literacy as developed by Susan Stanford Friedman (2001), I argue here for a corresponding notion of transgenerational literacy as a prerequisite for a transgenerational dialogue. Looking at feminist theory as a traveling theory, Mary Evans and Kathy Davis, in their edited volume Transatlantic Conversations (2011), explore various forms of transatlantic dialogue between the United States and Europe, emphasizing a bi-directional understanding of these relations. In accordance with the feminist politics of location, the volume opens with narratives by the two editors, who also bring some autobiographical facts of importance for their feminist formation. Thus, Kathy Davis speaks of her experiences as a feminist living between Europe and the United States, highlighting misunderstandings that occurred when she attempted to “translate” her experiences from an American to a European context. As Davis points out, “the realization of how theories take on different meanings as they cross borders has instilled in me a conviction that feminist theory can only fully develop its critical potential through transnational dialogue” (Evans and Davis, 7–8). Using the format of personal criticism to underline their locatedness in certain intellectual traditions, both Evans and Davis emphasize the theoretical engagements that result from transnational conversations, which inevitably involve the traveling of theories and the question of

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translation, but also the question of hierarchies between the spaces and the languages involved in these processes: If we think seriously about the issue of translation, it becomes essential not only to situate U.S. theory (as one theory among many) and to critique its privileged position globally, but also to think seriously about the issue of translation, how the ideas that are generated outside non-hegemonic language communities can be made accessible within global networks of circulation. (Evans and Davis, 9)

In other words, the question of translation is seen here as an indispensable aspect of the traveling of theories and of theoretical concepts, with an emphasis on the fact that processes of translation are not politically neutral. This is also visible in the way Davis interprets the dynamics of transatlantic conversations that are the topic of this volume. She makes three points regarding the transfer of ideas across the ocean. The first is the rather gloomy conclusion that “U.S. feminist scholarship has seldom paid much attention to scholarship outside its borders.” The second one is that “European feminists have been quick to take up U.S. feminist texts,” borrowing extensively from U.S. theoretical paradigms in teaching and research. But this borrowing—and this is the third point Davis makes—often produces new debates, rearticulating American feminist concerns in distinctly European ways. Thus, traveling theory becomes a clear case of theory in translation. As Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva points out (2006), translation has often been neglected in theorizing about traveling theories. Underlining that Said’s seminal text on traveling theories neglects the problem of translation, and using Turkish translations of Hélène Cixous and Roland Bathes as her case study, Susam-Sarajeva emphasizes that theories are very often ascribed “universal qualities,” even if they themselves do not claim them, while “[t]he ‘translatedness’ of theoretical texts tends to detract from this universality, highlighting the local and the particular in them. Consequently, it is much more convenient to ignore the influx of ideas through translation, so that this idea of ‘universality’ will be sustained” (9). This leads to a situation in which “[t]he travel accounts of theories 118

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are often told without any reference to translation” (11). But, as “turning one language into another” is inseparable from “the larger matter of cultural transference in general,” Susam-Sarajeva emphasizes that traveling theories should also be studied within translation studies (11). Susan Stanford Friedman approaches the problem of the traveling theory differently. Going back to Said’s text, she proposes a somewhat different interpretation of the ways theories and ideas travel from one cultural context to another: Said’s assumption that every traveling idea has an identifiable and presumably single “origin” from which any transplantation necessarily departs as it localizes needs to be modified, in my view. The notion that a given social order privileges the masculine does not, I believe, have a single origin. Nor does the advocacy of gender equity. Rather, these constitutive components of locational feminism have emerged differently in particular times and places and have traveled from one culture to another, producing hybridic cultural formations of indigenous feminism influenced by other traveling forms of feminism. (16)

For Friedman, “locational feminism” brings together the local and the global, and “acknowledges the historically and geographically specific forms in which feminism emerges, takes root, changes, travels, translates, and transplants in different spatial/temporal contexts” (15). Emphasizing that “[t]he contemporary geopolitical rhetoric of feminism has to a large extent repudiated notions of monolithic patriarchy and sisterhood in favor of locational heterogeneity and idiomatic particularity in transnational context” (25), Friedman evokes Spivak’s concept of “transnational literacy” as a concept “which assumes multiple agencies and heterogeneities in all locations” (25).1 Transnational literacy, as Friedman understands it here, is based upon the geopolitical rhetoric of feminism that “operates according to transnational grammar with a number of specific figural formations” with Friedman refers here to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Cultural Studies,” in Outside the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), 255–84.

1

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“some of the most prevalent forms—namely, the metaphorics of nation, borders, migration, ‘glocation,’ and conjuncture. Geopolitical and transnational literacy for feminists begins, I suggest, in recognizing these five tropic patterns” (26). The aim of this feminist rhetoric is not so much to “track the tropes,” but rather to look into their epistemological significance since they can “provide a window into the interpretation of language and other cultural formations as products and shapers of their times and places. Such attention potentially constitutes a meta-analysis that allows for interventions in theory and praxis” (33). Friedman’s analysis focuses primarily on American feminism, where she emphasizes a shift from temporal rhetoric to the prevailing spatial rhetoric, which generally corresponds with the rise of third-wave feminism in the 1980s and the 1990s (18). Following her theoretical assumptions, I would like to look into another case, one from Central and Eastern Europe, aiming to examine a particular dynamic of spatial/ temporal rhetoric in the so called “Second World,” that is, geo-political spaces of formerly socialist and currently post-socialist countries. I would also like to address the significance of the generational shift in this context by looking at it as a form from the perspective of traveling theory, at both the local and the transnational level. The usual question here, when it comes to the so called “Second World,” is whether the terms Central and Eastern Europe still make sense, whether the fall of the Berlin Wall and enlargement of the European Union have made them completely obsolete. At the same time, arguing for a more complex approach to socialism(s), its various forms and distinct histories, I must also raise the question of national and transnational perspective in approaching Central and Eastern European feminism. Both questions can be productively addressed using the concepts of locational feminism, transnational literacy and minor transnationalism. Applying the concept of locational feminism, it is possible to look into certain national and transnational traditions within the “second world” in both socialist and post-socialist times.2 It is also a concept that can help

2

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us to address what Michaela Mudure sees as the “oxymoronic” relationship between the East and the West (2006), which calls for a comparative perspective. In other words, the region cannot be approached as a unified, undifferentiated space; instead, one must follow specificities of each local/ national tradition, to establish similarities and differences, as well as cultural connections between different members of the former socialist bloc, and one must analyze gender regimes in their concrete manifestations and in comparative perspective within and beyond the region. This analysis assumes that, on the one hand, there have been and still are significant differences between particular countries in the region; nevertheless, the mutual experience of life under socialism left a shared cultural legacy that is still very much present in a more or less overt way and that must be taken into account when we look into the history of second and third-wave feminism3 in Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, while the differences must be carefully considered, this shared history has marked the so called “Second World” for the constitutive gaze from the outside, that is, for those who look at it as “the other” of the West. Speaking about this problem, Kornelia Slavova emphasizes that Eastern European feminism (feminisms) is located in a different spatio/temporality—which, on the one hand, defines its local characteristics, and, on the other hand, offers a critical reflection on some widespread, generalized ideas about feminism (2006, 258–59). In her discussion of East/Central European feminisms, Michaela Mudure (2006) emphasizes their complicated evolution and calls for a recognition of particularities of that region on the grounds of its specific history. Using as an example the Romanian socialist regime, Mudure points to the multifaceted character of the socialist legacy. She underlines that this legacy, because of the way socialist regimes addressed women’s questions, cannot be excluded from the feminist theory that is being developed in post-socialist spaces. But the prevailing postsocialist representations of socialism do not leave enough space for



3

frame will depend on the problem raised. Thus “locational” can refer to a specific Romanian or specific Yugoslav situation, but in another context it can refer to the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. “Feminism” is used in singular here and in accordance with Susan Friedman’s definition in the article that I rely on extensively in this analysis (see Friedman 2001, 15). 121

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particular forms and concrete effects of the influence of socialist regimes on women and on gender regimes, which were far more complex than is usually recognized. Slavova’s and Mudure’s interventions are important, since the first decades after the fall of the Berlin wall (as the most notable spatio/temporal indicator of the fall of communism) were marked by a rather generalized dismissal of experiences from the past (i.e., from socialist times). This also meant that the particularities and complexities of women’s lives under communism were marginalized topics, very much subsumed (not to say obliterated) within more generalized discourses on socialism as a totalitarian, repressive regime. When it comes to relations between spatial and temporal perspectives, the specificities of women’s history in the so called “second world” point to a different dynamic than the one Susan Friedman recognizes in American feminism. This refers not only to the well-known fact that the history of both second and third wave feminism was different in socialist and post-socialist countries in comparison with the so-called “first world,” but also to the fact that big historical changes experienced at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century were profoundly marked by an interplay between the spatial and the temporal, with big changes in geo-political configurations and a rather specific attitude towards time. On the one hand, the very concept of Eastern and Central Europe is spatial, as are many other notions related to the “second world,” from the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall to the Schengen Area, all of which indicate spaces “from” and “to,” or “before” and “after” a certain point of demarcation, or rather, a point of identification; it is always a border between “us” and “them,” a border with “the other” that also indicates the associated spaces that go with it. But these concepts are also firmly grounded in a temporal perspective since they have well-known histories, a beginning and often an ending in the time that we know, as well as explanatory narratives related to them. Speaking of spatio/temporal relations, it is important to note that under socialism (as was the case with early second-wave feminism), a temporal discourse with the central metaphor of women’s awakening was overused, with the rhetoric of a “bright future” as a general promise. And although many socialist promises have not been fulfilled, the very discourse of women’s emancipation did have concrete positive effects 122

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on the lives of many women, contributing to much-needed changes in the gender regimes of many socialist states. In order to understand the significance of these processes, we must observe them not only from a linear historical perspective, but within a comparative analytical framework that would take into account both the so called “first world” and the “third world” at different moments in time. Such an analysis would not only enable a better understanding of the significance of so called “socialist modernism” for women’s lives and changes in gender regimes of socialist countries; it would also allow for a critical rethinking of the legacies of socialism in light of the current degradation of social rights and social protections, which most strongly affects the most vulnerable parts of society, and which is also strongly gendered. Thus, one of the questions to be asked here is how we should remember the complex realities of women’s lives under socialism, and whether the widespread post-socialist tendency to obliterate it is in the interest of the new generations of women, who could learn from both the good and the bad experiences of their foremothers. Or, to formulate it more in line with the main arguments of this chapter, how can feminist literacy help us better understand locational feminisms outside the imposed East-West divides and the dominant stereotypes about the legacy of socialism? In order to address some of these questions I would like to introduce generationality as one of the more rarely used categories of intersectional analysis. In a project entitled Traveling Concepts in Feminist Pedagogy: European Perspectives (2006), which brought together feminist scholars across Europe including those from the so called “second world,” Iris van der Tuin underlines that a generational perspective should be seen as one of the axes of the social and cultural production of meaning and, consequently, of feminist reflection (Van der Tuin 2006, 82). Acceptance of one’s generationality and a self-reflection that includes age and generational belonging can contribute significantly to a more complex analytical perspective, helping to problematize teleological narratives of continuous lines of progress in feminist theory as well (82–83). The subversion of teleological narratives is important when it comes to feminist interpretations of recent history and legacies of socialism as well. It calls for a critical re-examination of the simplified narrative of 123

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post-socialist liberation from totalitarian ideologies, which also relies on a temporal discourse involving a “bright future” ahead (not so different from former socialist discourses), and a tendency to erase whatever was inherited from the past as “less developed,” i.e., less valuable than what we have now. Such a teleological perspective was very much present among regional feminists in the 1990s, when the failed promises of the socialist emancipation of women dominated as topics. But from today’s perspective, it is obvious that we need a more complex approach to recognizing different aspects of changes in gender regimes, including strategies for bringing women into the public sphere, and the effects of these strategies compared to the state of affairs before their implementation. A comparative historical and intersectional perspective can be of help in this regard. And again, the concept of locational feminism needs to be invoked on various levels, since the “second world” was not one united entity, just as socialism was not one and the same in all countries at all times. Any history of women in socialism must take these differences into account. Van der Tuin relates generationality to second- and third-wave feminism, arguing for the concept of “third-wave feminism” in order to distinguish between the starting point of feminists active in the seventies and the eighties, and feminists active in the nineties and the two thousands. For her, third-wave feminism is defined by the fact that women who belong to it enter a scene in which feminism has already been institutionalized. Thus, in her view, a generational dialogue between second- and third-wave feminism can be based on a transfer of ideas between generations, while women belonging to second-wave feminism did not have such a possibility, but were forced instead to make radical breaks with the inherited systems of values. But speaking from the perspective of the “second world,” the question is whether such a distinction can be made on a similar basis. Or, whether the emancipatory project of socialism has on some level created some form of feminist context for women, even though the term “feminism,” as well as the idea of an independent women’s movement, were not accepted in any socialist country aside from Yugoslavia. In other words, did the emancipatory project of socialism create a context in which some form of transgenerational dialogue concerning women’s issues was also pos124

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sible for women of second-wave feminism with their predecessors, and is it possible to claim that the experience of life in socialism can be in some way related to the concept of state feminism? And what would be the indicators of such a situation? In their introduction to the volume Gender & Generation (2007), Věra Sokolová and Kateřina Kolářova define the concept of generation as “an analytically critical term, a conceptual tool to define a specific experience and/or a position shared by a distinct social group and as a culturally specific concept structuring human kinship and/or locating the individual within social structures” (2). Here again, generationality is put in an intersectional perspective and brought in relation with other categories like gender, age, race, class, sexuality and ethnicity. At the same time, Kolářova and Sokolová raise the epistemological question of the role of generations in the production and preservation of knowledge. The difference that Van der Tuin establishes between second- and third-wave feminism is also an epistemological one, since it concerns the feminist knowledge production and its institutional status. In her view, the opposition between second- and third-wave feminism is quite clear in that respect, as well as the travel of knowledge production about women from a marginalized activity to an institutionalized enterprise. The picture seems to be somewhat different when we look from the perspective of the post-socialist countries. For women who lived in socialism, the agenda of second-wave feminism in the United States did not have to be something fully understandable or close to their hearts. In socialist countries, the question of middle-class women who had to stay at home was not a problem to be addressed. On the contrary, women were expected to join the workforce, with an assumption that they would earn the same wages for the same work. State discourses on equality among men and women were a visible part of their lives, despite more or less obvious mechanisms of discrimination that kept the more powerful and privileged jobs for men or that kept women locked in the famous “double burden” structure. But despite these undeniable deficiencies in acquiring full equality, women felt more equal than they had ever been before (and this is particularly important for less educated women from lower classes and rural backgrounds). Hence, the difference in the lives of women in socialism with regards to their mother’s gen125

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eration was huge, and they also witnessed the way the changes in their status in the public sphere profoundly affected the private sphere as well, bringing them more power and independence.4 The post-socialist transition, interpreted as a liberation from totalitarian socialist regimes, also meant a general break with the legacies of socialism; hence, particular experiences and knowledges acquired by women in that time were also suppressed. The more recent interest in the legacies of socialism, which tries to go beyond generalized flattening judgments from the 1990s, is rooted not only in an understanding that teleological narratives of the history of socialism and the transition must be re-examined, but also in the current context of the global crisis and the aggressive neo-capitalist attack on a range of previously acquired social and human rights, with women among particularly vulnerable social groups. In a time when reproductive rights are under attack by conservative movements on a large scale, when precarious work is on the rise while social protections for those in need are in decline, remembrance of past experiences of life in some other forms of social organization—like soft Yugoslav socialism, with its self-management practices and its emancipatory politics for women—can help better understand the current moment in time. Transgenerational dialogue is an important tool in looking back at the not-so-distant past whose actors are still alive and able to speak about their experiences. But in order to go beyond many interfering factors that impede the dialogue—like the inevitable influence of time upon the work of memory, the impact of the social context on personal readings and interpretation of past events, or simply a change of perspective that occurs over time—there is also a need to create a particular form of transgenerational literacy, which in essence is not different from the transnational literacy that Friedman speaks of, or the minor transnational literacy that Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih 4



I do not intend to negate here the fact that many women did feel discriminated as citizens by the controlling practices of socialist states, very much in the same way as men did. Nevertheless, the modernist project of socialism has profoundly affected the conceptualization of gender on a number of levels, affecting the practice of everyday life and family life and helping many women to strive for more independence. 126

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argue for (2005). It should, in the first place, “provide a window into the interpretation of language and other cultural formations as products and shapers of their times and places” (Friedman 2001, 33), thus allowing for translation from one context into another in a dialogic process. This is particularly important in cases when the societies involved undergo radical changes that produce some kind of cultural break, thus further affecting transgenerational dialogue. I will try to illustrate these points with a recent drama Three Winters by Tena Štivičić. Both the writer and her drama call for “transnational” as an adjective. Croatian by birth, Tena Štivičić has been living and working in London for years now, thus becoming a transnational writer. Her drama Three Winters was written and performed first in English, receiving an award for the best drama of the year written in that language.5 The drama later appeared in a Croatian version and was performed in the main national theatre in Zagreb. The text of the drama has also been published in both languages, first in English (2014) and then in Croatian (2015), thus having two originals since both versions were written by the author herself.6 Three Winters follows four generations of women from a Croatian family from the mid-1940s to the present day. The historical perspective has been captured through three important phases in recent Croatian history: the end of World War II, which was also the beginning of socialist Yugoslavia; the break-up of Yugoslavia; and the current moment in Croatia. The first time frame is brought in through several scenes from November 1945, in which Rose King and her husband Aleksandar King get a state-owned apartment to live in after the end of the war. Coincidentally, this apartment is in the same house where Rose’s mother, Monika Zima, worked as a servant for the wealthy Amruš family before the war. Although everyone believed that the whole Amruš family, as German collaborators, left Zagreb before the

5

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Three Winters won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for 2015. An interesting comparison here can be made with some other transnational writers from the region. Thus the main works of Aleksandar Hemon were written in English and then translated into Bosnian (his denomination of the common language, lately designated as BCMS, or Serbo-Croatian), while Dubravka Ugresic and David Albahari write in Croatian and Serbian idioms of the common language to be later translated into other languages. 127

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end of the war, the Kings find in the house one Katarina Amruš, daughter of the former homeowner, forgotten by everybody and thus left in the city. When Katarina Amruš joins the King family, a domestic circle is established, formed by those who are interrelated by circumstances, profound emotions, blood ties and family secrets. The drama is also immediately framed as a both family saga and a social drama, with gender and class issues profoundly connected. This connection is rather directly hinted at by Katarina, who nominally belongs to the prewar high bourgeoisie, but who was as a woman marginalized and mistreated very much like a house slave, her destiny almost worse than that of her former servant Monika, since she was locked in an asylum due to her disobedience to her father’s authority. November 1945 is the first time-knot that introduces into the play the whole complex background of the end of World War II in Croatia. On a larger scale, it introduces the history of socialist Yugoslavia, starting with military victory and a social revolution that promises to erase the old class relations and replace them with something completely new. A promise of both class and gender emancipation was made to the citizens of the new country, and they believed in it. That history and that promise shape the life of the King family, and the first one to follow it is Rose King, who received/attained some education before the war, fought as a partisan, and in 1945 demanded her rightfully earned new place in society. Yugoslav feminist theorists wrote about this particular feeling experienced by socialist women—that it was not for the state to give them equal rights; they had actually earned these rights themselves through their participation in the war and the revolution.7 Rose can also be seen as a very good spokeperson of this view. Her two daughters, Maša and Dunja, are to have a regular socialist childhood and follow two rather typical paths. Maša stays in the country and leads the usual Yugoslav socialist life, which also means that she silently accepts what in the 1990s was recognized and criticized by feminist theorists as a 7



See for example Zabilježene - Žene i javni život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. Vijeku [On Record: Women in Public Life in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 20th Century], http://www.scribd.comdoc/258137781/Zabiljezene-Zene-i-Javni-Zivot-Bosne-iHercegovine#scribd [last accessed:135-145], on Yugoslav women and socialism (in Lukić 2016). 128

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socialist “double burden.” She works full time and performs all of the household duties, ending up, as we will see in the third time-knot, as a profoundly unhappy old woman. Dunja, on the other hand, goes to Germany as a typical Yugoslav Gastarbeiter, or “guest worker” as they were called at the time, to earn a better life for herself and to help her family as well. The Yugoslav part of the story ends with the dissolution of the country and the subsequent wars, introduced here through a significant event in the breakup of the Yugoslav Communist Party at the 14th Special Congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party, where the 45-yearlong rule of the Party came to an end. This was also the beginning of the end of the common country. The particular moment at the 14th Congress at which the Slovenian and Croatian parties left the Congress8 is used in the drama as a marker of the second time frame, including the political crisis and the subsequent wars, ending with the establishment of Croatia as an independent country. This is again presented through very private optics, since the day of these dramatic historical events was also the funeral of Rose King, former partisan and convinced advocate of socialism. Born as the illegitimate child of a very poor house servant, mistreated herself as a child servant before World War II, she lived the life promised by the socialist revolution, experiencing a profound positive change both from the class and from the gender point of view. The third time knot of the drama is introduced by a date in November 2011, at a time when Croatia, already an independent country for twenty years, is preparing to enter the European Union.9 Again, family events seem to be foregrounded against the historical perspective, but in a way that shows how profoundly the historical penetrates the private sphere. The day represented in the drama is the day before Rose’s granddaughter Lucija will marry to a local “taycoon,” that is, to a man who For more details on the Yugoslav crisis and these events, see Jović 2009. The agreement between the European Union and Croatia about Croatia joining the Union was signed on December 11, 2011, so the drama addresses a moment in time when the eight long years of negotiations were over, and the outcome was clear. Croatia became a full member in 2013, a decade after it applied to join the EU, which was a period strongly marked by the complex processes of negotiation and transformation required from the candidates before they can be accepted to the EU.

8 9

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belongs to the new class of financial winners in post-socialist Croatia, a man who represents not only the new money, but also the new values bought by the transition and the post-conflict culture. It is also a moment in which two sisters, the fourth generation of women in the drama, get into a conflict over the life paths and the values they have chosen to follow. Lucia cherishes a pragmatic approach to life and adapts to the new ways of a transitional society, in which women are once again too often expected to recognize the importance of hegemonic masculinity and to perform certain stereotypically feminine roles. Her agreement to marry a rather robust representative of the new shady class of businessmen is associated with a number of other choices that her sister Alisa finds highly problematic, like Lucia’s decision to enlarge her breasts and to get married in church, although she has never been a believer. On the other hand, Lucia sees herself as the one who continually cares about the family; actually, she pragmatically sees her marriage as a way to keep her family under one roof. In a strong speech that she delivers at the end of the drama, many of Lucia’s points seem both problematic and convincing, and it looks like a situation that is hard to resolve. “I do not see this marriage as potentially a happy one,” says Tena Štivičić in an interview to Theatre Voice, speaking about the possible destiny of Lucia beyond the scope of the drama (Štivičić, 2014a). Alisa, on the other hand, in London, lives the life of a free independent intellectual, a bisexual feminist who claims that “gender is not important” when it comes to her choice of partners. She cannot understand her sister’s decisions, and her answer to all of these problems is simply to leave. She did the same thing in the early 1990s, when her lover Marko came back from the war with PTSD, aggressive to himself and everyone around him; and she does it again at the end of the drama, unable to take part in societal and family changes she does not approve of. It is obvious that Alisa is the character closest to the writer’s alter ego, but she does not dominate the drama; instead, she is continually put in a situation to reflect upon her choices. Thus, Three Winters ends in an unresolved conflict where the fourth generation of women is heading towards their new struggles: Lucia at home, where she will have to bring together two obviously different worlds, the one her family rep130

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resents, and the new world her bridegroom belongs to; and Alisa in London, where she must handle the fate of a migrant. Within every time-knot in the drama, there is at least one character who offers a gaze from aside, a view of events that offers a ground for their critical reinterpretation. In the first part, it is Katarina Amruš who offers a critical view of the grand narratives of class conflict in the Yugoslav socialist revolution: the defeated bourgeoisie and the new worker’s class that is taking over. As an outcast from both of these classes, Katarina can see what the others are missing. When it comes to her own class, she offers a serious gender criticism, showing that, as a woman, she was not treated much better than her poor servant; she was deprived of the education she wanted, and locked into various asylums whenever her family felt that she was in their way as an unmarried woman. Since both Katarina and Monika are marginalized by patriarchal rule, a profound understanding and even friendship ultimately develops between the two women. Katarina and Monika belong to the same generation of women who were fully subjected to the rule of the father as the family patriarch, and in that sense they share a generational knowledge that is also the basis of their female closeness, which we can even see as a form of feminist sisterhood. Rose lacks this knowledge and an understanding of how profoundly it was engraved in the life of her mother and her generation, hence her continual irritation at what she sees as her mother’s submissive behavior. Here transgenerational literacy would imply a better understanding of this shared experience, which Rose does not have because of her strong entrenchment in her perspective as a former partisan and a communist party woman who puts her class struggle first. In the second time-knot, the outsider’s views belong to men, since it is a time of impending war and political crisis that will be dominated by hegemonic masculinity. This upcoming aggressive masculinity is represented here by Dunja’s husband Karl, a returning migrant from Germany who obviously wishes for war and who ends up beating his wife. As the drama develops, it is obvious that Karl will never really become a fighter but a politician, and the task of defending the country of Croatia will befall young Marko, who will perform his patriotic duty and become a real victim of war, despite not wishing for it. His counterpart Vlado, Maša’s husband, represents the other pole of the 131

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political spectrum in Croatia at the time. Pro-partisan and pro-Yugoslav, he will soon lose his job and become dependent on his family. Although presented as much more tolerant and sympathetic toward his wife and daughters, he is also locked in his masculinity, unaware of the level of actual women’s work that goes into the incessant support he is given by his family. But unlike Karl, he is willing to listen and, it seems, willing to change. Finally, in the third knot, a gaze from aside belongs to Alisa, as someone who not only arrives from London and thus has an outsider’s perspective, but also as a person who has radically changed through her experiences as a migrant. The drama masterfully uses details to indicate important points like this one. For instance, in London, Alisa stops coloring her hair, which is not only a visible sign of her own change, but an important indicator of her opposition to her sister, who in a very different manner decides to enlarge her breasts. Both Alisa and Lucia get into a transgenerational conflict with their parents, but they approach it from rather different positions. As a product of a transitional culture, Lucia misreads her parents’ past life through their socialist poverty and lack of material goods. Her reading of their socialist past is very much in line with the dominant post-socialist discourses in which important achievements of Yugoslav socialism were easily forgotten. She also disregards her parents’ attachment to those values and their own much more positive reading of their past, which includes her father’s refusal to change his political views after 1991, causing him to lose his job. For Lucia, transgenerational literacy would mean making an effort to learn to read the socialist past from her parents’ perspective as well, and being willing to consider their views as relevant as the ones she is willing to adopt from her future husband. Instead, she expects her parents to recognize that times have changed, and that the new rules are to be followed. Alisa, on the other hand, reproaches her parents for their inability to act and their unwillingness to oppose Lucia in her intention to marry someone who belongs to the shady spaces of a barely legal transitional economy and who reintroduces aggressive hegemonic masculinity into the family. Speaking from an outsider’s perspective, she fails to see that they feel defeated, or, rather, she fails to read her parents’ age as an 132

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identifying category that defines them in 2011. While her mother feels unhappy in a way typical of middle-aged or older women who have lost real touch with their husbands and children, her father feels that he has failed both in his parental role and in his role as a husband; and neither of them can see how they can make a change, so they go forward along the existing path. Speaking from her position of strength and ability to change, which is required by her situation as a migrant, Alisa is unprepared to acknowledge this complacency of old age, which leads her to forget their previously fought battles as well. She feels betrayed by them, and alone, which only strengthens her decision to leave once again for London. Thus, a transnational perspective is introduced into the drama, where Štivičić uses more of a globalized perspective to cast a critical view on the current local context of Zagreb. As we can see in the case of Three Winters, the “five tropic patterns” of “nation, borders, migration, ‘glocation,’ and conjuncture” (Friedman, 26) prove to be highly relevant in transgenerational dialogue as well. In following some key moments in the personal lives of four generations of women from the King family, Štivičić indicates some of the formative moments in the social history they belong to, and without understanding that history, a dialogue between generations seems to be impossible. In the previously quoted interview, Štivičić explains that in the drama she was interested in seeing how gender roles changed under the influence of changes in political systems. Her drama thus brings together the perspectives of women living in the pre-World War II early capitalist Croatian patriarchy, under postwar socialism in Croatia, and in the post-1991 Croatian transition to democracy and advanced neo-liberal capitalism. In moving across such a large time scale, Štivičić effectively uses details from the personal lives of her characters to indicate bigger historical events or larger social contexts. Her characters travel along an extensive timeline, growing old in front of our eyes, and in that process, their lives and their environment change, together with the meaning of the key terms that frame them. Štivičić also shows the ways in which changes in the dominant discourses and the conceptual frameworks affect our self-perception and identity building. Monika and Katarina are both defined by the same discourse, which places women as inferior to men, and in this particular case social class 133

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was not enough to save Katarina from being literally restricted (placed in various asylums), while Monika was literally considered to be less valuable as a servant. Thus the concept of a woman as well as the concept of a citizen that Katarina and Monika had to live with for a great part of their lives profoundly differed from the legal and social interpretation of these concepts after 1945, when women became legally equal to man, and the Communist Party promised to abolish class differences. This conceptual change offers Monika’s daughter Rose the grounds to reinvent herself as a strong, independent woman who makes her own decisions about her future. This reinvention of her identity belongs to a World War II and post-World War II revolutionary momentum, which was soon abandoned; hence Rose’s daughter Maša ends up combining socialist emancipation in the workplace with a very subservient role in the patriarchal household. Finally, her daughters Lucia and Alisa end up separating these two roles, with Lucia stepping back into typical post-socialist reinvented traditional femininity, and Alisa adopting a new feminist and migrant identity. For Štivičić, transgenerational dialogue is obviously affected by the conceptual changes that occurred with societal changes. We have looked here into the ways the concepts of womanhood and citizenship have been changing together with the major changes of social systems and ruling ideologies. Addressing those changes in her drama, Štivičić is also quite aware of intersectional relations between different aspects of identity, as well as among different axes of social oppression. Various ways in which gender, class, education, age and sexual identity intersect are also very much set forth by the predominant characteristics of the given social order and thus redefined through major societal changes. Looking at some of the implications of these changes as they are brought forward in Three Winters, we can go back to the initial comparison between transnational literacy and transgenerational literacy. What Tena Štivičić indicates in her drama, and what I would like to argue here, is that on the local level10 these profound changes produce a new cul Speaking from the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe, it is important to emphasize that it is a geographic space where major social changes with dramatic consequences occurred within practically each generation. It refers not only to the most obvious changes like World War I, World War II, and the establishment

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tural context that requires a new form of literacy, both locational (Friedman), and minor (Shi and Lionnet). From that perspective, the transgenerational is not essentially different from the transnational, since in both cases there is a need to overcome some symbolic borders, which in the first case tend to be neglected or suppressed, and in the other to be objectified and imposed as an inevitable part of human reality. But in both cases they require an understanding of the ways in which theories and concepts travel across these borders, and an understanding of both the power and the limitations of the translation processes that are involved in any form of the dialogue. References Daskalova, Krassimira. 2007. “How Should We Name the ‘Women-Friendly’ Actions of State Socialism?” Aspasia I: 214–19. Davis, Kathy, and Mary Evans. 2011. “Introduction – Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism is Traveling Theory.” In Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism is Traveling Theory, 1–11. Edited by Kathy Davis and Mary Evans. London: Routledge. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2001. “Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy.” In Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, 13–36. Edited by Uredila Marianne DeKoven. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hawkesworth, Mary, and Lisa Disch. 2016. “Feminist Theory: Transforming the Known World.” In Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, 1-15. Edited by Mary Hawkesworth and Lisa Disch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jović, Dejan. 2009. Yugoslavia: A State that Withered Away. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih. 2005. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In Minor Transnationalism, 1-23. Edited by and the fall of socialist regimens, but to the time of socialism as well, where in each country there were dramatic internal moments of internal demarcation like, for example, 1948 in Yugoslavia, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and 1956 and 1980 in Poland, which caused profound moves within the established system of power. 135

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Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lukić, Jasmina. 2016. “One Socialist Story, Or How I Became a Feminist.” Aspasia X: 135–145. Miroiu, Mihaela. 2007. “Communism Was a State Patriarchy, not State Feminism.” Aspasia I: 197–201. Mudure, Mihaela. 2006. “Zeugmatic Spaces: East/Central European Femi­ nisms.” In Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, 407–33. Edited by Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova and Svetlana Slapšak. Belgrade: KaktusPrint. Said, Edward. 1983. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic, 226–47. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva. 2006. Theories on the Move: Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Slavova, Kornelia. 2006. “Looking at Western Feminisms through the Double Lens of Eastern Europe and the Third World.” In Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, 245–63. Edited by Jasmina Lukić, with Joanna Regulska and Darja Zavirsek. London: Ashgate. Sokolová, Věra, and Kateřina Kolářova (eds.). 2007. Gender and Generation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Intersections. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Štivičić, Tena. 2014. Three Winters (NHB Modern Plays). Nick Hern Books: Kindle Edition. ———. 2014a. “Playwright Tena Stivicic Discusses Her Epic Family Drama 3 Winters.” Theatre Voice, 18th December 2014. http://www.theatrevoice. com/audio/croatian-playwright-tena-stivicic-discusses-epic-family-play-3winters, accessed February 10, 2017. Tuin, Iris van der. 2006. “The Generation Game.” In Teaching Subjects In Between: Feminist Politics, Disciplines, Generations, 81-89. Edited by Therese Garstenauer et al. York: Raw Nerve Books.

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Translation into Dance Adaptation and Transnational Hellenism in Balanchine’s Apollo1 G R AC E L ED B E T T ER

Thinking Beyond “Sources”

The critical discourse on Stravinsky’s and Balanchine’s 1928 ballet, Apollon Musagète (later shortened to Apollo), has uncovered a full array of sources that figured into the ballet’s genesis, including painting and sculpture (Brancusi, Michaelangelo), previous ballets (French court ballet, Petipa, Fokine, Goleizovsky, Nijinski), literary sources (Boileau’s poetry, the St. Petersburg journal, Apollon, Volynsky’s plans for a ballet called Birth of Apollo), and various modernisms (symbolism, constructivism, retrospectivism). It is also widely acknowledged that ancient Greek sources played a significant role, in particular, Stravinsky’s appropriation of ancient metrics (accessed primarily through Boileau’s use of the Alexandrine) and the archaic Greek Homeric Hymn to Apollo. In the ballet’s scenario, Stravinsky adapted the Homeric hymn’s narrative of Apollo’s birth and assumption of power, and Balanchine’s choreography, added to Stravinsky’s musical adaptation, transformed that narrative further into the vocabulary of dance. Although identifying sources that figured into the creation of a work of art allows us to catch a glimpse of the creative process, in many cases we must go further to ask more precise questions about the particular use and transformation of the source material. In the case of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, scholars have not yet worked in depth on questions concerning how and to what end Balanchine’s ballet transforms, “translates,” or adapts the hymn. In fact, it has not yet been acknowledged that the ballet should be viewed as a kind of translation or adaptation of the hymn. Questions about how The author would like to thank Lynn Garafola and audiences at University of Pennsylvania and Swathmore College for their helpful feedback. Special thanks to Jasmina Lukić.

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the ballet employs and transforms the hymn prove especially significant, I will argue, because even though Apollo is often said to be “plotless,” or at least a precursor to Balanchine’s later plotless ballets, its narrative is neither simple nor unimportant to the ballet’s meaning and relation to the whole Balanchine repertoire. Just as translation theory and adaptation theory have had to overcome the moralistic orientation of “fidelity discourse,” which privileges the source text and holds the translation or adaptation to an ideal of authenticity, so too Classicists have taken great strides in reorienting how they view the reception of the Classical tradition. With the full recognition that the ancient sources themselves are in many cases re-workings of earlier versions, comes an expansion that now has Classicists studying a vast array of literary and artistic works from antiquity to the contemporary world as transformations of Greco-Roman and subsequent sources that not only have value in their own right, but also exist as steps in the evolution and transformation of the tradition itself. The Classical tradition extends to the present day, and it changes, sometimes radically, as it works its way globally through various cultural, social, political, intellectual, and artistic contexts. I suspect that giving up the essentialism traditionally inherent in the field of Classics—that is, the view that there is some core essence of, say, the Oedipus myth, that must be present in a subsequent incarnation in order for it to count as “the Oedipus myth”—proves more difficult for many of us, simply because we are immersed in the particular ancient sources that we know so well. However, we would all do well to consider carefully the alternative articulated, for example, by Robert Stam: “Hidden within War and Peace, it is assumed, there is an originary core, a kernel of meaning or nucleus of events that can be ‘delivered’ by an adaptation. But in fact there is no such transferable core: a single novelistic text comprises a series of verbal signals that can generate a plethora of possible readings, including even readings of the narrative itself. The literary text is not a closed, but an open structure (or, better, structuration, as the later Barthes would have it) to be reworked by a boundless context. The text feeds on and is fed into an infinitely permutating intertext, which is seen through evershifting grids of interpretation” (Stam 2012, 57). Martindale’s important work on Classical reception contests “the idea that classics is something 140

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fixed, whose boundaries can be shown, and whose essential nature we can understand on its own terms,” and proposes a model according to which “the sharp distinction between antiquity itself and its reception over the centuries is dissolved” (Martindale 2006, 2, 4). It is in a spirit modified by these recent developments in translation theory, adaptation theory, and reception theory that I would like to consider the use of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. One of my goals is to show that this ballet effects a significant step in the evolution of the myth of Apollo, and one that, given the ballet’s long-standing popularity, can be seen as a uniquely successful and compelling adaptation of the myth. In addition to examining the particular selections, additions, subtractions, expansions, and distillations to which the ballet subjects the myth, I take particular interest in the process of transmediation, that is, the significance of adapting the verbal medium of the Homeric hymn to the non-verbal medium of dance. What exactly is added by this change of medium, and what is lost? Finally, because Apollo in its original performance context (1928, Paris) has been linked to discourses of nationalism (French Monarchy and contemporary fascism, see Garafola 1989, 115–122; Taruskin 1993), I will re-examine this issue and ask especially how the ballet’s Hellenism—its particular formulation of “Greekness”—functions in the context of these questions. Ultimately I will suggest that critical perspectives that attribute to the ballet a nationalist agenda or significance fall short of accounting for the ballet’s relation to questions of nation. Metamorphosis of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo

Viewed in retrospect and in the context of the Balanchine repertoire as a whole, Apollo was a revolutionary modernist work that helped define one of the twentieth century’s most influential contributions to ballet and modern dance: Balanchine’s neoclassicism. Always remaining a standard part of the repertoire, Apollo joined other pivotal works (Four Temperaments, Agon, Jewels) in the thriving popularity and international influence of the New York City Ballet in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and is still performed regularly. Apollo changed ballet by maintaining but modifying classical technique. It introduced non-classical movements 141

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that later became hallmarks of Balanchine’s neoclassicism, and its comparatively austere style and minimal narrative anticipated Balanchine’s later works. Apollo was created at a point in the history of ballet—the late 1920s—when the future of classical ballet was uncertain. Classical ballet had, from most perspectives, already peaked in the romantic era. But the experimental and bold productions of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–1929) offered hope for ballet’s future. Apollo premiered near the end of the company’s tenure in Paris, where it met with mixed success in contrast with its later popularity as a foundational and programmatic work for Balanchine’s subsequent repertoire in New York City, where he eventually founded the NYC Ballet with Lincoln Kirstein. As Arlene Croce puts it: “Already in . . . Apollo, the nature of his gift is completely and purely pronounced. In its most basic manifestations, it reveals itself as a gift for distillation, harmonious design, and logical progression, with a propensity for theme and variation structures. It is a profoundly musical gift, and its philosophical bias is classical. Because Balanchine remained true to his gift to the end of his life, Apollo can be looked at as a kind of manifesto, setting out the terms and predicting the direction of many later masterpieces” (Croce 1998, 258). Apollo was not a radical ballet in the way that the highly experimental, sometimes shocking, anti-classical ballets of the Ballet Russes were. It had a shock value of its own. In bold contrast to The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s music for Apollo is pared down and ethereal. Written for a strings-only orchestra, it evokes eighteenth century French ballet and opera (Rameau and Lully in particular), and its overall tone is measured; it conveys a prominent sense of awakening. There are only four dancers in the ballet, one man and three women. The ballet’s choreographic lines are unusually sharp and geometric; the dancers often appear in devotional poses. The ballet showcases many of the essential elements of classical ballet, many bold modernizations of that vocabulary, and several tableaux that appear two-dimensional and are strikingly reminiscent of Greek vase paintings and friezes. The original sets for the ballet evoked the notoriously rugged terrain of Delos, where Apollo was born, while a chariot provided a Greek motif that nodded to the French neoclassicism of Louis XIV, the Sun King who had been famous for dancing the role of Apollo in his court ballets. 142

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The first costumes, designed by Bauchant, were long tutus with Grecian touches for the Muses and a gold tunic for Apollo. These were not the minimal white costumes that Stravinsky had envisioned and that Balanchine eventually adopted. When the ballet was revived in New York, its sets and costumes gradually grew more and more spare, white, and abstract. Stravinsky based the scenario for the ballet on the archaic Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which most likely dates from the 6th century BCE. The hymn to Apollo is one of the longer hymns belonging to a group of Homeric hymns that have been studied by Classicists largely in terms of their dating, performance context, religious significance, and relation to the broader mythological tradition. In her compelling full scale treatment of the hymns, Jenny Strauss Clay has argued persuasively that the hymns are united by a specific purpose: they tell of a stage in the history of the cosmos where various threats were posed to Zeus’s cosmic order, and they explain how order was maintained or restored by granting individual gods specific powers and domains. The hymns on this account are etiological; they explain why the cosmos is ordered the way it is, and they fix the specific functions of the Olympian gods (Clay 1989). The Homeric Hymn to Apollo praises the god in a relatively solemn tone while it explains the origin of his specific powers, his connection to the island of Delos, and the location of his temple at Delphi. If we had to sum up the impression we get of this god through the hymn, we might accurately say that he is extraordinarily powerful, at times terrifying, and his domains have been established from birth as the lyre, the bow, and prophesy. We get a remote impression of his role in the harmony of festivities, including song and dance, both when the Ionians celebrate him with remarkable grace, and when he is said to join the gods (including all the Muses) on Olympus in their singing and dancing. The hymn spends considerable time demonstrating Apollo’s fearful power through listing the number of places that rejected Leto’s request to give birth there; through Apollo’s spontaneous growth to adulthood minutes after birth (See Slater 1971 on Apollo’s triumphant escape from the maternal clutch, the goal of all male gods), through his slaying of the monster, Typhon, born to threaten Zeus’ power; and through his transformation into a Dolphin in order to inspire fear and awe in the 143

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Cretan sailors he orders to become the keepers of his temple at Delphi. By contrast, Apollo’s connection to dance in the hymn emerges through his self-proclaimed primordial connection with the lyre (and therefore mousike, the Greek combination of poetry, music, and dance), and through the explicit mention of dance in the two festivity scenes. In the first, the Ionians do the dancing and singing, and in the second, divine scene on Olympus, Apollo may himself join in the dancing, although the language of the hymn does not make that entirely clear. The ballet departs from the hymn in striking ways. Balletic Apollo is for some time an awkward youth who only with the Muses’ help eventually learns how to dance. Furthermore, three Muses (who are specifically named) play a prominent role in the narrative. In the ballet, Leto gives birth to a fully adult Apollo, who is nevertheless wrapped in swaddling clothes. The mother disappears leaving her son in the hands of nymphs who help the god with his first awkward movements. The nymphs bring him a lute and begin to teach him to play. Left alone, Apollo makes his first attempts to dance. Three anonymous Muses appear. Apollo leads them as a sort of choreographer trying out some basic movements and lifts. At several points he appears almost to bless them in a kind of choreographic rite of passage. At the end of the prologue Apollo awards each Muse an emblem of her particular gift (a pen, a mask, and a lyre) and with it her identity. We now have on stage Calliope (Muse of poetry), Polyhymnia (Muse of mime), and Terpsichore (Muse of dance). Stravinsky chose these three Muses, he said, because of the close connection they have with dance. Now the ballet proper begins with a kind of contest scenario as each Muse dances a highly individualized variation for Apollo, hoping to win his favor. Apollo sits quietly in judgment, rejects the first two, and finally chooses Terpsichore as his favorite and dances with her. In a solo, Apollo now demonstrates his newly-developed balletic grace and virtuosity. Terpsichore returns and the two of them dance another pas de deux. The music speeds up and lightens as the other two Muses rejoin the dance (Apollo does not reject them after all; he only subordinates them to Terpsichore). The ensemble dancing in this section builds the complexity of the piece as a whole. It is lively, playful, and presents some unforgettable configurations, for example of the Muses and Apollo as a moving chariot, and of 144

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all three in the sun formation that has now found its way onto many book covers. Zeus calls the group to Parnassus, and they solemnly ascend. A final unified pose defines what has been born, developed, experimented with, and finally established: the art of dance. Poetry and mime are subordinate but essential components. Apollo and Terpsichore have established the existence, priority, and nature of dance. A New Myth of Origin for Ballet

How should we understand the grammar of transformation that shapes this ballet? As both Venuti and Hutcheon make clear, adaptations, like translations, do not simply communicate their source text, but interpret them (Venuti 2007, 25–43; Hutcheon 2012). Like a translation, an adaptation can be seen as “an act of both intercultural and inter-temporal communication” (Bassnett 2002, 9). What, then, are the interpretive mechanisms at work in this ballet when it is viewed as an adaptation of the Homeric hymn? What is the “process of mutation or adjustment” effected by this story being placed into a particular cultural environment? Is it the same story? The question of whether the ballet tells the same story as the hymn only makes sense if one assumes the essentialist position I have already mentioned, which posits that there is a definable core or essence of the Homeric hymn that either is or is not accurately carried over into the ballet. Let us put aside this assumption and ask instead what sorts of selections, additions, subtractions, and refocusing the ballet enacts on the hymn. Perhaps the most striking overall transformation is the ballet’s dilation on the theme of dance, which plays only a minor role in the hymn. The ballet’s Apollo is the god of dance, and the entire story of his birth and ascension revolves around establishing the existence and nature of dance. Fascinating from the perspective of gender is the fact that this balletic Apollo moves as an awkward youth, until he becomes a graceful dancer, and never inspires the fear and terror so prominent in the hymn. The Muses play a significantly more prominent role in the ballet, where they are reduced to three and cast in the specific identities that connect 145

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them to dance. Scholl has pointed out that the contest of the Muses that Apollo judges “adapts and abbreviates a favorite plot line of the nineteenth century ballet: the selection of a mate from a number of suitors, as in the basic plot of both Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake” (Scholl 1994, 94). This connection is not only important and emblematic of Balanchine’s later pattern of alluding to previous ballets by recognizable ingredients. Balanchine goes further by inserting this trope into a Greek context. Others have rightly viewed this episode as a Judgment of Paris scenario—and indeed, in this archaic Greek context that allusion emerges. The typical genius of Balanchine is that he reveals a similarity between the basic plot line of nineteenth century ballet and the Judgment of Paris myth. This demonstrated connection between ballet and Greek myth, we shall see, will prove extremely important to understanding Apollo’s significance. The ballet serves an etiological function, but one different from the hymn: the origin of dance is explained, not the origin of Apollo’s temple at Delphi or his connection with Delos. When viewed as a whole and in relation to the ballet’s new frames of reference, this refraction of the Homeric hymn formulates a narrative that functions with a specific effect. The ballet first and foremost inserts the Homeric Hymn into the history of ballet, not only by creating a ballet in 1928 based on the Homeric Hymn, but in a much more profound way by creating a myth of origin for ballet itself. As Croce recognizes, Apollo “is a rendition in dance of ideas about dance” (Croce 1998, 260). The ballet tells a story of the origin of dance through the birth of Apollo, the gradual formulation of (modified) classical dancing, both the pas de deux and ensemble dancing, and especially through the selection of Terpsichore and her elevation. By making classical ballet look Greek, which this ballet does in part through its sculptural aesthetic and reproduction of vase painting tableaux, the hymn becomes an account of ballet’s origin. Somewhat self-servingly, this original form of “Greek” ballet is not a pure form of Russian/French Classicism, but Balanchine’s modernized version of that technique. The fanciful conceit of this ballet is that the original form of ballet was Balanchine’s—it is primary—and it came long before the development of nineteenth-century classical ballet. Ancient myth and visual culture become incorporated into this myth of origin for ballet. 146

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Re-Mediation

Transposing the Homeric hymn from the verbal medium of poetry to the visual/performative/non-verbal medium of dance raises two main issues for us to consider as we examine the nature of this adaptation: the limitations and new possibilities of the medium of dance, and the more fraught issue of implicit hierarchies among different media. As Hutcheon explains, “adaptations are often to a different medium—they are remediations, that is, specifically translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system (for example, words) to another (for example, images). This is translation but in a very specific sense, as transmutation or transcoding, that is, as necessarily a recoding into a new set of conventions as well as signs” (Hutcheon 2012, 16). One significant transcoding of the Homeric hymn that occurs in Apollo is the loss of the verbal medium and the gaining of the vocabulary and syntax of classical ballet. The visual or “ocular” mode of showing and performing takes the place of reading or listening to the words of the poem (Marshik 2015, 32). As we have seen, a narrative is conveyed, but not through words. This performance mode thus teaches us that meaning, sometimes complex meaning, can be conveyed in ways that are not verbal (Hutcheon 2012, 56). Just as Stam warns us that in the study of film adaptation there is a danger of “quietly reinscribing” the superiority of literary art to film by privileging seniority as well as verbal over iconographic modes (Stam 2012, 58), so too in the case of Apollo we must be careful to counter impulses and established histories that would implicitly subordinate the non-verbal, bodily medium of dance to the literary medium of poetry. Opera, for example, has been accused of “denaturing” a novel and reducing it to a cartoon because librettos so radically abbreviate their literary sources (Hutcheon 2012, 38; Honig 2001, 22). Carrie Preston’s work has done much to remind us of how important dance—especially dance that represented the primitive past— was to the modernist period generally (Preston 2011, 128-44). Preston also reminds us of those who, like William Carlos Williams, “used dance images to theorize the poetic act and pre-modern language rooted in gesture that could recover an authenticity words lacked” (Preston

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2011, 6). In some views, then, dance is able to convey meaning that is more authentic and complete than what verbal media can convey. Symbolist poetics, which were influential at the time of Apollo’s creation, offer a way to understand what the particular medium of dance adds to the adaptation of the Homeric hymn. In fact, Symbolism’s antirealist, Platonizing metaphysics of ideal meaning shaped the aesthetic theories of critic André Levinson, a Russian by birth who had a great influence on the dance world in Paris in the 1920s and reviewed many performances at the Ballets Russes during that period (Acocella and Garafola 1991). Levinson held out hope that Classical ballet could be reborn on a new foundation of pure dance, where the formal elements of ballet portray a symbolic world of higher meaning and do not mix with extraneous elements like psychological drama and non-choreographic visual spectacle. During the same decade, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer published his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, formulating a theory that applied a similar line of thought to myth. According to Cassirer’s theory, mythical thought is the most primitive level of symbolic meaning and distinct from natural language. Mythical thought expresses meaning charged with emotional significance, and it is what underlies mythical consciousness (Schultz 2013). If dance can be understood to convey a higher realm of non-verbal ideas, as Levinson suggests, then it might also be said in the case of Apollo to express mythical thought as understood by Cassirer, to express what the words of the Homeric hymn fail to express precisely because they must be formulated verbally. Informed by a Jungian perspective, Martha Graham later explored a similar connection between myth and dance in her many great re-workings of Greek myth. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, then, loses its verbal form as well as many details of its narrative in its transfer to the ballet Apollo. Yet it can also be said to gain a whole dimension of meaning made possible by the particular features of its medium. One final point about re-mediation emerges when Hutcheon draws our attention to another cliché operative in critical discourse on visual and performance arts, the assumption that “showing modes only have one tense: present” (Hutcheon 2012, 59, 63). This presumption captures the transient and unrepeatable nature of performance, but wrongly attributes necessary temporal limitations to visual and performing 148

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modes. As we have seen, Apollo refers to the primitive past as it formulates a myth of origin for ballet, and it alludes to many other stages in the history of ballet, for example to eighteenth-century France. Furthermore, Apollo forecasts a future by presenting newly modified classical ballet as though it were the original language of dance, thereby suggesting a fresh start for ballet. Croce recognizes that not only Apollo, but many other Balanchine ballets “look backward and forward at the same time” as they implicitly formulate a “process of recapitulation and forecast” (Croce 1998, 261, 263). Making Ballet Greek

The “Greekness” of Apollo is not a single thing, not one particular conception of what it means to be Greek, or archaic, or Classical. Rather, both in its initial cultural context in Paris, and in its subsequent movements into American culture, the ballet entered many frames of reference that define Greekness differently. For example, during its performances in the 1920s, Apollo can be said to have signified through its archaic Greek story and style the elite, retrospective aesthetics of Louis XIV’s France and its monarchical politics (Garafola 1989, 117), a modernist drive toward the primitive (Haynes 2007, 101–114), an assertion of Nietzsche’s Apollonian conception of art (Stanger 2010), an assertion of Nietzsche’s Dionysian conception of art (Scholl 1994, 98), or an example of modernism’s turn to Greece as a way of conjuring ghosts of the past or reanimating statues (Kolocotroni 2012; Gross 1992). When the ballet later appeared in New York, we could say that its Greekness signified its foundational and programmatic nature for the whole Balanchine repertoire (Croce 1998). I would like to suggest an additional context that gives meaning to Apollo’s Greekness, or rather to its attempt to make ballet seem “Greek” through its synthesis of classical balletic forms with Greek mythology and aesthetic structures. Whether one considers ballet to have originated historically in the fifteenth-century court of Catherine de’ Medici (as most histories of ballet do), or in eighteenth-century Russia with the establishment of the first imperial ballet school by Empress Anna in 1738, it was a par149

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ticular preoccupation of late nineteenth-century French artistic culture to assign the origin of ballet to ancient Greece. Many factors, including recent archaeological discoveries and an obsession with authenticity, play into this interest, and one book in particular garnered considerable popularity as it painstakingly laid out an academic case for ballet’s Greek origins. In 1895, composer and theater director Maurice Emmanuel published in Paris Essai Sur L’Orchestique Grecque, later translated into English as The Antique Greek Dance After Sculptured and Painted Figures (1916). Based on his study of hundreds of Greek vase paintings and sculptures (the book contains 600 figures, most of which are drawings of figures from vase painting or sculpture, as well as photographic studies of contemporary subjects executing proposed movements after the ancient sources), Emmanuel argued that the basic vocabulary of classical ballet was already present in ancient Greek dancing. The primary difference was that classical ballet had a more refined technique, while ancient Greek dancing made greater expressive and natural use of the upper body, something that ballet lacked at the time. Emmanuel’s methodology was deeply problematic, yet if we view his purpose as an attempt to inspire much-needed innovation in dance rather than to establish historical facts, his book could be said both to have made a compelling case, and to have inspired the innovation it prescribed (Naerebout 2010, 39–56). André Levinson responded critically to Emmanuel’s claim that ancient Greek dancing was more “natural” and insisted instead that it showed evidence of artificially imposed technique and stylization throughout (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 27–34). Even this criticism of Emmanuel’s position seeks to maintain a strong affinity between ancient Greek dance and the ballet of the time, and thereby to connect the classicism of ancient Greece with balletic classicism. Given Levinson’s prominent place in the Paris dance world of the 1920s, we can say that Emmanuel’s ideas were still alive and well at the time. Apollo did not to seek to establish or reiterate the literal historical position that ballet owes its origins to ancient Greece. However, when viewed in the context of Emmanuel’s work and its influence, Apollo continued and modified a trend of positing a Greek origin for ballet. Apollo defended its thesis through its narrative and, perhaps even more compellingly, through its choreographic blending of Greco-Roman with 150

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classical balletic forms. To the extent that Apollo succeeded in creating this synthesis (contrast Bellow 2010), it portrays the fantasy that ballet originated in ancient Greece. Considering its ultimate success in becoming a foundational work for the Balanchine repertoire, Apollo demonstrates how artistic ingenuity, rather than historical proof, accomplishes such a feat. Re-animating and transforming the Greek myth of Apollo in a work of astonishing beauty and force results in gains both for ballet and for the Greek myth: the ballet launches innovative features that herald a new future for the art form, and the archaic Greek myth of Apollo evolves into a new kind of prominence. Apollo and the Question of Nation

Through its Rameau-like music, its theme of Apollo as the god-king of dance, and its allusions to French neoclassicism of the eighteenth century, Apollo clearly signals Louis XIV (who himself danced the role of Apollo in Ballet de la Nuit) and France’s monarchic past (Garafola 1989, 117; cf. Taruskin 1993). If we view these elements as the primary unifying features of the ballet’s significance and conclude that Apollo is essentially a reactionary, nationalistic, backward-looking homage to a lost classicism, we will fail to do justice to other features of the ballet, some of which contradict this more limited picture, and all of which complicate it. Tim Scholl has pointed out with great insight that the role of Terpsichore in Apollo “acknowledges the distinctly Russian contributions to the Western art form” (Scholl 1994, 101). As the “winner” of the contest, and as the dancer whose choreography is most fluidly classical, Terpsichore’s dancing can be said to define the height of Russian classical ballet, now inflected with Balanchine’s modernism. When Apollo traveled to New York and eventually became a foundational work, it also became known as “American” ballet, along with the rest of the Balanchine repertoire. Even if we consider the ballet only in its initial Parisian incarnation, the idea that it functions mainly as a nationalistic ode to French neoclassicism is insufficient to account for its connection to nations. Is the ballet Russian? French? Neoclassical French? Ancient Greek? American? 151

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Furthermore, viewing Apollo as fundamentally conservative flies in the face of the ballet’s innovative artistic features, as well as its integration of elements that move across cultural strata, from high-brow to low-brow. Allusions to Michelangelo, Louis XIV, Greek sculpture and vase painting combine with the “modernist brazenness” of Calliope’s attempt to speak, hand gestures based on Balanchine’s perception of an electric sign in Piccadilly Circus (Joseph 2002, 106, 114), and jazz movements inspired by Josephine Baker (Butkas 2010, 227). Apollo, indeed, accomplishes a “daring marriage of classicism and modernism” (Denby 1986, 435). Dancers who performed the ballet in Paris remarked on how the audience was “stunned” by Balanchine’s modernist departures from classical technique, for example, the flexed feet, the angular shapes, the configuration of a single male dancer with three women (Joseph 2002, 87–88). The resulting stylistic amalgam was typical of modernism: “The crossing of national boundaries and cultural strata created the feeling of the modern not only through movement but also through a challenge to what had been considered appropriate or normal before” (Marshik 2015, 32). Apollo may not be overtly and single-mindedly anti-traditional, but it would be limiting to assume that innovation cannot be compatible with contributing to tradition. One of Balanchine’s biographers, Robert Gottlieb, takes for granted that for Balanchine “there was no contradiction between creative force and the impersonal objective limitations of classical style” (Gottlieb 2004, 435; Stravinsky 1942). Ancient Greece is not a national culture, and although the use of Greek mythology in Apollo and elsewhere can signal the coded privilege of French monarchy, anti-Soviet nostalgia for all that is “classical,” or a general withdrawal into a utopian vision of the past, we have seen that the Greekness of Apollo functions every bit as much as a mechanism of innovation and a blurring of national boundaries. Just as Gaborik and Harris have suggested that, because it is linked to Balanchine’s global neo-Liberalism, Italian futurism should not be reduced to a form of fascism (Gaborik and Harris 2010, 23–40), I would suggest that the meaning of Apollo’s Greekness is an irreducible and ever-shifting plurality.

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References Acocella, J. and Garafola, L., eds. 1991. André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Bellow, J. 2010. “Balanchine and the Deconstruction of Classicism” in Kant 2010, 237–245. Bassnet, S. 2002. Translation Studies, 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Butkas, M. 2010. “George Balanchine” in Kant 2010, 224–236. Cohen, S. J. and Dance Perspectives Foundation, eds. 1998. International Encyclopedia of Dance. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cornfield, R. and Mackay, W. eds. 1996. Edwin Denby: Dance Writings. Gaines­ ville, Fl.: University Press of Florida. Clay, J. S. 1989. The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Corrigan, T. 2012. Film and Literature: an Introduction and Reader. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Croce, A. 1998. “Balanchine, George” in Cohen, 1998. Denby, E. 1953. “Some Thoughts about Classicism and George Balanchine” in Cornfield and Mackay 1986, 433–440. Frascina, F. 1992. Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts. New York: HarperCollins. Gaborik, P. and Harris, A. 2010. “From Italy and Russia to France and the U.S.: Fascist Futurism and Balanchine’s ‘American’ Ballet” in Sell 2010, 23–40. Garafola, L. 1989. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press. Gottlieb, R. 2004. George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker. New York: Harper­ Collins/Atlas Books. Greenberg, C. 1960. “Modernist Painting” in Frascina 1992, 308-314. Gross, K. 1992. The Dream of the Moving Statue. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Haynes, K. 2007. “Modernism” in Kallendorf 2007, 101–114. Honig, J. 2001. “A Novel Idea.” In Opera News 66: 2, 20–23. Hutcheon, L. 2012. A Theory of Adaptation. Hoboken, NJ.: Taylor and Francis. Joseph, C. M. 2002. Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Kallendorf, C. W., ed. 2002. A Companion to the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. 153

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Kant, M. 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Ballet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kolocotroni, V. 2012. “Still Life: Modernism’s Turn to Greece.” In Journal of Modern Literature 35:2, 1–24. Levinson, A. 1982. Ballet Old and New. Translated by Susan Cook Summer. New York: Dance Horizons. Macintosh, F., ed. 2010. The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Marshik, C. 2015. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Martindale, C. and Thomas, R. F. 2006. Classics and the Uses of Reception. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell. Naerebout, F. 2010. “‘In Search of a Dead Rat’: The Reception of Ancient Greek Dance in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe and America” in Macintosh, 2010, 39–56. Preston, C. P. 2011. Modernism’s Mythic Pose. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. “Dance” in Marshik 2015, 128–144. Scholl, T. 1994. From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet. London and New York: Routledge. Schultz, W. 2013. Cassirer and Langer on Myth: An Introduction. Hoboken, NJ.: Taylor and Francis. Sell, M. 2010. Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange: Vectors of the Radical. Basinstoke, UK.: Palgrave Macmillan Limited. Slater, P. E. 1971. The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Stam, R. 2012. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation” in Corrigan, 2012, 74–88. Stanger, A. 2010. “Striking a Balance: The Apolline and Dionysiac in Contemporary Classical Choreography” In Macintosh 2010, 347–367. Stravinsky, I. 1942. Poetics of Music. Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press. Taruskin, R. 1993. “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology” 19th-Century Music 16:3. Venuti, L. 2007. “Adaptation, Translation, Critique.” In Journal of Visual Culture 6:1, 25–43. 154

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Stories from Elsewhere The City as a Transnational Space in Doris Lessing’s Fiction1 ÁG N E S GYÖ R K E

This chapter explores London as a transnational space in Doris Lessing’s fiction, including In Pursuit of the English (1960), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Four-Gated City (1969), and London Observed (1992). Both Lessing’s novels and the second volume of her autobiography, entitled Walking in the Shade (1997), depict the main characters’ migration to London, offering a fruitful terrain to investigate displacement, flânerie, and the recurring transnational imagery which showcase the texts’ engagement with urban space. Though Lessing was concerned with urban life from the very beginning of her career, few attempts have been made to read her novels from this specific angle. Critics noted her engagement with the city already in the late 1970s (Mary Ann Singleton 1977; Ingrid Holmquist 1980), yet most of them have either read London as the antithesis of nature in her novels, or focused on the notion of the ideal, mythical city in her fiction (Ellen Cronan Rose 1983; Claire Sprague 1987). Mary Ann Singleton, for instance, claims that Lessing’s main concern is the fall from a state of wholeness embodied by the “African veld,” while London, its exact opposite, is imagined as a space haunted by fragmentation and loss. This rather reductive view of the city, however, does not only simplify the role London plays in Lessing’s novels, but also fails to do justice to the transnational memories of Southern Rhodesia, which abound in her early writings. Christine Wick Sizemore is the first critic who has called attention to the fact that the city has a more ambivalent relationship with nature in Lessing’s writings. In her book, published in 1989, A Female Vision of the City, she canonized Lessing as an urban novelist who belongs to

1

This research was supported by the New National Excellence Programme, UNKP17-4.

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a group of women writers such as Buchi Emecheta, Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch, among others. According to Sizemore, London is portrayed as a palimpsest in Lessing’s writings, since the repressed stories of women are hidden behind the surface text in her novels, most visibly in The Four-Gated City, the final volume of her Children of Violence series. By claiming that nature and the desire for wholeness lie underneath fragmentary cityscapes, not opposed to the grey and appalling metropolis, Sizemore subverts the oppositions Singleton and many other critics relied on. Nevertheless, I think Sizemore has not fully explored the role London plays in Lessing’s writings. It is my contention that the city is by no means the same palimpsest in her later fiction as it was in the early novels: while walking in postwar London evokes memories of the African countryside, the Rhodesian veld and the characters’ childhood in her early novels, in London Observed the city becomes a transnational space dissociated from nostalgic recollections. Walking and the City in Lessing’s Novels

In Pursuit of the English is Lessing’s first urban novel, which has been read as a postcolonial, hybrid and feminist text (Sizemore 2008, 133). The novel is a semi-autobiographical narrative, which depicts Doris’s passage to London after World War II, and which, according to Sizemore, “brings her experience of Africa into her observations of her new space and uses that hybrid and feminist vision to map the neighbourhood and create a snapshot of a culture of London in the 1940s and 1950s” (133). Doris gets initiated into the everyday life of the working class, the unnamed streets and the Notting Hill district, while the narrative also explores the life of the other tenants in the large lodging house where she takes up occupancy. The house has been associated with Englishness by a number of critics (Yelin 1998, 63; Watkins 2010, 2), while Doris’s ramblings have often been read as transnational explorations of London. Even before Sizemore, John McLeod noted that “Lessing represents London as a transnational location in which dominant models of national identity are being challenged by emergent alternatives that are by no means desirable” (2004, 77). In Pursuit depicts these new alter156

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natives as if emerging stories were literally being inscribed upon older narratives: Thin shells of wall stood brokenly among debris; and from this desolation I heard a sound which reminded me of a cricket chirping with quiet persistence from sun-warmed grasses in the veld. It was a typewriter; and peering over a bricky gulf I saw a man in his shirtsleeves, which were held neatly above the elbow by expanding bands, sitting on a tidy pile of rubble, the typewriter on a broken girder, clean white paper fluttering from the rim of the machine. “Who is he?” I asked. “An optimist,” said Rose grimly. “Thinks he is going to be rebuilt, I shouldn’t be surprised.” (In Pursuit of the English, 47)

While McLeod claims that the typewriter evokes the re-inscription and re-creation of postwar London, Sizemore reads the trope as an example of transnational urban imagery: the sound of the typewriter recalling the cricket chirping in the veld is a reference to the African countryside projected onto the metropolitan cityscape. As Sizemore points out, “[t] he bricks and mortar of the colonizing country have been destroyed, but new civilizations will be created by those who prop their typewriters on broken girders and can embed the echo of the colonized and the rural in the mechanics of writing” (140). Sizemore is right in claiming that the unexpected comparison erases the distance between colony and metropole, margin and centre, but I think the veld is not simply a reminder of Britain’s imperial heritage in Lessing’s novel: it becomes a vital, indispensable part of the Western metropolitan landscape. In another episode the image of the anthill serves a similar function: “Under the roof it was like sitting on top of an anthill, a tall sharp peak of baked earth, that seems abandoned, but which sounds, when one puts one’s ear to it, with a continuous vibrant humming. Even when the door shut, it was not long before the silence grew into an orchestra of sound” (In Pursuit of the English, 77). The anthill, rather unexpectedly, recalls the Rhodesian landscape again when Doris is describing her attic room in the “English” boarding house. According to Sizemore, the simile links the sounds of London to the sounds of the African veld 157

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(141), transforming the house into a “quintessentially English yet simultaneously hybridised” image (Holden 2003, 111, quoted by Sizemore, 141). In other words, London is depicted as a devastated yet all the more vibrant transnational metropolis in Lessing’s first urban novel: memories of Africa are projected onto the metropolitan landscape, challenging the vision of London as a uniquely British metropolitan center long before groundbreaking postcolonial books, such as The Empire Writes Back (1989), explored these issues extensively. It is not only Doris’s identity that is shaped by transnational movement through space, which is one of the most significant aspects of multipositionality according to Susan Stanford Friedman (2001, 22–24), but space itself is produced as a profoundly transnational entity in the narrative. Walking in London is an often recurring trope in Lessing’s fiction: apart from In Pursuit of the English, it appears in The Four Gated City and in London Observed, for instance, and the very title of Walking in the Shade, the second volume of Lessing’s autobiography, refers to this practice. Walking in the Shade depicts Lessing’s life between 1949 and 1962, the period in which she settled in London and published her first novels. The narrator often walks in the city, especially at night, when she cannot see the grey and ugly the streets, and these nocturnal wanderings remind her of Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, as if walking bridged the distance between these locations: “Walking around and about the London streets was like my nocturnal wanderings in Salisbury; when I set off, the houses would have lights in them, and by the time I got home again they were dark, and the radios, which had been spilling music from house to house, were silent” (Walking in the Shade, 163). She has no idea what compels her to walk in the city at night, but the practice is clearly connected to writing: “What was I doing? What was I looking for? There was the need to move, for I had all that physical energy, earned by the ritual need to write, when I walked around the room, blind to it, wrote a little, working up into a crescendo of effort so intense it was exhausting and sent me off into a few minutes’ sleep, and then up again into walking around and about the room” (ibid.). Just like in In Pursuit of the English, walking in the city is portrayed as a transnational practice, which evokes memories of Southern Rhodesia, and a profoundly creative act, associated with writing and recreation. 158

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The narrator feels like a child when she walks at night: “This is how a child experiences a certain street, or even a room […]. There are no street names, no house names or numbers, in this geography, and no grown-up would recognise the way a child knows a street, a house, a room, even the corner of a sofa” (163–64). Relying on a psychogeography of her own, she portrays the city as a creative space that is not constrained by the laws of physics. Likewise, when Martha arrives in London in The Four-Gated City, she feels she becomes a child who is free to ramble in the metropolis: “Matty” is reborn, her playful alter ego, who had been created as an act of survival somewhere early in her childhood, “on that farm on the highveld” (The Four-Gated City, 13). The unexpected reference haunts the Western metropolis, following close behind In Pursuit of the English: the main character’s childhood memories are projected onto the urban landscape, as if the practice of walking in the city connected these very different spatialities (Salisbury and London) as well as temporalities (childhood and adulthood). Though The Golden Notebook is not a specifically urban novel, it also foregrounds the protagonist’s relationship with the city. The very first sentence already suggests that London plays a crucial role in the narrative: “The two women were alone in the London flat” (The Golden Notebook, 3). In this novel it is not only flânerie, however, through which the city is explored; the act of standing by the window and observing the streets is also a recurring motif. When the room is first portrayed, we learn that it overlooks “a narrow side street, whose windows had flower boxes and painted shutters, and whose pavements were decorated with three basking cats […]” (10). Anna often watches pedestrians and customers buy strawberries from the window, and in one of the most memorable episodes we see Ella, the fictional alter ego of Anna, stand by the window night after night, waiting for her lover, Paul, to come back: “Then she heard, quite by chance, that Paul had returned to England for leave and had been here already for two weeks. On the night of the day she heard this news, she found herself dressed and made-up, her hair carefully done, standing at the window looking down into the street, and waiting for him” (227). The episode shows very well how the concrete, material objects and mundane events Ella sees from the window disappear as the imaginary vision of Paul’s return runs through her mind. 159

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In another episode, Anna recalls a childhood game she used to play in Southern Rhodesia, which allegorizes a profoundly transnational vision London: I used at nights to sit up in bed and play what I called “the game.” First I created the room I sat in, object by object, “naming” everything, bed, chair, curtains, till it was whole in my mind, then move out of the house, slowly creating the street, then rise into the air, looking down on London, at the enormous sprawling wastes of London, but holding at the same time the room and the house and the street in mind, and then England, the shape of England in Britain, then the little group of islands lying against the continent, then slowly, slowly, I would create the world, continent by continent, ocean by ocean (but the point of “the game” was to create this vastness while holding the bedroom, the house, the street in their littleness in my mind at the same time) […]. (548)

The game allows Anna to impose an order she is familiar with on an environment which is alien, shifting the ugliness that pervades the city.2 The position she occupies is that of mastery: first, she is standing by the window, looking down, which already puts her into a godlike position, as Deborah Parsons remarks,3 then she literally transcends above the city and looks down on London, Britain, and the whole continent. This is, of course, a game, yet I argue that it allegorizes the way the city is perceived in the novel, which is transnational by definition. The fact that Anna used to play this game in her childhood lends a backward-facing, nostalgic aura to this vision, and this, again, suggests that Southern Rhodesia plays a significant role in the portrayal of London. Just like the previous novels discussed, the metropolis unfolding in

Anna often complains about the greyness and ugliness of London in the novel: “Ahead of her the street of grey mean little houses crawled endlessly. The grey light of a late summer’s evening lowered a damp sky. For miles in all directions this ugliness, this meanness. This was London—endless streets of such houses. It was hard to bear, the sheer physical weight of the knowledge because—where was the force that could shift this ugliness?” (The Golden Notebook, 176). 3 As Deborah L. Parsons puts it, the flâneur “retreats to the balcony or the window for authoritative control […]” (225). 2

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The Golden Notebook challenges national and cultural boundaries, first by the reference to the memories that provide a framework for the vision, and second by the very vision itself, which literally transcends physical boundaries. The game suggests that the psychogeography of the city is affected by emotions rooted elsewhere. Furthermore, the vision seems to offer an ideal balance between apparently opposing entities such as London and Southern Rhodesia, colonizer and colonized; as Anna remarks, its point is to keep the everyday, the mundane (the vision of the room, the street), in balance with the larger-than-life and the collective, while erasing the opposition between these two: “the point of ‘the game’ was to create this vastness while holding the bedroom, the house, the street in their littleness in my mind at the same time” (548). In other words, the flâneuse’s perspective, which focuses on the particular, the waste, the litter on the streets, and the panoptical view of the city from above—which Michel de Certeau posits as binary opposites in The Practice of Everyday Life—seem to be reconcilable in this novel. In The Four-Gated City, published seven years after The Golden Notebook, a very similar urban vision unfolds. At the beginning of the novel, as we have already seen, walking in London is portrayed as a transnational practice: Martha feels that “Matty,” her childhood self created on the highveld in Rhodesia, is reborn when she walks in the city and experiences a sense of “freedom from whatever other people must conform to [. . .]” (The Four-Gated City 14). Later, after spending a month in the basement with Lynda, a mad woman she deeply sympathizes with, her perception of London is transformed: she is no longer able to see the metropolis as a real, material place.. Before Martha returns to the streets after her self-imposed isolation, she recalls how “Matty” felt while walking in the city: “She had known this lightness and clarity before—yes, walking through London, long ago. And then too, it had been the reward of not-eating, not-sleeping, using her body as an engine to get her out of the small dim prison of every day” ( 519). However, after the experience in the basement, Martha does not perceive London as a real, tangible place: She stood on a pavement looking at the sky where soft white clouds were lit with sunlight. She wanted to cry because it was so beautiful. 161

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[…] She stood gazing up, up until her eyes seemed absorbed in the crystalline substance of the sky with its blocks of clouds like snow banks, she seemed to be streaming out through her eyes into the skies, but then sounds came into her, they were vibrations of feet on pavement, and she looked down again at an extraordinarily hideous creature who stood watching her […]. (527)

Following in the wake of Anna in The Golden Notebook, Martha attempts to reconcile a transcendental, utopian vision (the sky, “the crystalline substance”) with a mundane, everyday image (the ugly creatures on the pavement), yet this no longer seems to be a viable option in this novel. When she looks down, she sees a hideous creature, almost like an animal, hairy and disgusting, the perfect antithesis of what she saw above. She walks on the streets of London like an alien, literally, falling in love with trees and the sky: “Martha looked up back at the sky, shutting out the street, and walked fast. The sky oh the sky! and the trees in the square, whose branches in gentle air sent her messages of such joy such peace, till she cried, Oh trees, I love you, and sky I love you!” (527). Observing London, then, means sensing the unsaid and hearing the unheard in this novel. While Matty’s walk in the city challenges the singularity of physical location, it is not only nostalgic memories that intervene into the portrayal of London in this text, but also a powerful dystopian vision over the edge.4 The Four-Gated City is, then, both a synthesis of the nostalgic transnational vision unfolding in Lessing’s writings published in the 1960s and a novel that points towards new ways of imagining the city. London Observed: Performing the Transnational City

While in the novels depicting postwar London the city is tinted with nostalgic transnational memories, in London Observed, the volume portraying London in the late 1980s, nostalgia no longer plays a central role.

4

Martha believes that her visions send her over the edge: “This sort of thing is not only very dangerous, but extremely inefficient. There must be other ways of doing it. And not drugs either. I’ve sent myself over the edge” (The Four-Gated City, 604). 162

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The unnamed third-person narrator of the volume is a flâneuse par excellence, as Rosario Arias notes (2005, 7), who observes couples, strangers, broken families, beggars, taxi drives and lonely wanderers in the city. As I argue in this chapter, London is depicted as a transnational city in the volume, but this transnationalism no longer relies on the past: spaces such as airports, cafés, parks and restaurants are the locations where the stories are set, all of which are transitory realms the female characters visit before embarking on an adventure elsewhere. It is my contention that the transnational city unfolding in London Observed offers a performative space for women to explore their subjectivities, and instead of relying on the past, turns towards the present and the near future. According to Arias, London is portrayed as a joyful city in London Observed: as opposed to Lessing’s previous novels “where the city is an ‘inferno’ and a ‘hurtful place’ […] [the stories] depict London as something to look at and enjoy, as a spectacle or a performance […]” (6). However, though I think the city indeed becomes a spectacle in this volume, providing many opportunities for characters to experiment, I do not think that enjoyment is the predominant affect in London Observed. Compared to the sensitivity of Anna and Martha, the narrator of the volume is aloof and detached; she observes the city and its inhabitants from a safe distance, remaining disengaged most of the time. I believe London Observed suggests that the British capital in the late 1980s became not only a more joyful transnational place, but also a deeply indifferent and apathetic city.5 In the last section of this chapter, I explore three stories from the volume, “In Defence of the Underground,” “Romance 1988” and “The New Café,” claiming that the transnationality unfolding in the volume is no longer characterized by a nostalgic vision. The stories abound in transitory spaces characters occupy before travelling elsewhere. Though these spaces allow them to experiment and connect playfully, the reader is seldom allowed to see the painful stories behind these joyful scenes. As I wish to point out,

For the role of empathy in London Observed, see Ágnes Györke, “Doris Lessing’s London Observed and the Limits of Empathy.”

5

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these apparently happy yet fleeting performances fail to offer empowering subject positions for the characters in the long run. The very title of “In Defence of the Underground” suggests that we are dealing with an exemplary city narrative: the underground is a frequently recurring trope in urban fiction. In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), for instance, which is one of the by now classical contributions to London fiction, the Underground is portrayed as a gigantic and hellish maze. In Lessing’s short story, however, though the Indian character behind the counter in the very first paragraph uncannily recalls Rushdie’s novel, travelling on the Tube is a much less perplexing experience: the journey allows the narrator to observe how Britain has changed in the past few decades and comment on postimperial nostalgia. Apart from observing people, she recalls conversations with other unnamed characters, such as an old woman, for instance, who likes complaining about the recent changes in the city: I know an old woman, I am sure I should say lady, who says, “People like you…” She means aliens, foreigners, though I have lived here for forty years… “have no idea what London was like. You could travel from one side of London to the other by taxi for half a crown […]. And everything was so nice and clean and people were polite. Buses were always on time and the Tube was cheap.” (London Observed, 82–83)

The episode, on the one hand, suggests that the narrator rejects nostalgia: while the old lady complains about inflation, the lack of politeness and cleanliness, the narrator judges her ironically. Intervening in the nostalgic lament, she remarks that “In Elizabeth I’s time you could buy a sheep for a few pence and under the Romans doubtless you could buy a villa for a silver coin, but currencies never devaluate when Nostalgia is in this gear” (83). The passage positions the narrator as a flâneuse: she is seen as an alien, a foreigner, who cannot sympathize with the endless complaints of “insiders,” though she has been a Londoner for forty years. On the heels of the Benjaminian flâneur (Parsons 2003, 226), she never entirely identifies with the spectacles she observes.

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“In Defence of the Underground,” just like many other short stories in the volume, depicts London as a constantly transforming and transitory space, which can only be explored via movement and unexpected encounters. The narrator records the stops on the Jubilee Line, such as St John’s Wood, for instance, the place “where kept women were put in discreetly pretty villas by rich or at least respectable lovers” (London Observed, 85), as Galsworthy believed, and also remarks that Abbey Road, where the Beatles recorded, is close to one of the stops (86). The journey offers a cultural map of the city, and the reference points are iconic images of Englishness, yet when the narrator describes the passengers on the tube, a profoundly transnational vision unfolds: we see two Japanese girls traveling “inside an invisible bubble” (84), a young black man with a dreamy look on his face, an Indian woman with a girl of ten wearing saris with cardigans (ibid.), and so on. It is this cultural eclecticism that characterizes the city in the volume; instead of evoking Rhodesia and colonial nostalgia, transnationality in London Observed is focused on the present moment and the future of London as a culturally diverse, multi-ethnic capital. Perhaps this subtle interest in the future of the city explains why the underground journey is not a labyrinth-like, perplexing experience in the short story, but a linear passage. The tube seems to be associated with order and clarity, as opposed to the chaos above the ground: You enter an unremarkable door, just as in a dream, and you are in an underground city, miles of it, with shops, restaurants, offices. There are people who actually like basement flats, choose them, draw curtains, turn on lights, create for themselves an underground, […] a place where everything is controlled by them, a calm concealed place, away from critical eyes […].” (90)

The underground seems to be the exact opposite of Lynda’s basement in The Four-Gated City, which is the place of chaos and madness, where both Lynda and Martha walk around in ecstatic circles. In this short story, the narrator travels to central London directly: she gets off at Trafalgar Square and plans to visit the National Gallery, a theatre, or the opera. She seems to enjoy living a middle-class life in London, tak165

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ing pleasure in what the capital has to offer, mainly its cultural life and ethnic diversity; the fact that she arrives t at her house at the end of the story also suggests that, despite being perceived as an “alien,” she has made the city her home. Nevertheless, I claim that the story offers a very limited view of the capital, which is allegorized by the underground journey itself: the narrator selects stops and sights while she ignores the hidden, less joyful narratives of the metropolis (ibid.). In other words, “In Defence of the Underground” suggests that the dynamic and open transnational city, though offering a stage for characters to experiment and explore, seldom lets the reader see what is behind the scenes. In another short story, “Romance 1988,” the theatricality that dominates the volume takes center stage. The story is about a brief encounter of two sisters, Joan and Sybil, who have not seen each other for a long time: Joan lives in Yorkshire, while Sybil came to London as a secretary two years ago. They meet at Heathrow Airport early in the morning, which is yet another transitory space in London Observed. While people attend to coffee, croissant and fruit juice, the sisters loudly talk about their private life: sitting in the raised part in the cafeteria in Terminal Three, “which is like a little stage” (102), the younger girl, Sybil, is determined to shock their audience. She shares details about her stormy relationship, including the decision to take an AIDS test with her fiancé, which “means much more than an engagement ring” (105), and their hard time with condoms, while people simply smile at each other, “probably feeling that they ought to be shocked or something” (ibid.). The city is portrayed as a grand transnational stage, since it is, of course, not only Londoners who listen to the girls at Heathrow, and the intimate stories shared in public remind the reader of the love stories in tabloids and cheap magazines. Not unlike “In Defence of the Underground,” then, this short story suggests that the reader can only access the surface of the capital, while meaningful intersubjective encounters remain unexplored, and probably unexplorable, in the volume. The two girls are seen as “two young adventurers” (ibid.), which is probably how they wish to present themselves. At the end of the story a young man, unimpressed by Sybil’s sexual adventures, condescendingly offers her help with condoms: “If you can’t get the hang of condoms, then just get in touch with me… no, no, any time, a pleasure!” (107). 166

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It is not a real invitation, as the narrator remarks, but more like a public rebuke: the man takes it on himself “to keep things in order” (ibid.), putting the girls in their proper place. The performance is over, literally, the order of the world is restored, and the girls look like a couple of giggling teenagers who have just realized how improperly they behaved. In other words, “Romance 1988” seems to suggest that the performances London allows women to stage are temporary and inadequate, failing to offer them empowering subject positions. “The New Café,” is also set in a public space, which is portrayed as a transnational locale: even though the café is located “in our main street” (97) next to a very British butcher, it is French and run by two Greeks. The narrator is one of the regular customers who likes observing “reallife soap operas” (ibid.), and the café, of course, offers plenty of these. The time is the summer of 1989, the year in which Soviet troops withdrew from Eastern Europe, yet this important historical event never appears in the short story. What we see in “The New Café” is yet another instance of a theatrical performance in a profoundly transnational milieu, which is later undermined by a silent and more meaningful dramatic act. Whereas in “Romance 1988” the narrator is undramatized and the girls are portrayed by a third-person and mildly judgmental voice, in “The New Café” she appears as a flâneuse again, sitting and observing people. Her knowledge is, obviously, rather limited: unlike in the case of Sybil and Joan, we do not know anything about the German girls; it is not even clear whether they come from East or West Germany, and the young man entertaining them is also a rather enigmatic character. This perspective, of course, makes the spectacles even more theatrical, and the reader, following close behind the narrator, feels like a voyeur observing private dramas. She records superficial details such as the girls’ smiles and “rows of dewy teeth” (98), and compares the man to a hawk “with a fluffy apprentice fierceness” (ibid.). Contrary to Arias’s argument, the narrator is often arrogant and judgmental, unlike the ideal flâneuse who would refrain from imposing a controlling gaze on the spectacles she observes (Wilson 2001, 78–79). In the second part of the short story, the narrator encounters the young man outside the Underground. He meets a woman with a baby 167

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who appears to be his child.. After the first embarrassed gestures, the man and the woman confront each other, spellbound: They stood there a long time, long at least for an observer, perhaps a minute or more, looking at each other, entranced. These two were a match, a fit, the same kind: you had to say about them as you do, rarely, say about a couple: they are two halves of a whole, they belong together. (London Observed, 100)

This is a rare moment in London Observed: instead of superficial remarks and alluring performances, we get a glimpse of a deeper drama, as if the narrative wanted to show another layer of urban life. However, the judgmental tone soon returns: “On the face of the charmed man chased emotions. There was regret, but a self-consciously dandyish regret […]” (101). Just like in “The Pit” or in “Debbie and Julie,” the dark side of city life unmasks the shallow performances staged in London, reminding the reader of the transitoriness of these joyful visions. It is the fleeting, the transitory, and the momentary that offer a sense of homeliness for the characters in this volume, most of whom are trying to avoid mental and physical pain. Therefore, I do not think that the city is a creative transitory space in London Observed, as Arias claims, which enables characters to establish mutual bonds.6 Rather, it becomes a transnational stage in the volume, which allows characters to experiement and connect, yet constantly reminds them of the inaccessible dark stories behind the scenes. As I have argued in this chapter, while in Lessing’s early fiction images of the African countryside are projected onto the Western metropolitan landscape, in London Observed the city is portrayed as a transnational space dissociated from nostalgic memories. London is depicted as a transnational city in the volume, but this transnationalism is no longer characterized by an engagement with the past: transitory multi-ethnic locations such as the Tube, Heathrow Airport and the New

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Arias claims that “[i]n the act of observing these scenes from everyday life, these twentieth-century female flaneurs render London as a potential space, a space of creativity, where mutual bonds are established between the flaneuse/spectator and the performers” (3). 168

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Café offer performative spaces for female characters to explore their subjectivities before embarking on an adventure elsewhere, or continuing their journeys home. These spaces, however, though they allow characters to connect playfully, fail to offer empowering subject positions in the long run: London appears to be a joyful transnational metropolis in the volume, yet this joy is the result of a refusal to engage with the painful experiences that linger on the margins of the text. References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Arias, Rosario. 2005. “‘All the World’s a Stage’: Theatricality, Spectacle and the Flaneuse in Doris Lessing’s Vision of London.” Journal of Gender Studies 14, no. 1: 3–11. De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2001. “Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy.” In Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, 13–36. Edited by Marianne DeKoven. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Györke, Ágnes. “Doris Lessing’s London Observed and the Limits of Empathy.” Etudes Anglaises 70.1 (2017): 63–77. Holden, Philip. 2003. “The Colony and the City: London, Heterotopias, and Common Histories.” New Literature Review 39 (2003): 105–124. Holmquist, Ingrid. 1980. From Society to Nature: A Study of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Lessing, Doris. 1993. In Pursuit of the English. London: Flamingo. ———. 1962. The Golden Notebook. New York: Ballantine. ———. 1993. The Four-Gated City. London: Flamingo. ———. 1994. London Observed. London: Flamingo. ———. 1997. Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962. London: Flamingo. McLeod, John. 2004. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge. 169

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Parsons, Deborah L. 2003. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Woman, the City and Modernity. Oxford: University of Oxford Press. Rose, Ellen Cronan. 1983. “Doris Lessing’s Citta Felice.” The Massachusetts Review 24, no. 2: 369–86. Singleton, Mary Ann. 1977. The City and the Veld: The Fiction of Doris Lessing. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Sizemore, Christine W. 2008. “In Pursuit of the English: Hybridity and the Local in Doris Lessing’s First Urban Text.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43, no. 2: 133–44. Sprague, Claire. 1987. Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caroline Press. Watkins, Susan. 2010. Doris Lessing: Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Yelin, Louise. 1998. From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wilson, Elizabeth. 2001. The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women. London: SAGE.

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The Mobile Imagination in European Women’s Writing Parallels Between Modern and Postmodern Times V ER A EL I A S OVA

“Now everything familiar was left behind.” (Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude”)

Mobility is primarily understood spatially, as moving from one place to another; or, it is understood temporally, as moving on a spatial axis, from the past to the future. Mobility, however, may also be seen in terms of innovation, i.e. moving from the old to the new, or from the familiar to the unfamiliar. This movement necessarily effects changes in imagination. The writing of mobility stems from such imaginative challenges to go beyond the fixed and the familiar in both content and style. Writers who take on such imaginative and stylistic challenges in response to mobility are the focus of this article. This small selection of authors, based on their unique grasp of mobility, spans a rather long period—the modern and postmodern periods of the twentieth century—when the innovative engagements of mobile imagination became at first manifested and later even intensified. I will first turn to British modernist women writers, focusing on their specific grasp on mobility, which may be termed the mobile imagination. Second, I will consider contemporary Central and South European writers who I see as inheritors of that particularly mobile imagination and its aesthetics. On the British modernist side, I will start with the canonical Virginia Woolf and continue with her less canonical, but no less groundbreaking, contemporary Katherine Mansfield.1 On the Cen In my dissertation, Women in the City: Female Flânerie and the Modern Urban Ima­ gination, I argued that both Woolf and Mansfield are female flâneurs (a figure characterizing modernity, as described by Charles Baudelaire and later by Walter Benjamin), urban walkers and observers who draw on their urban observation in order to articulate the modern female subjectivity.

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tral and Southeast European side, I will examine the Czech writer, Iva Pekárková, who was an immigrant in the United States, but who now lives in London, and the ex-Yugoslav writer, Dubravka Ugrešić, who currently resides in the Netherlands.2 Deeming these writers so connected across time and space reveals larger patterns and resonances in grappling with the mobile experience, and how it relates to creativity in women’s writing. It seems that the mobile imagination is rather mobile itself, transmuting throughout the twentieth century and across different locations. For grappling with such manifold transmutations of the mobile imagination across time and space, Susan Stanford Friedman’s critical approach, called “cultural parataxis,” seems particularly apt. Friedman proposes it as “a new kind of transnational approach” based on “a juxtaposition of texts from different times and places for the new light this geopolitical conjuncture sheds on each.” (Friedman 2005, 245). Friedman employs “cultural parataxis” not only as a method of analysis, but also as a “reading strategy,” one in which the reader is “looking for possible correspondences between the disjunct and the fragmentary,” a strategy that enables “a new kind of comparativism” (Friedman 2005, 245). I propose to read the modernist and postmodernist women writers through the lens of such a “cultural parataxis,” offering to draw parallels—“correspondences between the disjunct and the fragmentary”—between women writers of different cultures and temporalities. A major parallel between the modernist and postmodernist writers I examine can be seen in their employment of mobility in relation to the concept of the home. Modernist writers Woolf and Mansfield deem mobility as a prerequisite of imagination and thus for the writer’s creativity. In their works, they infuse the home with the element of mobility: if the home is a familiar and rigid place, thus lacking the element of mobility, it must be left by women in search of creative

2

Some of the following ideas on mobility in the twentieth century, derived from juxtaposing the contemporary writers Iva Pekárková and Dubravka Ugrešić, appeared previously in two of my articles. First, in “Immigration and Mobility in Iva Pekárková’s Gimme the Money. In this article, I also analyzed Woolf’s “Street Haunting” as an essay that anticipates the aesthetic of to contemporary immigrant literature. Second, it was also in my article, “Constructing Continuities: Narratives of Migration by Iva Pekárková and Dubravka Ugrešić.” 172

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adventures; or, conversely, the home has to be revamped to include the necessary element of mobility, rendering it an unfamiliar and fluid space open to new imaginative possibilities. The latter approach is continued and even expanded on by contemporary writers of the era of global mobility. The writers of the late twentieth century, when mobility had become almost a norm, thus deploy the mobile imagination in a transnational sense. They render the home, often their second or third home, as a space where cultural cross-fertilization and creativity flows, thrives, and derives new meanings. The mobile imagination, besides being an aesthetic category, also entails an important political dimension. In the handling of these writers, the mobile imagination pushes the boundaries of imagination back against familiar conceptual territories, such as the idea of domesticity precluding women’s imagination (for Mansfield, as I will show, the domestic space is full of motion), or the categorization of literatures according to the national origins of authors (most of these authors have multiple homes – literal as well as literary and cultural, thus drawing on multiple national literary traditions in their work). Metaphorically speaking, the home invested within the mobile imagination of its makers becomes a place of unrest, a place of imaginative rebellion against its purportedly safe comforts. It becomes a kind of restless home, or rather a restless “mode” of occupying it, one that Iain Chambers celebrates in Migrancy, Culture, Identity when calling for “a dwelling as a mobile habitat, a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging” (Chambers 1994, 4). Virginia Woolf: Walking as Writing in “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”

For Virginia Woolf (1882–1841), mobility represented the quintessence of modern life. In particular, it was urban mobility that occupied Woolf’s creative mind, as she sought to capture its dynamic, fleeting, 173

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and changeable nature. Clarissa Dalloway famously praises her London perambulations, avowing, “Really, it’s better than walking in the country” (6). Characters in Woolf’s novels move through cities (like Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway, 1925); plan family trips (To the Lighthouse, 1927); or move from one age, literary period, or even gender to another as in the case of the age-defying, gender-bending protagonist of Orlando: A Biography (1928). But it is especially in her short story-like essay, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927), where Woolf makes the most striking connection between walking and writing. It can be said that Woolf turns them into conjoined processes because she “tends to think of writing itself as like walking” (Bowlby 1997, 199). In “Street Haunting,” Woolf’s nameless (but most likely female) narrator walks through the city to buy a pencil. However, the unfolding of the writer’s imagination starts well before the pencil is obtained—that is, in the street, and during the walk itself. Thus the lack of a pencil, presented at first as a pretext for the walk, turns out to be an imperative: it seems that the narrator is in no hurry to reach the stationary shop; on the contrary, the longer the narrator walks, still pencil-less, the more inspired she becomes. In this essay, the street invites the narrator—the walker as well as the writer—to become mobile; this invitation also extends to her imagination. Specifically, the sphere of the street is strictly separate from the sphere of the home. At home, the narrator’s imagination is stifled by the familiar; it fails to flow: “For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience” (Woolf 1942, 21). In contrast, imagination takes wing, freed from the familiar, in the street: “We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room” (Woolf 1942, 21). For Woolf, mobility takes the form of escape from the familiar environment, which then affects the mobile imagination. The familiar—whether one’s own room, objects, or self—works as an obstacle 174

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precluding creative imagination; metaphorically speaking, the familiar puts shackles on the narrator’s feet, forbidding free walking, i.e. free imagination. Therefore, the narrator must flee the forms of the familiar, claiming that “to escape is the greatest of pleasures” and “street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures” (Woolf 1942, 35). By these “adventures,” the narrator means gaining access to the stories of the London streets (although they are rather glimpses of London life, fragments of stories), which crop up along the way; for example, there is “the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop” (Woolf 1942, 35). The noticeable peculiarity of these stories may then support the speculation that the narrator’s imaginative powers intensify as she keeps walking. Eventually, the narrator even tries to escape her “old” self, previously situated in the home full of familiar objects, in an attempt to reinvent her identity. This new perspective on her own self starts with questioning it: “Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?” (Woolf 1942, 28–29) The narrator, in search of a new vision of her own self, arrives at no answers; the whole process of searching instead serves as an example of the mobile imagination at work. The mobile imagination thus employed yields a creative enquiry—both into the category of the self itself and the way of telling the story of the self. The narrator’s questioning of herself from multiple viewpoints, which are created in process of walking through the city, questions the conventions of storytelling, such as the stability and singularity of the narrator. If the narrator’s self is neither stable, nor singular, then all the stories, even the stories of London streets, remain unresolved. In the handling of such a mobile, dislocated narrator, London remains a space open to interpretation—a mystery, and an invitation to further creative pursuits. One of the major characteristics of the mobile imagination is the pervasive sense of wonder. For the “street haunter,” wandering and 175

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wondering go hand in hand: to wander and wonder means to question the familiar first; but it also means to search for new paths towards more stories, mining the depths of inspiration: “And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?” (Woolf 1942, 35) In this respect, Bowlby concludes, “The essay ends with a celebration of fantasy, as creative mobility” (Bowlby, 1997, 217). However, the “street haunter’s” creativity, stemming from her mobile imagination, is just a temporary adventure, a short physical and mental exercise. Upon reaching the stationery shop, Woolf’s narrator-walker-writer turns back; she reaches a certain turning point, but does not venture beyond it. Nevertheless, armed with the mobile imagination acquired in the streets of London, it can be assumed that the home, upon her return, may also be affected. However, Woolf does not disclose whether this adventure, the temporary metamorphosis of a walker into a writer, ultimately leaves such a desirable after-effect. Katherine Mansfield: Moving Beyond the Familiar in “Prelude”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), one of the major female voices of modernism, was originally from New Zealand, but spent most of her life in Europe, especially Britain and France. Mansfield has become famous for her innovative short stories that manifest the modernist concern with simple, everyday epiphanies. Typically for Mansfield, these “small” adventures, epic dramas of everyday life, unfold in the interior world of a character’s mind, remaining quite unnoticed by the outside world. Unlike Woolf’s life, Mansfield’s life was heavily marked by dislocation, as she moved from New Zealand to London at the age of nineteen never to return home. Mansfield died young of tuberculosis in France, never achieving her full potential as a writer. In her most famous short story, “Prelude” (1918), mobility pervades everything that occurs. Drawing on her childhood experience of moving from Wellington to Karori in 1893, Mansfield depicts the Burnell 176

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family in the process of moving to a new house, including the child Kezia, who is based on Mansfield herself. The moving initiates a new life in a new home, but also coincides with a new kind of imaginative beginning: “Now everything familiar was left behind” (Mansfield 1956, 57). The family’s physical move to a new house, requiring the loss of the familiar, engenders a new kind of imagination—the mobile imagination—that from this point forward begins to shape the mental worlds of all the characters. As with Woolf, the shift toward mobile imagination happens in the moment of leaving the home that represents the familiar. Like Woolf, Mansfield thus links mobility and imagination, but goes even further. She raises the stakes by adopting the aesthetics of mobility more decisively and with a lasting effect. It can be said that she picks up where Woolf left off. Mansfield tells the story of the transformed home, the process of change that Woolf in “Street Haunting” left outdoors. She invites us in. The opening scene depicts the Burnell family moving to the new house: “There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers for any distance” (Mansfield 1956, 51). This scene signals the beginning of the new, mobile imagination: it zeros in on typical moving imagery, such as a buggy or luggage. This scene of children “wobbling” represents the instability or uncertainty entailed by leaving the old home; the “luggage” of old meanings is transferred to a new location, where it will be unpacked and re-installed. However, in contrast to Woolf, who situates the mobile imagination strictly in the space outside of the home, Mansfield shows how it works within the home. Her characters do not return to the old home, but instead move into a new one. Although their move does not entail a radical uprooting, as they set up a new house in close proximity to the old one and they keep the same furniture, their relocation still has a profound and lasting effect on them. The loss of the familiar becomes the new status quo: the new house, enveloped in a new cloak of unfamiliarity, becomes imaginatively unhinged, a space in which anything may happen. In this process, it becomes a place of new, mobile imagina177

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tion, a location from which old meanings may be questioned, and new, unexpected meanings may arise. Peter Adey, one of the leading scholars of mobility in the field of cultural and social geography, underscores the concept of mobility as “a kind of relation” (Adey 2010, 12). He claims that “mobilities are commonly involved with how we address the world” and that they “involve how we form relations with others and indeed how we make sense of this” (Adey 2010, 19). In Mansfield’s story, the characters are trying to establish feelings of connectedness to the new home, a process which, in turn, naturally changes them as well. The process of making relations to the unfamiliar has a defamiliarizing effect. Indeed, the story abounds in instances of new perspectives arising from newly-formed relations to the new place. Everyone in the Burnell family suddenly sees things differently—old objects are seen anew, people see each other anew, or they even see themselves anew. Unlike in Woolf’s essay, familiar objects inside the home (such as the old furniture that the Burnells moved to the new house) do not mirror the “old,” familiar identities. On the contrary, they challenge them. It is certainly Linda, Kezia’s mother, who is most affected by the transformative power of imagination, newly charged by the physical move. In one of her daydreams, Linda touches the floral pattern of wallpaper. At this moment, her finger becomes a magic wand that can turn objects in her surroundings to life and set them in motion: “In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Not only large substantial things like furniture, but curtains and the patterns of stuffs and fringes of quilts and cushions. [. . .] Yes, everything had come alive down to the minutest, tiniest particle, and she did not feel her bed, she floated, held up in the air” (Mansfield 1956, 66–67). Thus in her imagination, mobilized by the move, the new home is not a mere replica of the old. Although it resembles the old home, with the same furniture and decorations, it lacks the old stabilizing force. The new home turns out to be fluid, permanently unsettled. The whole environment seems to be charged with this magic: “A strange beautiful excitement seemed to stream from the house in 178

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quivering ripples” (Mansfield 1956, 57). Depicting the house in such evocative terms, Mansfield preserves the element of mobility in the new home; she keeps a sense of wonder there, rebuilding the home with the magic wand of Linda’s dreams. In contrast to Woolf’s narrator who meets the sense of wonder in the street because the familiar home precludes change, Mansfield’s invites the sense of wonder inside. Her childhood home thus never turns static; throughout the story, it remains new and unsettled as if always on its first day when it was freshly moved into. She purposefully keeps “everything familiar that was left behind” truly behind her. It has been argued that Mansfield’s employment of modernist aesthetics was effective precisely because of the distance from her New Zealand home. Elleke Boehmer argues in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature that for expatriate artists in London, such as Mansfield, “modernist urban reality correlated quite closely with their own experience, doubly or triply alienated from origins” (Boehmer 1995, 118). Moreover, Boehmer makes an important statement that this “new hybridity of aesthetic influence” engenders “the process of global transculturation in literature” (Boehmer 1995, 124). If for Mansfield, as Boehmer holds, displacement led to the adoption of the specific aesthetics of mobility, then an analogous argument can be made for other writers reflecting various forms of displacement. In the following, I will try to draw these connections. I argue that Mansfield’s treatment of mobility, her strategy of inserting the element of flow into the fixed structure of the familiar, which results in the imaginative unsettling of the home, resonates well with contemporary forms of mobility and migration. The kinds of mobile experiences at the end of the twentieth century become more commonly shared and multifarious. While some traumatic forms, such as exile, certainly persist, others become common forms of living. Pico Iyer, one of the contemporary writers writing about the changes in our experience and perception of global mobility, describes the overwhelming, almost dizzying feeling of what he calls “the Global Soul,” the soul defined by mobility, as the contemporary status quo: “And what complicates the confusions of the Global Soul is that, as fast as we are moving around the world, the world is moving around us; it is not just the individual but the globe with which we’re 179

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interacting that seems to be in constant flux. So even the man who never leaves home may feel that home is leaving him, as parents, children, lovers scatter around the map, taking pieces of him wherever they go. More and more of us may find ourselves in the emotional or metaphysical equivalent of that state we know from railway stations, when we’re sitting in a carriage waiting to pull out and can’t tell, often, whether we’re moving forwards, or the train next to ours is pulling back” (Iyer 2000, 27). Thus the writers of the late twentieth century seem to tap into the widths and depths of the late-twentieth century mobile experience, drawing on the rich inspirational potential that such a wide range of experience offers. They push the boundaries of the familiar even further into the unfamiliar, stirring the imaginary dust in their new homes ever more vigorously and across the globe. Iva Pekárková: The New Home on a New Planet in Gimme the Money

Iva Pekárková (1963–) is probably the most mobile of Czech writers, in both her life and her work. She left communist Czechoslovakia in 1985 and decided to live in the United States where she drove a cab, the inspiration for perhaps her most famous novel, Gimme the Money (1995, in English 2000), which features a taxi-driving heroine. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pekárková returned to the Czech Republic, but now lives in the UK. However, she does not simply move her domicile, but is a passionate traveler, blogger, and author of travel books. Pekárková’s three major novels have been translated into English. Although not intended as such, they may be read as a trilogy with a unifying theme of mobility. The three books are inspired by her own life, tracing a journey emblematic of the Czech émigré experience. First, in Truck Stop Rainbows (1989, in English 1992), set in 1980s Czechoslovakia, the main heroine is a hitchhiker who uses this mode of mobility to escape the confines of a totalitarian society. The next novel, The World is Round (1993, in English 1994), takes place in a refugee camp in Austria where the female protagonist, a Czech émigré, waits for permission to move to the United States. Finally, in Gimme the Money, the main heroine, a Czech immigrant, starts a new life as a cab driver in New York. 180

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In Gimme the Money, Pekárková employs mobile imagination to the utmost degree. The novel was written in the last decade of the twentieth century, but there are visible parallels with earlier decades, especially between the artistic handling of mobility by Pekárková and that of Mansfield. As in Mansfield’s “Prelude,” the heroine of the novel, Gin, moves to a new home. However, Gin’s second home, the United States, is geographically, politically, and culturally removed from her original home, Czechoslovakia. Moreover, Gin’s new home seems totally cut off from the old one. Thus Pekárková depicts Gin’s arrival to NYC not as a gradual process, but as a rupture or a shock: “Into a big city you have to fall, usually head first” (Pekárková 2000, 1). Severed from her previous life, Gin finds herself in a very distant universe, having landed on “a unique and thorny planet”—New York City (Pekárková 2000, 2). However, she feels at home in the Big Apple; she fits in immediately, feeling no desire to return to Czechoslovakia. There are hardly any memories of her past life; the focus is almost exclusively on her present experience. Pekárková renders Gin’s new life a completely new beginning, situated metaphorically and literally in the New World. On this new “planet,” mobility is ubiquitous. The city itself is described as embodying motion: “She felt the bridge twitching and vibrating under her wheels just like the muscles on a horse’s back” (Pekárková 2000, 2). It seems impossible not to be affected by these “vibrations” that “penetrated the whole person” (Pekárková 2000, 2). Inevitably, Gin internalizes these urban stimuli – metaphorically, they even become part of her body: “But when you submerged yourself in the City (like it was a whirling foam), then every cell of your body got permeated with its rhythm, its plasma circled in your veins [. . .]” (Pekárková 2000, 34). To some extent, this physical sensation representing mobility resembles Mansfield’s scene of children “wobbling” on the loaded buggy. As in “Prelude,” the novelty of the second home is expressed in terms of the physical sensation produced by motion. This holds true for Pekárková’s novel, too. Moreover, for Mansfield, the physical sensation symbolizes the instability entailed in the arrival at a new, unfamiliar home. For Pekárková, in contrast, the physical sensation of motion (perhaps even bordering on motion sickness) manifests itself as an overwhelming excitement, even an intoxication, with the new home’s mobile energy. 181

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Like in Mansfield’s work, the second home in Pekárková’s novel is permanently unsettled, but this notion is intensified. This is not only because of Gin’s intoxication with New York’s vibrant energy, but also because Gin defines the cab as a home. Taxi-driving is a typical job for new immigrants, so perhaps not surprisingly, Pekárková likens the cabs cruising the city, driven by immigrants, to their “four-wheeled homes away from home” (Pekárková 2000, 51). If mobility is seen as a kind of relationship, as Adey suggests above, then Gin’s interactions are not only with the vibrant and “vibrating” metropolis, but also with New Yorkers who bear the same characteristics of mobile energy. Pekárková uses various metaphors for these relationships. For example, she describes New York’s bridges as “tentacles” connecting the city to Gin’s body: “Tentacles emerged from her belly like she was an octopus, and their gentle suction cups stroked the whole world. The world stroke her back” (Pekárková 2000, 19). At the same time, New Yorkers, always on the move, relate to each other in a similar way, one that invades their personal physical space. In these mutual exchanges, their individual bodies, minds, and selves are redefined, or rewritten: “The interference of thoughts, opinions, ideas and heads, however, penetrated the entire city. ALL the heads here left their signature on one another; all the opinions, loves, hates, happy and unhappy thoughts, ideas, emotions, inspirations - absolutely everything that ever took place in human heads got reflected in the heads of all the others, whether they liked it or not, like rainbow-color interference stripes—” (Pekárková 2000, 33). There is yet another resonance between Pekárková’s and Mansfield’s understanding of the new home. As in “Prelude,” there remains little room for nostalgia. The thoughts of the characters, charged by the mobile imagination, are directed toward the new place almost entirely; their previous homes are barely remembered while their new homes are fully engrossing. It can be said that both writers replace nostalgia with wonder. They focus on creating new meanings as their characters form new relationships with their new homes. At the same time, this new relation-making is an unfinished process. Pekárková strongly emphasizes the open-endedness of Gin’s new life in a new country: “Gin, too, was an artist who was working day after day 182

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on a humongous canvas – the Manhattan Island – creating yellow pictures on it with jerky motions of her brush. Her tires stroked the surface of it, leaving their imprint, and Gin, day after day, was choosing again and again how to make her opening brush stroke” (Pekárková 2000, 63). The motif of new beginnings is prevalent in Gimme the Money. Gin, in Pekárková’s rendering, becomes an artist skilled in the art of mobility which continually yields something new. Gin’s imaginary painting, or the story that she writes, are works in progress: “It’s as if each taxi driver was unrolling on the asphalt behind him an infinitely long spool of thread” (Pekárková 2000, 53). Conclusively, the new home at the end of the twentieth century, at least if Pekárková may represent the trend, is one where the mobile imagination is intensified—to such a degree that it cannot stop. Dubravka Ugrešić: The Transmuting Home in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

Dubravka Ugrešić (1949–), an ex-Yugoslav author originally from Croatia, is a major voice in contemporary European literature. In her prolific career she has reflected on many faces and forms of exile. Ugrešić speaks from her own deeply personal experience. In the 1990s, after the dissolution of the multicultural state of Yugoslavia, she was viciously attacked by some in the Croatian media for her anti-nationalistic political stance in an ugly hate campaign, which contributed to her decision to leave Croatia. In her work, mostly novels and essays, Ugrešić creatively explores the tropes of exile and mobility, such as migration, displacement, loss, memory, identity and belonging while simultaneously relating them to questions of artistic creation. Thus her narrative style is polyphonous and intertextual, echoing various literary voices and juxtaposing a variety of experience—personal, observed, as well as strictly literary (e.g. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender – 2002, in English 1998; Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream – 1993, in English 1994; The Ministry of Pain – 2004, in English 2006).

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Ugrešić also addresses the problems of the global literary marketplace. She reflects on not fitting into various market-oriented categories that cater to a consumerist approach to art, such as national canons, exilic literatures, or women’s writing (e.g. Thank You for Not Reading – 2001, in English 2003; Karaoke Culture – 2010, in English 2011; Nobody’s Home – 2005, in English 2007). Ugrešić’s artistic, cultural, and even political mission lies not only in crossing these boundaries, but in simultaneously exposing their shaky premises. Indeed, Ugrešić’s current situation, as an author and cultural ambassador, is in sync with this mission. Although currently living in the Netherlands, she lectures, reads, and continues to engage generally with literary audiences across the globe. Ugrešić’s experimental novel-memoir, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996), takes place in Berlin, the city of the narrator’s temporary sojourn during the civil war in Yugoslavia. Ugrešić’s narrator walks through the Berlin that has become her temporary home, but unlike the homes of Pekárková or Mansfield, there is no aspiration to settle there permanently. The narrator does not quite fit in with the city itself, but rather with the stories that she meets on the way. The collage of stories of similarly displaced people creates a specific polyphonous milieu, in which Ugrešić’s own story is steeped. However, the novel should not be read through the lens of autobiography. Jasmina Lukić, in her article, “Witches Fly High: The Sweeping Broom of Dubravka Ugrešić,” warns against a simplistic reading of the novel as merely an autobiography: “But it is not her personal story that Dubravka Ugrešić wants to narrate there, although the novel is written in the first person, and it might seem as if the author speaks about herself” (Lukić 2000, 389). Here Lukić points especially to Ugrešić’s own warning at the novel’s very beginning, in which she states: “The question as whether this novel is autobiographical might at some hypothetical moment be of concern to the police, but not to the reader” (Ugrešić 1999, ix). In The Museum, mobility takes a multitude of forms, ranging from mobility understood in terms of displacement, entailing the cutting of previous familial and familiar ties, to mobility presented mainly as a process of making new relationships. It can be said that Berlin is a mobile place. Ugrešić’s narrator constantly moves across Berlin’s terri184

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tory, exploring its parts from a mobile perspective. But unlike New York, Berlin’s mobility lies more in its transmutations than its traffic jams: “Berlin is a mutant-city. Berlin has its Western and its Eastern face: sometimes the Western one appears in East Berlin, and the Eastern one in West Berlin. The face of Berlin is criss-crossed by the hologram reflections of some cities. If I go to Kreuzberg I shall arrive in a corner of Istanbul, if I travel by S-Bahn to the edges of Berlin, I can be sure I reach the outskirts of Moscow. That is why the hundreds of transvestites who pour out on to the streets of Berlin on one day in June each year, are the real and at the same time the metaphorical face of its mutation” (Ugrešić 1999, 104). Interestingly, these transmutations are described in terms of reflections of other cities. Traveling across Berlin thus seems analogous to traveling across the whole world—or at least across Europe. There is hardly one solid, totalizing image of Berlin that Ugrešić offers; at any given moment Berlin may transform into a different metropolis. Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, points out this uncanny feeling, typical for Ugrešić’s aesthetic: “Immigrant Berlin exists in the stolen air and unlicensed spaces, in the invisible ghosts and imaginary maps superimposed on the city. This other Berlin is composed of secret alleys, basements, crossroads” (Boym 2001, 211). Besides walking across Berlin, or passing through it for the duration of one’s stay, the characters of Ugrešić’s novel also move along the axis of time. There is a myriad of voices from the past, equally as audible as those in the present; they bring Berlin alive, turning it into a place of ongoing conversations. The speakers share the view of Berlin as a hard-to-locate place defined by flux rather than stability. For example, this is the view of Viktor Shklovsky, whose voice appears when he says that Berlin is “hard to describe,” or of other interlocutors who share his view on the fleeting nature of the place. They see Berlin as “more of what there’s not than what there is”—in short, as “a non-place” (Ugrešić 1999, 221). Ugrešić creates a narrative of meetings, crossroads and conversations—a narrative of “interferences,” to use Pekárková term. The paths, voices and stories of migrants, exiles, or travelers intersect, thereby cowriting the story of Berlin as well as the story of their presence in a place that has become their surrogate home. Again, Ugrešić even includes imaginary encounters in the equation: “People I once knew, people I 185

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know, and those I have yet to meet, flash in Berlin like shooting stars, pass like shadows from some other life, appear in an instant like faces from a nightmarish dream, meet and intersect in me, past, present and future” (Ugrešić 1999, 168). Distinct from the other authors in this article, Ugrešić places the individual experience of mobility as well as the concept of the home within a larger historical context: “Things in Berlin acquire the most various interconnections. Berlin is Teufelsberg, a walrus which has swallowed too many indigestible items. That is why one has to tread carefully in Berlin streets; without thinking, the walker could step on someone’s roof. The asphalt is only a thin crust covering human bones. Yellow stars, black swastikas, red hammers and sickles crunch like cockroaches under the walker’s feet” (Ugrešić 1999, 161). Thus for a walker in Berlin, mobility is far from a smooth ride, a distinct difference from Pekárková’s depiction of life being an easy ride for the immigrants in New York. Berlin pedestrians, in contrast, are in danger of tripping over buried fragments of history, possibly breaking their legs. For Ugrešić, the second home is hardly brand new because it has been occupied by others before. The echoes of the past, perhaps even its ghosts, have a bearing on all who pass through present-day Berlin. Ugrešić thus turns Berlin into a rather strange tunnel connecting its past and future. Similar to the second homes of Mansfield or Pekárková, although for very different historical and political reasons, Ugrešić’s second home is one full of traffic, physical and imaginary. It remains permanently unsettled. Ugrešić’s Berlin is a place where current dwellers keep tripping over the fractures and fragments of the past. However, Ugrešić balances these risks of losing one’s footing with a unique opportunity. In the streets of Berlin, it is also possible to stumble upon fragments of art. In the novel, Berlin is a place of “interconnections” between literary figures as well as literary histories. The cracked asphalt of Berlin streets is a dangerous surface to walk on, exposing pedestrians to disturbing encounters, but it may also lead to crossing paths with such literary figures as Miroslav Krleža, Vladimir Nabokov, or the aforementioned Viktor Shklovsky, the writers who once walked in Berlin as well.

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Ugrešić’s passers-by are exiles running away from their homes, but also running into others’ stories, histories, or literatures. In this way they may have an opportunity to transform their stories or selves, to tell them anew. In another work, a collection of essays, Thank You For Not Reading, Ugrešić relates the experience of exile to the process of profound transformation, more precisely to “an exceptionally appealing myth of metamorphosis” (Ugrešić 2003, 128). She states: “Exile is a total change, achieving a different life, realizing the daydream of how it would be to wake up one day in a different town, in a different country, perhaps as another person. Exile is a kind of a coveted trial: we all have a hidden longing to test ourselves in the exam of life. Exile is that dream of transformation” (Ugrešić 2003, 131). Exile, as a “dream of transformation,” is expressed in spatial terms, as a relocation. Here Ugrešić renders exile not only as a state of one’s current placelessness, or statelessness, but also as a mental state marked by the mobile imagination. In The Museum, Ugrešić casts Berlin as a constantly mutating “non-place,” as a suitable mental space for such a transformation. At the same time, this transformation requires a state of wonder, leading to the permanent questioning of one’s own status, identity, future destiny and destination. Throughout the novel, the narrator continually examines her own identity in a way reminiscent of Woolf’s “street haunter,” inquiring about different kinds of selves at different street corners. At the same time, this is also an artist’s dream, a “daydream” reminiscent of Linda’s fantasy in Mansfield’s “Prelude,” in which her imagination turns familiar objects into magical ones. For Ugrešić, this kind of process—the mobile imagination in the form of daydreaming—turns an exile into an artist. Throughout the novel, recurring questions appear: “Wo bin ich?” and “Was ist Kunst?”3 Moreover, these questions are asked in German, to mark their defamiliarizing poignancy.4 However, there are as many

3 4

“Who am I?”, “What is art?” [translation mine]. Ugrešić 1999, 157. In terms of the strategies of defamiliarization, Dimitar Kambourov, in “Exile or Exodus: D. Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Ilyia Troyanov’s The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner,” argues that the defamiliarization of the home in exilic literature, such as in Ugrešić’s Museum, brings a different kind of pain, as well as its own aesthetic, than that caused by nostalgia. 187

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answers as there are exiles and artists—or, perhaps more poignantly, exiles-as-artists. One of them, Sissel, may speak for all: “’Was ist Kunst?’ I ask Sissel. ‘I don’t know . . . An artistic act is always some sort of alteration in the world,’ says Sissel” (Ugrešić 1999, 166). In this conversation, the exiled person as an artist, equipped with the mobile imagination that intensifies all dreams of transformation, uses art to effect change beyond his or her world. Ugrešić thus deems the state of exile as one that potentially sets into motion an unpredictable chain reaction that connects individual minds, cultures, territories or situations. For an exile-as-artist, as one of the speakers conveys, “Art is an endeavor to defend the wholeness of the world, the secret connection between all things . . . Only true art can assume a secret connection between the nail on my wife’s little finger and the earthquake in Kobe” (Ugrešić 1999, 161). In her recent essay, “The Transnational Turn, Comparative Literature and the Ethics of Solidarity: Engendering Transnational Literature,” Jasmina Lukić argues, “the position Dubravka Ugrešić wants to create for herself and for her writing” is “that of an author, who should be read outside the frameworks of any national literature” (Lukić 2014, 45). A similar claim may be made on behalf of all four writers addressed in this paper. These writers, constantly and creatively pushing back against the conceptual boundaries of the home, enable new imaginative flows in new directions. The mobile imagination that they have been employing, as I have tried to show, manifests itself in a proliferation of modalities of escaping the familiar as well as in multifarious forms of mobility—a walk across the city, a move to a new house, immigration, exile, as well as wanderings across disparate literary times and territories. Within such diverse modalities of mobility, these writers seem to rely on a common artistic tool: they deploy the sense of wonder that accompanies the act of leaving the comfort zone of the familiar, and use this newly gained sensibility to rejuvenate the stale and stable structures of women’s lives. This rejuvenation is only possible by way of exchanges, or conversations, with the ever-changing world outside the home, a space that never ceases to supply inspiration. In the words of a prominent scholar of mobility, Rosi Braidotti, these writers employ nomadism as an active 188

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artistic and political strategy. As Braidotti points out, nomadism should not be mistaken for a politically and artistically purposeless state of “homelessness of compulsive displacement” (Braidotti 2011, 57). She argues that the nomad as the “central figuration for postmodern subjectivity” is not a “disembedded marginalized exile” but engages in “active nomadism” (Braidotti 2011, 55). Embracing nomadism as an “active” approach lies in challenging the reading public to examine, if not expand, their own mobilities across their own boundaries and borders. The mobile imagination in the literary texts I have examined certainly calls for transnational forms of mobilities, and thus also transnational forms of writing and aesthetics. Drawing on Azade Seyhan’s words regarding transnational literature, these texts have the capacity to speak to contemporary audiences of readers and scholars across the globe: “Texts that sensitize the reader to the power of language, its capacity to mark cultural differences, and its responsibility to respond creatively to cultural difference, contribute new structures of knowledge to the body of criticism” (Seyhan 2000, 14). Woolf, Mansfield, Pekárková and Ugrešić are writers who make it imperative to read the narrative of the home with a grain of salt, or perhaps two grains, refusing to settle into any given space, territory, or canon. References Adey, Peter. 2010. Mobility. New York: Routledge. Boehmer, Elleke. 1995. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bowlby, Rachel. 1997. “Walking, Women and Writing.” In Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 191–219. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Chambers, Iain. 1994. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. New York: Routledge. Eliášová, Věra. 2014. “Constructing Continuities: Narratives of Migration by Iva Pekárková and Dubravka Ugresic.” In Between History and Personal 189

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Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millenium, edited by Draga Alexandru, Maria Sabina, Mădălina Nicolaescu, and Helen Smith. Vienna: LIT Verlag, 229–248. ———. 2009. “Women in the City: Female Flânerie and the Modern Urban Imagination.” PhD. diss., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA. ———. 2006. “Immigration and Mobility in Iva Pekárková’s Gimme the Money.” In Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization. Special Issue of Contemporary Literature. Edited by Rebecca Walkowitz. 47, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 536–668. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2005. “Paranoia, Pollution and Sexuality: Affiliations between E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” In Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Edited by Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 245–261. Iyer, Pico. 2000. The Global Soul: Jet Lags, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. New York: Vintage Books. Kambourov, Dimitar. 2010. “Exile or Exodus: D. Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Ilyia Troyanov’s The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner.” In Shoreless Bridges: South East European Writing in Diaspora. Edited by Elka Agoston-Nikolaeva. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 149–181. Lukić, Jasmina. 2014. “The Transnational Turn, Comparative Literature and the Ethics of Solidarity: Engendering Transnational Literature.” In Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millenium. Edited by Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina, Mădălina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith. Vienna: LIT Verlag, 33–51. ———. 2000. “Witches Fly High: The Sweeping Broom of Dubravka Ugresic.” In The European Journal of Women Studies. 7.3 (2000): 385–93. Mansfield, Katherine. 1956. “Prelude.” Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 51– 96. Pekárková, Iva. 2000. Gimme the Money. Trans. Raymond Johnston and Iva Pekárková. London: Serpent’s Tail. Seyhan, Azade. 2000. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP. Ugrešić, Dubravka. 1999. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. New York: New Directions.

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———. 2003. “The Writer in Exile.” Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. Normal, IL. Dalkey Archive Press, 127–148. Woolf, Virginia. 1942. “Street Haunting. A London Adventure.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 20–36.

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Romanian Women’s Migration Online Versus Offline Stories M A DA L I N A N I C O L A E S C U

Romania is currently experiencing an unprecedented wave of emigration, the largest in its history. The landmarks for this dramatic increase in emigration were the years 2001, when the necessity for a visa was abolished for Romanian citizens travelling to the Schengen countries, and the year 2007, when the country was admitted to the European Union (Sandu 2006, 2010). Out of a total of nineteen million, the estimated figure of Romania’s population, more than three million people are living and working abroad (Dragulin 2011, 97). The percentage of women involved in this process of migration was initially lower than that of men, but it has caught up in the past few years. Thus, the percentage of Romanians working abroad who are women has tripled since 2001 and has presently risen to 55 per cent of all Romanian migrant workers (Sandu 2010). A large number of the women migrants coming from rural areas are young and low-skilled workers, whereas women from urban areas tend to be higher qualified and older. The job that the less-skilled workers hold most frequently is that of domestic worker (sixty per cent)—cleaning the house or taking care of the elderly and children (Sandu 2006, 23). Workers in agriculture—which are widely known as “capsunari” (strawberry pickers)—only make up fifteen per cent of the migrants. The remaining 25 per cent are high-skilled workers from a variety of fields ranging from medicine and business to computer science and architecture (Dragulin 97–100). Most of the research on Romanian migration has not had a gender dimension; it is mostly the news media or, more recently, narratives posted on the Internet that offer greater exposure to women’s experiences of dis- and relocation in the host countries. Widely-read women’s journals like Formula AS have been publishing letters on the plight of being a Romanian emigrant: no matter how hard a Romanian woman

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may try to integrate in the society of the host country, they find, she will be othered and excluded. Another category of letters and articles in the press are so called “success-stories,” often published in Romanian editions of glossy global journals like Elle and Cosmopolitan, or in the local journal Unica, and which mostly foreground the glamorous aspects of the experience of highly-skilled women working abroad. In the case of successful women, migration is no longer a mere strategy of survival, but the expression of a desire for mobility (Laliotou 2007, 51). Access to the labor market is provided for by educational opportunities, such as scholarships to pursue Master or Doctoral degrees in these countries. A new wave of success stories has been registered in online journals or forums addressing issues of migration and enlisting a transnational audience, located in the various host countries in the European Union, Canada, the United States and Australia, as well as Romania. Unlike the stories in the glossy magazines, the online narratives are unambiguously authored by the migrant women themselves. Their views are expressed without the mediation that publishing in a women’s journal presupposes. This does not mean, however, that the authors of online stories can utterly neglect the pro-migration policies of the sites they post their stories on. The organizers of the Toronto Forum for the Romanian Diaspora, for example, have made it explicit that their policy is to show readers in Romania that “in Canada you can live the life you deserve.” Both offline and online stories share the same model of success and are informed by the pro-migration ideology currently dominant among the Romanian population (Grigan 2001, 187). In keeping with this ideology, migration is associated with success; not to migrate is to accept inevitable social and economic failure. However, the pressure audience expectations exert on online writers when fashioning their migration stories is far greater than the one exerted on offline writers. This is largely due to the inherently dialogic structure of online communication, with feedback immediately provided about the story. The authors are thereby made aware of the immediate impact of their stories and of the social responsibilities they have to share for publishing them. As Jennifer Brinkerhoff has noted, 194

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online stories contribute to the cohesion of the group of migrants constituted around them and are of great importance in establishing bridges with the host society or the society in the country of origin (Brinkerhoff 2011, 52). Authors are often reminded that their life stories are supposed to provide moral support to their fellow migrants to cope with the traumas of dislocation. As Ruth Page has shown in a discussion of women’s blogs, the interaction between the storyteller and the audience shapes not only the story, but also the life experiences of both storyteller and audience (Page 2011, 224). When these expectations are unmet because of “undue” insistence on the obstacles and failures in the migration process, the audience is quick to react negatively. On the contrary, stories that highlight the writer’s determination to stick it out at all costs get the audience’s wholehearted support.1 The transnational experiences of migrants have increasingly become a favorite topic of Romanian fiction, displacing the earlier obsession with our socialist experiences. Fictional narratives, many of them written by writers who are migrants themselves, can be looked upon as responses to transnational experiences, as well as attempts to rewrite and make cultural sense of the large number of non-fictional narratives that have been accumulated in the media and in online forums. This chapter sets out to examine recent Romanian fictional narratives on migration by contrasting them with their non-fictional online alternatives. With respect to the online stories, focus will be placed on those posted on UK diaspora forums such as Romȃni in UK, Romȃni online in UK or in the online journal Confluente, where an interesting diary—“Jurnalul londonez” (London Journal)—was posted. As to fictional stories, I will be concentrating on Ioana Baetica Morpurgo’s novel Imigrantii (The Immigrants), with some references to Aura Imbarus’s autobiographical story Out of the Transylvania Night and to other novels written by East European migrant writers.2

For more details on the similarities and differences between migration stories published in Romanian journals and those posted on migration forums, see my “Romanian Women’s Success Stories as Transnational Migrants” in Draga-Alexandru et al. 2013, 99–109.. 2 Ioana Baetica Morpurgo pursued her PhD studies at the University of Exeter, got married in the United Kingdom, and has been living and working there for the past ten years. She has also been contributing to both Romanian and British lit-

1

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One important element that the non-fictional and fictional stories discussed in this chapter have in common is the fact that they are written in Romanian and designed for Romanian audiences. However, the audiences targeted differ significantly: the online stories are written for transnational communities of Romanian migrants, or aspiring migrants, whereas Morpurgo’s novel is addressed to an audience that is only tangentially transnational since it is made up of the present readership in Romania. In this respect, Morpurgo shares common ground with other Romanian writers belonging to the diaspora (Dani Rockhoff, Bogdan Suceava, Sanda Golopentia and partially Mirela Roznoveanu), who live and work in Western countries but continue to write in Romanian for a Romania-based audience. This group of writers have chosen to write about Romanian migration in the language of their home country rather than that of their host country, and have adopted a particular position different from that of the majority of Romanian migrant novelists who have decided to write in the languages of their respective adoptive countries. We can also mention the American-based author Aura Imbarus, whose autobiography Out of the Transylvania Night won a Pulitzer prize, the Canadian Felicia Mihali writing both in French and in English, or Gabriela Melinescu, writing in French, Leyana Galis, writing in Italian, and Alina Diaconu, writing in Spanish. This chapter contends that the geographical, linguistic and communication site from which the transnational stories are produced has important effects on the narrative and ideological positions adopted. Life stories of migration published in Romanian for a Romanian public represent migration from altogether different positions than the stories representing Romanian migration to, for example, an American audience. Morpurgo adopts radically different strategies from those of Imbarus, as she does not have to win over a “foreign” audience, nor does she have to comply with traditional conventions, widely accepted in the United States, of presenting migration as a journey of acculturation and assimilation. In this respect, Morpurgo’s narrative and ideological positions are closer to that of the online narrators. At the same time, Morpurgo does not have to cope erary journals and has written two novels in Romanian shortlisted for the most important Romanian literary prizes. 196

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with the immediate pressure exerted by an online audience of migrants or with the constraints imposed by the organizers of online forums. The differences in the medium in which the narratives are made public are as important as those produced by different cultural locations: a life story posted on a forum for an audience that will provide immediate feedback and that may well expect to derive psychological and moral support from it differs radically from fictional narratives published offline to a traditional, more heterogeneous and non-interactive public. What topics and areas of concern do Morpurgo’s fictional narrative and the online non-fictional ones have in common? One cluster of issues can be grouped under the heading of citizenship. There is a general complaint in all women’s narratives, whether online or fictional, that women migrants in Europe are treated as second-class citizens and that the universal rights warranted by European citizenship are not applicable to Romanian citizens who live and work outside Romania. Recent anti-migration discourses in countries like the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands have led to the racialization of Romanian migrants in the European Union and to discrimination against them in the job market and the state administration, all of which are a blatant transgression of EU norms. Romanian women share this position with women from Ukraine or Moldova. As they are associated with poverty and poor countries, they are treated worse than workers from Poland or Lithuania, being considered “not quite white.”3 Women writing to the journals describe their low social status in the host country as one of servants if not slaves: “suntem slugi la straini” (we are servants to strangers). Frustration and resentment caused by the injury to both their self-esteem and their sense of national pride recur in all types of migrant narratives.4

3



4

On the violation of EU norms and new forms of racism, see Nastuta 2011 and Druga 2011. On the racialization of East European migrant women and in particular of those coming from Romania, Moldova or the Ukraine, see Enrica Capussotti, Ioanna Lalioutou and Dawn Lyon, “Migrant Women in Work,” and Enrica Capussotti, “Modernity versus Backwardness,” in Passerini et al. 2007, 122–38, 199–206. On the precarious living and working conditions of Romanian and Bulgarian women in Italy, see Capussotti et al. 2007. On the exploitation of domestic workers coming from Eastern Europe and South America, with reference to Romanian women, see Capussotti et al. 2007. On the psychological trauma of Romanian domestic workers in Italy, see Sirghie 2012. 197

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Lavinia, the author of the London Journal, is particularly disappointed with the British authorities, who seem to grant priority to non-EU members, whereas she, an EU citizen, has to wait months on end to receive the much-desired NIN, which enables her to work in the UK. Morpurgo’s characters insist on the restricted agency available to them in the host country, where they feel they are relegated to a subaltern position. As a Romanian in the United Kingdom, “the only role available to you is to confirm, not to change anything” admits Maria (The Immigrants, 187). Sabina, though taking dedicated care of her employer, cannot overcome the stigma attached to being a migrant. Even the successful broker in the City, Traian, suffers from negative stereotyping: his British-born colleagues call him either Dracula or a communist. The positions of inferiority the women in this novel find themselves in affect their chances of success. The only viable alternative accessible to them is to put their bodies up for sale—either as Orientalized wives of exotic beauty (Maria), as domestic workers (Sabina), or as sexual workers (Alina). The very mentioning of one’s nationality is traumatic, as Maria confesses: I have already reached the third stage in stating my citizenship. The first stage lasted a little more than a year after my arrival in the UK: I used to say I was Romanian with a certain pride. I don’t remember why. During the second brief stage, when somebody asked me, I would answer apologetically, as if I was sorry I had to admit to where I came from. Now as I said, I have reached the third stage, where I take my: “I am from Romania” out of my pocket like a knife and wave it defensively in front of whoever happens to be inquiring. “I am from Romania, so what?! Do you have a problem with that?!” (142)

Maria thinks that Romanian migrants will forever be mere “venetici” (a derogatory term for strangers) who “keep knocking at the honeyed doors of Western Europe and will not be let in” (187). Laura, in the forum Romani online UK, similarly admits that: “I am looked at as a stranger here in the UK, everywhere I go, because I am a stranger.” Ruxandra Trandafoliu quotes another female participant in the forum discussion, stating, “I have been avoiding confessing that I am 198

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a Romanian because the reaction is so great” (Trandafoiu 2013, 67). Most of the time, however, complaints about discrimination against Romanians on account of their ethnic origin are censured in the online forums. Participants in diaspora forums as a rule endorse the dominant assimilationist, Orientalizing and even racializing discourse. The online migrant community tends to dismiss complaints about discrimination as symptoms of failure in the process of integration. The reality the complaints describe is either occluded or put down exclusively to the migrants’ moral or intellectual inadequacy. Interestingly, Aura Imbarus, the author of Out of the Transylvania Night, adopts a similar position towards success or failure in integration. The narration of her life story as an immigrant to America is informed by her attempt to persuade the American audience of the legitimacy of her voice and by the need to compel their belief in her story. Sidonie Smith has pointed out that immigrants’ life stories that are critical of the American reality stand fewer chances of acceptance than the assimilationist stories where immigrants refashion themselves as new American subjects (Smith and Watson 2001, 106). It is fiction addressing a public “back home,” like Morpurgo’s novel, that can afford the “luxury” of being less wary of the audience’s expectations and can thus be critical of both the Western host society and the dominant ideology of migration at home. Novelists like Morpurgo are less constrained in their questioning of unexamined assumptions beneath migration rhetoric, such as the superiority of Western modernity versus the backwardness of more or less unenlightened countries, such as Romania. Despite the stressful experience of discrimination, fictional and nonfictional narratives share a persistent positive valorization of migration. The stories insist over and again that success in the host country is possible, that everyone “can make it,” provided they work hard and do not give up the fight. Lavinia, in her London Journal, considers the obstacles encountered as challenges in her personal growth and development. All the suffering is worthwhile; it is part of a rite of passage and is invested with the moral significance of personal development and enrichment.5 She comes to learn the importance of self-reliance and independence,

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On the Romanian migrants’ desire to read their experience as a form of enhancement, a journey of initiation, see Trandafoiu 2013. 199

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thus cutting herself loose from the collectivist mentality she was raised in. Determination and courage (involving action and responsible risktaking) come next. Lavinia’s narrative moves in the direction of a Bildungsroman. The Romanian migrant is eager to learn the values and lessons of Western individualism. An important template for organizing her migration experience is the Western myth of emancipation and of the self-made man. Arguably this template was already available to her in Romania as a component of the dream of migrating to the “West” and has been reinforced during her stay in the United Kingdom. Discursive insistence on the need to “make it” in the United Kingdom is enhanced by the participatory structure that the net-stories are embedded in. The transnational audience of Lavinia’s stories encourages her determination to “stick it out against all odds,” rather than admit defeat and return home. As Jennifer Brinkerhoff has pointed out in her investigation of digital diasporas, a major role of this type of internet communication is to facilitate psychological empowerment and confidence building, to ease off the stress and cultural anxiety migrants might experience (Brinkerhoff 2011, 52, 208). It should therefore come as no surprise that less positive, more critical positions are quickly dismissed by the audience, who remind all nostalgic persons of the poverty and squalor in Romania. Admitting defeat is tantamount to committing suicide. Many of the participants in the Romȃnia online in UK or Romȃni in UK admit to having been determined to migrate by a collective dream defining the West as a land of plenty and promise. This dream was first articulated by the dissident diaspora during the socialist period, and then it was reinforced by the first success stories that migrants told their fellows back home. Writing a success story of one’s migration to the West became a must, as it not only legitimized the separation from home, but also consolidated the higher social status that living and working in the West granted to migrants in the eyes of their compatriots back home. Lavinia writes in her London Journal that what convinced her to emigrate was a desire for mobility that would give her the possibility of enjoying the much-praised freedoms and opportunities British society can offer. Though she keeps repeating that she might just as well go home if she fails to get a job in London, she acknowledges that she has 200

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risked everything to make it in the United Kingdom. This is indicative that, for her, too, migration is a life project rather than merely a temporary exposure to another culture. The dream of the West of material plenitude and personal realization has fuelled the migrants’ actions in Morpurgo’s novel as well. Maria tells about the dream that developed from the obsession with the empty shelves of the stores of her socialist childhood. By deciding to marry a well-off Brit, Maria also accomplishes her parents’ dream. Maria reaches the conclusion that she has married these dreams: I married a dream that was not even my own. I married the oranges that never reached us in Tulcea, I married because of the empty shelves in the superstore which was silent, somber and deserted… I married my mother’s phantom fur coat and father’s expensive tobacco, the tennis rackets he never had… I married my parents’ wasted youth… I didn’t marry Dorian but a symbol, a projection. I’m now living in the tepid shadow of a satisfaction that is foreign to me and belongs to someone else. To mother and father who wanted me to experience what was out of their reach. And they nudged me onto it. (192)

Even if the migrants become painfully aware of the gap between their initial dreams and the reality of migration, they do not express the desire to return to Romania for good. They are determined to live out the story of personal development and success in spite of all odds and all sacrifices, as they are convinced that Romanian society holds out no promising future for them. As Cristian Bocancea points out, the migrants are strongly attached to the ideals of liberty, equality and personal development and are ready to accept the sacrifice of these principles in the present so as to reclaim them in a not very distant future (Bocancea 2011, 5). Returning to Romania, on the contrary, signifies a return to prison and hopelessness (Trandafoiu 2013, 38–40). Morpurgo’s characters reject all prospects of returning to Romania unless as tourists or researchers. Traian, who goes back to Romania to dig up the remains of his idyllic childhood, hoping to cure his estrangement and isolation that borders on despair, 201

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cannot connect with either his family or friends, nor can he resonate with their political concerns and interests. He has a nightmarish vision of his split self, one part of which re-settles in Romania, yet is unemployed. He no longer knows how to cope with the authorities and has very grim prospects. Maria and Sabina do not even go back home but arrange for their family to come over to visit them, or in Sabina’s case, to join her for good. Morpurgo’s novel echoes the undoing of the myth of the great return in Kundera’s novel Ignorance. At the same time, Traian’s crisis during his stay in his hometown resembles the mood of disappointment and alienation that Kassapova experiences revisiting Sophia in the novel Street without A Name. At the end of this novel, the narrator has a similar nightmare in which the reality of her home country is assimilated to the experience of drowning and she is gasping for breath, desperately trying to escape from it. So far the paper has discussed the convergence of online and offline migration stories. Where do fictional and non-fictional narrations diverge? First of all, fiction seems to be lagging behind reality as it is represented in the net-stories. In Morpurgo’s novel, characters conspicuously lack the social network that Lavinia relies on and that is key to the success of the migration enterprise. Not only does Lavinia receive strong psychological support from the participants in the forum where she is posting her diary, but her story insists on the material help that Romanians living in the United Kingdom and their British friends have lent her. Lavinia repeatedly expresses her gratitude to her friends, whose help enabled her “to survive in the London jungle.” Her story never voices the feeling of despair due to loneliness and alienation that Morpurgo’s characters experience. The latter never meet with their countrymen, as they steadily avoid such contacts. In Morpugo’s novel, there is no community of Romanians where the characters (male or female) can find comfort. Modern technology, such as e-mail, Facebook, Skype or other socializing sites, proves vacuous and disappointing. Neither Maria nor Sabina make use of the Internet. Sabina makes regular phone calls to hear from her family, only to hear a long list of commodities that they want her to buy and send to Romania. Journeys back home cannot fill the void surrounding the characters. At the same time, 202

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mobility, whether virtual, on the Internet, or physical, by travelling to and fro, is a male preserve: women stay put. Morpurgo’s female characters display a much more traditional, patriarchal gender identity than the one that Lavinia fashions in her stories. Morpurgo’s female characters, in addition to being less mobile and less connected than their non-fictional counterparts, have a more limited scope of action and are basically confined to the private space of home. Whereas the male characters in the novel pursue a PhD or carry out high status work in the City, the female characters make a living in the United Kingdom either as wives or as domestic workers (to say nothing of Alina, who works in a high-class brothel). Morpurgo denies to her female characters the kind of determination to beat the system and get a decent job that makes Lavinia so endearing to her readers. Though Maria, in Morpurgo’s novel, is fully aware that she is regarded as an exotic object to be looked at, she does nothing to change her status. She neither pursues any graduate studies nor tries to find a job. Her attitude of passive acceptance makes her lose out in competition with a more assertive British woman that starts a relationship with her husband. Sabina is a conscientious, highly committed domestic worker taking care of a terminally ill old man. Morpurgo’s insistence on Sabina’s selflessness, sympathy, and willingness to sacrifice her own interests to help her own family or her employer provides a counterpart to the rapacious Ukrainian in Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Morpurgo seems to be responding here to the negative stereotypes of Eastern European women that Lewycka apparently reinforces and that are rife in the British press and among the British audience. However, as Sabina’s qualities and virtues compel respect, they also reassert the patriarchal gender identity that is generally associated with Eastern European women. Neither the sophisticated Maria nor the unassuming Sabina transgress against the limits of patriarchal gender definitions, nor do they contradict stereotypical images of Romanian women. However, as their narratives are fashioned as stories of development and emancipation, both characters become aware of the need to perform changes in their gender roles so as to survive in the new social environment.

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It comes as no surprise that Morpurgo’s postmodern prose radically departs from the linear, teleological narrative structure of life stories posted on the Internet. Fragmentation, discontinuity, the use of multiple temporalities and multiple narrative perspectives (first person, third person), the inclusion of e-mails, diaries and anthropological interviews—in short, all the stylistic devices common to migration literature are evident in Morpurgo’s novel (Frank 2008, 19–21). Their employment dramatizes the traumatic aspect of the migration experience that is “forgotten” in the recollections posted on online forums. They insist on the doubts, the sense of loneliness, the marginalization and even the failure that the net-stories do their best to occlude. Therefore, the relationship between fictional and non-fictional stories can be said to be complementary. At the same time, Morpurgo does not shy away from using plots and narratives recurrent in popular culture. The melodramatic plot of telenovellas seems to have been deliberately used to fashion the happy ending of Sabina’s migration story: she inherits her employer’s fortune, marries the employer’s son and plans to bring her son over to the United Kingdom. At the same time, Morpugo undercuts the utopian ending: while Sabina becomes financially self-sufficient, her status as outsider is reasserted, as she is slightly better than her new husband, who served a five-year sentence for pedophilia. Fictional stories of migration published in Romanian, therefore, while not contesting the pro-migration ideology, have more leeway to question the teleological plot associated with integration in the hostsociety that seems to be the template of online stories as well as of the above-mentioned novels written in English. In this respect, the pressure exerted by audience expectations plays a decisive role: since Morpurgo writes for a heterogeneous, offline Romanian public, she is less constrained to endorse the values associated with integration than Aura Imbarus, Domnica Radulescu or migrant authors writing in Romanian yet publishing in online forums or journals. At the same time, fiction seems to be lagging behind reality: online stories show migrants getting better organized in networks, building up stronger communities and exercising greater mobility than in novels. The migrant’s isolation, which is prevalent in most of the Romanian novels, seems to be a thing of the past. Women telling their stories 204

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online are more resourceful than their fictional counterparts and more determined to overcome the limitations of patriarchal gender definitions. They sound more empowered. But what are their stories leaving out? It is up for fiction to fill these gaps. References Locuirea temporara in strainantate [Living temporarily abroad]. 2006. Bucharest: Fundatia pentru o societate deschisa. Bocancea, Cristian. 2011. “Migratia, noile dimensiuni ale unui vechi fenomen politic” [Migration, the new dimension of an older political phenomenon]. Sfera Politica 29, no. 12: 4–10. Brinkerhoff, Jennifer. 2011. Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Capussotti, Lidia, Manuela Coppola, Lidia Curti, Laura Fantone, MarieHelene Laforest and Susanna Poole. 2007. “Women, Migration and Precarity.” Feminist Review: 87–102. Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina, Madalina Nicolaescu, and Helen Smith, eds. 2013. Between History and Personal Narrative. East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millennium. Vienna: LIT Verlag. Dragulin, Sabin. 2011. “Fluxul migrational din perspectiva istorica—studiu de caz: romanii din Italia 1990–2010.” Sfera Politica 29, no. 12: 97–105. Druga, Dana Larisa. 2011. “Managementul fluxurilor migrationiste in UE.” Sfera Politica 29, no. 12: 105–10. Frank, Soren. 2008. Migration and Literature. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Grigan, Gabriel. 2011. “Efecte socio-economice ale migratiei dupa 1989. Cazul Feldru Transilvania.” Sfera Politica 29, no. 12: 187–92. Imbarus, Aura. 2010. Out of the Transylvania Night. Cambridge, MA: Betty Youngs Books Publishing. Kassabova, Kapka. 2009. Street without a Name. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. Laliotou, Ioanna. 2007. “I Want to See the World. Mobility and Subjectivity in the European Context.” In Women Migrants from East to West, 45–68. Edited by Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capusotti and Ioanna Laliotou. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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Lewycka, Marina. 2005. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Kensington: Viking Books. Morpurgo, Ioana Baetica. 2011. Imigrantii [The emigrants]. Bucharest: Polirom. Moslund, S. Pultz. 2010. Migration and Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Changes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nastuta, Sebastian. 2011. “Who’s Afraid of Immigrants.” Sfera Politica 29, no. 12: 35–45. Page, Ruth. 2011. “Blogging on the Body: Gender and Narrative.” In New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, 220–39. Edited by Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Sandu, Dumitru. 2010. Lumile sociale ale migratiei romanesti in strainantate [The social worlds of the Romanian migration]. Bucharest: Polirom. Sirghie, Daniela. 2012. “Ingrijitoarele de batrini din Italia—intre normalitate si turlburare mentala sau “Sindromul Italia” [Caregivers for the elderly in Italy on the edge of mental illness: The “Syndrome of Italy”]. Revista de Asistenta Sociala 1: 67–87. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Trandafoiu, Ruxandra. 2013. Diaspora Online: Identity Politics and Romanian Migrants. New York: Berghahn Books. Vertocek, Steven. 2009. Transnationalism. London and New York: Routledge.

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From Traveling Memoir to Nomadic Narrative in Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name and Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story1 M A R I A-S A B I N A D R AG A A L E X A N D R U

“I knew I didn’t need physically to inhabit the land of tango anymore, because tango had taken permanent residence inside me.” (Kapka Kassabova, Twelve Minutes of Love, 317)

Residence in one country or another is one of the most controversial issues in migration narratives, since migration is most often a permanent act of relocation. Yet the meaning attached to the choice of an otherland over a motherland has shifted since the turn of the millennium. This shift, explored in some of the latest literature on migration, has been tackled in similar ways in postcommunist cultures, and more so as migration from these spaces has increased after the fall of communism. Since 2000, an increased amount of writing in English has come out of Eastern Europe into the global literary space—perhaps because enough time has passed for people who suffered trauma under communism to be ready to express this in words. Postcommunist Eastern Europe, considered by scholars such as Charad Shari and Katherine Verdery as the new postcolonial zone and further a significant new contributor to the global political and cultural exchange, has seen a significant number of migrants relocate permanently or temporarily to Western Europe and various non-European spaces since 1989. Within these recent diasporas, which overlap with those formed under communism but are made of people with a different political motivation to migrate, the choice to write in English is, most significantly, a sign of a new global world order, in which relocation and 1



This article has benefited from two UEFISCDI-funded projects at the University of Bucharest: PN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-0159 (2011-2013) in its early stages and PN-IIRU-TE 2014-4-0609 (2015-2017) for its completion.

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communication across geographical (and other kinds of) borders have become more frequent. The fact that authors whose native language is not English choose to write in English (mostly, but not always, because they choose to live in English-speaking countries) is most importantly a form of translation or, rather, as Rosi Braidotti puts it, of linguistic, cultural and spatial transposition—“a leap from one code, field or axis into another” (Braidotti 2006, 5). The leap, in this case, takes place in both space and language. Translation/transposition of the migrant, as well as of the postcommunist experience, into an internationally accessible code has come to be seen as a necessary gesture, which various forms of narrative assume, thus symbolically validating Eastern Europe’s contribution to the emerging English-language literature of the global diasporic space. This chapter will argue that, as diasporic cultures are increasingly becoming “travelling cultures” (Clifford 1994, 302), less and less connected to places, these narratives are characterized by what Rosi Braidotti would call a nomadic textuality. Such textuality not only overcomes older imperialist binaries, but also acts as a space of reflection on the deterritorialized status of its authors. I will analyze the function of translation and transposition in migration writing in English in the case of one Eastern European writer relocated from Bulgaria to New Zealand and then to the UK (with many spaces inhabited or visited in between): Kapka Kassabova. I will also follow the evolution of textual strategies and dislocation/relocation metaphors in a comparative reading of her novels Street Without a Name (2008) and Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story (2011) and identify some of the ways in which forms of translation mediate relocation as reflected in the textuality of these novels. I will argue that tango—Kassabova’s supreme metaphor of overcoming the violence of dislocation and espousing perpetual change—is used by the author to reposition her migrant/traveling self as nomadic, in an attempt to escape post-migration limitations of thinking and thus claim ownership, through writing in English, of the global literary space. In Twelve Minutes of Love, a novelistic memoir mixed with travel writing (a form Kassabova has already experimented with in her celebrated Street Without a Name2),

2

For example, Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian calls Street Without a Name “a beautifully structured book: its closing pages take you back to the beginning, by which time you will know and feel for Bulgaria much more deeply than you did when you 208

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a fluid, dynamic, nomadic textuality emerges. Tango is a language in its own right, going beyond the English language in prompting, through music and dancing, a reinvention of oneself and the resolution of past traumas through intense experiences whose starting point is in the body. Kapka Kassabova was born in Bulgaria in 1973. She left the country with her parents in the early nineties to immigrate to New Zealand, where she became a successful travel writer and poet, despite having only learned English as a young adult. She was already fluent in Bulgarian, French and Russian at the time of emigration. Kassabova’s writings, whether poetry, prose, essays, book reviews, book translations or plain Globetrotter travel guides (Kassabova 2008; Kassabova and Ghose 2012), are heavily inspired by “real life” and contain deeply subjective autobiographical material. Along her complex trajectory as a migrant turned nomad, in which travel guides represent necessary research into how to be a successful traveler and then write creatively about traveling, Kassabova is a writer in search of a voice amid complex searches through discursive possibilities. She is also, importantly, a tango-dancer. Kassabova uses writing to examine her feelings and practice a kind of self-therapy that allows her to not miss having her own country, and as my epigraph suggests, to carry her residence within her wherever she is. Kassabova moves from a more group- or nation-oriented approach to a personal one. Street Without a Name belongs, to a certain extent, to the autobiographical genre already explored occasionally by Kassabova, even though, through the eyes of the protagonist who retells the story of her communist childhood and subsequent migration, we also see the destiny of her country before and after the fall of communism. The book, started.” Nicholas Lezard, “Danube Blues,” Guardian, February 14, 2009. In her review of the novel in Harvard Review Online, Carmen Bugan notices that, while “Kassabova’s sense of humor makes the narrative of old and new Bulgaria, as seen through the eyes of a sometimes detached, sometimes emotional emigrant, readable and enjoyable,” the narrative acquires a different depth for “those who live as exiles, emigrants, and refugees,” who perceive it as “a book that speaks deeply of the relationship between people and their land, a relationship broken by totalitarianism and the consequent emigration.” Carmen Bugan, “Review: Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria,” Harvard Review Online, January 20, 2011. 209

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published in 2008, propelled Kassabova into the Anglo-American literary limelight and has enjoyed a positive reception, as shown in reviews such as those by Cathy Galvin in The Sunday Times 27 July 2008, by Misha Glenny in The Guardian, 5 and by Marta Bladek in Women’s Review of Books. It has been described by Ioana Luca as relevant to a postcommunist East European aesthetic of “intimate publics” (Lauren Berlant’s concept) which does justice to the private/public confusion of which the communist regime was guilty and on which Kassabova reflects extensively in her memoir (Luca 2011, 70– 82). Gabriele Linke follows in Luca’s footsteps to argue, using Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic ethics in Transpositions (2006) that Kassabova’s discourse about the public and the private is an ambivalent one, since she represents her life “as different and similar, as universal and unique, as post/communist and Western” (Linke 2013, 28). In depicting all of these inconsistencies, Linke argues that Kassabova employs a “nomadic mode” (Linke 2013, 36) to transpose “the (solid) communist past into liquid transnational modernity” (Linke 2013, 39). In Street Without a Name she reflects in narrative form on images of herself and her native country that she had already put forth in her poetry. Bulgaria, remembered as it had been in the author’s childhood, is now seen through fresh eyes from the vantage point of the returned emigrant, who is also a tourist, who can put things into a perspective that locals sometimes lack. In an article dedicated to the book, Claudia Duppé calls Kassabova a “tourist in her native country” (Duppé 2010, 423), a term used by the author herself in a poem included in her 2007 collection Geography for the Lost: “I want to be a tourist/ In the city of my life” (Kassabova 2007, 11). Returning to Bulgaria after many years (in 2006, when the country was getting ready to join the EU), Kassabova re-examines the concept of home and its importance: Since leaving Bulgaria, I have gone backwards and forwards across the world several times, propelled by a slightly manic energy. I managed to convince myself that I’d left Bulgaria behind for good. I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from, they ask. Does it matter, I answer. 210

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But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other places and people, if you don’t even know where you come from? (Kassabova 2008, 16)

Kassabova has dedicated her life and literature to pursuing this mobile version of the self that she describes, unstuck in space and time, set on exploring the world and testing its limits. Why, then, does she fall back on this traditional, nostalgic reassertion of the importance of home as a geographical place that can be located on the map, as the place one comes from and is bound to be connected to forever? It is a question she seems unable to answer, hence she doesn’t shy away from exploring it in her work. In Street Without a Name, she even theorizes on the concept of home, beginning with Walter Benjamin’s observation that the character of a place depends on the eye of the beholder: When an outsider comes to a new place, Walter Benjamin wrote, he sees the picturesque and the freakish, whereas the local sees through layers of emotion and memory. In other words, they see completely different things. So while a newcomer would have looked at Youth 3 and seen an uninhabitable dystopia of concrete and mud, I learnt to see it for what it really was: my home. (Kassabova 2008, 30)

The Sofia neighborhood of Kassabova’s childhood no longer looks the same, even though little has changed. What has changed is the observer’s perspective, which casts a different light on the place which has ceased to be familiar. The reference to Benjamin discreetly opens up another possible interpretation in this text which is so much about translation, whether spatially or linguistically. For Benjamin, translation, as the afterlife of a text rather than a manner of communicating across languages to a reader who cannot understand the original, becomes particularly relevant (Benjamin 2002, 253–4). Relocation is not just about communicating across geographical and linguistic borders, but is, more importantly, about creating a new life in a new language and in a different space.

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As she returns to her former home as a professional traveler and widely published travel writer (evident in her Globetrotter guides or Guardian Travel articles, as well as other publications),3 Kassabova is placed at the vantage point of the foreign returned citizen with a double perspective. She can now see Bulgaria through the eyes of the outsider, while also, at the same time, seeing it as home through her memories. This dual perception, privileged and sad at the same time (as it stains the joy of return with the aloofness of inevitable estrangement) offers, however, great intellectual benefits, as it let her not miss any details about the character of the place. At the same time, the habit of constant travel for work or pleasure, which often felt like a way to escape dislocation trauma, is finally unmasked as a false antidote the moment one is a foreigner in their own country and, by extension, in their own past, which has so systematically been avoided to keep their longing for it away: My chief delusion was that by becoming deeply absorbed by every other country on the planet except Bulgaria (which I carefully tiptoed around as if it was a ticking bomb in the shape of a country ready to detonate at the slightest touch of memory) I could get rid of two things. One, my Bulgarian past, which was not of the miserable variety but bothered me nevertheless, like an infirm relative calling out from a darkened room at the back of the house. Two, the need to answer directly the question nice people ask when they meet you: so, where are you from? (Kassabova 2008, 2)

The difficulty of the “where are you from” question pushes the author to explore in depth the importance of belonging to a place. It is not present-day Bulgaria (about which, as her personal website insists, she writes in much of her journalistic work) that makes her uneasy, but the awareness of Bulgaria’s persistent communist image, seen from the West as inferior: “an appendix, a kind of afterthought” to Europe’s history (Kassabova 2008, 3). Return to Bulgaria seems to be no longer possible, 3



Kassabova, “essays & articles,” Kapka-Kassabova.net, http://kapka-kassabova.com/ articles---essays.html, accessed June 20, 2016. 212

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as she has come of age somewhere else, in a different way. Consequently, Kapka needs to reinvent herself as someone new, free from ethnic and political determinations and, more importantly, free from the pressure of any kind of postsocialist nostalgia she may have felt compelled to feel as a Bulgarian, even though she did not live through postsocialism in her native country. To grow out of her internalized, culturally and historically conditioned inferiority complex, she needs to allow herself to be absorbed by something else, to translate herself into a different language. This language proves to be tango. Street Without a Name and Twelve Minutes of Love can be read through each other’s lens, as different translation exercises that encode similar experiences at different points in time. If the former is about migration, the latter is about going beyond migration to build a freer selfhood that eludes being stuck in space. Yet there is an important technical difference between these two texts that seem to belong to the same memoir genre. Street Without a Name uses personal narrative to reflect on the predicament of a whole nation living under communism, which, according to Fredric Jameson’s controversial 1986 article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” postcolonial literatures have done in an attempt to rewrite the history of former colonial countries. Twelve Minutes of Love—a story of Argentine tango, which gradually blurs the painful search for home—focuses much more on the personal dimension. The narcotic lure of tango (which is dance, music, but also a philosophy in its own right), takes over dictatorially and becomes the most faithful expression of the narrator’s whole life, more than any possible home, with or without a totalitarian regime. Tango is a complex language that knows no boundaries, through which its practitioners speak more truthfully than in any other way: “I live in New Zealand, the most beautiful country in the world, but...” “But you don’t belong there,” the psychoanalyst said. “Yes. I mean, no.” “You feel like your life is elsewhere.” “How do you know?” “From the way you dance.” He smiled gnomically, and I didn’t dare probe further. “But imagine a whole nation that feels like this. 213

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We don’t have strong indigenous roots, and that’s why we have held on to European culture. Something pushes us to search beyond ourselves, to always want to be different. Special. Nothing unites us, except that longing. This is at the heart of the Argentine malaise...” (Kassabova 2011, 103–104)

In this description, tango—the Argentine dance, known in tango circles as “the vertical expression of horizontal desire,” which defies regulations in favor of improvisation and creativity—is about overcoming the trauma of displacement and refusing to ever put down roots again through this ad hoc bodily communion achieved through dance and music. In this, tango—currently a global phenomenon and one of the most important present-day forms of social networking across the world with its own websites, events, and festivals—becomes an expression of a kind of thirdmillennium ethos which redefines migration as nomadism. Whereas migration was once defined as a one-way journey, as we advance into the new millennium, the migrant/diasporic condition loses the need for roots and seems to feel more like nomadism. In the discourse of nomadology as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1988) favours “deterritorialization par excellence” rather than “reterritorialization”, in which the nomad moves “along a trajectory,” unlike the migrant who moves from point to point (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 380–81). This has since been revised by Rosi Braidotti and repositioned in the context of a new millennium using a highly relevant feminist reinterpretation. Nomadism is “not fluidity without borders but rather an acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries” Braidotti says (1994, 36). This perspective makes her extremely knowledgeable about contemporary migrant female writing, where migration is not just an opportunity for becoming—“the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become” (Braidotti 2002, 2)—but something that involves change to the very structure of discourse beyond simply change in one’s own self-understanding. Braidotti’s post-Deleuzian nomadology, which rethinks “the bodily roots of subjectivity” (Braidotti 1994, 3), places at its center the nomad as “my own figuration of a situated, postmodern, culturally differentiated understanding of the subject in general and of the feminist subject 214

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in particular” (Braidotti 1994, 4), with “a kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior” (Braidotti 1994, 5): As opposed to the images of both the migrant [economic] and the exile [political], I want to emphasize that of the nomad. The nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; it is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinate changes, without and against an essential unity. The nomadic subject, however, is not altogether devoid of unity; his/her mode is one of definite, seasonal patterns of movement through rather fixed routes. It is a cohesion engendered by repetitions, cyclical moves, rhythmical displacement. In this respect, I shall take the nomad as the prototype of the “man or woman of ideas”, as Deleuze put it, the point of being an intellectual nomad is about crossing boundaries, about the act of going, regardless of the destination. (Braidotti 1994, 22–23)

Nomadic thinking is reflected in the making of discourse and text. Nomadic texts display a nomadic textuality, a “situated form of heterogeneity” characterized by the fact that “each text seems to grow from another” (Braidotti 1994, 17). Braidotti sees this multiplicity as especially characteristic of women’s writing and of what women represent in culture. Hence she uses the female dimension as emblematic of an intellectual attitude connected to the opposition to oppressive establishments, to movement and change. She relies on the complexity and subversive nature of the female presence in culture when she notices that the feminist movement, which “has provided stability amid changing conditions and shifting contexts,” can be considered a telling example of intellectual nomadism. Women are to Braidotti paradigmatic nomads. In theorizing a discursive/textual nomadism that can better express the “molecularisation of the self” which she sees as characteristic of the new millennium, Braidotti extends this metaphor of the fluid female continuum beyond the boundaries of women’s writing per se 215

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and shows that it provides ways to reflect on what she calls “my desire for nomadism, that is to say, my desire to suspend all attachment to established discourses” (Braidotti 1994, 18).4 One of the strategies used in nomadic thinking, according to Braidotti, is a move from translation to transposition. A transposition in mathe­ matics is a permutation which exchanges two elements and keeps all others fixed. In music, a transposition is moving a note or collection of notes up or down in pitch by a constant number of semitones. In her 2006 book Transpositions, Braidotti defines this concept in the following way: The term “transpositions” has a double source of inspiration: from music and from genetics. It indicates an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another, not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex multiplicities. It is not just a matter of weaving together different strands, variations on a theme (textual or musical), but rather of playing the positivity of difference as a specific theme of its own. As a term in music, transposition indicates variations and shifts of scale in a discontinuous but harmonious pattern. It is thus created as an in-between space of zigzagging, and of crossing: non-linear, but not chaotic; nomadic, yet accountable and committed; creative, but also cognitively valid; discursive and also materially embedded (...) (Braidotti 2006, 5)

Transposition is therefore the act by which a discourse originally set in a language or code makes a leap to another level, or into another code, where it functions in a parallel order, while staying the same on the level of content. It can be argued that in Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story 4



I have been following this transition from the migrant to the nomad and the emergence of a nomadic textuality in contemporary migrant female writing coming from the postcolonial and postcommunist spaces, with reference to Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (see my book Draga Alexandru, Identity Performance in Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction (Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2008), 74-76) and Domnica Radulescu’s novels (see my introduction to “States of Exile: An Interview with Domnica Radulescu,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 10, no. 2 (July 2016): 273-85, doi:10.1093/cwwrit/vpw004. 216

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Kassabova—another “migrant who turned nomad” as Braidotti did (Braidotti 1994, 1)—tests an aesthetic femininization of the migrant experience as multiple and dynamic, as nomadic par excellence, by transposing her story of displacement into the language of tango. Every single experience Kapka (the narrator, protagonist and authorial persona) goes through is translated (or transposed) into tango. This memoir, whose “twelve minutes” in the title evokes the duration of a tanda (a set of three of four tango songs one normally dances with the same partner), follows the structure of a milonga (a social tango event) through four tandas rather than parts. These tandas (separated, as they should be, by cortinas, which in the book are instances of musing over the significance of the busy events occurring during tandas) have titles and subtitles, standing for stages in Kapka’s evolution towards healing from personal trauma through this particular form of highly embodied spirituality: “Tanda One: The Feet. In Search of Authentic Tango” (Kassabova 2011, 5) “Tanda Two: The Heart. In Search of Intimacy” (Kassabova 2011, 61) “Tanda Three: The Mind. In Search of Home” (Kassabova 2011, 141) “Tanda Four: The Embrace. In Search of Transcendence” (Kassabova 2011, 229)

This detailed description of the stages of tango initiation shows the importance of passing through experiences that are deeply rooted in the body–passing through the emotional in order to reach the mind and then detach from everyday troubles. The tango pilgrimage the authorprotagonist goes through is a search for herself and for a way out of the pain of uprootedness. Kapka’s discovery of tango one evening in Auckland (the city where her parents live, where she does not belong, but where she keeps coming back to for solace and to give herself the illusion of having roots from time to time) is sudden and unconditional, like falling in love. Tango 217

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seems the ideal healing solution from Kassabova’s sudden realization when she returns to Bulgaria in 2006, and which she describes bitterly in Street Without a Name: I suddenly see that I have sleep-walked through my life between then and now. Between the hazy eighties and these grown-up days, there is a void. And in this void I see a familiar figure running frantically between continents, not knowing what it’s running from. Just contemplating the tiny wretch tires me. (Kassabova 2008, 15)

Tango brings a sense of direction free from territorial borders, a freedom without constraints. Yet this liberation comes at a price, bringing its own confusion and requiring a whole initiation process. It is the commitment to change that tango brings, to progress, to not wanting to be defeated by personal trauma that makes Kassabova’s autobiographical character a Braidottian nomad. Her evolution through tango is both her salvation and her temptation. Unlike other fellow tangoers—such as Juliette, the French woman who moves to Buenos Aires and lives from one milonga to another, betting everything on tango and having no life outside it—Kapka resolves not to be a victim, but to learn about detachment from tango and move on: I don’t want to become Juliette. I don’t want to run away, this time. I want to be one of those who remain; I’ve been transient too many times, in too many milongas, in too many cities. (Kassabova 2011, 235)

As in the case of Braidotti’s nomad, Kapka’s new path to knowledge is deeply rooted in the body, which gradually learns to not need to be rooted. It is the body that is the site of the deepest transformative experiences, from “tangasms” to dissassociations: “Dissassociation: clearly, this is what we must do: 1. physically, to improve our open-embrace style; 2. emotionally, to ease our suffering” (Kassabova 2011, 121). As her initiation into tango progresses, Kapka becomes more and more of a nomadic self, to the point where she identifies with emblematic no-

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madic figures such as gypsies and their Eastern-European history of exclusion: “Che, I want to stay in Berlin. I’ve been so happy here.” “But you are gypsy. Gypsy always leave.” “I don’t want to be gypsy. I want to be part of something.” (Kassabova 2011, 136)

This “something” she becomes part of is the transnational tango community. Most of the second half of the memoir experiments with attempts at transposing ordinary experiences into the language and signsystem of tango, the whole world coming to be understood through it. In terms of these tango transpositions, the rigidity of the communist rule means that “There was no tango under Communism” (Kassabova 2011, 155). Tango can offer a solution to the painful question of searching for a home once you have lost your own. Even though it is without roots itself, tango paradoxically leads Kapka to find a home in Edinburgh (Kassabova 2011, 178), which would have seemed impossible in Street Without a Name. The geography of tango allows every place to become home as long as you take residence in tango (or tango has taken residence inside you) (Kassabova 2011, 317): “Whether you live here or in Casablanca is just an accident of geography. (...) You make your own world” (Kassabova 2011, 157) The tango experience is deemed so complex and intense that it becomes a standard to measure other passions by: in Ecuador, for example, “orchids are to some what tango is to others” (Kassabova 2011, 238). People and nationalities are characterized by the ways they respond to tango and the ways they belong to the tango family: Here is Greg, with a milonguero paunch and endless cheer. He is the family photographer who records, milonga after festival, party after practica, the life and times of Edinburgh Tango. He teaches free beginners’ classes, and female students are often found in his arms (“Let me show you this gancho”)—until they find a boyfriend their age, leaving Greg to the next crop of beginners, which makes him just as happy.

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Here is the Swiss girl with a face made for pleasure and closed eyelids that flutter orgasmically in the arms of men—all men. Her Dutch boyfriend smiles bravely, in a “we’re having an open relationship and it’s cool” sort of way, but he’s a sensitive soul—and, a year later, a broken heart. Then there is the French-English student scientist couple, thin and pale like lovely young vampires. They never see the sun because they practise seven nights a week, until their Nuevo routine is flawless, like a perfectly executed chemistry experiment in some midnight tango lab. (p. 184)

Tango even molds character and concerns over identity are approached through its lens (Kassabova 2011, 192–93). Representing the tango family is a mission, so that every experienced tanguero becomes a tango ambassador (Kassabova 2011, 214). Tango is a far more successful form of rebellion/revolution than many of others (Kassabova 2011, 288). Moreover, tango is a form of psychotherapy, as Buenos Aires, a city of immigrants, is described as a place where, sooner or later, one is bound to meet a psychoanalyst at a milonga, since there are so many. Ignacio L.C., who teaches psicotango to various groups in need of healing, sees tango as the ideal therapy for “dispossessed souls” and, further, even as a space of ritual, where one can be reborn in a healthier guise: ‘Kapka.’ Ignacio L.C. leans over. ‘You came to tango because you were an immigrant, no? A dispossessed soul.’ I nod. ‘You thought you could run away from it. But you found that in tango, everybody is an immigrant, everyone is on the periphery. It’s the human condition. And longing to be in the centre.’ [...] ‘The tango floor is a sacred space’ (says Ignacio). (pp. 298–99)

Associated with online communities such as Tango Partner and Todo Tango, tango becomes an important global phenomenon, with its own meeting and even dating scheme (Kassabova 2011, 303–305). Tango camps are organized—see Tango Mango in Devon (Kassabova 2011, 220

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306)—to give people of the same kinds of opportunities to meet, and such gatherings require no commitment other than their shared passion. For Kassabova, this newfound global community provides a sense of belonging for the first time since her teenage moment of migration. On the allegorical level of the Jamesonian “nation,” in a world that is becoming increasingly mobile and due to the influx of immigrants, this tango story invites us to imagine an ideal of a future, transnational world, based on the non-binding rules of tango. Twelve Minutes of Love can thus be read in two keys: as a “tango story”, as the author describes it in the subtitle and on her website, but also as an allegorical account of the trajectory of a “migrant who turned nomad” (Braidotti 1994, 1) and who, in this sense, is emblematic of a growing global diaspora. We can interpret this global tango diaspora as a community of people looking for meaning on an individual level, but also allegorically, as a whole part of the world’s population, formerly forced to live through a repressive regime which damaged their sense of being, and who are now looking to reinvent it. For Kassabova as a native of a former socialist country, who did not experience the postsocialist period in Bulgaria and thus, having lived away for years, found herself doubly estranged upon her return as a visitor, tango provides not just a solace for the troubles of territorial and historical displacement, but also a kind of virtual home that cannot be taken away in any circumstances. Tango is not an antidote for displacement, but a way of embracing displacement creatively, which, through the force of music, is turned into a highly privileged form of freedom. The fact that freedom is, for this global diaspora (and even more so for natives of the former Soviet bloc), the major asset, contributes massively to the irresistible lure of tango. Tango seems to best epitomize the change of perception in today’s patterns of relocation: less static and definitive, as one-way migration used to be, and more dynamic, always in the making, hence nomadic.

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References Benjamin, Walter. 2002. “The Task of the Translator”. In Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. I: 1913–1926. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MS and London: Harvard University Press, 253–263. Bladek, Marta. 2010. “They Know We Know They Know: A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova and Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova”. Women’s Review of Books 27(6), November/December. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. ———. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity. Clifford, James. 1994. “Diasporas”. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 302–308. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone. Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina. 2008. Identity Performance in Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction. Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press,. ———. 2016. “States of Exile: An Interview with Domnica Radulescu”. Contemporary Women’s Writing 10:2, July, pp. 273–85. doi:10.1093/cwwrit/ vpw004. Duppé, Claudia. 2010. “Tourist in Her Native Country: Kapka Kasssabova’s Street Without a Name”. In Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture. Eds. Barbara Korte, Ulrike Pirker and Sissy Helff. 423–36. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Galvin, Cathy. 2008. “Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria by Kapka Kassabova”, The Sunday Times, 27 July 2008, http:// www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/non_fiction/article107884. ece, accessed 10 June 2016. Glenny, Misha. 2016. “‘Mum, why is everything so ugly?’ Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria by Kapka Kassabova”, The Guardian, 4 July 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/05/ saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview27, accessed 10 June 2016. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”. Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn), 65-88.

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Kassabova, Kapka. 2011. Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story. London: Portobello. ———. 2008. Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. London: Portobello. ———. 1997. All Roads Lead to the Sea. Auckland: Auckland University Press. ———. 1999. Reconnaissance. Auckland: Penguin NZ. ———. 2007. Geography for the Lost. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. ———. 2003. Someone Else’s Life. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. ———. 2008. The Globetrotter’s Guide to Bulgaria. New Holland Publishers. ——— and Sagarika Ghose. 2012. Delhi, Jaipur and Agra. New Holland Publishers. Lezard, Nicholas. 2009. “Danube Blues”. The Guardian, Saturday, 14 February 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/feb/14/street-withoutname-kapka-kassabova. Accessed 15 November 2016. Linke, Gabriele. 2013 “‘Belonging’ in Post-Communist Europe: Strategies of Representation in Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name”. The European Journal of Life Writing, volume II (2013), T25-41. doi: 10.5463/ejlw.2.46. Luca, Ioana. 2011. “Communism: Intimate Publics”. Biography 34.1 (Winter 2011): 70-82. Shari, Charad and Katherine Verdery. 2009. “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51.1: 1–29.

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Through the Looking-Glass On Recurring Motifs and Devices in the Prose of Dubravka Ugrešić DEJAN ILIĆ

Several motifs recur in the novels and essays of Dubravka Ugrešić. I am not thinking here of motifs particular to any one segment of this author’s creative opus, rather images that link to clusters of meaning that weave throughout all of her writing. For instance, the motif of Ivan the Fool; Ugrešić’s “mother” character; the notion of “byt”; or the figure of the looking-glass and Alice, Lewis Carroll’s (or rather mathematician Charles Ludwig Dodgson’s) heroine, who found herself on its other side. That these motifs crop up regularly, that Ugrešić stays true to them, suggests that we can understand them as topoi of a sort within her opus—something essential for interpreting her books, for reconstructing her particular view of the world. In a more ambitious reading, one should also pay attention to, aside from topoi, the narrative patterns or literary devices which she regularly uses in building her stories. Here we are mainly interested in her topos of the looking-glass and Alice, and the literary devices particular to fairy tales–either folk tales (in Ugrešić’s case, most often Russian tales) or literary tales (such as Carroll’s story of Alice, though Ugrešić has found Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz almost as important).1 Ugrešić uses both of these to formulate a clear-cut The fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, for instance, otherwise emblematic for the literary tale genre, did not leave a visible trace on the work of Dubravka Ugrešić, so one could say in a slightly simplified and, to a degree, arbitrary manner that she builds her fiction world, in part, on two extremes—the eastern, hence Russian, oral folk tradition, and the western, hence Anglo-Saxon, modern popular children’s culture. That Ugrešić successfully mediates between these two only superficially juxtaposed extremes or poles of “popular” culture and melds them together smoothly in her stories and novels says something about her personal artistic ambitions. Popular culture (both the traditional oral version and the modern kind) generally offers a simplified image of the world in which consumers of that culture feel as if it is easy to find their bearings in it. Artistic prose,

1

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stance about the world she describes—a stance which could be summarized as “poetic justice.”2 1.

Firstly, Dubravka Ugrešić’s prose allows us to see the figure of Alice through a looking-glass that, in semantic terms, seems highly transparent: as if its meaning opens itself readily to us. Remember that Carroll himself sent his heroine Alice through the looking-glass not only to entertain his eponymous young friend with odd stories on the verge of the absurd but also because he meant to problematize conventions that apply to the so-called normal world in front of the looking-glass. Here, for example, we will consider only one episode, meaningful for this text, the scene with Humpty Dumpty (Dundo Bumbo in translation3), the theme of which is the habits and prejudices we hold related to language. writing that belongs to “high” culture (in contrast to “low” or popular culture”), including Ugrešić’s fiction, generally takes the entirely opposite approach to the world. And yet, our author cares about preserving this “simple” (or “naive”) view of the world in one dimension of her writing and her “view” is precisely what this text is about. This is only, understandably, one possible reading that follows the references the author leaves in her writing just as—to use a comparison akin to her literary repertoire—Hansel and Gretel leave crumbs of bread behind them to keep from losing their way in the woods. We are warned of just how successful this technique is by the subsequent narrative image of birds pecking at the crumbs. We are drawing attention, herein, to only a small number of motifs and devices of which there are, of course, in the work of Dubravka Ugrešić, many more. Like one of the authors dear to Ugrešić’s heart, about whom more will be said herein, we used the method of squinting through “cupped fingers” to narrow our critical gaze to one segment only of this rich opus. 2 For more on “poetic justice” see Nussbaum 1995. 3 Although this will have no significance for the readers of this collection, we should say that “Serbo-Croatian” readers had available a masterful translation of Carroll’s book: the work of writer Antun Šoljan, published by the Zagreb Grafički zavod Hrvatske, with John Tenniel’s illustrations from the original English edition. A somewhat older translation, Alica u Zemlji Čudesa, by Mira Jurkić-Šunjić published by Mladost in the 1960s is also available. At the point when Ugrešić, in 1977, first employed the motive of Alice through the looking-glass, Carroll’s book had already grown deep roots in the popular culture of Socialist Yugoslavia. The fact that this children’s book appeared in two translations in only two decades testifies its cultural importance there. 226

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It is not surprising that excerpts from the episode along with Humpty’s commentaries have been cited in the scholarly linguistic literature that examines connections between words and their referents (Does the shape of a word correspond to the shape of the object it denotes?) or the thoughts it expresses (Can one express in words with no remainder or excess precisely what one means to say?). This episode uses the exemplary device of defamiliarization or, as early twentieth-century Russian formalists termed it—”остранение.” For them, defamiliarization was at the heart of literary creativity, its very essence. Defamiliarization implies a view of the world, particularly the quotidian (or “byt”), which we take for granted in the ordinary scheme of things and in which we can discover things we otherwise would not see, bringing into question what we consider common-sense and our understanding of reality as it is represented. Like Alice through the looking-glass, “byt” is also a category to which Ugrešić frequently turns, both in her critical texts on the Soviet writer Leonid Dobychin (Ugrešić 1984), and on the avant-garde and contemporaneity (Ugrešić 1989), and in her novels, particularly The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1999). This novel could be said to spring directly from the notion of “byt”—the everyday life which a walrus at the Berlin zoo had tried, symbolically and without success, to ingest. With an apparent face-off between the two worlds divided by the “membrane” of the looking-glass, Carroll suggests, in fact, that our world (and language) with its conventions is not essentially different from the world into which Alice has stumbled. As in that other world, things happen in our world according to arbitrarily established conventions that often defy rational explanation. This is precisely why the looking-glass is used instead of the rabbit hole, for instance, that Alice fell into in her first round of adventures. The passage through the looking-glass is symbolic in every way: Alice remains in the same world, but now sees it with different eyes, as does the reader who follows her through. Literature, of course, contains other defamiliarization narrative strategies in addition to the juxtaposition of seemingly opposed or essentially correspondent worlds. Ugrešić lists several of these strategies when she writes about “byt” in Dobychin’s novels. One of them consists of taking 227

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everyday habitual actions out of context in such a way that they appear incomprehensible and unacceptable. “The narrator experiences and conveys reality,” Ugrešić explains, “as a stringing of images, and each image is reduced by squinting through cupped fingers” (Ugrešić 1984, 125). But here, too, the connection to Carroll’s heroine soon becomes evident: Ugrešić insists that with Dobychin we have a story that is composed from the “point of view of an infantile narrator,” and the goal is a “grotesque estrangement” of a monstrous, yet nonchalantly narrated, reality. In this manner the burden or responsibility for “taking a position” is shifted from the realm of the story to its readers. From all of this it is possible to conclude that the passage through the looking-glass is actually a metaphor for remaining in the same world which now, however, thanks to defamiliarization, we can see with different eyes. If it weren’t for defamiliarization or those “cupped fingers” which bring into focus an important and, thanks to its being taken out of context, defamiliarized detail, we would not be able to say what was wrong with the previous image. But this is nowhere near all that should be said regarding the figure of the looking-glass and Alice in Dubravka Ugrešić’s literary world. The looking-glass here is not only a metaphor for defamiliarization, just as Alice is not merely a stand-in for the author in the fictional world she builds. We need to take yet another step and ask ourselves which worlds these are, or more precisely which oncedefamiliarized world this is and what the author is discovering for us, in this world, through the “looking-glass’“ of her books. 2.

Alice appears for the first time in Dubravka Ugrešić’s prose in the story “Who Am I?” (1977). The story came out in 1983 in the collection titled Life is a Fairy Tale, so appropriately eloquent in the context of this essay (Ugrešić 2001a).4 The title of the story is more than just a paraphrase of a line from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The 4



To continue providing information which we fear may be superfluous for our foreign readers: this edition of Ugrešić’s story collection from 2001, which came out 228

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title and substance of Ugrešić’s story are closely connected to questions of identity, language and the space within which this identity is built. As far as the relation between identity and language are concerned, Ugrešić demonstrates it using yet another frequent motif in her books— the child’s primer. More on the primer later. Regarding identity and space (which should probably be understood in the Bourdieusian concept of field), in her early prose, Ugrešić already visualizes this space quite aptly as a contested area of partial overlap but also as a site of collision between the public and the private. Thirty-three years later, Ugrešić would critique her own youthful writing harshly: “Didn’t I, thirty years ago, write a story called “Who Am I?” in which I messed around with Lewis Carroll’s original? Swaddled in literature like a mouse in cheese, wasn’t I the one who was into the literariness of literature, deconstructing texts to see how the mechanism worked, protected by trendy jargon like intertextuality and metatextuality? Didn’t I spread my literary feathers like a peacock, parading the elegance of my handiwork?! Back then it was called postmodernism” (Ugrešić 2011, 94–95). Perhaps that was true, but nonetheless the story “Who am I?” is more than that, and the harsh tone the author uses for her own work is excessive. The space in which the narrator asks ‘who are you’ is given at the beginning as the sphere of the private, which the question of identity situates, unsurprisingly (but erroneously), in the sphere of the personal. However, we are immediately informed that this space is not isolated, that, indeed, it is exposed to constant attacks, and it becomes clear that the author wanted to use an image to say that the apartment of her protagonist is located, in fact, right on a highway. The image of a house through which a highway passes is a metaphor for the overlap and intersection of private and public space in which the identity of the narrator is formed and laid bare. The constant assaults of the public on that private space drives the heroine to a dilemma over who she really is and whether she, like Alice, crossed over into a world that was strange to as part of her collected works, was the first joint cultural venture—in which the ministries of culture of these two states were officially involved—between Croatian and Serbian publishers after the 1990s war. The conflict had ended only a few years before. 229

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her while never moving an inch. This threat to the private by the invasion of the public, which the story captures for us at one level, can, unfortunately, be read today as a hint of what was to happen a decade and a half later. The public space truly did violently invade the private sphere and completely change and usurp the life of the author and the members of her community. In 1992, having invoked the infantile point of view of the little girl through the looking-glass, Ugrešić would say of herself that all words were going the wrong way, “just as they did for Carroll’s Alice.” But those were not any old words—they were words that built an entire world. The author put it this way: “A year ago, sorting through some old things, I found my first school primer, dated 1957. A whole world I had entirely forgotten was shaken out of the primer along with the dust” (p. 15). This world, which the author only pretends to have forgotten, fell to pieces just as Humpty Dumpty did, who was a guarantee or “master” of the meaning of words in the world through the looking-glass. In fact it wasn’t a question of falling to pieces so much as disappearing altogether: “The names of the streets were vanishing and being replaced by new ones, the names of squares and towns, photographs and encyclopaedia entries were disappearing, people were disappearing, a whole mythology was vanishing and being replaced by another, a country was disappearing and being replaced by another, an age half a century old was disappearing...” (p. 15) And the author, was “once more on the wrong side of a looking-glass” (p. 17).5 The image of Humpty Dumpty’s shattering, as a metaphor for the shattering of language on which rested an entire fifty-year-old world, will appear as the motto for a chapter in the novel Ministry of Pain (2004). The lines, “Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. / All the King’s horses and all the King’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” are followed by the beginning of a chapter which is undeniably reminiscent of the initial situation from the story “Who am I?”

5

All quotes are taken from the foreword to the collection of essays entitled in Croatian Američki fikcionar (Ugrešić 2001b). The English-language edition of the same collection has the title Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (Ugrešić 2005). 230

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“I was plagued by nightmares at the beginning of the war and again when Goran and I left Zagreb. They had the same structure and were connected with a house. The house always had two sides to it: a front and a back. The front I knew; the back I came to know as I dreamed. The back was a false bottom, leaping out at me like a jack-in-the-box and thumbing its nose” (Ugrešić 2006, 219). This is the reverse of the “public sphere” which so violently invaded peoples’ lives and devastated them, just as Humpty Dumpty, the “master of words” was smashed to pieces. Ugrešić establishes a clear connection between the devastation of society and the devastation of language, between the erasure of memory and the imposition of a new past as the only valid one. This new past has come up from below and has shown itself to be a “false bottom” or “jack-in-the-box.” The metaphor for this change is the surface of the looking-glass itself. The smooth and extremely porous membrane divides the world into what is in front of the looking-glass and what is through it. But, by refusing to pass through to the other side along with everyone else, the author remains alone in her heroic attempt at piecing Humpty, language, and memory together again despite everything, to preserve—and where else but in language—a world that was vanishing. The collision between the world disappearing and the one appearing is similar to the collision between the worlds whose border Alice stepped across: from the vantage point of one world, the other world seems incomprehensible and pointless. And when we speak about Ugrešić’s prose, an important point must be raised here. The worlds between which the looking-glass stands do not appear merely incomprehensible and pointless, but, primarily, amoral. Therefore not a single narrator in Dubravka Ugrešić’s prose ever considers crossing the border between these two worlds because that, simply put, is the borderline between good and evil. And so it is that Ugrešić wove into her topos of the looking-glass, along with identity and the public and private spheres, the question of morality. She formulates this question simply, avoiding all puns and the relativization of world views: how was it possible for people, overnight, to become prepared to do things that were unimaginable to them earlier and morally absolutely unacceptable? Ugrešić’s Alice is no longer merely an analyst interested in the theory of possible worlds, she has grown 231

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unambiguously into a moral judge for whom there can be no dilemma in which borderlines exist that simply must not be crossed. But, people the author believed she knew and who shared her world view and moral convictions crossed them with ease, forgetting in the process that they had ever stood on the other side. 3.

Related to this, practically since her essay collection The Culture of Lies, Ugrešić has been offering a seemingly simple explanation for which a primer stands as a metonymic exchange in her prose.6 The cluster of the words, concepts, assumptions, and principles that comprise collective and individual identities, which the primer introduces us to as the first arranged presentation of language which we acquire in school, is inextricably bound to the moral principles which a political community upholds. When these key words are erased or replaced with others, when the basic assumptions and concepts are set aside, the morals that relied on them also disappear. In other words, with new assumptions and concepts a different moral arrives, which in the Yugoslav case was manifested as a nationalist fall into the barbaric. On that fall were built new worlds and identities, whose true face Ugrešić stubbornly lays bare, while remaining on the other side of the looking-glass. This is how Ugrešić sees it: “I also discovered something I had not previously known. That pullover knitted in the shelter was a deeply subconscious act of self-defence, a way (the only one we know) of containing chaos, an act of white magic. Knitting a pullover, we seem subconsciously to be knitting up the reality that others are violently unravelling at the same time. But the difference between a pullover knit6

See, for instance, the essay “My First Primer” in The Culture of Lies. In the introduction to this collection, entitled “Dark Beginning,” a variation on the theme of Alice through the looking-glass crops up not at all unexpectedly. This time, Alice is embodied in the character of the author’s mother: “I don’t know who I am any more, or where I’m from, or where I belong, said my mother once as we ran down to the cellar, in panic at the air-raid warning. Although I now have Croatian citizenship, when someone asks me who I am I repeat my mother’s words: ‘I don’t know who I am any more...’” (Ugrešić 1998, 7). 232

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ted in normal times and one knitted in a shelter cannot and need not be visible to the eye of the observer” (Ugrešić 1994, pp. 17–18). In the end, the reader should not come away with the impression that this author is forever trapped in a vanishing world, refusing to cross over to the other side. Ugrešić knows full well, and this arises in her books as a specific folkloric (more precisely fairy tale-like) aspect of her prose, that the battle between good and evil has no end and that it is waged with fickle success by one side or the other. The fairy-tale-like (oral) equivalent of her Alice is her Ivan the Fool. If Alice crosses the border between the worlds out of curiosity, Ivan the Fool will not, simply because he is—a fool. Or it only seems to us that he is a fool, because he knows what many overlook—that intelligence ultimately lies in making forthright moral decisions, and Ivan the Fool never errs in that respect. It is therefore no surprise that in Ugrešić’s most recent novel from 2007, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Ugrešić 2009), Alice retreats into the background to give Ivan the Fool the spotlight, embodied in the character of Mevludin. The author, of course, does not pass up the opportunity that in keeping with “poetic justice” she awards Mevludin with a nod to fairy tales—a marriage to a princess. For fairy tales, after all, are a sort of moral, instructive tale, which by the nature of their genre permit their authors to intervene as to the (moral) merits of the heroes where “life” most often fails to do so. The central part of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a fairy tale precisely in this sense—a story in which fairy tale-like solutions give the author the room to intervene (administer justice) where life is incapable of doing so. It is interesting that one critic saw this as a “fantastical” solution— “pure Hollywood” (Gaitskill 2010). And she is not far from the truth here: as we have already said several times, the popular (film) culture of the west is only one facet of a “universal” popular culture that shows its other face in Russian fairy tales. A fairy tale-like structure similar to the middle section of Baba Yaga appears in Ugrešić’s first novel from 1981, Steffie Cvek In the Jaws of Life (Ugrešić 2005). It is Steffie herself in that novel who has all the traits of Ivan the Fool, and the author will pull her from the “jaws of life” by giving her—in keeping with the principle of “poetic justice”—a prince.

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Baba Yaga also preserves the connection with Alice. The actual title of the novel from 2007 is, in fact, the motto of the story “Who am I?” from 1977. That story begins with the words “Baba Yaga laid an egg.” And while the “egg” of 1977 initiated a process of first identity collapse and then total collapse, the egg from 2007 seems to suggest the accrual of a new, whole language as the foundation for new identities and a more moral order. At least that is how I like to read the third part of this “mythic” novel—as a battle cry disguised as a treatise on literary criticism.7 Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać References Gaitskill, Mary. 2010. “Dubravka Ugrešić finds feminist mettle in an Eastern European witch,” Bookforum, February/March 2010. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1995. Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press. Ugrešić, Dubravka. 1984. “Leonid Dobičin,” in: Aleksandar Flaker and Dubravka Ugrešić, eds. Pojmovnik ruske avangarde [Glossary of the Russian Avant-Garde], vol. 2 (Zagreb: Grafički zavod Hrvatske), pp. 123-131. ———. 1989. “The Avant-Garde and Contemporaneity,” in: Aleksandar Flaker and Dubravka Ugrešić, eds. Pojmovnik ruske avangarde [Glossary of the Russian Avant-Garde], vol. 6, 301–313. Zagreb: Grafički zavod Hrvatske. ———. 1994. Have A Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream. New York: Viking Penguin. 7



In keeping with the structure of this study of Dubravka Ugrešić’s prose, we have left a footnote for last. Dubravka Ugrešić’s authorial moral or “poetic justice” applies not only to recognizable and acceptable choices in the “good/evil” coupling within her prose. Hers is a work of (professional) ethic implying that a person has a choice regarding the job they do. This, among other things, implies an awareness of the role of a writer as a “master of words” (albeit quite a fragile one). This is a role that has been compromised countless times to date, but this does not mean it does not exist, that it can no longer be fulfilled. Dubravka Ugrešić’s prose can be read as a literal attempt at preserving such a role for the writer in the public sphere. Thence comes respect for those who came before, for literature as a system of specific knowledge. In this context, references to fairy tales, to individual characters, authors, or texts, are a way of showing that respect. 234

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———. 1998. The Culture of Lies. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. ———. 1999. Museum of Unconditional Surrender. New York: New Directions. ———. 2001a. Život je bajka. Belgrade and Zagreb: B92 & Konzor. ———. 2001b. Američki fikcionar. Belgrade and Zagreb: B92 & Konzor. ———. 2005. Steffie Cvek In the Jaws of Life. In: Lend Me Your Character. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press. ———. 2006. Ministry of Pain. New York: Viking Penguin. ———. 2009. Baba Jaga Laid An Egg. Canongate 2009/Grove Press 2010. ———. 2011. Karaoke Culture. Rochester: Open Letter Books.

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Transnational in Translation

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It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing1 M I C H A EL K A N D EL

Tuwim and Me

Many years ago, I was a graduate student at Indiana University, in the library stacks looking for poetry by Julian Tuwim—or possibly I was just browsing. My eye fell on a small book of translations by him, from Russian into Polish, of Pushkin’s poetry. The title was Lutnia Puszkina (1937; Pushkin’s Lyre). I don’t think that I was aware at the time that Tuwim had translated from Russian; for me, he was an early-twentieth-century poet whom I liked very much. He was a breath of fresh air, a rebel against two literary traditions, strong in Poland (and they still are strong): verse with an ideological, political burden; and symbolic, metaphysical verse. The two traditions, both deeply serious, sometimes mingle. Tuwim, on the other hand, liked to have fun. His celebration of lilacs in the spring or of a woman’s thighs, for example, is unrestrained and unabashed; it may use childlike exclamation points. (Tuwim, by the way, wrote wonderful poems for children [2011]. He also put together a playful dictionary of Polish drinking expressions [2008b].) I opened Pushkin’s Lyre with skepticism, of the opinion that poetry could not be translated—especially not the poetry of someone like Pushkin, who speaks so directly, so plainly, and yet the result is art. One might think of Pushkin in the company of Mozart, whose music seems to emerge naturally, without effort or the need of footwork.2 Simplicity is a tremendous problem for a translator of poetry. We expect that the translating of a complex trope or device will be difficult,

1



2

This chapter is based on a paper given at the conference Transnational Literature and Translation at Swarthmore College, February 6, 2015. “Pushkin is the Mozart of poets” (Shaw 2013).

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so translators must exert all their cleverness if they are to succeed. But where does one begin to exert cleverness if the text to be translated appears to contain no tropes and devices? Render Pushkin in another language, and, even if you are the incredibly talented and wise Vladimir Nabokov,3 the result is prose, not poetry, however respectable that prose may be. And therefore readers must take it on faith that they are in the presence of a poet, because for them there is no—there can be no—visceral delight in the word-by-word, line-by-line unfolding of the poem. We read Dante in translation in this way, appreciating the ideas, images, story, characters; but, if we have no Italian, we are deaf to the music. We who have no Ancient Greek read Homer in translation in this same removed, incomplete, and disabled way. So I was surprised, reading a few poems by Pushkin in Tuwim’s Polish, to find Pushkin himself present. It was an illusion, of course, smoke and mirrors—smoke and mirrors is the way of all art—and the illusion didn’t always hold, but on some pages, in some stanzas, Tuwim had actually transported the Russian poet to another country, another century, another language and culture, somehow keeping him alive and breathing in the process. I thought then, and I think now, that this feat of prestidigitation is rarer even than the birth in our world of great poetry. Robert Frost’s statement that poetry is what gets lost in translation is so patent that we always nod when we hear it.4 How many exceptions can you think of to that adage-definition? Some have said that Dryden’s Vergil is such an exception, but many—among them Wordsworth and Samuel Johnson—said no, not quite (see, resp. Gilles­ pie 2011, 155; Johnson 2015). My surprise in the library stacks at Bloomington, Indiana, led to my doctoral dissertation. The assignment I set myself was to tackle the question, How did Tuwim manage this? I went through the usual academic exercises. I assembled a bibliography on the history, criticism, and theory of literary translation. I read and took notes. I studied the prosody, semantics, and cultural context of Pushkin’s poems and of 3

4





Edmund Wilson provides an interesting, full, and nonadulatory critique of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Frost is often cited as the source of this statement, but there appears to be no hard evidence that he ever said it (see Papavassiliou, n.1). 240

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Tuwim’s renditions of them. I found a connecting parallel between the lives of these two poets: in early-nineteenth-century Russia, Pushkin had trouble fitting in partly because of his African ancestry (Gates 2013); in Poland a hundred years later, Tuwim had trouble fitting in partly because he was Jewish (Polonsky 2005, 198). That Pushkin and Tuwim were both racially tagged outsiders contributed, I believe, to the fact that each in his generation played the role of rule breaker. I believe that this personal resonance between them led to Tuwim’s choice of Pushkin to translate and helped make that translation successful. I learned that Tuwim had written a humorous essay on how he translated Pushkin—or, rather, on how he tried with all his might to translate Pushkin yet fell on his face: the essay is “Czterowiersz na warsztacie” (“Quatrain in the Workshop” [2008a]). The quatrain on Tuwim’s poetic translation workbench was the beginning of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila: “У лукоморья дуб зелёный…” “By the bay, a green oak…”—four lines of a children’s fairy tale, simple and charming, that ended up inflicting one awful contortion after another on the Polish translator who was struggling to keep in the air, all at the same time, the juggling pins of rhyme, sense, meter, and style. In graduate school and later, I had done a few translations myself, for the same reason that most people translate without a contract from a publisher: they love something in another tongue and want to share it with others or generally with a public who, without taking several years of a language, cannot know the original. I imagine a child at a seashore. The child sees a stone or shell in the water that is unusually pretty; the child picks it up and runs with it to show a friend—“Look what I found! You’ll love this!” But in the few moments it takes to reach the friend, in those few steps or skips over the sand, the water has dried, leaving a film of salt, and the vivid colors of the stone or shell have gone dull and now are completely boring. I became a translator with a publisher’s contract through my involvement with Stanisław Lem, a science fiction writer, satirist, essayist, and philosopher. I had written an article on Lem and sent it to him in the spirit of fan mail. He wrote back that he was being translated into English for McGraw-Hill (then eventually it was Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), and the translation needed help. Would I be interested in repairing it, 241

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and, further, would I be willing to translate him in the future?5 I replied that he needed a writer, ideally, to translate him—the rule that only a writer should translate a writer was one of my dissertation conclusions— and I wasn’t a writer, alas, but I would do my best until one came along who happened to know Polish and some science. I ended up translating several books by Lem. Some of the praise that came to me from places both elevated (famous authors, leading critics) and unelevated (young people at science fiction conventions) made me think that maybe I was a sort of writer after all. At the same time, I was teaching Russian literature in English translation to undergraduates at George Washington University. The required reading in my courses was almost all novels and short stories, because the poetry didn’t make it across the linguistic-cultural barrier: it didn’t translate. In my class in Soviet literature, for example, we read Mayakovsky’s Bedbug but not his Облако в штанах (Cloud in Trousers). Years later, when I became a manuscript editor at Harcourt, I worked with English translations from various languages, for the imprint Helen and Kurt Wolff Books and for the editor Drenka Willen. At my desk, I fussed and fiddled with and to different degrees revised—or, more precisely, suggested the revision of—the English of Ralph Manheim, the translator of Günter Grass; the English of William Weaver, the translator of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino; the English of Giovanni Pontiero, the translator of José Saramago; the English of Michael Henry Heim, the translator of Bohumil Hrabal. I worked with these and many more Englishes. I edited the texts of dozens of translators. This fiddling amounted to most of my job. When I moved from Harcourt to the Modern Language Association, occasionally I got involved again with the editing of English translations, this time in manuscripts for the MLA series Texts and Translations. A logical question is, how can one edit a translation without knowing the original language? Obviously it would help to know the original language. Yet more than once it happened to me—and to Drenka Willen—that when a suggestion was offered to make an English sentence

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This letter by Lem, dated January 13, 1972, is published in his Sława i Fortuna (his offer to me is on page 16). 242

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clearer, more grammatical, more logical, the translator said, with surprise, “This is now closer to the original!” I became a member of PEN American Center, joined its Translation Committee, and at one point, with a few fellow translators, worked on revising PEN’s model translation contract (online at www.pen.org/ model-contract). Questions discussed around the committee table were matters of copyright, fees, royalties, deadlines, subsidiary rights, newspaper and magazine reviews of translations, translation awards. And, of course, when translators get together, they always relate, in inexhaustible detail, their tribulations with this word, that phrase. A former colleague of mine from Harcourt, Alane Mason, who moved to Norton, launched Words without Borders—a Web site, organization, and publisher devoted to building bridges, through literary translation, among different countries and cultures. Alane gave me the opportunity to participate a little in this hopeful, valuable enterprise. A central idea of the project is that when we get to know people beyond their stereotype—by interacting with them firsthand or by reading their poems and stories—we discover their humanity, acquire respect for them, and global tolerance, so sorely needed, goes up a notch. I would recommend, in this spirit, the Words without Borders book Literature from the “Axis of Evil”: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations. My connections with Lem and with science fiction brought me into contact with Polish science fiction and fantasy writers who came after Lem, and to show some of their writing to English readers I put together the anthology A Polish Book of Monsters, published by PIASA Books (PIASA is the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America). I translated a metafictional novel by Marek Huberath, Nest of Worlds, e-published by Restless Books. I also had the unusual experience of seeing my own prose, both fiction and nonfiction, in translation, a few in a language that I could actually read. It was flattering, of course, but also disorienting. I encountered a different author each time. Kandel in Polish, for example, sounds more confident than Kandel in English. At the MLA, where I am a manuscript editor today, I edit essays written by scholars and professors on subjects of interest and importance to the academic community, and among them have been essays on trans243

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lation. By this route, Lawrence Venuti updated me a bit on the theory and practice of literary translation. So, to sum up my autobiographical account, I have looked at this field from more than one angle, wearing different hats at different times— translator, scholar, critic, reader, teacher, colleague, editor. You may think that I am presenting this curriculum vitae as a decent accumulation of credentials, but, please note, my intention is to offer no truths here, only a few personal opinions. There is plenty of attitude in these opinions, and its resistance to theory is fairly consistent. I respect theory and understand the need for it, but theory, seeking wider perspectives and higher principles, tends to oversimplify. That I speak with no authority makes perfect sense, since my drift, I think you will agree, resists authority. Some of My Opinions

In the past few years, there has been an increased interest among academics and intellectuals in literary translation. This change puzzles me. I think of a translator as a person who works offstage, behind the curtain—moving scenery, making sure the props are where they ought to be. The audience applauds the actor, the playwright, maybe the director, but surely not the stagehand. The purpose of translating is to have readers exclaim, “What a wonderful author!” not, “What a wonderful translator!” Just as the whole point of editing is to have readers admire the prowess of the writer, not the skill of the editor. Translators, like editors, are and should remain invisible. A couple of times, I was invited to give a talk or interview on translation, and once I was asked to visit a class in a course on literary translation—at Washington University in Saint Louis.6 Those students were impressive; I still remember them. But I didn’t understand why they were taking this course. I didn’t understand their ambition or where this new attention, this new respect, was coming from. 6



The professor of the class that I visited was Fatemeh Keshavarz. She is a remarkably cheerful builder of bridges, and I highly recommend her Web site Windows on Iran (https://windowsoniran.wordpress.com/author/fatemehk/). 244

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For one thing, translation does not pay well. I have been told more than once that in Europe a good translator is highly regarded, may even become a literary personage, but in the United States a translator’s name often is not included on the title page of a book; it is given in small print on the copyright page or not given at all. If a translator’s name is included on the title page, it usually does not appear on the jacket. Once in a while in our country a translator makes the limelight, sharing the stage and taking bows with the star: Edith Grossman and Gregory Rabassa, for example, accompanied Gabriel García Márquez in that way. But usually such laborers have no public existence, and their labor is so time-consuming that the fee received for hours put in amounts to way less than the minimum wage. For this reason, organizations and government agencies sometimes help a translator by providing a grant or fellowship. Translation is a practical activity: it is done for a particular audience and for a particular purpose. A writer may write, intentionally or through the will of the Muse, for all humanity, for posterity; but a translator translates for one moment and for one small region in that vast continuum. A writer is global, a translator local. A writer is unique, a translator one of the writer’s many mirrors. Because the world changes, and people and their language and attitudes and fashions change, the need for a new translation of a work arises over and over again. Looking at how a canonized masterpiece of antiquity was rendered from century to century and in different parts of the globe can provide us with a sequence of snapshots of ourselves, as in a family album. A LiteraryTranslator and a Literary Critic Have Much in Common

There is no such thing as a universal critic—the most astute and wellread critic will have blind spots, will not be on the right wavelength for a particular author, will be tone-deaf to a certain kind of writing—but a good critic possesses a bag of many tools and has the sense and sensitivity to take out the right ones to deal with the work in hand. Critics with an ideology to develop and sell may have important contributions to make to theory, to our understanding of the world, ourselves, and 245

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art, but the light they shed on a text, like the beam of a spotlight, is narrow. The study Rabelais and His World is important, but there is more Mikhail Bakhtin in it than François Rabelais. A good translator, like a good critic, must grasp the special essencepersonality of a work and then decide which tools are needed to render it and which aspects of that work are secondary or peripheral and can be jettisoned. I accept the inevitability of triage, the idea that translation is an act not only of interpretation but also of selection. Not everything can be carried across the barrier. If you intend to translate Byron, work on preserving the wit, logic, and ideas and worry less about soundplay and rhythm; if you intend to translate Shelley, work on capturing the imagery, emotion, and rhythm and worry less about the ideas; if you translate Emily Dickinson, keep down the word count no matter how much of her wisdom you hope to share; if you translate Walt Whitman, be the expansive showman, not a cautious, fastidious accountant of this word for that. A great many different elements are present in each of these poets, of course, but hard choices must be made when, before the transcontinental flight, you have to fit things into the carry-on suitcase of your translation. It can help a translator to play the literary critic by wondering and analyzing how an author achieves a certain effect. The translator will not have the same tools that the author used, because the grammatical, syntactical, and lexical opportunities of one language will differ from those of another, but grasping the engineering that was done in the original can help a translator find an analogous application of linguistic nuts and bolts. I buy and endorse the concept of functional equivalence: that the goal should be to communicate the result, not the cause; convey the spirit, not the letter. If a work is funny, let its translation be funny. Explaining a joke either by adding words in text or by using a footnote may enlighten students, readers, about a time and place, but humor does not survive vivisection. Often, when I translated Lem, I came upon a joke that absolutely could not be conveyed; my response was to dodge the obstacle, to fudge by creating a different but comparable joke, either in the line or passage itself or on the next or previous page. In this strategy, you are faithful through betrayal. The much-quoted Italian pun 246

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traduttore, traditore “translator, traitor” is similar to, I recently learned, the Hungarian fordítás ferdítés “translation is distortion.” However, if your purpose is to use Zoshchenko, for example, as a document of his society, forget the charm and fabulous hilarity of Scenes from the Bathhouse and use all the explanatory notes you need to. Failure is inevitable. If you’ve ever sat down and read the complete works of a wonderful author, you’ve learned that some of those works are less than wonderful. Not every sonnet by Shakespeare is a gem. Homer does indeed sometimes sleep. Lewis Carroll is a thoroughly delightful writer, in my opinion, but you would never guess that if you read only his Sylvie and Bruno. So many factors that lead to the success of a literary work lie outside the control, outside the ken, of the work’s creator. Personal talent, intelligence, and intention are only part of the picture and maybe a small part. This same uncertainty of the result of literary labor haunts a translator also, who is a secondary author or author once removed. An inspired trick that is used to solve a translation problem on one page may not work at all on the next. Simple mistakes, and sometimes they can be howlers, happen to the best translators. This vulnerability or curse comes with the territory. A translator who knows the original language well, who is even a native speaker of the original language, may be unaware of the meaning of some expression from a dialect, subculture, technical field, or new generation. There are many embarrassing examples of mistakes, which are often made public by rival translators or snarky critics and which provide general entertainment. I’ve been ungenerous in this way myself, pointing out that another translator of Lem who didn’t know the physics involved, stochastic processes, translated the Polish for the term Brownian motion, the random motion of particles in a liquid or gas, named after the botanist Robert Brown (1827), as “brown movements.” One of the self-deprecating remarks I take out and dust off, as I am doing now, is that the goal of the translator is not to keep from tripping but to trip in a way that will not be noticed by too many. People who attend a writers’ workshop want, and typically receive, rules and formulas. How to craft a plot, use point of view, create believable characters. There is much the same hands-on, tricks-of-the-trade, and textbook approach offered to, and taken by, would-be translators. 247

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The advice is often good common sense, yet my feeling is that, for both writers and translators, there are no rules, at best only rules of thumb. Is it not practically a rule that writers break rules? It wouldn’t be fun otherwise, for many of them—and for many of their readers. Breaking rules makes literature new again, whether the jolt is given by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. A translator who goes too much by the book will not be flexible enough to shift gears when shifting gears is required. I remember how a professional copyeditor once corrected the grammar of an English translation, which gave the famous utterance by our Creator from Exodus 3.14 of the King James Version of the Bible: “I am that I am.” The wielder of the blue pencil, following the rules of modern American copyediting, changed it to, “I am he who is.” It is good for a translator, as it is good for an editor, to know a little about many things. To have a checkered or patchwork career. Translators and editors, like writers, tend not to be experts or authorities on anything. Misfits, they stand a little outside; they never completely belong, are never entirely invested. Just as learning another language can give you insight into your own, translating can give you a fresh perspective on an original work. I remember, as I learned Russian and read Russian poetry, discovering the lamentable absence in English of a simple word, onomatopoeic and monosyllabic, common yet poetic, that could convey both the sound of the wind in the trees and the sound of the waves of the sea: шум. In English, for the trees, “rustling” is onomatopoeic but too localized and too peaceful. “Roar” works for both forest and sea but is too dramatic, too loud. Our “susurration” or “susurrus” approaches the flavor of шум but is too quiet, like “whisper” or “murmur,” and it is certainly not common speech. Who knew that there was such a big hole in English? In the same way, putting a text in a different language, like close reading, can make you aware of a feature or element—or absence—you never noticed before. Huberath’s Nest of Worlds contains, among many things, a mathematical-logical proof of the existence of God. (Huberath, by the way, is not a theologian but a physicist.) It wasn’t until I was in the midst of translating the novel that I realized that the word God does not appear anywhere in it, that the author made a point of not uttering 248

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the name of what is at the heart of all his writing. Even an offhand, nonreligious exclamation like “Good God!” was not permitted. In translating as in writing, and as in any art, the proof is in the pudding. Giving a lecture on having an ear does not mean that the lecturer has an ear, no matter how venerable or awarded the lecturer. Dancing is more than the moves; music is more than the notes. Countless hours of studying, analyzing, and practicing boogie-woogie is no guarantee that the outcome, when you get on your feet and start moving, will be boogie-woogie. I don’t want to hear that you have a PhD or board certification in the lambada; I want to see you do it before I say, “You’re hired.” People bump and grind and twist on a dance floor, and yet many of them remain, for all their honest effort and physical competence, chaste. There is no justice in this. In art, doing all the work and heroic extra credit besides doesn’t mean you get an A. You can put your heart and soul and many years into an enterprise and still flunk miserably. Behind my talk of ear lies the old-fashioned, unsophisticated opinion that whether a literary work succeeds or not is not a matter of opinion, that some objective reality underlies the judgment, if the judge is competent, that this poem is better than that poem, that this play is mediocre and that play terrific. I appreciate the sociological arguments, dominant for a generation now in our world of criticism, against such nonrelativist essentialism, but I believe in it nevertheless. Tuwim spoke of an “infallible indicator” in his “Quatrain in the Workshop”: a kind of needle on a meter that tells you yes or no—as internal as the “still small voice of conscience,” and as unquestionable. This is a belief, of course, not a matter of knowledge, perhaps a little in the vein of Credo quia absurdum est. Translation, like a marriage, may have a business basis—rational reasons—but it will not work if there is not also a personal involvement, some emotional heat, a little chemistry. A translator should find in an author a kindred spirit. Terry Gallagher’s translation Self-Reference Engine, of the novel by Toh Enjoe, is a recent example of this authortranslator connection: the work of the Japanese author is an off-the-beaten-path fusion of science fiction, postmodernism, mathematics, philosophy, and literary satire—and, appropriately, the 249

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American translator, in personality and experience, is an off-the-beatenpath man. The bios of both Toh Enjoe and Gallagher remind me of that of Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi. These people have been in all kinds of places and done all kinds of things. It’s incredible how helpful the Internet has become for a translator: finding a bit of argot not included in any print or online collection of idioms, getting a technical term right, or a place-name, or a fact of history or geography or currency exchange. A couple of years ago, I was working on On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe, by Andrzej Stasiuk, and, because it was nonfiction rooted in today’s world (unlike science fiction, where I had obvious license to make things up as needed), it was imperative that I know, for example, exactly how a certain piece of farm equipment in Moldova worked. If you’re not clear on the layout of a bar-restaurant at an intersection in downtown Baia Mare, and you need to be in order to translate a sentence, do a Google search, and you will find not only detailed information about this restaurant but also several nice photographs of it, inside and out. Not many tourists may go to that corner of Romania, but a few do, and nowadays, to create a personal travelogue blog, anyone can take a picture and upload it in seconds, with two or three clicks on a hand-held device. A translator and an editor have in common the need to maintain a schizophrenic balance between assertiveness and deference. Neither translator nor editor should wade in and take charge, disregarding the author; but neither should be timid. Consider a close adviser to the king. The adviser loves the king and serves the king, the throne, the kingdom, by always being—not right but completely honest, because obviously the crowd of sycophants will not be honest. The king is bound to be displeased by some of the adviser’s advice; therefore the adviser, even one extremely careful to couch every opinion, suggestion, and concern in the most diplomatic, delicate way possible, runs the risk of execution, exile, or dismissal. A fearful translator gives word for word and says, “Don’t blame me; this is what the author said.” A fearful editor sees to spelling and punctuation but looks the other way at every solecism, malapropism, and other kind of writerly embarrassment. Both servants are useless—and thereby actually show less respect to their master. 250

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I am aware that in these comments I often put in the same boat, almost as if they were interchangeable, translator, writer, critic, editor, dancer, musician, artist. In my defense: for all their obvious and important differences, they worship at the same altar—and therefore they all deserve our admiration and our pity. Let Us Keep Our Noses to the Ground

Another argument for stressing the value of specifics over generalities in thinking about literary translation is that sometimes a detail can make a big difference. Articles on translation—occasionally there is one in the New York Times book section—are filled with examples, to the extent that they seem like a list of anecdotes. The anecdotes are fascinating, funny, sometimes instructive, but they are like pieces of candy popped into the mouth one after another. The presence of such candy is in books on translation as well, such as Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, by David Bellos. We should not look down on the humble example, however. One word, one phrase, might change our overall take on an author. Growing up, I loved Dostoevsky and read him in the English of Constance Garnett. I was taken with his fevered prose, with the way his characters thought and spoke as if they were in a dream. All in a vaguely Victorian style, which, combined with the author’s post-Victorian ideas about right and wrong and how the mind works, captivated me. When after many years I finally sat down with Dostoevsky in the original, I was disappointed: the prose was not so fevered; sentences made more sense and were less rambling; the diction was more normal, natural; the effect was less fantastic, less poetic. This was not my Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has just murdered the old pawnbroker and her half-sister with an ax. He emerges from the building and wanders in the street. He reels as if drunk. This scene is in part 1, toward the end of chapter 7. An unnamed workman, a person who is not an intellectual, not of the gentry, seeing Raskolnikov, shouts, with

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humor, “Ишь нарезался.” The meaning is, “Look at that, you’ve [or the guy has] had one too many.” Translators of the novel, over several generations and recently, have given that meaning: “My word, he has been going at it!” someone shouted. … (Garnett) “Look at you—cut to the teeth!” someone shouted to him. … (McDuff) “You’ve had a drop too much!” someone called after him. …. (Coulson) … someone shouted at him: “You’ve sure had it, brother!” (Monas) “There’s a potted one!” someone shouted at him … (Pevear and Volokhonsky)

The verb is based on the Russian резать (“to cut”). Accordingly David McDuff uses an expression, possibly British, although Benjamin Franklin included it in his catalog of synonyms for being drunk, that is unfamiliar to most of us: “cut” (or “half-cut”). Many English expressions for being drunk—“smashed,” “wasted,” “blasted,” “ “annihilated,” “destroyed,” “wrecked,” “hammered”—carry the sense of violence done to oneself. But Dostoevsky’s нарезаться (“to get drunk”) is not far from зарезаться (“to commit suicide”). On the Internet, someone quipped in Russian, in answer to the question of what нарезаться means, “To drink so much that in the morning you want to kill yourself [зарезаться].” In Crime and Punishment, where drunkenness occurs often and in many characters, the idea of suicide is central. At one point, Raskolnikov exclaims, referring to his crime, “I killed myself” (pt. 5, ch. 4). There is undeniable wordplay in Dostoevsky’s novels: in the names of characters—Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov, Marmeladov, and so on. That a name suggests a personality follows a tradition that goes back centuries and appears in the literatures of many countries; in Dostoevsky’s case, it shows the influence especially of Charles Dickens, whose pres252

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ence in Crime and Punishment is already evident in characterization, dialogue, and arrangement of scenes (see Gredina 2007). But to take a pun that packs an ideological punch and bury inside a remark from the street that on the surface has no special significance indicates a kind of cleverness that doesn’t go with prose that spills across the page in an irrational, frenetic way. To me, the verbal precision of “Ишь нарезался” suggests the existence of a Dostoevsky who can play not only with images and symbols, as critics have noted, but also with the many meanings and associations that a word can carry. The importance of context—concentrically from the inside out, a scene in Crime and Punishment, the whole novel, its author, the author’s period—argues against a universalizing approach to or conceptualization of literary translation. What is right for a translator to do must always depend on the original text, on what makes sense from that special, concrete perspective (with the understanding that different translators will see this perspective differently), and always depend as well on who will be reading the translation and why. I believe that literary translation is a practical, personal activity, not something that can be learned by acquiring an all-purpose set of skills or taught by listing principles, though of course a skill or a principle acquired secondhand can be helpful to one in the trenches. As any art, translation works—or doesn’t work—for a variety of reasons that are outside our control and ultimately may not be articulable. As any other art, but perhaps more than any other art, it can be humbling. The good news is that the position of translator was humble from the start: if you’re low to the ground, your fall will not be far. References Bellos, David. 2012. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. New York: Faber. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 2015. Преступление и наказание [Prestuplenie i kazanie]. Lib.ru “Klassika” [last accessed July 19, 2015]. Franklin, Benjamin. 2003. “The Drinker’s Dictionary.” In A Benjamin Franklin Reader, 109–12. Edited by Walter Isaacson. New York: Simon & Schuster. 253

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Gallagher, Terry. 2013. Self-Reference Engine. Translated by Toh Enjoe. San Francisco: Haikasoru. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 2013. “Was the Father of Russian Lit a Brother?” The Root, April 15 [last accessed July 19, 2015]. Gillespie, Stuart. 2011. English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History. Chichester: Wiley. Gredina, Irina. 2007. “Dickens’s Influence upon Dostoevsky, 1860–1870; or, One Nineteenth-Century Master’s Assimilation of Another’s Manner and Vision.” The Victorian, August 8 [last accessed July 19, 2015]. Huberath, Marek S. 2014. Nest of Worlds. Translated by Michael Kandel. New York: Restless Books. Johnson, Samuel. 2015. “Dryden as a Translator.” Lives of the Poets. Classical Works from the Library of Philip Atkinson. Ourcivilisation.com [last accessed July 16, 2015]. Kandel, Michael, transl. and ed. 2010. A Polish Book of Monsters: Five Dark Tales from Contemporary Poland. New York: PIASA. Lem, Stanisław. 2013. Sława i Fortuna: Listy do Michaela Kandela, 1972–1987. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Literature from the “Axis of Evil”: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations: A Words without Borders Anthology. 2006. New York: The New Press. Papavassiliou, Anna. 2012. “The Interminable Journey of Translating Poetry.” Termcoord, July 26 [last accessed July 19, 2015]. Polonsky, Antony. 2005. “‘Why Did They Hate Tuwim and Boy So Much?’: Jews and ‘Artificial Jews’ in the Literary Polemics of the Second Polish Republic.” In Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, 189–209. Edited by Robert Blobaum. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pushkin, Aleksandr. 1937. Lutnia Puszkina. Translated by Julian Tuwim. Warsaw: Przeworskiego Shaw, Allen (translator). 2013. Mozart and Salieri. By Aleksandr Pushkin. University of Adelaide Library, December 17 [last accessed July 19, 2016]. Stasiuk, Andrzej. 2011. On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe. Translated by Michael Kandel. Boston: Houghton. Tuwim, Julian. 2008. “Czterowiersz na warsztacie” (1934). Pegaz dęba, czyli panopticum poetyckie, 191–210. Warsaw: Iskry. ———. 2008. Polski słownik pijacki. Warsaw: Prószyński. 254

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———. 2011. Wiersze dla dzieci. Warsaw: Wilga. Venuti, Lawrence. 2007. “Translation Studies.” In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, 3rd edition, 294–311. Edited by David G. Nicholls. New York: Modern Language Association. Wilson, Edmund. 1965. “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov.” The New York Review of Books, July 15 [last accessed July 19, 2015].

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Translating Folktales From National to Transnational S I B EL A N FO R R E S T ER

Nothing is part of world literature or world culture unless and until it crosses linguistic borders: translation makes a verbal artifact into something different, accessible to audiences who are linguistically Other and often culturally Other, too. Folklore is one of the bodies of discourse that has crossed these boundaries most often, but at the same time, folklore may be the sphere of discourse and practice most often associated outside the borders of a nation with a particular nationality. The history, theory and practice of folklore translation open up insights into the role of translation in transnational literature as a whole. This chapter presents several issues in folklore translation, concentrating in particular on the folktale, and aligns them with current questions in the growing discipline of translation studies. Introductions or studies by several translators and critics of folktales, emphasizing mostly European materials (Haase, Warner, Zipes, Forrester), bear out the particular issues that arise in translating folktales. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on the question’s relevance to current politics in the very regions from which the folktales that form the basis of the study originate. Folklore may be defined as the verbal culture of any local group, embodied in acts of performance and passed on not by formal study, but by observing the performance. Verbal folk arts are passed on as individuals listen to and witness an oral performance of a tale or a song, gradually absorbing the rules or “grammar” of each genre.1 The concept of orality as defined by Walter Ong (2000) is crucial for understanding the workings of any kind of oral tradition, often produced using pat1



Not for nothing is Vladimir Propp’s groundbreaking 1928 study of the wonder tale entitled Morphology of the Folktale.

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terns of composition described in Albert Lord’s Singer of Tales (Lord 2003). Although any oral folk genre may contain some elements that are always performed identically, committed to memory by the audience (and then expected in retelling) in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever told children a recurring bedtime story, in practice any performance will differ slightly or even greatly from other performances of the same tale. Barre Toelken (1996) notes that “even when content accuracy is a chief consideration, exact duplication of wording is relatively rare in orally transmitted materials” (53). An oral performance occurs in time as well as in place, a specific setting, which itself reflects the temporal context of seasonal chores and traditional rituals or celebrations. Endlessly variable in its contents and performance, folklore is subject to a constant process of “editing” by the surrounding community, whose members will approve and encourage certain words, approaches or tales, while discouraging, critiquing or walking out on others. Pëtr Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson (1982) outline the “special form of creativity” based on folklore performance in the 1920s, a time when (as they noted in 1929 [42]) there was still a highly ramified living tradition of folktale telling in the Moscow region. This editing function means that every member of a community participates in the local folk culture and thus “owns” it. Folklore, as already noted, is prone to crossing borders; it is an exemplary transnational field of discourse, even while any one performance is situated in a local community with a language and an ethnic if not national definition. As Toelken (1996) notes, The most heavily used critical tools in folklore, the type and motif indexes, are founded on the proposition that in folklore no single item can be called the tale or song or barn. It is axiomatic that we need more than one instance of a tale or motif or ballad or popular belief even to know whether in fact we are dealing with an expression shaped by tradition. (38)

As folklore began to be collected and studied in Europe, the folktale became one of the most prestigious and attractive genres for study and 258

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comparison.2 As soon as scholars and collectors became aware of folktales in other languages and countries, they were fascinated by the apparent connections and possible paths of dissemination. The similarities they observed among folktales in different places nourished a variety of theories and eventually whole schools of scholarship. Whether seeking the origins (and then hoping to perceive the original forms) of folktales, like the Meteorological School, or focusing synchronically on widespread tale types, like the Finnish School, folkloristics has depended on translation to do its comparative work. Along with scholars studying folktales, anyone who does not know the original language but wants to read the tale obviously needs a translation. (My reader will notice that I have slipped from discussing oral performance in a folk setting to indicating folktales in translation, for reasons that will be discussed below.) Folklore is universally verbal in human civilization: every language has folklore, although not every language has a literature—or even a written form, literature’s prerequisite. Therefore, folklore is a natural place to seek information for any project investigating culture or discourse that aims to reach broadly across a transnational range of humanity. As folklore is found in every culture, it is present even in the most disadvantaged communities; indeed, it was often associated with “backward” groups, such as peasants, while Europe began to undergo industrialization. Even as modernity created new classes and cultural differences, the children of educated elites who no longer told folktales themselves would still hear tales from their peasant nannies. Folklore formed a basis for secular European literature from Apuleius to Basile, Boccaccio and Chaucer. By the nineteenth century, literate readers were both charmed by the folktales peasants told and afraid that, since the peasants were mostly illiterate, their tales would be forgotten. Literate individuals began to write down the narratives they enjoyed, whether as literary fairy tales in the French style or attempts to achieve a simple and “oral” style. In nineteenth-century Russia, the practice of sending

2

In Anglo-American areas of the world, the ballad was another highly prized folk genre. It is telling, though, that Achim von Arnim’s and Clemens Brentano’s famous 1805 collection of German folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, did not achieve the same resonance in the Anglophone world as the Grimms’ collection. 259

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troublesome aristocrats into exile in remote parts of the country (Karelia, Siberia) led to folklore collections by such figures as Ivan Khudiakov (1842–1876). As soon as folktales are collected and published, they become a source for literary works, and we rightly begin to think of them as “folk literature.” Once a folktale is written down, it is no longer what it was: the snapshot it provides of a particular performance is also simultaneously a fixed text that begins to partake of the status of a literary work. The folktale was a prestigious genre in Europe thanks largely to the Grimm brothers’ tremendous success in publishing and highlighting their tales, which have often been translated and retold in the Anglophone world. Hansen (1997, 275) observes, “The comparative study of the international folktale began in the early years of the nineteenth century when the brothers Jacob [sic] and Wilhelm Grimm published their collection of folktales in two volumes, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–1815).” Jack Zipes points to the motivations of the Grimms: […] all their research was geared toward exploring the epics, sagas, and tales that contained what they thought were essential truths about the German cultural heritage. Underlying their work was a pronounced romantic urge to excavate and preserve German cultural contributions made by the common people before the stories became extinct. (Zipes 2014, xxv)

In accord with this, “[…] in the first edition they refrained from embellishment and making major alterations in substance and plot” (xxviii). Earlier collections of folktales in Italy or France tended to transform the tales into more literary texts; the literary fairy tale may be quite far removed from the tale’s folk roots, if indeed a particular literary tale has folk roots.3 The Romantic Nationalism of the early nineteenth century rejected French-dominated Enlightenment literary styles, which would depict “the folk” (if at all) for comic relief. In Eastern Europe, as well as in Germany and Italy, the collection and then the study of folklore 3



Warner (1994) points out that women were more involved in writing these literary tales than in other genres of literature. 260

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served nation-building projects that sought out and affirmed works in the national language after centuries of “submersion” in empires, where educated individuals tended to assimilate to the language of the empire rather than participating in the local oral culture. By the nineteenth century, these elites felt a greater impetus to collect and preserve the folktales while confirming their own ethnic belonging and (often) solidifying their linguistic proficiency.4 The subsequent translation of folklore was, then, a way to highlight local culture and its specificity, while bringing a previously neglected nation’s folklore into dialogue with that of other nations in the grand projects of interpreting or classifying folktales. Collectors and translators were serving both their own nations and the greater scholarly and intellectual enterprise of folklore study. As Zipes notes of the Grimms, It did not matter who their informants were because they regarded them only as mediators of the treasures of ancient storytelling of ordinary people. […] As I have mentioned before, the Grimms envisaged themselves—and their collaborators—as moral cultivators of these tales, or tillers of the soil. Their mission was to excavate them, study them, sort them carefully, and to keep shaping them so that they remained artistically and philologically resilient and retained their primal essence. (xxxi)

In the early to mid-nineteenth century, folkloristics began to emerge as a discipline. Educated people—amateurs, Renaissance men and women, and university professors like Max Müller, star of the Meteorological School, who taught at Oxford University—invested considerable time and effort in the comparison and analysis of folktales. This historical trend of folklore studies still impacts practice today, and it also largely shapes the attitudes of non-scholars to folktales. It has led to a tendency

4

Women, in particular, were more readily accepted as folklore collectors and translators than they were as writers of original work—perhaps because their expected maternal role in patriarchal society fit the association of folktales with children (entertained by a peasant caretaker with tales in the nursery), and with “the childhood of nations” since folktales were perceived as predecessors of literary forms, “primitive” in their assumptions as well as their origins. 261

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to use folktales as material for illumination of the past, while viewing current performances as poor descendants of some superior or unadulterated original culture (often itself fixed in earlier written/published versions, if not in scholarly extrapolation), a devolutionist tendency that folklorist Alan Dundes noted critically (1969, 12): […] it is quite evident that the concept of progress per se had a devastatingly negative effect upon folklore theory. The association of folklore with the past, glorious or not, continued. Progress meant leaving the past behind. From this perspective, the noble savage and the equally noble peasant—folkloristically speaking—were destined to lose their folklore as they marched ineluctably towards civilization. Thus it was not a matter of the evolution of folklore; it was more a matter of the evolution out of folklore.

Marina Warner (1994) describes both the ways French women authors of literary fairy tales (some of them preceding the famous Charles Perrault) have been written out of the genre’s history, and the ways seventeenth- and eighteenth-century published editions of the tales were presented and consumed as fare for children. Warner notes, however, that “These editions solicited an adult audience; the older generation were being eased into taking pleasure in make-believe, in pretending they had become children again and had returned to the pleasures of their youth through tales of magic and enchantment and the homespun wisdom of the hearth” (xvii). Thus even before the Grimms and others began to mine fairy tales for traces of national character (or to insert the traits they found desirable into their editions of the tales), the French adult reader could return to a childlike state in the pleasure of reading the tales, and that state (à la Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had himself penned a literary fairy tale) was somehow closer to the authentic person, the individual equivalent of a nation’s own childhood. In some places the relationship of scholars and readers to folklore and its reflection of the past is inflected with pathos even greater than the regret felt by the elites in industrializing societies (and peasants and proletarians too, as they emerge into literacy and modernity) when fac262

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ing the change in and threat of the eventual disappearance of traditional ways of life. In the Soviet Union, the dekulakization,5 forced collectivization, and involuntary resettlement of farmers or herders, who had until then preserved oral peasant culture, broke links with traditional society and folkways in a much more painful manner than did the arrival of trains, the lure of factory work in the city, and the seductive appeal of popular culture. The sense that folk culture had been forcibly ended and taken away has sometimes given folklore collection and interpretation a great urgency. In most regions of Europe today, the folktale is a dead or dying genre of oral culture: parents or other relations who tell their children either folk or literary stories most likely read them aloud from printed versions. My students in the early twenty-first-century United States likewise describe their parents reading them folktales. The printed and read version is what these young people experience, besides animated versions, and they are bound to notice that the words never change.6 This experience of fixed forms belies the fluid nature of actual folklore performance and underlines that we now experience folktales as literature, even as we still encounter and participate in spreading other forms of verbal folklore (jokes, rumors, even ghost stories that may have quite a bit in common with folktales). Types of Translation

After this introduction to folklore and its study in Europe, let us turn briefly to some relevant issues of translation theory. Whether one has heard a folktale or read it, there are two basic approaches to translating it. One is to retell it, orally or in writing, in a new language: this is the way folktales have always crossed linguistic boundaries. Even a literate 5



6



A wealthy and grasping peasant had been called a “kulak,” the Russian word for fist. As part of forced collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s, wealthier and more successful peasant farming families were often stripped of their property and exiled to distant regions; the men were sometimes killed outright. The process was called “dekulakization.” That unchanging wording can make it easier for a child who has memorized parts of the tale to learn to read, using the book from which the tale was read aloud. 263

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person who never developed the techniques of oral performance can retell a tale, though probably less effectively than a practiced oral teller. The other way to translate a folktale is to write it down in another language, staying as close to the version just heard or read as possible. As Zipes has noted (Zipes 2006): Authentic or definitive renderings of oral folk tales in written languages are virtually impossible, even if the collector takes down the story in the vernacular with signs denoting tone and gesticulation. The contextual moment cannot be recaptured. (x)

Any written (and then printed) form of a folktale originally heard is already a translation, no matter how immediately the tale is recorded, and a published version participates in the literary system, even as it may move from there back into folk telling or be transmediated into an opera, ballet or cartoon. (An audio or audio-video recording is much closer to a snapshot of the event of performance, and we owe some precious historical records of performances of epic poems and songs, in particular, to the introduction of technologies of audio recording.) The greater or lesser degree of distortion that human memory introduces into an oral retelling is less essential than the reteller’s ability to create a true folk performance, and though we may presume that written versions have greater stability (after all, there is the original text before your eyes), these have often been compromised by the censorship or editing, subconscious or intentional, of compilers or translators. Oral and written translation lie along a continuum rather than appearing as polar opposites. Nevertheless, they are two distinct tendencies of translation. To make a written translation, there must be some snapshot of the original tale, be it an audio recording that can be replayed, a written or printed text, or the author’s own (surely more variable) memory of a tale. The living tradition of tale-telling is in decline in many parts of the world, and many professional storytellers are entirely literate themselves, gleaning new tales from printed sources. This decline makes it more likely that a folktale translation will be made from a printed text. The more distant the original telling is in time and space, the more likely 264

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the source the translator uses will be printed rather than an oral telling or even a recollected oral telling. This raises issues discussed recently by scholars of folklore, like Donald Haase and Jack Zipes: in the process of collection, editing and publication there are a multitude of possibilities for distortion. A folklorist must simply assume that there has indeed been distortion, and work from there—as should any serious reader of folktales in translation. This necessary assumption contrasts markedly with the typical assumption, inherited from the Romantic Nationalists, that when we read folklore we are encountering something autochthonous and deeply genuine—something that reflects the essence of the People, whichever People that is. Besides the differences between oral retelling and written translation, translation theorists usefully distinguish between two tendencies in any translation: domestication and foreignization. First proposed in essence by Friedrich Schleiermacher in an 1818 lecture (2012),7 and influential more recently in the field of translation studies, the distinction is between “bringing the text toward the reader” or “bringing the reader toward the text,” in Schleiermacher’s terms. The domesticating translation fits local literary mores and is likely to be accepted by readers, so it is the most effective initial introduction to a new foreign writer, genre or literary movement. The foreignizing translation is full of marks of difference (in its style and choice of wording, as well as other traits), so it may be rejected by the pleasure reader or valued as a more authentic version by a reader who already accepts the importance of the text’s author or (in the case of folktales) its ethnic or national tradition. As a simple example, a domesticating translation of a folktale into English might well begin with “Once upon a time,” signaling unmistakably to the Anglophone reader that This Is a Fairy Tale, whereas a foreignizing translation of a Russian tale into English might begin with one of the analogous opening formulae: “In a certain kingdom, in a certain state.” Although Schleiermacher saw the two tendencies, domestication and foreignization, as mutually exclusive, it is clear that any translation will involve elements of both—and this combination, indeed, is what makes translation the marker and essential component of transnational lit7



Obviously, this idea has been mentioned many times since 1818. 265

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erature: for example, an American English translation of a German version of Sicilian folktales, like Zipes’s version of Laura Gonzenbach’s collection Beautiful Angiola (Zipes 2006). Reasons for reading folktales in translation parallel the two translational approaches. One is to partake of the fairy tale experience, already familiar and probably enhanced by a domesticating retelling. The other is to see how folktales, taken as important or indicative of a culture’s traits and values, differ in this other culture from what the reader already knows. (And indeed, why do we read foreign folktales if not to perceive and appreciate the difference, the different traditional markers of fairy-taleness, as well as signs of national character, be they genuine or imagined?) A highly exoticizing translation may be the most domesticating of all, presenting everything foreign in terms like those of an ethnic joke: we all know those (fill-in-the-blank)s, this is just the way they speak and act. Folklore is itself far from immune to this kind of stereotyping. It may seem at first that an oral retelling with its particular strategies of memory and organization would tend to map onto domesticating translation strategies, while a written translation would tend to further the attention to difference that enables a foreignizing translation. There is something to that assumption: an oral tale-teller is likely to use devices from the home tradition in telling a tale newly learned, and (if the audience approves, per Bogatyrëv and Jakobson) those devices bring the new tale quickly into the local repertoire. Ivo Andrić’s 1945 novel The Bridge on the Drina provides a thoughtful paragraph on the changes caused by cultural differences in the same Bosnian town of Višegrad, as children understand the local geography in accord with folk narratives: The children who fished for tiddlers all day [in the small depressions—SF] along these stony banks knew that these were hoofprints of ancient days and long dead warriors. Great heroes lived on earth in those days, when the stone had not yet hardened and was soft as the earth and the horses, like the warriors, were of colossal growth. Only for the Serbian children these were prints of the hooves of Šarac, the horse of Kraljević Marko, which had remained there from the time when Kraljević Marko himself was 266

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in prison up there in the Old Fortress and escaped, flying down the slope and leaping the Drina, for at that time there was no bridge. But the Turkish children knew that it had not been Kraljević Marko, nor could it have been (for whence could a bastard Christian dog have had such strength or such a horse!) any but Djerzelez Alija on his winged charger which, as everyone knew, despised ferries and ferrymen and leapt over rivers as if they were watercourses. They did not even squabble about this, so convinced were both sides in their own belief. And there was never an instance of any one of them being able to convince another, or that any one had changed his belief. (Andrić 1977, 17)

A written translation, on the other hand, may range from the most scrupulous rendering of a recorded oral telling, comparable to a linguist’s phonetic transcription and just as hard for a non-specialist to read, to the most self-serving domestication. Jorge Luis Borges comments on the value of Jean Antoine Gallanda’s otherwise egregiously exoticizing translation of a hugely important collection of tales, One Thousand and One Nights (Borges 2012): the translated tales are hopeless as folklore but enchanting as literary monuments. (Gallanda claimed that his translation was based on oral versions he himself had heard.) What making a written translation of a written or printed version of a tale can allow, however, is close adherence to the details of the original, and this is more likely to favor foreignization and the preservation of stylistic as well as content details, as opposed to embellishment and censorship— adding elements meant to please the reader, and subtracting those that do not match the collector’s ideology, or that the collector or editor considers obscene.8 Depending on the intended audience, scholars may prioritize domestication or foreignization to various degrees in their versions of folktales or their translations. Zipes notes that in some cases a translation may have much less distortion than an “original” folktale It is interesting that the spread of literacy tended to reserve obscenity for the upper and lower classes. The upper classes could learn Latin or Greek and read Catullus, or else purchase the privately, Swiss-printed edition of Afanas’ev’s Obscene Russian Tales if they wanted obscene or anti-clerical folklore. The lower classes, of course, were not expected to know better.

8

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recording, comparing Laura Gonzenbach’s versions of Sicilian tales written down directly in High German to the much edited, censored and embellished later editions of the Grimms’ folktale collection (Zipes 2006, xxv). Discussions of Translation

Here this chapter will zoom in on only written (printed) translations of folktales and focus on statements made about particular published translations by the translators themselves and in criticism by scholars. Space does not allow a broader sampling of these statements, and indeed many earlier translations do not include any commentary on the decisions and approaches taken by the translator. This lack of commentary supports the mystification through which a folktale, no matter how it has been altered and manipulated by the processes that produced the version before the reader, is taken to remain an authentic and unmediated reflection of the essence of a particular nation’s or ethnicity’s characteristic culture and beliefs. Attention to these questions has become more common in recent translations and scholarly works, and this section will focus mainly on recent examples by several Anglophone authors: Donald Haase, Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, and the author of this article—a mix of folklore translators and scholars of folklore. In his article “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies,” Haase notes, “Fairytale textuality is a complex state of affairs that defies simplification and demands nuanced exploration, attention to textual history, and—especially in the case of translations—a critical awareness of transcultural contexts” (Haase 2010, 31). Simplistic and decontextualized treatments of folktales like the example Haase critiques ignore these factors, which can be magnified by the space and time between the version used in a study or reading, on the one hand, and the collection and publication of tales on the other, even as collection and publication inevitably introduce changes. Whether domesticating or foreignizing, folktale translations usually strive to maintain an “oral” style, meaning one that is simple, accessible, not pretentious or fancy, and often included folksy turns of speech that 268

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suggest the lower classes, especially the rooted lower class of the peasantry. Actual folktales might be told in highly elaborate ways using fancy language, but that is not how we tend to imagine them9; simplification is even more likely to occur where a literate person hears a tale told but is more concerned with its plot elements than with its style. In his book The Irresistible Fairy Tale, Zipes asserts the political value of the folktale (and of folklore in general) based on class, stressing folklore’s often critical or oppositional character: To collect, transcribe, and translate folklore is to recognize the values of common people and esteem their position in the world, even if one does not comprehend fully what the words of these people represent in the web of power and authority relations. There is always a struggle for appropriation, adaptation, and authenticity whenever tales are translated and printed. This is what makes them so interesting, especially if we admit to their conflicting and inexplicable nature. (Zipes 2012, 103)

A reader unfamiliar with the broad range of folktales might think: “I’ve never read a folktale that seemed at all oppositional, and they tend to be full of kings and queens, princes and princesses, not of peasants and workers.” Zipes notes the ways the most famous European collection of fairytales, assembled by the Brothers Grimm,10 underwent significant revisions in each new edition, something that has been widely studied by folklorists in recent decades. Besides stylistic polishing and embellishment meant to make the tales more pleasant for middle-class readers, Zipes points to the addition of Christian elements and the puritan tendencies of censorship (essentially: sex out, violence in), which add an element of fakelore to this prestigious collection of European folktales,11 One example of a highly elaborate written tale is “The Little Scarlet Flower” (related to the “Beauty and the Beast” tale type) by Konstantin Aksakov, who claimed that he was writing the tale down just the way his beloved peasant nanny used to tell it. 10 Even this standard way of naming Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in English, with the words inverted rather than the more standard “Grimm Brothers,” has a folkloric flavor to it. 11 After introducing the term “fakelore” in 1965, Dundes refined his presentation in 9



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especially if compared to the first version of the Grimms’ tales, which Zipes has translated into English (Zipes 2014). Zipes also translated the nineteenth-century collection of Sicilian folktales by Laura Gonzenbach, and he discusses the issues it raised in his introduction to the volume (Zipes 2006). Gonzenbach was born in Messina and spoke the local language, but she was invited to collect Sicilian tales for publication in Germany and wrote down the tales she heard in High German, which her Swiss family spoke at home. Zipes praises Gonzenbach’s simple style and direct manner, though there are obvious drawbacks to a collection that immediately exists only in translation: In fact, there is not one trace of dialect or description of the storytellers and their background in Gonzenbach’s collection because she translated the tales directly into German and only inserted sparse footnotes. The language she uses is literary German. As she recorded the tales on paper and sought the “appropriate” German words and expressions, she probably thought about what an educated German might expect. She had to find the forms and words that this implied German reader would approve and probably also censored herself, unless the peasant women already censored themselves by omitting curse words, sexual inferences, and other speech that had no place in the literature of this era’s polite classes. (Zipes 2012, 104)

Zipes points out that some of the original dialect terms, notoriously difficult to translate in any genre, are preserved in the notes to Gonzenbach’s collection. Including notes in an edition of folktales has a foreignizing effect, especially when it informs the reader of elements in the original that could not be conveyed in translation. At the same time, the simplicity of style and lack of varnish leads Zipes to an assertion that might be surprising: “Gonzenbach’s translation of the Sicilian tales is perhaps more ‘authentic’ than the tales of the Brothers Grimm” (103). He explains: “Nationalistic Inferiority Complexes and the Fabrication of Fakelore: A Reconsideration of Ossian, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Kalevala, and Paul Bunyan,” in The Journal of Folklore Research 22, no. 1 (April 1985): 5–18. Dundes’s title says it all. 270

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[…] it is striking to see how close Gonzenbach remained to the plots and the terse, abrupt manner in which the tales were obviously told. […] fortunately, Gonzenbach’s German “equivalents” do not embellish or improve the tales with smooth transitions and clearer motivation. Gonzenbach respected the “authorial” and ideological perspective of the narrators. Of course, there is no clear uniform ideology in the tales, but Gonzenbach’s translation keeps alive the anger, disappointment, hope, and hardiness of the storytellers, who view life from the bottom and do not mask their sentiments. Her work stands in contrast to that of the Brothers Grimm, who more or less “bourgeoisified” their tales for a middle-class audience and added a male perspective. Their tales have served as the model or typical fairy tale of the nineteenth century and thus have obfuscated crucial perspectives that Gonzenbach brings to light. (104)

Zipes quickly clarifies the importance of the comparison from both the moral and the scholarly point of view: “There is nothing ‘immoral’ in what the Grimms did, as John Ellis would have us believe, and nothing immoral in editing and appropriation.12 Yet it is crucial for the understanding of folklore, fairy tales, and cultural history that the complexity of the process of their collection be open to study and evaluated and compared with other collections” (105). In his translation of the first edition of the Grimms’ tales, where the tales had undergone much less revision by the editors, he points out some of the interventions the Grimms practiced: “[…] the Grimms […] ‘vaccinated’ or censored them with their sentimental Christianity and puritanical ideology,” and “Wilhelm could not control his desire to make the tales more artistic to appeal to middle-class reading audiences” (Zipes 2014, xx). To which principles does Zipes himself adhere when he translates folktales? As I have argued in Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, it is foolish to generalize about the meaning of translations or appropriate way to translate because each text brings its 12

See John Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). [Zipes’s note – SF] 271

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own demands and difficulties. My English translation, completed at the beginning of the twenty-first century in contemporary American vernacular, is another transformation of the oral tales that has multiple purposes. (Zipes 2012, 14–15)

The handsome edition of the Grimms’ tales in his translation (Zipes 2014) embodies this multiplicity: though published by a university press and fit for multiple purposes, it is clearly meant to appeal to the general reader as well and would make a handsome gift. Zipes goes into more detail about his practice in the separate “Note on the Text and Translation”: I have endeavored to capture the tone and style of the different tales by translating them into a basic American idiom. My main objective was to render the frank and blunt qualities of the tales in a succinct American English. […] As I have emphasized in my introduction, the Grimms’ tales, though diverse and not their own, share an innocent and naïve morality that pervades their works. It is this quality that I have tried to communicate in my translation. (xlv)

In sum, Zipes strives both to avoid embellishment and elevated language and to offer a blunt and simple style, which he associates with folktales and finds more present in the original edition of the Grimms’ tales than in later editions. Marina Warner notes (in Stranger Magic, her volume on One Thousand and One Nights) a similar pattern of revision by the first translator of the Nights into a Western European language: Galland transformed his sources, his fluent prose adding politesse and polish. He does not attempt the strongly flavoured shifts in tone and register of the original, which was not esteemed in its native places either. Bawdy and smut are left out altogether—none of the rude laughter here which later erupts at pantomime Ali Babas or Aladdins, nor the frank dealing with sexuality […]. Galland cleans up the bathing scene […] and avoids explicit allusions to homosexuality. He expurgated the eroticism that heightens many passages in the 272

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original tales, and after readers had objected to the refrains that closed each session at dawn, he took out those crucial returns to the scene in the bedroom, where Shahrazad is telling the story to her sister and the Sultan. Galland also decided that the outbursts of poetry held up the narrative. (Warner 2012, 16)

This approach was typical of the time in which the tales were published: “[…] Galland […] was taking to extremes the seventeenth-century practice of imitation or belle infidèle translation” (ibid.). As with the Grimms’ revisions in Zipes’s critique, this does not lessen the value of Galland’s version—it simply changes it. Rather than a genuine reflection of Arabian folklore, One Thousand and One Nights is a literary product with roots in folklore. Warner notes its enduring and protean appeal for Western readers, as Borges points to Galland’s “bijoux and sorceries” (Borges 2012, 93), the magical quality of the first translation that the Argentine writer continued to appreciate even after he had closely examined other versions. Donald Haase’s important article on the unhelpful residues of past practices and assumptions in the study and scholarly use of folklore cites Sadhana Naithani’s book In Quest of Indian Folklore for its discussion of “the complex and sometime hidden intercultural process by which colonial collections of Indian folklore and folktales were gathered, edited, and translated” (Haase 2010, 22). Naithani observes, “As Indian folklore has been textualized, it has moved from dialects to foreign language(s). The reason for and the implication of this were the same: the published collections were not meant for those who had told the stories, but for British and other European readers” (cited in Haase 2010, 19). Haase goes on, again citing Naithani: And it is precisely the invisibility of this web of relationships involving narrators, collectors, editors, and translators (not to mention publishers) that enables the assumption that colonial-era texts—not only from India but also from other colonized countries, continents, and cultures—give expression to an unequivocal folk voice, that they “reflect the traditional attitudes and social patterns of the populations that produced them.” (22) 273

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Haase notes the chain of assumptions that proceed from folktales’ oral origins: […] in each case the assumption that traditional narratives are simple, direct expressions relies on the assumption that all the published texts have oral origins, that orality is pure and natural, and that this natural origin essentially survives intact and defines each text’s unequivocal and primary level of significance, whatever the language of that text and despite whatever mediation, alteration, or appropriation might occur at the hands of collectors, editors, and translators. (21)

He traces this in part to the role of folklore in the hands of the Romantic Nationalists, and the Grimms in particular: Of course, for all their intense interest in documenting the authentic language and oral narratives of the folk in their collection of Kinder und Hausmärchen, the Grimms gave us something much more complex, influential, and paradoxical. The story of their literate informants, literary sources, and editorial interventions is by now well known, so I won’t repeat it here. What I do want to highlight, however, is that in becoming convincing ventriloquists for the folk, they not only created the enduring idea that folktales give direct expression to national identity, but they also created a fairy-tale language whose apparent artlessness, purity, and simplicity seemed completely transparent and facilitated the translation of their tales as universal stories. (28)

Perhaps the idea that the tales in the Kinder und Hausmärchen were especially suited for telling at home and for children encouraged this move toward a style that so well fits the definition of domestication? Of course, it would be surprising if collectors, who meant to create something precisely domestic, representing their vision of their own ethnicity and nation, had chosen “foreignizing” strategies. As Zipes notes, the domestication practiced by the Grimms (especially Wilhelm, who continued revising over decades) erased signs of social class and replaced women’s 274

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perspectives with men’s, surely impacting later readers’ views of German folk traditions. Haase (2010) notes that “colonialist trespassing,” similar to the appropriations and revision practiced by many European folktale collectors in the nineteenth century, not only loses some elements while preserving others: as Borges points out with Galland and other European translators of One Thousand and One Nights, the trespasses “produce something new—a transcultural text that communicates more than the sum of its cultural parts” (30). Haase neatly defines the status of any translation of a folklore text: In our encounter with the other by way of translations, we simply have to replace the expectation of authenticity and transparency with the understanding that translations of folktales are already literary adaptations, transcultural creations that must be experienced in their own right. The challenge, it seems to me, is to go about this work of inevitable appropriation, whether as producers or consumers of translations, self-consciously and self-critically, to understand fairy-tale production and reception precisely as acts of translation, transformation, and transcultural communication. (29)

The author of this chapter has translated numerous Russian folktales involving the witch, tester, and border guard of the realm of the dead, Baba Yaga (Forrester 2013). The tales in that volume are drawn from two sources of Russian folktales, the famous three-volume collection of Aleksandr Afanas’ev, and the less well-known one-volume collection of Ivan Khudiakov. Afanas’ev himself actually collected very few of the tales he published: he was asked to work with materials in the archives of the Russian Geographical Society, and some of the tales in his edition, including the beloved and influential “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” were drawn from earlier published material. The style of the tales varies considerably, and some are written in dialect (including dialects of Belarusian and Ukrainian). Afanas’ev died before he could even be tempted to start revising the tales, and on the whole they are much closer to folk versions collected later in Russia than the Grimms’ tales of 1857 are to their first edition. Unlike Afanas’ev, Khudiakov collected the 275

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tales in his volume himself, and their wording is often sparser and more abrupt than that in Afanas’ev’s tales, which depended on recordings made by a variety of literate Russians. In my translations I wanted to maintain this difference between the two collections, even though my collaborators suggested at times that the Khudiakov should be worded more smoothly. (And it is true, the tale might have been worded more smoothly, if he had heard it on another day.) Although the translations in the collection are intended for general readers, the variety of voices present in the published sources was maintained as much as possible in the translations. Fictions of Authenticity

Why do we continue to read folklore today—or, if we have the chance, go to a public library to hear a professional taleteller? There is still the sense that we will learn something about another culture, or about our own, in addition to the pleasure of the tales. Folklore is one of the few genres of text for children that are commonly translated into English; translations of most other kinds of children’s books do not interest publishers. Folktales have the appealing quality of being both familiar in shape and redolent of other times and places. The attraction of folk plots to the Disney studios and other makers of animated films is clear: the tales are seen as suitable for children, they have engaging plots, and they are out of copyright—unlike the Disney versions themselves. As Toelken notes, echoing others this study has cited, “Folklore is traditional (whether oral or material or gestural or musical) only when it is actually used or performed in its indigenous set of live contexts” (Toelken 1996, 42). Folktale translations (like the printed versions of folktales from which they are now usually made) are not themselves folklore—though they have a clear relationship to folklore, and we continue to read them because of that relationship. The changes introduced by the process of translation only continue to add distance from the original performance. The changes inevitably introduced into folktales as they were collected, edited and published, have sometimes left folklore in a peculiar 276

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position. On one hand, the tales were taken (as the Grimms meant them to be) as guides to the nature of the ethnos and the aspirations of the people. On the other hand, scholars and members of the elite literate classes wanted the Folk to do the work of preserving this culture—certainly not the first time elites have wanted people of lower classes to do work they themselves were unwilling or unable to do. Today, scholars agree that the translator of a folktale, however limited by the qualities of the transcription or the published source, has an ethical obligation to convey what the original printed version, that quasi-literary object, actually says and does—balanced somewhere between fidelity to the plot and style and fitness as something that a reader in the receiving culture will pick up with pleasure and recognize as a folktale. Zipes’s readings of ideology in folktales are inflected by close attention to social class and gender in lower-class expression of oppositional viewpoints in tales, while Haase addresses a variety of issues of origin and identity that have frequently been glossed over by the assumption that folktales in any form, published or translated as well as oral, somehow retain a “primitive” orality and may be used as raw material for analysis. In actual fact, folktales are one of the most transnational genres, and the assumptions of their authenticity or fixed national character, discussed here, make their translation into new languages a particularly rewarding test case for theories of translation. Haase crisply states, “Nineteenthcentury romantic models of national, cultural, and ethnic purity will have no place in a model where folktales and fairy tales are understood as transcultural texts” (Haase 2010, 29). Dundes, also cited above, points out the place folklore frequently holds in ideology: The difference between a future oriented worldview involving progressive evolution out of folklore and a past oriented worldview reveling romantically in the glorious folkloristic materials of nationalistic patrimonies seems to be clear cut. However, it is important to realize that not everyone shares the future oriented evolutionistic postulate. There are a number of devolutionary based philosophies of life, philosophies which decry the inroads made by civilization. In such philosophies of cultural primitivism the golden age remains safely embedded in the past while the evils of civiliza277

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tion do their deadly work, destroying all that is deemed good and worthwhile. (Dundes 1969, 15)

This orientation toward the past sounds very much like restorative nostalgia, as Svetlana Boym (2001) describes it in her book The Future of Nostalgia: The [restorative] nostalgics do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth. This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the word, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, though swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past […]. (Boym 2001, 41)

In the past twenty-five years, Eastern Europe in general has witnessed an often pernicious employment of folklore and (real or supposed) traditional folk culture to assert the historical presence and thus territorial pretensions of certain nations, as well as the imagined “pure” ethnic pasts of a markedly patriarchal kind that attempt to impose certain views of class, gender, and sexuality that (oddly enough) suit the ambitions of the very figures who manipulate representations of that folklore. This is not primarily an issue of translation, although making sure local folklore material is made available to broader audiences through translation into a major language has been part of projects of national self-definition and self-assertion in Eastern Europe, as it has elsewhere. I would argue that some right-wing philosophies of The Nation reflect the devolutionary premise Dundes describes, and that the romantic attachment to the folklore of The Nation, as that folklore is tendentiously “translated” by those who push this world view, gains them greater support from people who feel they are and want to be part of that nation, who are ready to preserve its language and culture and particular ways of life, or who fear being perceived as not worthy members of the nation where they live. That story, unfortunately, is not a folktale. 278

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References Andrić, Ivo. 1977. The Bridge on the Drina. Translated by Lovett F. Edwards. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ben-Amos, Dan. 2010. “The European Fairy-Tale Between Orality and Literacy.” The Journal of American Folklore 123, no. 490: 373–76. Bogatyrëv, Pëtr, and Roman Jakobson. 1982. “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity.” In The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946, 32–46. Edited by Peter Steiner. Austin: University of Texas Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 2012. “The Translations of One Thousand and One Nights.” In The Translation Studies Reader, third edition, 92–106. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Dundes, Alan. 1969. “The Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 6, no. 1: 5–19. Forrester, Sibelan. 2013. “Translator’s Note.” In Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales, xvii–xix. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Haase, Donald. 2010. “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies.” Marvels & Tales 24, no. 1, special issue on “The Fairy Tale After Angela Carter”: 17–38. Hansen, William. 1997. “Mythology and Folklore Typology: Chronicle of a Failed Scholarly Revolution.” Journal of Folklore Research 34, no. 3: 275–80. Lieberman, Sharon. 1972. “‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale.” College English 34, no. 3: 383–95. Lord, Albert B. 2003. The Singer of Tales. Second edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ong, Walter J. 2000. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2012. “On the Different Methods of Translating.” Translated by Susan Bernofsky. In The Translation Studies Reader, third edition, 43–63. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge. Toelken, Barre. 1996. Dynamics of Folklore. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, Utah State University Press. Warner, Marina. 1994. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 279

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———. 2012. Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. Cambridge, MA: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press. Zipes, Jack. 2006. “Laura Gonzenbach’s Buried Treasure” and “A Note on the Translation and Acknowledgments.” In Beautiful Angiola: The Lost Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Laura Gonzenbach, xi–xxviii and xxix–xxxii. Translated and Introduction by Jack Zipes. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. “Introduction: Rediscovering the Original Tales of the Brothers Grimm.” In The Complete First Edition: The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, xix–xliii. Translated and edited by Jack Zipes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Transnational Rivalry and Consecration Croatian and Serbian Writers in Translation EL L EN EL I A S- B U RS AĆ

In her article “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange,” Pascale Casanova proposes an analysis of translation from the transnational point of view, because doing so “re-establishes relations, hierarchies, and power struggles between national fields.” She concludes that translation is an “unequal exchange” occurring in a strongly “hierarchized universe” and suggests that translation can be described as playing a role in the “relationship of domination in the international literary field,” conferring legitimacy and consecrating authors and texts (2010, 287–88). She offers an analysis of the rivalries within a literature among the writers with an international bent and those with a predominantly national focus, and then homes in on the consecrating role that translation and translators play in heightening this asymmetry, bringing certain works to a worldwide readership while leaving others untranslated. These notions of “rivalry” and “consecration” help shed light on the ways the prose of several generations of writers evolved and diverged both during the 1980s, as Yugoslav socialism was on the wane, and in the 1990s, during the wars that followed, and how the fact that their work was or was not translated into other languages played into these evolutions and divergences. The attention paid to their work abroad helped assure them a place in their domestic literatures and has shaped the subsequent generations. A study of the literatures of ex-Yugoslavia and the ways translation has shaped them also, reciprocally, contributes to the ideas Casanova sketches in this brief but thought-provoking essay. Examining the relationship between French culture and literature translated into French, Casanova focuses specifically on the asymmetrical exchanges that exist between dominating cultural centers such as France, and those cultures she refers to as “less prestigious” in the world

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republic of letters that vie for an international voice through translation. But her work itself demonstrates a certain asymmetry. For instance, while she mentions the Serbian-Jewish-Hungarian writer Danilo Kiš in the context of his translations of Hungarian, Russian and French writers into Serbo-Croatian, she does not attend to the other side of the story, namely, the impact that the translations of his writing into other languages have had on the cultural landscape of Yugoslavia. This is the direction this analysis will address. Rivalries similar to those among the generations of writers on the Yugoslav cultural scenes leading up to the wars of the 1990s have existed in many of the cultures of pre-1989 Eastern Europe, hence the broader relevance of Casanova’s observations. The Rivalries

This chapter will first consider the rivalries among several groups of influential novelists publishing in Croatian and Serbian before, during and after the 1990s wars, and then go on to examine how the translation—or lack of translation—of their writing into English has exemplified their place in the world republic of letters. To describe these rivalries I will refer to writers to whom I am assigning the labels “critical nationalists,” “critical intellectuals,” and “postmodernists.” A brief blaze of liberalization in the mid-1960s gave rise to a broadly based number of writers critical of Tito’s Yugoslavia, some of them lambasting the regime for its suppression of nationalist voices, others—more broadly—for suppression of freedom of expression. While these two groups shared a commitment to interrogating Titoist socialism, they diverge in important ways. Those with a strong nationalist focus saw themselves as champions of their ethnic communities (a comparable writer might be the Russian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). The anti-nationalist or less nationalist critical writers, on the other hand, held to a more broadly based, intellectual purpose: to join writers in other Eastern European countries in speaking out against repression (much like the writing of, say, the Czech Milan Kundera). Both of these groups saw themselves as Yugoslav equivalents of Eastern European dissidents—in 282

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opposition to the regime—but to apply the term “dissident” to them is misleading; unlike their counterparts in the Eastern European and Soviet regimes, who often were unable to publish their work at all and had, instead, to circulate it clandestinely in samizdat editions, the writers in Croatia and Serbia were mostly able, between 1965 and 1991, to publish their work and receive reviews, national awards and other forms of state and public recognition. The points of divergence between the critical nationalists and the critical intellectual writers are readily visible. The nationalists tended toward the tragic and essentialist in their narratives, with novels firmly rooted in the specific physical location of their ethnic group; they used humor only sparingly. Novels by the critical nationalists speak in a strongly patriarchal voice; there is not a single woman novelist among them. For purposes of this chapter, I will refer to Dobrica Ćosić, Vuk Drašković, Antonije Isaković (Serbian) and Ivan Aralica (Croatian) as characteristic of this group.1 In contrast, the critical intellectuals do not always situate their stories in a domestic setting, but, if they do, they ironicize it; they often employ humor, satirical or otherwise, and though a sense of tragedy is always lurking, it is seldom in the foreground. Several women writers, such as Irena Vrkljan, were associated with this group. I will refer to Danilo Kiš (Serbian, Jewish, Hungarian), Borislav Pekić (Serbian), Antun Šoljan and Slobodan Novak (Croatian) as representative of the critical intellectual writers.2 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, sparked by the metafiction and postmodernism introduced by the critical intellectual writers—particularly Danilo Kiš and Borislav Pekić—a generation of younger writers pursuing a postmodern aesthetic began to appear. Most of these

While I chose to include the Croatian writer Ivan Aralica in this group because his writing is inspired by the same sort of defense of national community, his novels, unlike those of Ćosić and Drašković, have not been translated into English. It is worth noting that most of the critical nationalist writers come from either Serbia or Montenegro. Two more names that fit into this category would be Dragoslav Mihailović and Danko Popović. 2 In Croatia, the core of the critical intellectual writers was composed of Antun Šoljan, Ivan Slamnig, Slobodan Novak and Vlado Gotovac. In Serbia, Danilo Kiš, Borislav Pekić, Bora Ćosić and Mirko Kovač.

1

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postmodern writers began with an intellectual, experimental, playful voice; their writing was markedly humorous. Theirs was an apolitical, urban prose that might be situated “anywhere” rather than in the historically saturated sites of the preceding generation.3 That women writers have been more visible amongst the postmodernists than they had been among the other two groups described here is evident in the fact that Dubravka Ugrešić and David Albahari serve, for the purposes of this analysis, as representative of the 1980s postmodern writers.4 Many of the writers of the 1970s and 1980s in Croatia and Serbia do not belong to any of these three groups, but it was largely these writers whose work was translated into English in these decades, while, since 1990, the work that finds it way into English translation includes a far broader range in terms of style, voice, gender and politics. Writers and their readers were riveted by the 1980s, during which novelists with a strong nationalist bent made a blood sport of demolishing the taboos5 imposed by the faltering post-Tito socialist system. With Tito’s death in 1980, an unparalleled decade began for publishing. The nationalist writers were the stars. The thrill of smashing the taboos of the Titoist regime transfixed the readership. There were bestsellers in these years selling many thousands of copies. With the gradual unrav

The postmodern prose of the 1980s from Croatia and Serbia is reminiscent of Woody Allen movies like Annie Hall: a man and a woman in a city somewhere are talking about art. The dramatic shift in writing that went on during the war, particularly for the writers I have described here as postmodernists, means that the term “postmodern” no longer strictly applies to their writing after 1993. But for the sake of clarity I will refer to them as such throughout. 4 Having said that, however, I should note that the other prominent postmodern writers of this generation are mostly male, such as the Croatian writers Pavao Pavličić and Goran Tribuson; the Serbian writers Svetislav Basara and Goran Petrović; and the Bosnian writer Nenad Veličkovič. By no means do I wish to suggest that all 1980s writers of this generation who appeared in translation were post-modernists. There have been several writers, translated into English, from this group who are not postmodernists, and among these there are several strong women’s voices, such as Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Oraić-Tolić (both from Croatia). 5 After the break with socialist realism in the early 1950s, the literatures in Yugoslavia asserted a modicum of artistic independence, but only within limits: there could be no mention of the Goli Otok prison camp and other sites of Partisan or communist atrocity, or an airing of nationalist and separatist sentiments, or scurrilous mention of the person of Josip Broz Tito. 3

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eling of socialist constraints on culture, the nationalists gave themselves over entirely to expounding on the grievances of their national communities, such as in a play about exhuming the bones of Serbs killed in World War II massacres,6 novels about Tito’s prison camps,7 or a novel and film about the prejudices and abuse of postwar Communists in a Croatian boarding school.8 This focus on grievances, in turn, exacerbated the distaste postmodern writers and their readers felt for essentialist approaches to literature. Meanwhile, as the national communities imploded into exclusivism, the critical intellectuals fought to keep their role as bellwethers and independent artists. They stepped out of the shadows to which they had been consigned during the tense decade before Tito’s death and took center stage, articulating artistic conscience and voicing social critique. They generally commanded smaller, more intellectual audiences than the nationalists, but their books, plays, poems and essays also enjoyed an upswing in popularity in the 1980s. They often found themselves on something of a seesaw, championing artistic autonomy, yet, at the same time, advancing and promoting their national literatures. As tensions on the cultural scenes of ex-Yugoslavia escalated in the 1980s, this forced some of the critical intellectual writers to assume the mantle of spokesperson, while others left the country.9 The decade drew to a close and reached a watershed when the frenzy of cultural activity began to shift to the frenzy of the political arena. This passage was marked by a series of deaths of key critical intellectual writers: Danilo Kiš in 1989, Borislav Pekić in 1992, and Antun Šoljan in 1993.10 When war engulfed the region, the literary landscape, like the

Golubnjača by Jovan Radulović. There were several titles on this theme, such as Antonije Isaković’s Tren 1 [Moment 1, 1976] and Tren 2 [Moment 2, 1982]; Goli otok by Dragoslav Mihailović from 1990; and others. 8 Okvir za mržnju [Framework for Hatred] by Ivan Aralica, made into the film Život sa stricem [Life with Uncle]. 9 All four of the core critical intellectual writers in Serbia ultimately moved out of Belgrade: Borislav Pekić to London in 1972, Danilo Kiš to Paris during the 1980s, Mirko Kovač to Croatia, and Bora Ćosić to Croatia and Berlin during the war. 10 This is not to suggest that the critical intellectual writers who survived this period did not continue writing. Bora Ćosić, Mirko Kovač, Slobodan Novak and 6

7

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social landscape, was transformed. And literary translation played a part in the transformation. Once the opportunity arose to enter politics with the advent of multiparty elections in the spring and fall of 1990, the nationalist writers Dobrica Ćosić, Vuk Drašković and Ivan Aralica all jumped into politics. From June 1992 to June 1993, Ćosić even went on to serve as the first president of rump Yugoslavia (a union of Serbia and Montenegro was all that was left at this point of what had been Yugoslavia). Few of this group of nationalist writers went on to enjoy the literary limelight after the wars of the 1990s. The most experimental of the postmodern writers of the 1980s, Milorad Pavić, has also been the most controversial and difficult to pigeonhole. The inventive structuring of his novels, particularly Dictionary of the Khazars and Landscape Painted with Tea, made him an immediate hit both throughout Yugoslavia and abroad. Yet by the late 1980s, Pavić was voicing support for Milošević’s nationalist policies. Somehow he managed to be a playful postmodernist abroad and a nationalist at home (Damrosch 2003, 274). When his political views became known abroad, his worldwide popularity as a postmodern writer flagged. Only recently has his work begun to receive renewed attention. The postmodernists, in contrast to the critical writers, flatly rejected the attitude that writers should maintain a stubborn silence—out of an overriding sense of loyalty—about the atrocities and malfeasance occurring in their own community, and insisted on an a-nationalist or anti-nationalist artistic autonomy. The war changed everything for them, too. Dubravka Ugrešić moved to the Netherlands, David Albahari to Canada, and the focus of their writing switched abruptly from the “anywhere” urban prose of the 1980s to fiction on displacement, trauma and loss, although always imbued with a dark humor. And as they were moving, in 1993 and 1994, publishers abroad began taking a lively interest in their work, something I know about first-hand as I have been

Vlado Gotovac have since published, but the novels, stories and poetry they are best known for were written in the 1960s and 1970s. 286

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translating Albahari’s writing into English since the late 1980s and have occasionally translated Ugrešić’s stories and essays as well.11 David Albahari’s Canadian novels, Bait, Snow Man, Globetrotter and Leeches, eye wartime Serbia from a distance. His protagonists are writers visiting a North American university, attending a writer’s colony in Alberta, or living as an expatriate in an unnamed location. The war is always a presence in these novels, but it is held at arm’s length. Each novel addresses displacement and war, and the narrative is shot through with the protagonist’s manic, obsessive humor. During his years in Canada, Albahari never completely severed his ties with Serbian culture—he always published his books first in the Serbian language and attended the Belgrade Book Fair every year, bringing Canadian writers with him; he found Canadian literary magazines willing to publish stories by the Serbian writers who shared his aesthetic. Now that he has started spending more time in Serbia, Albahari’s writing has taken a new turn. He has brought his stories home to Belgrade in novels such as Checkpoint and is exploring provocative new territory such as nationalism and gender prejudice; his most recent novels are exploring, in particular, Belgrade’s special brand of claustrophobia. Dubravka Ugrešić had a more contentious relationship with Croatia than Albahari did with Serbia, but she, too, has been spending more time in Croatia during the last few years. Like Albahari, Ugrešić writes about displacement and loss. Since 1990 she has published three novels that roam among Berlin, Bulgaria, Amsterdam, the Czech Republic and Zagreb. Her collections of essays, particularly American Fictionary and Culture of Lies, closely examine the role of culture in war. Ever since Thank You for Not Reading, however, she has been exploring a wider view of the role of culture in societies beyond Croatia, taking the pulse of the rapidly changing state of publishing in the world and the emergence of world literature. Like many of the other writers described in this chapter, she explores the dynamic between allegiance to a community For more on my involvement as a translator in the work of Dubravka Ugrešić and David Albahari, see my article “Translating Dubravka Ugrešić and David Albahari,” in Shoreless Bridges: Southeast European Writing in Diaspora after 1990, Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics 55, edited by Elka Agoston (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2017): 133–47.

11

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and the need for resistance to its pull, stubbornly insisting on her allegiance to a-nationality. As an illustration of her views, in her story “The Spirit of the Kakanian Province,” Ugrešić imagines an artistic conversation between two writers who find themselves “at the border of the Republic of Literature of Kakania,” one attacking artistic autonomy and the other defending it. “It is not the same if you’re English or if you’re Macedonian. And, by the way, where are you from?” “Kakania. Isn’t that obvious?” “Why should it be? I’m betting you’re Lithuanian. Come on, admit it.” “No, I am Kakanian.” “OK. Kakanian. I have nothing against it. I am a Czech, my mother is Hungarian, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. From the cultural and historical perspective, I have more right to call myself Kakanian than you do. But we aren’t splitting hairs here, now are we. What language do you write in?” “Literary.” “All of us are literate, we wouldn’t be here otherwise. But whether you write in the language of Shakespeare or some fellow called Costa Costolopoulus matters. Come on, confess, I won’t tell a soul.” “Literary language.” “You are really stuck on that. Weren’t you baptized? And by the way, do you believe in God?” “I believe in the muse.” “Jesus, what a stickler! And on top of it you’ve disguised yourself as a feminist. OK, so that’s politically correct. The muses were women after all, so we had to include them in our work. But, do tell, my Kakanian, where do you stand on politics?” “I believe in humanism.” (Ugrešić 2013)

Now, many years after the end of the war, domestic writers in Croatia and Serbia no longer command the attention they enjoyed during the 1980s. The era of literature as a blood sport is over. This is not to say that 288

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writers and critics do not lambast each other these days: there is no lack of vitriol on the various cultural scenes, but, overall, fiction plays a less central social and cultural role, functioning more as entertainment than as a political and cultural game-changer. This trend can be observed in most of the formerly communist countries. The cultural landscape at home and abroad, however, shows a vital new diversity. More women are publishing than ever before in these communities; articulate LGBTQ+ writers are stepping forward. Writers explore genres ranging from narrative family chronicles to terse experimental fiction. There is a lively fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction scene. Graphic novels enjoy a growing popularity. Noir stories abound. There are powerful younger authors revisiting the war, others are caught up in intellectually playful thrusts and parries, and there is a strong presence of acerbic prose by critical writers who deride the successor-state regimes. Even the most popular writers, however, have been relegated to a peripheral position in their own domestic literary marketplace, unable to compete with the translations from English and other languages that have flooded the market. Yet, at the same time, far more of them are having their work translated into English than was the case before the war. Translation as Consecration

Pascale Casanova suggests that translators, along with publishers, literary agents and professors, consecrate certain literary works by plucking them out of a “less-privileged” national context and inserting them into a more influential language, such as English or French. Translation is one of the “consecrating agents” that move literature through the hierarchies dictating relations within the international literary field: […] far from being the horizontal exchange and pacified transfer often described, translation must be understood, on the contrary, as an “unequal exchange” occurring in a strongly hierarchized universe. Translation can therefore be described as one of the specific forms of the relationship of domination in the international literary field. It is an important factor in the struggles for legitimacy which 289

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occur in this universe, and one of the principal means of consecration of authors and texts. (Casanova 2010, 288)

What works of fiction from Croatia and Serbia have been consecrated by English-language publishing through English translation? How do the patterns of translating Croatian and Serbian fiction correspond to the aesthetics of the nationalists, critical intellectuals, and postmodernists? Casanova refers to “struggles for legitimacy” and how being translated abroad was a reciprocal factor in promoting an author on his or her home turf. Did the fact that particular authors and texts were published in English have any reciprocal impact on their domestic reception? A number of publishers have been central to the publishing of translations in English from the Serbian, Croatian and other ex-Yugoslav literatures. In the Cold War 1960s, Yugoslavia caught the imagination of readers abroad as a socialist country outside the Soviet sphere of influence. This became a magnet for both readers and publishers, especially after Ivo Andrić received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich broke ground, publishing chiefly critical intellectual writers from Serbia and Montenegro.12 They were the first to publish Danilo Kiš and Borislav Pekić, and they have had a long history of publishing novels by key Serbian writers ever since (recently as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Then Philip Roth brought out the Penguin series, “Writers from the Other Europe,” between 1976 and 1988, and included Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a further act of consecration for Kiš. The success he enjoyed due to the English and French translations of his work turned out to be particularly important as a corrective after the harrowing period when his groundbreaking novel, with its strong anti-totalitarian stand and innovative postmodernist metafic12

Their focus on writers from Serbia and Montenegro is due, at least in part, to the fact that William Jovanovich, the director of HBJ, was a Serb, as is the editor and translator Drenka Willen, who worked with him for many years. For more on Jovanovich’s views on publishing Serbian writers in translation, particularly on Milovan Djilas’s memoirs and fiction, see his Serbdom (1998). Together, Jovanovich and Willen opened the door to some of the finest writing from this part of the world. The novels of the Croatian critical intellectual novelists have been published in English by Northwestern University Press and Autumn Hill. 290

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tional referentiality, stirred up a storm of controversy and bile in Belgrade, leading to a lawsuit,13 pursued by prominent nationalist writers (not the government), in which Kiš ultimately prevailed. When Northwestern University Press (NUP) began their landmark “Writings from an Unbound Europe” series in 1993, continuing Philip Roth’s initiative in the post-1989 context, interest in East European literature was keen among English-language readers, particularly for writers from ex-Yugoslavia, as the war was then at its peak. NUP introduced David Albahari and Dubravka Ugrešić to readers in the United States (Ugrešić had been published first in the United Kingdom), and they also introduced Muharem Bazdulj, Miljenko Jergović, Nenad Veličković and Zoran Živković. In another series, NUP also introduced writers of the critical intellectual generation, such as Irena Vrkljan, Bora Ćosić and Antun Šoljan, and they reprinted earlier translations of work by Kiš and Pekić, as well as commissioned new translations of writing by these authors previously unavailable in English. The translation that sold the most during the twenty years of the series was Meša Selimović’s Death and the Dervish (Wachtel 2011). Almost entirely absent from the English-language translation landscape are any English translations of prose by the nationalist writers, despite their bestseller-status among domestic readers in the 1980s. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich took on the ambitious task, from 1978 to 1981, of publishing Dobrica Ćosić’s trilogy of novels drawn from Serbian history, but the trilogy has had remarkably little impact and is almost never referenced. The only other of the nationalist novels to be translated into English is Vuk Drašković’s Knife, again, seldom referenced. At first this paucity might seem surprising in light of their earlier popularity, but nationalist prose writers did not aspire to universality and, hence, did not have the appeal for a worldwide readership that both the critical intellectuals and the postmodernists enjoyed. The choice of a transnational approach over a national one during the war proved to be more than just an expression of aesthetic preference. It became a polemical bone of contention, particularly for Ugrešić in Croatia. The “witches of Rio” controversy that raged in the Croatian 13

For more on the lawsuit, see Thompson, Birth Certificate, 265–82. 291

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media in 1992 and 1993 revolved precisely around the issue of rejecting a nation-specific perspective in favor of a transnational one. Ugrešić and four other prominent women writers14 asserted that it was not, during the war, Croatian or Bosnian women being raped by Serbian men, but women (regardless of nationality) being raped by men (regardless of nationality). This shift of focus away from the local to the global was instantly unacceptable to the ruling cultural clique in Zagreb, and a media witch-hunt ensued. Four of the five women targeted subsequently moved abroad, including Ugrešić. Both Ugrešić and Albahari had always preferred a transnational aesthetic, but during the years of the war and afterwards, it became central to their writing. Writing from abroad, bolstered by a worldwide readership through the many translations of their books, they had the breadth of audience and personal commitment to promote an a-nationalist perspective. This allowed them to address the subject of the trauma of the war as it applied to all its victims, irrespective of nationality. Who could have predicted, ten years before, that these two postmodern fans of wry, cosmopolitan banter, metafiction, and intertextuality would mature into voices best suited to address the wounds of war, the losses, and the displacement? Yet it was precisely their transnational position that compelled them to do this. The fact that Ugrešić and Albahari chose to write from a position of displacement helps explain their immediate appeal to a broader readership and the extensive translation of much of their writing. Moreover, the accolades, reviews, prizes and readers they acquired abroad have made it much more difficult for critics to dismiss their writing in their home communities. Casanova offers the example of James Joyce, who was recognized in Ireland only once his work had been translated into French. The consecration offered by being translated acts as something of a shield for embattled writers. Translation then functions like a kind of right to international existence. It allows a writer not only to be recognized as a literary figure Slavenka Drakulić, Vesna Kesić, Rada Iveković and Jelena Lovrić.

14

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outside his or her national borders, but even more importantly it brings into existence an international position, an autonomous position inside the national universe. (Casanova 2010, 296)

Much the same can be said for Ugrešić. Albahari did not antagonize his home base quite as thoroughly as Ugrešić, although he, too, especially in his recent writing, aims to provoke and challenge. Twenty years after the end of the war in Croatia and Bosnia, Ugrešić is still a focus of acrimony in the world of Croatian letters. In recent conversations, I found that most of the writers and readers I spoke to about Ugrešić admit to a grudging admiration for her work, but they also deeply resent her fame and her often disparaging dismissal of their writing. It has to be said, however, that the success enjoyed by Albahari and Ugrešić has paved the way for attention enjoyed now by many writers of their generation and younger. Readers abroad have acquired a taste for writing from this part of the world and want to read more. And literary tastes have diversified. Whereas in the 1960s and 70s, during the Cold War, publishers were mainly interested in critical intellectual voices, there is broader attention now to writing of all sorts. Established publishers such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Harvill Seckler, New Directions, Yale University Press and the New York Review of Books are scouting for new titles and they are translating and/or reprinting classics. Meanwhile, smaller publishers, such as Autumn Hill Books, Archipelago Books, Dalkey Archive Press, Deep Vellum, Graywolf Press, Istros Books, Maclehose Press, Transit, and Open Letter, to name but a few, are eager for edgy new writing from these regions, often aided by a subvention from the ministry of culture of the country in question. Online journals such as Words Without Borders, Asymptote and many others are regularly publishing writing from the region in translation. Never have these literatures been so well represented with English translations.15 The translators working from Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian and Slovenian whose translations are referenced in this article include Peter Agnone, Oleg Andrić, Ann Clymer Bigelow, Stephen M. Dickey, Alice Copple-Tošić, Lovett Edwards, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Will Firth, William J. Hannaher, Celia Hawkesworth, Michael Henry Heim, Muriel Heppell, Joseph Hitrec, John Jef-

15

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Each in their own way, David Albahari and Dubravka Ugrešić have mapped out a territory of displacement: Albahari through his Canadian novels, and Ugrešić in her exploration of the transnational republic of letters. They have staked out an exterritorial realm that is now available for writers living at home and/or abroad. The exterritorial/transnational writers working within this displaced space are a particularly interesting group to look at in the context of the transnational impact of translation. Their displacement narratives, in which the protagonist leaves his or her country to live and write somewhere else, have explored the experience of negotiating between worlds and languages. Vladimir Arsenijević’s novel In the Hold ends at the moment the protagonists are on a bus, leaving Serbia for Greece. Ajla Terzić’s first novel, Lutrija [Lottery], is about someone winning a green card in the United States green card lottery. Bekim Sejranović’s Happier Ending describes his certainty, while he is in Croatia, that he would be so much happier if only he were in Norway, while when he is in Norway, he can think only of how happy he had been in Croatia. In the title story, “Marilyn Monroe, My Mother,” part of a short story collection devoted entirely to displacement narratives, Neda Miranda Blažević-Kreitzman imagines a flirtatious encounter between two Split businessmen on a sales trip to Los Angeles and a cab driver who claims to be Marilyn Monroe’s daughter. Vladimir Tasić writes of his protagonist’s decision to move from Belgrade to Canada. David Mladinov’s short stories explore, among other things, the vicissitudes of expatriate life of Serbs living in the United States. Vladimir Pištalo’s Tesla: A Portrait with Masks uses the inventor’s biography as his displacement vehicle, following the arc of a life spanning rural Lika and the industrial-era United States. An even more radical departure is represented by recent novels that make little or no effort to tie their narrative to a geography defined “home.” Veselin Marković, in Mi različiti [We, Who Are Different], sets his story in an unnamed country with a distinctly Nordic flavor (a city fries, Bernard Johnson, Filip Korženski, Christina Kramer, Ana Lucić, Randall A. Major, Duška Mikić-Mitchell, Jelena Petrović, Christina Pribićević-Zorić, Bogdan Rakić, Damion Searls, Mark Thompson, Stela Tomašević, Drenka Willen, David Williams and Milo Yelesiyevich. 294

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on a lake, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and ski slopes), yet gives his characters Slavic names such as Valentina, Vladimir and Branko, while providing no narrative justification for this (the characters are not Slavic guest workers in a Nordic country—but the regular inhabitants of wherever it is). This gives his writing an air of mystery that serves the truth-hunting tenor of the story well. Neda Miranda Blažević-Kreitzman’s novel, Potres [Earthquake], takes place in San Diego and unfolds entirely within that setting, though narrated with a voice that has a slightly instructive tone (explaining American lawns, baseball, household customs), as if offering her Croatian readers a window onto American life. Ognjen Spahić sets his novel Hansen’s Children in a leper colony in Romania, with only a passing reference to Montenegro and Dubrovnik at the very end. In Goce Smilevski’s fictional bio-novels on Spinoza and Sigmund Freud’s sister, he steps right out of the milieu in which he lives, Macedonia, with no gesture to essentializing his stories in any way. Note that not all of these novels have been translated into English. It is significantly more difficult to interest an English-language publisher in a novel that does not offer at least some essentialist framework. All of the novels mentioned above—the displacement novels and the more radical ones that step completely out of the author’s milieu—were written in the authors’ native language and must be translated to be read by readers abroad. This trend is certainly not limited to the literatures of ex-Yugoslavia. Petra Hůlová (Czech) situates her novel, All This Belongs to Me, in Mongolia; László Krasznahorkai (Hungarian) writes about Japan in Seibo There Below; Jubert Klimko-Dobrozaniecki (Polish) situates his novel Lullaby for a Hanged Man in Iceland; Jáchym Topol (Czech) writes about Belarus in The Devil’s Workshop. The writers Tea Obreht, Sara Nović and Aleksandar Hemon have published novels that explore negotiation between one of these communities and the English-language, but in contrast to the authors described above, Obreht, Nović and Hemon write in English, and their work is then translated into Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian. So far, at least, their novels have been linked in various explicit ways to the regions they hail from, though as they assert themselves as writers they will undoubtedly reach for other themes. There are many more writers 295

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(originally from ex-Yugoslavia) doing the same all over the world, a reflection of the scattering of people during and after the wars of the 1990s.16 To conclude, this chapter has considered how applicable the premises raised in Pascale Casanova’s article are to the writing in ex-Yugoslavia and its successor countries over the last forty years. Her point that the critical nationalist writers are less likely to be translated is borne out by the absence of English translations of the work of best-selling authors such as Antonije Isaković and Ivan Aralica. In the 1970s and 80s, Cold War exigencies17 were key in dictating which works of literature were to be translated into English, with a strong focus on writing by the critical intellectual writers. When the postmodernists made their appearance just as the cultural scene was heating up after Tito’s death and the country was beginning its decade-long slide into war, their refusal to accept a nationalist model and declare allegiance to their national culture and community gave rise to accusations of betrayal. Yet the fact that their writing was so much more accessible to readers abroad meant the cultivation of interest in other writers from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia, resulting in an unprecedented quantity of prose of all genres from the region being translated into English. Several instances merit special note. The case of Milorad Pavić offers one example. He was one of the most widely read Serbian writers in Serbia and abroad for a decade, and then, with the advent of the war and his outspoken support for the Milošević government, his popularity was almost entirely eclipsed. The fact that the two foremost nationalist writers, Dobrica Ćosić and Vuk Drašković, were published in English and thereby consecrated by selection and translation, was not sufficient to secure them international success and recognition. The consecrating of critical intellectual writers through English translations was a defiant response to repressive Cold War regimes and an expression For a perspective on this same phenomenon among writers from Russia, see Andrew Wanner, Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). 17 For more on political patronage in the Cold War publishing of translations, see Saunders 1999/2013, and Barnhisel 2015. 16

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of the anti-totalitarian sympathies of some publishers. As such, this was a proactive choice rather than one that, necessarily, followed the tastes of the larger English-language reading public. And, as Mark Thompson has pointed out in his biography of Danilo Kiš, this by no means guaranteed the critical intellectual writers such as Kiš an enduring presence among English-language readers. The rivalries described here among the critical nationalists, the critical intellectuals and the postmodernists were certainly heightened by the outbreak of war. Be that as it may, the aesthetic shifts in the cultural landscape, from the critical intellectual voice to postmodernism, have parallels in the sensibilities of writers and readers in all of the East European literatures during these years, despite the fact that the other countries were not going through war. So, perhaps, the rivalries Casanova describes are due at least in part to the evolving political and social conditions and shifting readers’ tastes in Europe and the Englishspeaking world. This chapter, then, demonstrates that the translations of these literatures have shaped the trajectory of culture overall, especially now, in the phase of world literature in which we find ourselves today. References Albahari, David. 1998. Bait. Translated by Peter Agnone. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Mamac, Belgrade 1996] ———. 2005. Snow Man. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. [Snežni čovek, Belgrade 1995] ———. 2011. Leeches. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. [Pijavice, Belgrade 2005] ———. 2014. Globetrotter. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Svetski putnik, Belgrade 2001] ———. 2014. Checkpoint. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books. [Kontrolni punkt, Belgrade 2011] Aralica, Ivan. 1987. Okvir za mržnju. Zagreb: Znanje. Andrić, Ivo. 1959. Bridge on the Drina. Translated by Lovett Edwards. New York: Macmillan. [Na Drini Ćuprija, Belgrade 1945] 297

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———. 1963. Bosnian Chronicle. Translated by Joseph Hitrec. New York: Knopf. Re-translated as: Days of the Consuls. Translated by Celia Hawkes­worth with Bogdan Rakić. London: Forest Books, 1992. [Travnička hronika, Belgrade 1945] ———. 1965. The Woman from Sarajevo. Translated by Joseph Hitrec. New York: Knopf. [Gospođica, Belgrade 1945] Arsenijević, Vladimir. 1996. In the Hold. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth. New York: Alfred Knopf. [U potpalublju: sapunska opera, Belgrade 1995] Barnhisel, Greg. 2015. Cold War Modernists: Art, Literatures, & American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press. Basara, Svetislav. 2004. Chinese Letter. Translated by Ana Lucic. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. [Kinesko pismo, Belgrade 1994] ———. 2012. The Cyclist Conspiracy. Translated by Randall A. Major. Rochester, NY: Open Letter. [Fama o biciklistima, Belgrade 1989] Bazdulj, Muharem. 2005. The Second Book. Translated by Oleg Andrić. Evanston, IlL: Northwestern University Press. [Druga knjiga, Sarajevo 2000] Blažević-Kreitzman, Neda Miranda. 2012. Marilyn Monroe, moja majka. Zagreb: Fraktura. ———. 2014. “Marilyn Monroe, My Mother.” Buenos Aires Review. http://www. buenosairesreview.org/2014/09/marilyn-monroe-my-mother [last accessed September 1, 2015]. ———. 2014. Potres. Zagreb: Fraktura. Casanova, Pascale. 2010. “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange.” Translated by Siobhan Brownlie. In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, 287–303. Edited by Mona Baker. London: Routledge. Ćosić, Bora. 1997. My Family’s Role in the World Revolution and Other Prose. Translated by Ann Clymer Bigelow. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji, Belgrade 1969] ———. Deobe. 1961. Belgrade: Prosveta. ———. 1978–1983. This Land, This Time (Into the Battle, Reach to Eternity, South to Destiny). Translated by Muriel Heppell. New York: Harcourt Brace. [Vreme smrti 1972–1979] Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Drašković, Vuk. 2000. Knife. Translated by Milo Yelesiyevich. New York: Serbian Classics Press. [Nož, Belgrade 1987] Hůlová, Petra. 2009. All This Belongs to Me. Translated by Alex Zucker. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Isaković, Antonije. 1976. Tren I. Belgrade: Prosveta. ———. 1982. Tren II. Belgrade: Prosveta. Jergović, Miljenko. 1997. Sarajevo Marlboro. Translated by Stela Tomašević. New York: Penguin. [Sarajevski Marlboro, Zagreb 1996] ———. 2011. Ruta Tannebaum. Translated by Stephen M. Dickey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Ruta Tannebaum, Zagreb 2006] ———. 2012. Mama Leone. Translated by David Williams. New York: Archipelago. [Mama Leone, Zagreb 1999] Jovanović, William. 1998. Serbdom. Tucson, AZ: Black Mountain Publishers. Kiš, Danilo. 1975. Garden, Ashes: A Novel. Translated by William J. Hannaher. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [Bašta, pepeo, Belgrade 1965] ———. 1978. The Tomb of Boris Davidovich. Translated by Duška MikićMitchell. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča, Zagreb 1976] ———. 1997. Encyclopedia of the Dead. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Northwestern University Press. [Enciklopedija mrtvih, Belgrade/ Zagreb 1983] ———. 1998. Early Sorrows. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: New Directions. [Rani jadi Belgrade 1970] Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, Hubert. Lullaby for a Hanged Man. Translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood. Houston, TX: Calypso Books. Krasznahorkai, László. 2015. Seibo There Below. Translated by Ottilie Mulzet. London: Tuskar Rock. Kurtović, Larisa. 2012. “The Paradoxes of Wartime “Freedom”: Alternative Culture during the Siege of Sarajevo.” In Resisting the Evil: (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Contention, 197–224. Edited by Bojan Bilić, Vesna Jančović. BadenBaden: Nomos. Lukić, Jasmina. 2001. Metaproza: Čitanje žanra. Belgrade: Stubovi kulture. Maček, Ivana. 2009. Sarajevo Under Siege. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Marinković, Ranko. 2010. CYCLOPS. Translated by Vlada Stojiljković. Edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Kiklop, Zagreb 1965] Marković, Veselin. 2010. Mi, različiti. Belgrade: Stubovi kulture. Mihailović, Dragoslav. 1971. When Pumpkins Blossomed. Translated by Drenka Willen. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [Kad su procvetale tikve, Belgrade 1968] ———. 1990. Goli Otok. Belgrade: NIP Politika. Mladinov, David. 1998. Aheronove ptice. Belgrade: Samizdat B92. ———. 2004. Kineski šah. Belgrade: Narodna knjiga Alfa. Nikolaidis, Andrej. 2012. The Coming. Translated by Will Firth. London: Istros Books. [Dolazak, Zagreb 2009] Novak, Slobodan. 2007. Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth. Iowa City, IA: Autumn Hill Books. [Miris, zlato i tamjan, Zagreb 1968] Pavić, Milorad. 1988. Dictionary of the Khazars. Translated by Christina Pribićević-Zorić. New York: Knopf. [Hazarski rečnik, Belgrade 1984] ———. 1990. Landscape Painted with Tea. Translated by Christina PribićevićZorić. New York: Knopf. [Predeo slikan čajem, Belgrade 1988] Pekić, Borislav. 2003. How to Quiet a Vampire. Translated by Stephen M. Dickey and Bogdan Rakić. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Kako upokojiti vampira, Belgrade 1977] ———. 1978. The Houses of Belgrade. Translated by Bernard Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [Hodočašće Arsenija Njegovana, Belgrade 1970] ———. 1976. The Time of Miracles. Translated by Lovett Edwards. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [Vreme čuda, Belgrade 1965] Pištalo, Vladimir. 2015. Tesla: A Portrait with Masks. Translated by Bogdan Rakic and John Jeffries. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. [Tesla: Portret medju maskama, Belgrade 2008] Popović, Danko. 1985. Knjiga o Milutinu. Belgrade: Književne Novine. Radulović, Jovan. 1983. Golubnjača. Belgrade: BIGZ. Saunders, Frances Stonor. 1999/2013. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press. Sejranović, Bekim. 2014. “A Happier Ending.” Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. McSweeney’s 48: 329–42. [Ljepši kraj, Zagreb 2010] 300

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Selimović, Meša. 1996. Death and the Dervish. Translated by Bogdan Rakić and Stephen M. Dickey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Derviš i smrt, Sarajevo 1966] ———. 1999. The Fortress. Translated by E. D. Goy and Jasna Levinger. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Tvrđava, Sarajevo 1970] Smilevski, Goce. 2006. Conversation with Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel. Translated by Filip Korženski. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Razgovor so Spinoza, Skopje 2003] ———. 2012. Freud’s Sister. Translated by Christina Kramer. New York: Penguin Books. [Sestrata na Sigmund Frojd, Skopje 2007] Šoljan, Antun. 1999. A Brief Excursion and Other Stories. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Kratki izlet, Zagreb 1965] Spahić, Ognjen. 2011. Hansen’s Children. Translated by Will Firth. London: Istros Books. [Hansenova djeca, Zagreb 2007] Tasić, Vladimir. 2011. Farewell Gift: Concerto. Translated by Bogdan Rakić and John Jeffries. Belgrade: Geopoetika. [Oproštajni dar: končerto, Novi Sad 2001] Terzić, Ajla. 2009. Lutrija. Belgrade: VBZ. Thompson, Mark. 2013. Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kiš. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Topol, Jáchym. 2013. The Devil’s Workshop. Translated by Alex Zucker. London: Portobello Books. Ugrešić, Dubravka. 1994. Have a Nice Day. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth. London: Jonathan Cape; republished as American Fictionary, translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Ellen Elias-Bursać. Rochester, NY: Open Letter Press 2018. [Američki fikcionar, Zagreb 1993] ———. 1998. The Culture of Lies. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth. Philadelphia, PA: Penn State University Press. [Kultura laži, Zagreb 1996] ———. 1999. Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth. New York: New Directions. [Muzej bezuvjetne predaje, Zagreb/Belgrade 2001–2002] ———. 2003. Thank You for Not Reading. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Damion Searls. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. [Zabranjeno čitanje, Zagreb 2001]

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———. 2006. The Ministry of Pain. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Ecco. [Ministarstvo boli, Zagreb/Belgrade 2004] ———. 2010. Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Celia Hawkesworth and Mark Thompson. Edinburgh: Canongate. [Baba Jaga je snijela jaje, Zagreb/Belgrade 2008] ———. 2013. “The Spirit of the Kakanian Province.” In After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land. Edited by Radmila Gorup. Stanford, CA: Stanford Scholarship Online. Veličković, Nenad. 2005. Lodgers. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Konačari, Sarajevo 1998] Vrkljan, Irena. 1999. The Silk, the Shears, and Marina: or, About Biography. Translated by Sibelan Forrester and Celia Hawkesworth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Svila, škare, Zagreb 1984] Wachtel, Andrew. 1998. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2011. “Remarks on the end of the run of Writers of the Other Europe.” http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index. php?id=3382 [last accessed September 1, 2015]. Živković, Zoran. 1998. Time Gifts. Translated by Alice Copple-Tošić. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Vremenski darovi, Belgrade 1997] ———. 2004. Hidden Camera. Translated by Alice Copple-Tošić. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. [Skrivena kamera, Belgrade 2005] ———. 2006. Seven Touches of Music. Translated by Alice Copple-Tošić. Charleston, SC: Aio Publishing. [Sedam dodira muzike, Belgrade 2001] ———. 2007. Twelve Collections & the Tea Shop. Translated by Alice CoppleTošić. Hornsea: PS. [Dvanaest zbirki, i Čajdžinica, Belgrade 2005] ———. 2007. Steps Through the Mist: A Mosaic Novel. Translated by Alice Copple-Tošić. Charleston, SC: Aio Press. [Koraci kroz magle, Belgrade 2003] ———. 2010. The Library. Translated by Alice Copple-Tošić. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. [Biblioteka, Belgrade 2005]

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China Comes to Warsaw, or Warsaw Comes to China Melech Ravitch’s Travel Poems and Journals1 K AT H RY N H EL L ERS T EI N

During a visit to China in 1935, Melech Ravitch, one of Warsaw’s most influential literary figures in the interwar period, wrote a travelogue and poems about what he saw there (Eber 2004, 103–4). In this chapter, I will discuss the section of poems on China and Asia in the collection that Ravitch published in 1937, Kontinentn un okeanen (Continents and oceans), and touch on his travelogue typescript, portions of which he published as journalism in Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw, Melbourne and Johannesburg. Through these disturbing, vivid writings, Ravitch engaged in a form of cultural translation that both brings China to Warsaw, and Warsaw to China. With his observations, his stories, and his very words, Ravitch infuses Yiddish with Chinese, expanding the dictionary and the worldview of Yiddish. While Ravitch conveys to his readers his own wonder at the novelty of traveling to these fabled places, at the same time, he attempts to make the “exotic” qualities or “otherness” of der vayter mizrakh (the Far East) comprehensible and even familiar to his Yiddish readers. Thus, Ravitch’s works about China engage in a dual process of foreignizing the Yiddish in which he writes and familiarizing the Chinese culture and society that he describes. In 1935, Yiddish was widely spoken among Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe and the Americas. At that time, some thirteen million Jews spoke the language, but within a decade, the Yiddish1



I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Irene Eber (z”l), the late professor emerita of Chinese history and culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in gratitude for her encouragement, inspiration, guidance, intellectual generosity and friendship in my work on China through Yiddish Eyes. I am indebted to her article, which establishes the historical context for my study (Eber 2004).

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speaking population was decimated by the Nazi destruction. In subsequent years, the number of speakers of Yiddish continued to decline, due to Stalin’s oppression of Jews in the USSR, the establishment of modern Hebrew as the national language of the State of Israel, and the cultural assimilation of Jews in the United States, Canada and western Europe (Katz 2011). Originating in the tenth century as a dialect of Middle High German among Jews who had settled in the Rhine Valley, Yiddish developed into what Dovid Katz calls “the third principal literary language in Jewish history, after classical Hebrew and (Jewish) Aramaic.” (Katz 2011). Over time, the Germanic base of this Jewish language incorporated a large Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, as well as significant elements from Slavic and other languages. The devotional and the folk-based literature in Yiddish, which had been transcribed in the Hebrew alphabet since at least the thirteenth century, evolved into a full-fledged modern literature by the early twentieth century. During the interwar years, Yiddish literature reached its peak in Warsaw, Vilna and New York. Writers of poetry, fiction and drama at that time were fully conversant with past and present German, Russian, Polish and English literatures. They developed works and movements that joined world modernisms with Jewish cultural traditions. One might argue that twentieth-century Yiddish literature was in its essence translingual and transcultural, and thus, that the introduction of Chinese cultural elements into Yiddish was only one step further into transnationalism. Melech Ravitch, a major force to be reckoned with in the worldwide, interwar Yiddish literary and cultural scene, was the pseudonym of Zekharye-Khone Bergner (1893–1976). Born in Redim (Redem [Yiddish]; Radymno) in eastern Galicia, Ravitch had a secular education in Polish and German; his education in Judaism was limited (Novershtern 2010).2 The Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of 1908 inspired Ravitch to write in Yiddish (although Polish and German were the languages spoken in his home), and he published prolifically—poetry, plays and essays—in that language for some 65 years, beginning in 1910. Ravitch led a peripatetic life, moving from Lemberg to Vienna to War

2

Another online biography of Melech Ravitch, including photos, is http://www. arts.monash.edu.au/yiddish-melbourne/biographies/melech-ravitch-biog.php [last accessed July 28, 2013]. 304

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saw, where he was the executive secretary of the Fareyn fun Yidishe Literatn un Zhurnalistn in Varshe (Association of Jewish Writers and Journalist in Warsaw) at 13 Tłomackie Street, which became, in Avraham Novershtern’s words, “the central address for Yiddish literature in Poland and one of the symbols of secular Yiddish culture in general” (Novershtern 2010). A member of the literary group known as “Di khalyastre” (The Gang), Ravitch cofounded and coedited the influential interwar journal Literarishe bleter and “later edited the literature page of the Bundist daily Folks-tsaytung” (Novershtern 2010). From 1932 to 1934 and again after 1935, Ravitch took to the road and wrote about his travels in South Africa, Australia, England, the Soviet Union and what he called “der vayter mizrakh”. According to Novershtern, “from the 1930s on, Ravitch lived in Australia, Argentina, and Mexico, until finally settling in Montreal” (Novershtern 2010). The “Vayter mizrakh” section of Ravitch’s travelogue—a work of many hundreds of closely-typed pages in the form of daily letters to an unspecified recipient, begins on January 28, 1935, in London, and documents his journey through the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Harbin in Northern China or Manchuria, to the Great Wall of China, to Peking, and then on to Shanghai, Canton in southern China, and Hong Kong. Ravitch then traveled to Saigon, Singapore and Sumatra. He chronicled his journey onward to Australia, where a letter he wrote from Melbourne placed him, on May 29, 1936.3 Ravitch published a number of individual chapters from his travelogue as articles in Yiddish and English newspapers in Warsaw, Melbourne, Johannesburg and Mexico City, in 1936 and 1937.4

3 4

Melech Ravitch Archive, 4, 1540, 2:350. Examples of Ravitch’s published articles drawn from the travelogue and found in Melech Ravitch Archives 4, 1540, 2:354, are: 1) “Yidn fun Shanghai,” Naye folkstsaytung [Warsaw?], Friday, 22 January 1936, no. 22, 6, in Melech Ravitch Archives 1540, 4, 2:354; 2) “Di legend, geshikhte un genyer matsev fun di velt-barimte ‘khinezishe yidn,’ afn yesod fun perzenlikhe gegenishn in mayn rayze iber khine,” in Afrikaner yidishe tsaytung (The African Jewish Newspaper), vol. 6, no. 69, Thursday, 31 December 1936, 2, and the sequel in the same publication, Vol. 6, no. 70, Tuesday, 5 January 1937, and yet another sequel in the same publication, Vol. 7, no. 2, Friday 8 January 1937, 2; 3) “Di legend, di geshikhte un vi halt es haynt mit di velt-barimte ‘khinezishe yidn’ (fun mayne velt-rayzes),” Di oystralishe yidishe nayes (The Australian Jewish News), Friday, 27 November, 1936, 3–4, and the 305

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But most of this immense document remains in typescript.5 In contrast to earlier Yiddish encounters with China, such as, for example, the translations of classical Chinese poetry by Meyer Shtiker in the modernist New York Yiddish journal Shriftn, Ravitch presents a portrait of contemporary China and of the national, political, social and cultural complexities of the place in 1935. He does this not by going to Chinese literature (although he includes a chapter in his travelogue on Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of the Japanese versions of Chinese folktales),6 but rather by focusing his relentless, truth-seeking gaze on the spectacle he encounters. He recounts experiences, ranging from observation of squalor and violence in Harbin and Canton to “Days in Peking—the Jerusalem of China […] Graves and Walls.”7 He observes the “human-dogs,” the rickshaw coolies on the streets of Shanghai, takes a walk in Shanghai’s theater district, and marvels at the “electrical inundation of the Shanghai night sky” in the French Concession, the “Paris of China.”8 A sophisticated stylist, Ravitch renders these anecdotes in impassioned yet ironic prose. In the Aziatishe (Asian) poems, however, which number twelve in Kontinentn un okeanes, Ravitch selectively presents primarily narratives of extreme poverty,

5



6

7





8

sequel, in the same publication, on Friday, 4 December, 1936, 4–5; 4) “Vi azoy es lebt zikh di fir [?] toyznt yidn fun ale ekn fun der yiddisher velt, in der grester khinezisher shtot, inem finfmilionikn Shanghai,” in Di Prese (Mexico? Argentina?), Sunday, 31 January 1937, 10–11; and 5) “Yidn in mandzshurien: vi azoy es lebn un es laydn yidn in mandzshurye—eynem fun di geferlikhste un vaytste vinklen fun der velt,” “Spetsial far Di Prese (no date or page number), clipping in Melech Ravitch Archive 4, 1540, 2:357. See the excellent article that sets Ravitch’s travel journals into historical context: Eber 2004. In addition to a critical assessment in my book project, I hope to translate selections from the typescript of Ravitch’s travelogue. Melech Ravitch Archive 4, 1540, 2:374: (regarding China) 82–96, 97–103, 104–20, 121–29, 130–40: “Tsvishn Japanishe blumen un negl—Lafcadio Hearn—fun a yapanisher perspektiv,” 121–26. Melech Ravitch Archive 4, 1540, 2:374, “Teg in Peking—Yerusalayim dekhine… kvorim un moyern,” 100–3. Melech Ravitch Archive 4, 1540, 2:374: (regarding China) see above, note 12: “Khinezishn Pariz”—elektrishe farfleytsung afn Shanghaier nakht-himl,” 133–36; and “Shikurer tog-shaptsir ibern nikhternem “Khinezishn Pariz,” 137–40. See also Ravitch Archive 4, 1540, 2:375, re. China: “‘Yinriksha—riksha—liksha— ikshia—kshia—(a kapitl vegn mentshn-hint af di gasn fun Shanghai),” 141–43, and “Abilderboygn fun dem lebn fun di Shanghaier gasn-hint af tsvey fis,” 144–47. 306

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victimization, prostitution, murder and drug addiction, in rhymed, metrical Yiddish verse. In order to understand how Ravitch renders China in Yiddish, I will examine two passages from his report of his first glimpse of the northern Chinese landscape from the Trans-Siberian Railway, which he rode from January 28, 1935, through February of that year, typing up his observations on the portable typewriter he carried with him.9 In the first passage, Ravitch describes his arrival in Manchuria, on February 11, 1935. In his words, the landscape from the train appears to him as “naked and sandy and yellow and flat” plains beneath the blue skies, and he sees “small square fortresses of clay,” which are, in fact, Chinese peasant villages. Then Ravitch describes an event: And moment by moment, it all becomes more colorful, the young Chinese women with elegant slippers on their tiny feet, and the old women who can barely walk on their tightly bound feet. When seen for the first time, the impression is like a blow to the head. Here is one of them, a second, a third—can this be possible?10

The specificity of these descriptions of the girls’ slippers and of the old women’s bound feet and crooked gait, as they appear one after the other, suggests that Ravitch observes in astonishment from the window of the train stopped at a station. This impression of the paused view grows stronger with more sensory description: Now from somewhere far away, drums are beating and the yellow clay-colored landscape reverberates with all seven colors of the rainbow. People carry huge gaudy chests on enormous yokes, drummers and trumpeters walk ahead and the colorful children of the village chase after and, in their red trousers, jump all the nearer to the gaudy chests. These chests are not empty, they are filled with living mer-

Melech Ravitch Archive 4, 1540, 2:370, 1–59. Regarding Ravitch’s typewriter, see Eber 2004, 103. 10 Melech Ravitch Archive 4, 1540, 2:370: 41. 9



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chandise, in the first, the bridegroom [der khosn] and in the second, the bride [di kale].11

As a reader, I, too, am struck in the head by the incongruity of the marvels Ravitch views—the bound-feet women, the flamboyant procession of the mysterious chests—with the familiarly Jewish Hebraic/Yiddish words for the human cargo in those bright boxes—“khosn” and “kale” (groom and bride). Ravitch brings home to his Yiddish reader and perhaps to himself this picturesque and exotic wedding procession in a Manchurian village. The Yiddish language necessitates that an ethnographic description becomes a cultural translation. How else can the Yiddish travel-writer and journalist report on a Chinese village wedding without using the Yiddish words for bride and groom, words that connote a shtetl wedding in Galicia, Poland, Belarus or Lithuania? The inescapable fact that language is embedded in its culture and cannot help but connote the customs and place of that culture makes a neutral or scientifically precise description of an event like a Chinese wedding impossible, unless it is described in Chinese. The Yiddish writer on a train through Manchuria can articulate his impressions only by transporting the spectacle of China into the language of Warsaw. In the same entry Ravitch, gazing out the train window, describes the “unending rows” of “small carts, man, horse, wagon, almost one piece. The horse is so closely harnessed to the cart […] and the man walks near the horse—all three, one piece. These are the small Chinese carts from the North of this enormous land to the South; they are seen like this today and yesterday and for hundreds and thousands of years.”12 Describing the primitive wheels on the carts, with their spokes forming a crude cross, Ravitch presents an unchanging face of China over millennia and across the huge nation. Although he is still assumed to be on the train approaching Harbin, his first stop in China, Ravitch also seems to be writing in retrospect—from the perspective of someone who has already traversed the nation, from north to south. In this description of a timeless simplicity and crudeness of an agrarian China, Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42.

11

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Ravitch takes the somewhat romanticized voice of a “Travel Writer.” Such a tone and stance stand in great contrast to the twelve poems that Ravitch writes about a contemporary, urban China, fraught with political unrest and unspeakable social and economic atrocities. In the second passage, Ravitch describes his arrival in Harbin, the hub (knip-punkt) of the Manchuguo railway, built by czarist Russia and now occupied by the Japanese puppet government, caught up in “a velt planter” (a worldwide mess), where “each of a dozen governments holds its own thread and tugs it in its direction.”13 This passage conveys Ravitch’s impression of the multicultural skyline of Harbin, dominated by the onion domes of Russian Orthodox churches, where droshkies and rickshaws traverse the ubiquitous poverty, and where Chinese and Russian merchants wheel and deal, the Chinese speaking broken Russian and the Russians speaking bastardized Chinese. This confluence of cultures and languages prepares us for the transnational character of the poems that Ravitch wrote about his travels in Asia. Even more telling, Ravitch ends this section with what seems to be an afterthought, but which can stand, in fact, as a kind of ars poetica: “di andere vokh: dos lebn aleyn molt simbolishe bilder un der shrayber kopirt zey […]” (The other week: Life itself paints symbolic pictures and the writer copies them down).”14 In China, the Yiddish poet must do nothing more than transcribe what he sees, because the very intensity of life in China provides all the symbolism a poet and writer could want. The Yiddish writer is relieved of the responsibility to embellish, invent, or even interpret. Ravitch’s China Poems

In his 1937 book of poems, Kontinentn un okeanes, Ravitch set out to prove himself a citizen of the world. Self-promoting, yet apologetic and self-mocking, Ravish summarizes his prolific publication record in the introduction to his book, and asserts that in 1937, despite the increased Ibid., 46. Ibid.

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trending toward nationalism and racial difference, his inclusion of “national, international, and interracial poems” does not contradict, but rather reflects the way that both the “human being and the Jew” are “in 1937” (Ravitch 1937, 8).15 The transnational intention of this book becomes clear in Ravitch’s introduction. Despite what he himself acknowledges as its somewhat “pretentious” and “non-Yiddish/non-Jewish” title, Ravitch insists that he does not intend this book to be a “geography, social-economy, or even a travel journal.” The book is arranged into ten sections, five titled with the adjectival form of the continent names, (“Aziatsihe,” Amerikanishe,” “Afrikanishe, “Eyropeishe,” “Oystralishe” [Asian, American, African, European, Australian]); and the other five with more wide-ranging names, (“Okeanishe,” “Patsifistishe un ideishe,” “Vegetarishe, “Yidishe,” and “In-fir-ventishe” [Oceanic, Pacifist and Idea-ist, Vegetarian, Yiddish/Jewish, and Within-Four-Walls/Domestically]). Ravish explains that he organized the sections of the book according to the chronology of the experiences that inspired the poems, between 1932 and 1937, and that he wrote most of the poems in the book between 1935 and 1937. Ravitch even appropriates the reviewer Shmuel Niger’s negative characterization of his earlier poems as “a mishung fun poezye un zshurnalism” (a mixture of poetry and journalism), by stating that his new journalistic poems allow for hope and the nuance of light and shadow, while the purely lyrical poems are “pure night.” He answers to the possible criticism of the “contradictions” of the book’s poems by saying that all the poems, “Moscow, Paris, New York,” seek “the city of cities” (di shtot fun di shtet), “the Jerusalem of the World” (dos yerushalayim d’velt) in the most concrete terms. Aware of the “cannons” that lurk “in all four corners of the world” “like growling dogs on chains,” Ravitch sends his book out into “this world and this time,” as a symbol of the millions of people for whom the world is their hope, and who themselves stand as the hope for the world. He concludes his introduction with:

Ravitch’s Yiddish reads: “Zenen zey a stire in eyn bukh: nationale, internationale un interrasishe lider? Neyn. Vayl azoy iz der mentsh, is der yid in 1937.”

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This book was brought together and mostly written on a long migratory way-station, on a world journey, which began in 1931 and will not end. The way-station is called Australia. In great measure, the aim of this great migratory endeavor was this book. Go forth and bring me good friends from the world, you, my book, you my child of suffering and joy and love! (Ravitch 1937, 8–9)

Ravitch intends his collection of poems to reflect the crisis at the edge of which the world teeters, which he has come to perceive from the point of view he has evolved through his extensive travels. The traveler between continents and nations and across oceans in this critical decade has achieved a vantage point from which he can report on the condition of humankind and perhaps even prophecy what will transpire. In the first of the book’s ten sections, Aziatishe lider (Asian Poems), ten of the eleven poems reprise and develop passages from the prose travelogue.16 From the individual titles, we can see how Ravitch brings into focus for his Yiddish readers the highly symbolic reality that the vayter mizrakh presents before the writer’s eyes. However, within these poems, most of them lengthy narrative ballads, Ravitch does more than simply record what he observes. Instead, he creates characters with backstories and voices and sets them within carefully crafted stories, which he shapes with the literary devices of dramatic monologue, dialogue, letter-writing, dream, description and a narrative voice that shifts its perspective with a deliberate skill to highlight the irony and pathos. The titles guide the reader through Asia, as the travelogue traces Ravitch’s route, from the Trans-Siberian railway to Harbin (Haerbin; The titles of the poems in Aziatishe lider are, in order, “Tropisher kohsmar in Singapore” (Tropical Nightmare in Singapore), “Trans-sibirishe vinter-rayze” (Trans-Siberian Winter Journey), “Lord Liton fun Genf un der kuli Mei-Wan-Fu fun Tshipu” (Lord Lytton of Geneva and the Coolie Mei-Wan-Fu of Chefoo), “Yapanisher dikhter zingt tsvishn karshnbeymer” (Japanese Poet sings among Cherry Trees), “A kop in a reml” (A Head in a Frame), “Khunkhuzn-lid af di vasern fun Yang-tse” (Khunkhuzn Song on the Waters of the Yangtze), “Ho-Nei-Wan un Li-Kwan-Yu, Pekiner libes-balade” (HoNei-Wan and Li-Kwan-Yu, Peking Love Ballad), “A riksha shtarbt in a Shanghaier fartog” (A Rickshaw Dies in a Shanghai Dawn), “A vayse grefin un der geler rikshakuli” (A White Countess and a Yellow Rickshaw-Coolie), “Buddha koyft zikh a zoyne fun a sampan in Kanton” (Buddha Buys a Whore from a Sampan in Canton), and “Buddha in a Saygoner opium-bude” (Buddha in a Saigon Opium Booth).

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Hāĕrbīn) and Japanese-ruled Manchuria (Mȃnzhōu), along the waters of the Yellow (Huanghe) River to Peking (Beijing) Canton (Guangzhou), and eventually to Saigon and Singapore. The poems focus on particular events, ranging from the legendary to what were the headlines in 1935. In various ways, though, each of these poems tells of an event that is shocking and, explicitly or implicitly, a comment on the political and social problems of China. For example, “Lord Liton fun Genf un der kuli Mei-Wan-Fu fun Tshipu” (Lord Lytton of Geneva and the Coolie Mei Wanfu of Chefoo (Yantai), formerly known as Zhifu),17 places the last days of an impoverished man from the northeastern China port Chefoo (Yantai) into the context of the abortive efforts in Manchuria in 1932 of the League of Nations Lytton Commission, led by Victor Alexander George Robert BulwerLytton, the 2nd Earl of Lytton, to determine why the Japanese had invaded Manchuria.18 In this poem, political tensions rise, as Henry Puyi (1905–1967), the last emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), has been set in place as the puppet governor of Manchukuo by the Japanese who conquered Manchuria, as, in Ravitch’s words, “Japanese ships are already anchored / In Harbin on the River Sungari” (lines 3–4). The villager, Mei Wanfu, henpecked by his wife to earn money, angrily leaves Chefoo and his beloved children to become a rickshaw coolie in Harbin, where “Lord Lytton from the League of Nations/ Has arrived with a huge [diplomatic] staff / In the “Modern” Hotel of Harbin” (lines 12–14). The poem moves back and forth between Mei Wanfu’s growing Ravitch, “Lord Liton fun Genf un der kuli mei-wan-fu fun tshifu,” in Kontinentn un okeanen, 27–30; and in Di lider fun mayne lider (1954), 187–90. 18 Lord Lytton of Geneva was the abbreviated name for Victor Alexander George Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton (1876–1947), who was appointed by the League of Nations to head the Lytton Commission to determine why the Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931. When condemned by the League of Nations as an aggressor state, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933. Henry Puyi (1905–1967) was the Westernized name of the last emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). After the Japanese conquered Manchuria, he was installed as Japan’s puppet emperor of Manchukuo in 1932. He remained in that position until 1945, when the war ended. In 1949, he was imprisoned by the Communist regime for ten years. Cheefoo (Zhifu) is the former Western misnomer for Yantai, a city in Shandong Province, in northeastern China, now the largest fishing seaport in that province. 17

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heroin addiction (“He smokes heroin, and on water with rice / He dwindles away more every day,” lines 21–22), the desperate letters from his wife in the village asking him to send money, and the grand futility of Lord Lytton’s political endeavors. In his notes on cultural and political references at the end of the volume, Ravitch explains that heroin was “fil biliker vi opium, popular tsvishn di orimste kulis” (far cheaper than opium, popular among the poorest coolies).19 In the end, Mei Wanfu sells his clothing for heroin. He freezes to death, and his corpse is dumped, faceup, near the railroad junction, past which travels Lord Lytton on the fast train. Regarding “Ho-Nei-Wan un Li-Kwan-Yu (Pekiner studentishe libesbalade)” (He Naiwan and Li Guanyu (Peking Student Love-ballad)), Ravitch explains that this poem was “written after meetings with Tientsin (Tianjin; Tiānjin), Shanghai, and Peking (Beijing) students.”20 It seems to refer to the December 9th Movement to Resist Japan and Save the Nation in Beijing, a student-led mass protest in 1935 urging the Chinese government to repel the Japanese military offensive (Israel and Klein 1976, 1–10, 71–82). Ravitch’s own specific views on the politics of China at this time remain obscure. In his writings and cultural leadership in Warsaw in the 1920s and early 1930s, Ravitch’s primary political concerns were with Yiddish-based Jewish nationalism, through the Bundist movement; he co-founded and edited the major Polish Yiddish literary journal in interwar Poland, Literarishe bleter, and served as poetry editor of the Bundist daily Folks-tsaytung (Novershtern 2010). Rather than taking an explicit political position, Ravitch’s “Asian Poems” express through their narratives an empathy with individual people who suffered from poverty and injustice. The poem opens in what seem to be an old-fashioned setting, complete with a delicate maiden, her silk-covered bed, and her indulgent parents:

Ravitch, “Notitsn un bamerkungen (loyt dem seder fun bukh),” Kontinentn un okeanen, 348. 20 Ibid.

19

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Ho-Nei-Wan veynt baytog un baynakht21 Af dem zaydn badektn bet, Der foter veynt un di muter mit ir, —Nei-Wan, vos vilstu, red. *** He Naiwan cries day and night On her silk-covered bed, Her father and mother weep with her, —Naiwan, what do you want? Speak!22 (lines 1–4)

But this is a tale of modern China. Modernity asserts itself first in terms of a girl seeking higher education. As her “silken skin grows green with grief” (line 6), the girl asks to be sent “To the university in Peking” (line 8). “Her father says yes and her mother winks assent, / And the golden Buddha in the corner—laughs” (lines 9–10). The following night, He Naiwan arrives in Peking. With the great landmarks of this city in the background—the Garden Bridge, the glimmering rooftops of the Emperor’s Forbidden City, the young woman, now dressed in a green silk shirt and long blue dress, with a rose in her hair, feels waves of hope for “Ka-tey, Ka-tey, du land, du, yung un gelibt!” (Cathay, Cathay, you country, you, young and beloved!) (line 19). Now we see, though, that modernity joins the girl’s hunger for education with her desire for the fulfillment of romantic love. He Naiwan’s love for Cathay spills over into her affection for “Li-Kwan-Yu” (Li Guanyu) (line 20), the young man with whom she has conducted a secret In my English translations of Melech Ravitch’s Yiddish renderings of Chinese place and personal names, I return them to the current Chinese spelling in Pinyin. However, in my English transliterations of Ravitch’s Yiddish transcriptions of these Chinese place and personal names I retain the poet’s versions. The act of transliteration necessarily changes a language’s sounds from one system of phonemes and stress to another. In my attempts to render in English letters Ravitch’s Yiddish transliterations of Chinese proper names, I engage in the continuum of the effort to represent the sounds of one language in the alphabet and aural system of another. 22 Ravitch, “Ho-Nei-Wan un Li-Kwan-Yu (Pekiner studentishe libes-balade),” in Kontinentn un okeanen, 39–43; here, 39. 21

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“libe-geshprekh” (love-conversation) (line 52), and who now awaits her in his blue silk coat and bare head at the university gate (lines 42–44). One morning, though, instead of a love note, he sends her an invitation to a meeting of “Royt Ka-tey’—geheymer student-komitet” (Red Cathay—secret student committee) (line 57).23 Her lover’s enthusiasm for the illegal communist student movement that challenged the government of Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese Civil War (1927–1937) (Israel and Klein 1976, 11–20), replaces romantic love for this girl: “Come He Naiwan, your Li doesn’t call, / But the eternal young China calls!” (lines 58–59). In response, she trembles: Un es shvert zikh Ho: Li, Li—far dir un dayn Khine, Liber hundert mol toyt, eyder eyn farrat. *** And He swears to herself: Li, Li—for you and your China, Better a hundred times death than one betrayal. (lines 68–69)

Of course, the story turns tragic. Throughout the city, Chiang Kaishek’s forces have seized the student revolutionaries and dragged them away. Ravitch narrates the subsequent atrocities—beatings and a rape: Li Guanyu came to himself at dawn And wiped the blood from his eyes— Where is He? Where on earth Has she been dragged? And He lay, leaking like a damaged barrel, Like a discarded vessel, drained, Three soldiers in the middle of the night Had dragged her here to this cellar. In the 1954 version of this poem, Ravitch changes the phrase to “Yung Ka-tey”— indicating, perhaps, the poet’s fear of explicit association with Communism. Ravitch, “Ho-Nei-Wan […],” in Di Lider fun mayne lider, 195.

23

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And therefore, because of her, because He had Survived four hours—excruciate— Soldier boots and screams: Hey, High noon, and time to decapitate! (lines 78–89)

Switching to Li’s point of view, Ravitch allows the doomed young man a vision of his place in the revolution, as he, along with his beloved He and all the captured students, is forced through Peking: He hears—the brass lion’s terrible roar. And he sees the fire over the roofs Of Peking, all the way to Shanghai, to Canton, And he sees marching, marching—along with himself All five hundred million. (lines 93–97)

When he tells this vision to He Naiwan, who stumbles at his side, she answers with unwavering faith in her lover, “You speak—Li Guanyu— I believe—” (line 101). In the market square, He is the second of the students to be beheaded, and Li the third. In a moment of poetic justice and romantic incongruity, Ravitch says, Their eyes one last time Opened and gazed full of love Before their heads rolled away from each other On the humpbacked bridge. (lines 110–13)

Ravitch tells us that, as the city continues on its way, the rickshaws swerve in order to avoid smearing their wheels in the lovers’ blood. And he ends with an ironic, grotesque metaphor: And He Naiwan’s skin through her torn dress Becomes thinner, greener, green as silken fabric. Thus the hope of China turns green On the stones of Peking. (lines 122–25)

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Throughout the poem, the motif of the color green has recurred in the lovesick girl’s pale skin, her silk blouse, her enthusiasm for coming to Peking, studying at the university, and joining her lover Li, and finally in both the skin of the girl’s corpse and the propagandistic symbolism of the revolutionary nationalist movement. With this extended metaphor, Ravitch may have enacted the charge of the Yiddish poet in China, spelled out in his travelogue: to the poet’s eyes, the symbolism of the world around him comes and cries out to be recorded. What Ravitch also achieves in this poem, as with others in the Aziatishe section, is to bring into Yiddish an array of Chinese words and names and place names. With these foreign elements in the Yiddish poetic line, Ravitch makes “other” a story that is not all that unfamiliar in kind, if not in extremity, to his Yiddish audience of 1937. Accounts of brutal rapes and murders had a longstanding place in Yiddish pogrom poetry, which stemmed from H. N. Bialik’s famous Hebrew poem on the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom, “Be-‘Ir ha-haregah” (In the City of Slaughter), such as Peretz Markish’s 1921/1922 Di Kupe (The Heap).24 In addition, the political atrocities in Poland of the 1930s were recorded in poems such as Kadya Molodowsky’s 1933 “Dzshike gas.” By depicting recent political atrocities in China through tropes associated with the Yiddish genre of pogrom poetry, Ravitch brings China to Warsaw and makes Chinese suffering recognizable to Yiddish readers. I will end this chapter with a discussion of the first of the Aziatishe poems in Kontinentn un okeanes, a poem which, although not about China per se, embodies the essence of Ravitch’s ideas in his book. Ravitch himself notes that he has set “Tropishe koshmar in Singapor” (Tropical Nightmare in Singapore) out of chronological order, as “a kind of introduction to the book.”25 No longer does the travel journalist report on what he has observed in der vayter mizrakh, but rather on the poet asleep, the dreamer: Peretz Markish, Di kupe (the Heap) (Warsaw 1921/Kiev 1922). Markish was Ravitch’s co-founder of Literarishe bleter and a fellow poet in Warsaw in the 1920s. See Novershtern, Avraham (2010), “Markish, Perets,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Markish_Perets [last accessed July 29, 2013]. 25 Ravitch, “Notitsn un bamerkungen,” in Kontinentn un okeanen, 348. 24

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Zibn veltn un zibn yamen Un tsvey un fertsik yor— Koshmarn zenen di heyse Nekht afn ekvator. *** Seven worlds and seven seas And forty-two years— Nightmares are the hot Nights on the Equator. Eyes open, heart naked And a mosquito drinks my blood, And buzzes, buzzes, buzzes Its nightmare song in my head. Across seven worlds and seas On wings of fire-wind A dream flies and in the dream Again I become a child.26

In the tropical heat of the night, a nightmare itself, the poet dreams that he is again a child and is transported from the wide world—seven worlds and seven seas—from the equator where a mosquito drinks his blood, back to his shtetl home in Redem (Redim; Radymno, eastern Galicia; today, Poland), where song becomes the motif—the songs of the buzzing mosquito, of the weekly market fair, and of a recollected childhood lullaby. Across seven worlds and seas I see Redem, my shtetl, and a fair, And the mosquito buzzes, Buzzes, buzzes its buzzing song. Ravitch, “Tropishe koshmar in Singapore,” in Kontinentn un okeanen, 19–23. Also found in Ravitch, Di lider fun mayne lider, 183–87.

26

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In the dream, the poet’s parents stand at the window, looking out at the world: Across seven worlds and seas In our marketplace, a fair, At the window, my father and mother Gaze out at the train on the mountain there. For a long while, the two old people gaze, Until into the kitchen they stray Where, from the window can be seen The graveyard walls, far away.

The world visible to the poet’s elderly parents from their windows is delimited by the train on the mountain in one direction and the cemetery in the other. Such boundaries throw the dreamer into a “toytnangst,” a deathly anxiety or a fear of death. He fears that he is not really a man of 42 years, and that he has not travelled across the world to Singapore, the Equator, and the seven seas: And the nightmare throws me Into fever and fear of death, I sit up suddenly, wide-open eyes, Lightning-sharp comes a thought— That the seven worlds and seven seas Are nothing but a dream, And what is also but a dream Are my forty-two years.

Still within the nightmare, his parents’ actions provide a disturbing answer to the poet’s fear that his adult reality is itself merely a dream: My mother gives a sudden smile, And my father bursts into laughter:

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—Of course, you fool of worlds and seas, The truth lies at home with us ever after— A mountain on this side of the house, Where one can watch the train, And always on that other side, The graveyard can be seen. There our grandfathers have lain Since four generations ago— You need to rest, son, rest some more, After forty-two years, After the Equator, after Singapore.

Treating him like a child with groundless fears, the parents assert that what is “true” and “eternal” can be reduced to the family home, the mountain on which one can see the train passing by, but not stopping in Redem, a shtetl disconnected from the wider world. The cemetery, seen from the other window, anchors the poet in four generations of his ancestors buried there. And in their nightmarish way, the parents invite their world-traveling son to his own eternal sleep in the family plot. Scolding her son, the mother corrects the son’s idea of what is important in the world. His response is to discard “the seven worlds” and “the seven seas” in the most ignominious way: My mother says:—You really believe, I see it on your face, That the world out there is something more Than our tiny marketplace. Out the window now I heave All seven of the worlds And pour out all the seven seas Into the pail of kitchen slops—

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Having won the argument, the mother offers homey comfort for the son’s misguided dream of the larger world, a dream within the poem’s tropical nightmare: Here, my son, sit at my feet And lean your head in my lap, It is nothing but a dream, And now the dream has passed—

The mother provides the traveler-son with the alternative “truth” of family and home, a truth that reduces the whole wide world and its seven seas to the most mundane and material form: And for all your dreams, take seven cents, Buy some apples for yourself— Bite into one, and you will see Where really the truth lives— And help me kindle the oil lamp And make the kitchen fire And then you may take off your shoes Your feet are tired. And set aside those thoughts That torment you in your head And unburden your shoulders Of the years’ load.

As night falls, the mother invites her son to fall asleep in his childhood bed and sings him a lullaby: And lie down in your little bed, Climb into your cradle, I will shield the lamp So its light won’t trouble.

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‘Froim, go lie down now, You’re so tired, your eyes close, I will sing you to sleep, child. Here’s how the song goes:

The lullaby that the mother choses to sing is a famous folkslid of loss and death, “Amol iz geven a mayse” (Once There Was a Story). This song tells that once upon a time, a Jewish king (a yidishn meylekh) flourished with his queen, her vineyard, the tree within it, and the bird nesting in that tree. When the king died, the queen despaired, the vineyard withered, the tree shattered, and the bird flew away: Amol iz geven a mayse, Di mayse iz gorisht freylekh, Di mayse hoybt zikh onet Mit a yidishn zinger, a meylekh. Der zinger iz avekgeforn Iber zibn yamen, Un er iz tsurikgekumen Tsu zayne alte tate-mamen. Un fun der meylekhs oygn Trern rinen un rinen, Vayl af zibn veltn un yamen Hot er di velt nisht gefunen. Vayl af ale zibn veltn Un af ale yamen zibn Iz der zinger, der meylekh Aleyn af der velt geblibn. Fun zibn veltn un yamen Iz er tsurikgeforn Un er fregt bay zayn alter mamen Farvos zi hot im geboyrn--322

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*** “Once upon a time, there was a story, This is not a happy story, This is a story that begins With a Jewish singer, a king. “The singer traveled far away Across the seven seas, And returned to his elderly parents Eventually. “And from the king’s eyes The tears flow and flow, Because in seven worlds and seas He did not find the world. “Because in all the seven worlds And on all the seven seas, This king, this singer has remained In the world, alone. “From seven worlds and seven seas, He has journeyed home And inquired of his old mother Why she gave birth to him—”

Ravitch alters the traditional song to drive home the irony central to his Aziatishe lider: that the Jew who travels the world to discover the truth will have trouble perceiving it and communicating it to his people back home, because, in order to be in the greater world, he isolates himself from those people. In such cultural isolation, the poet risks losing his own language, yet the necessary dislocation and isolation of the traveler enable him to marvel at the differences he encounters. At the same time, that isolation makes him homesick and, in longing, he regresses to feeling like a child again. 323

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In the mother’s lullaby, Ravitch puns on his own first name, or, rather, the name he gave himself as his authorial pseudonym, Melech, which means “king.” With this pun, Ravitch alters the familiar opening and final stanzas, “amol iz geven a mayse / di mayse iz gornisht freylekh / di mayse heybt zikh onet, / mit a yidishn meylekh” (Once there was a story / The story is not happy / The story begins / With a Jewish king), in order to add a modern, existential question. Ravitch’s lullaby is not a tale about the demise of a king and his queen and all their kingdom, their vineyard and their spirit, a tale that has been interpreted as about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Exile from Israel. Instead, in the mother’s nightmare lullaby, the king (meylekh) is a solitary singer who travels the world, only to return to his old parents to alleviate the loneliness inevitable to the traveler far from home. The mother’s song tells how futile it is for a Jewish boy to seek the truth in the wider world, instead of at home. Moreover, the mother’s lullaby, framed by Ravitch’s poem, asks the Yiddish poet why he needs to write about China and Singapore. She seems to inquire, “Why write ‘Aziatishe lider’ when you can sing Yiddish folksongs?” This is “the question” for the Yiddish poet in 1937: When the 42 year old “king” and “singer” becomes a baby again, his grand adventures vanish as the flame gutters and his mother has the final word: Hot di mame zikh tseyomert Un dem zun mit trern bagosn, un hot dem meylekh, dem zinger, vi a kind in di orems geshlosn. (hot genumen tsanken dos lempl, un dos glezl shvarts zikh tsu farbn...) —kh’hob, mayn zun, gemuzt dikh geboyrn Kedey du zolst muzn shtarbn— *** Amol iz geven a mayse Di mayse iz gornisht freylekh, 324

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Di mayse hoybt zikh onet Mit a yidishn zinger a meylekh… (1935) *** So my mother lamented, And soaked her son with tears, And locked this king, this singer Like a child into her arms. (The lamp began to sputter, And the lamp-glass to grow black…) —My son, I had to bear you So that you should have to die— *** “Once upon a time, there was a story, This is not a happy story, The story begins with A Jewish singer, a king…” (1935)

In this poem, Ravitch places within the foreign climate of Asia a dream of the poet’s shtetl childhood and home. Punning on his pen-name, “Melech” (Meylekh), Ravitch makes the mosquito-ridden dream in Singapore bring the Yiddish traveler to the truth of his origins as a poet. He is a king without a kingdom, except that of his Yiddish song. The tropical nightmare and the lullaby dreamed up within it force the Yiddish poet to face his own mortality, which is defined by the limits of his being, rather than by the immortality of poetry. The realization of his mortality forces the poet at once to recognize his own essential humanity, for all men are born to die, and also the essential nature of his being a Jew: In the nightmare, his mother returns the infantilized poet back to his cradle and reminds him that he will join his dead ancestors in the Jewish cemetery in Redem. In the shtetl, the view from his parents’ kitchen window looks out both toward the mountain that blocks any 325

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inkling of what lies beyond it and toward the graves of generations of his family., In this ars poetica to Kontinentn un okeanen, Melech Ravitch’s nightmare lullaby in the tropics transports the Galician shtetl Redem into a Singapore night and his poetry, back home to Yiddish. Ravitch could have had only an intuition in 1937 that, with the events to come in 1939 and beyond, a shtetl burial in the family plot was never to be. In the end, the poems that Ravitch wrote in der vayter mizrakh do more than simply record the “symbolic pictures” of what seemed exotic. These poems bring China to Warsaw, and Warsaw to China, because in the wide and distant world, China itself was one of the few places where those Jews who could escape Europe would go in order to survive. Regarding these poems through the critical lens of transnationalism, we come to understand how crucial the poet felt his own transcultural and transnational experiences of travel were to give him a voice that could report with urgency the precarious situation he observed just before the outbreak of World War II. References Eber, Irene. 2004. “Meylekh Ravitch in China: A Travelogue of 1935.” In Transkulturelle Rezeption und Konstruktion: Transcultural Reception and/et Constructions transculturelles: Festschrift fuer Adriean Hsia, 103–17, edited by Monika Schmitz-Emans. Heidelberg: Synchron Publishers. Israel, John, and Donald W. Klein. 1976. Rebels and Bureaucrats: China’s December 9ers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Katz, Dovid. 2011. “Language: Yiddish.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Language/Yiddish [last accessed May 31, 2016]. Novershtern, Avraham. 2010. “Ravitch, Melech,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Ravitch_ Melech [last accessed June 21, 2017]. Ravitch, Melech. 1937. “Hakdome” (Introduction), Kontinenten un okeanen. Warsaw: Literarishe bleter. Melech Ravitch Archive, ARC. 4* 1540. Jerusalem: The National Library of Israel. 326

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Ravitch, Melech. 1937. “Aziatishe lider,” Kontinenten un okeanen. Warsaw: Literarishe bleter. Ravitch, Melech. 1954. “Aziatishe lider,” Di lider fun mayne lider. Montreal: M. Ravitch Bukh Komitet, Yidishe Folks Bibliotek.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Bucharest. Her main research interests are transnational multiethnic narratives, gender in postcolonial and postsocialist studies, and ethnic American literatures. She has published articles in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Perspectives, The European Journal of American Culture. Her latest books are: Between History and Personal Narrative: East-European Women’s Stories of Transnational Relocation (co-edited, LIT Verlag, 2013) and Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English (Brill Rodopi, 2015). She has also recently completed a co-edited collection entitled Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Practices, Remediations, and Alternative Retellings (with Dragoș Manea). Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating novels and non-fiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including writing by David Albahari, Neda Miranda Blažević, Slavenka Drakulić, Daša Drndić, Igor Štiks, Vedrana Rudan, Antun Šoljan, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Karim Zaimović. ALTA’s National Translation Award was given to her translation of Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer in 2006. Her work as an independent scholar, exemplified by her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War, received the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015. Vera Eliasova holds a PhD in English literature from Rutgers University, USA. Her research interests lie at the border between Anglophone and Central European literatures, (im)migrant literature and women’s writing. More specifically, her research is focused on the figure of the flâneuse, the female urban peripatetic, as a gendered trope of mobility in modernist and postmodern transnational literature. She currently teaches at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

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Borbála Faragó currently teaches at Central European University, where she previously held a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship. Dr Faragó holds a PhD from University College Dublin. Her research interests include literature and cultural studies, poetry, literary theory, gender, ecocriticism and discourses of migration and transnationalism. She is the author of a monograph on the work of Medbh McGuckian (Medbh McGuckian, Bucknell and Cork University Press, 2014) a number of articles on contemporary Irish poetry, and is also co-editor of a collection of essays, entitled Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland (with M. Sullivan, 2008), an anthology of Irish immigrant poetry entitled Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland published by Dedalus Press (with Eva Bourke, 2010), and Animals in Irish Literature (with K. Kirkpatrick, 2015) from Palgrave Press. Eleonora Federici (MA and PhD University of Hull) is Associate Professor of English and translation studies at the university l’Orientale in Naples. She has written extensively on translation and gender studies. Among her publications are the edited collections Translating Gender (2011 Peter Lange) and (with V. Leonardi) Translation and Gender Studies: Bridging the Gap Between Theories and Practices (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), Quando la fantascienza e’ donna. Dalle utopie del XIX secolo all’età contemporanea (Carocci 2015) and Translation Theory and Practice from English into Italian: Cultural Differences in Tourism and Advertising (Loffredo editore, 2018).  Sonia Fernández Hoyos holds a PhD from University of Granada (Spain). She has taught in different international universities: University of Granada (Spain), State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York University (USA), University of Utrecht (The Netherlands), Sorbonne Nouvelle and University of Lorraine (France), University of Nantes (France), University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France). Her area of expertise is contemporary Spanish literature and comparative literature; she has published articles and books on a variety of topics and literary genres.  Sibelan Forrester is Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA. She specializes in Russian Modernist poetry, women writers, and translation theory and practice. She has published widely on Russian poetry of the 330

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Silver Age, and her edited and co-edited books include Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts; A Companion to Marina Cvetaeva: Approaches to a Major Russian Poet; Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze; and Engendering Slavic Literatures. Her translations include Irena Vrkljan’s lyrical autobiography, The Silk, the Shears (from Croatian), Vladimir Propp’s The Russian Folktale (from Russian), folktales involving Baba Yaga (from Russian), Milica Mićić Dimovska’s The Cataract (from Serbian), and poetry by Elena Ignatova, Maria Stepanova, and Marija Knežević. Vita Fortunati was Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna. Her main areas of research are modernism, utopian literature, women’s writing, cultural memory, nostalgia, the representation of female bodies, and aging between culture and medicine. Her most recent publications are: “Mirror Shards: Conflicting Images between Marie Curie’s Autobiography and her Biographies” in Writing about Lives in Science, V&R unipress, 2014. “Utopia/2010: Is it Time for Meta-Utopia?” in The Good Place: Comparative Perspectives on Utopia, Mussgnug F., Reza M. (eds.) Peter Lang, Oxford, 2014; “I diari di Mary Sarton come meta-narrazione sulla vecchiaia” in Pagine di diario: coriandoli di vita, a cura di P. Bottalla e G. D’Agostini, Unipress, 2015; “Pre-modernist and Modernist Experiments an Auto/Biografiction: Ford M. Ford and Joyce” in James Joyce: Whence, Whither and How, Studies in Honour of Carla Vaglio, a cura di G.Cortese, Edizione dell’Orso, Alessandria, 2015; “The Rhetoric of Thomas More’s Utopia: a Key to grasp its Political Message” Utopia: 500 years, ed. Pablo Guerra, Ediciones Universidad Cooperativa de Columbia, Bogotá Columbia, 2016; “Mort” in Dictionnaire critique de l’utopie aux temps des Lumières, sous la direction de B. Baczko, M. Porret et F.Rosset, Geneve, Georg Editeur, 2016; A.Huxley, Una società ecologica e pacifista, Milano Jaca Book, 2017. Susan Stanford Friedman is the Hilldale Professor Emerita in the Humanities and the Virginia Woolf Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She publishes widely on global modernisms, feminist theory, women’s writing, and migration. Her books include Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity across Time; Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter; Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses; and Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art. She received the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime 331

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Achievement in Narrative Studies, she is co-founder of the prize-winning journal Contemporary Women’s Writing, and her work has been translated into 11 languages. She is at work on Sisters of Scheherazade: Religion, Diaspora, and Women’s Writing. Ágnes Györke is Associate Professor of English at Károli Gáspár University’s Institute of English. She specializes in 20th and 21st century British literature, post-colonialism and literary theory. Her recent publications include “Doris Lessing’s London Observed and the Limits of Empathy,” Etudes Anglaises 70.1 (2017), and “Emotional Geographies of London: Doris Lessing’s Diasporic Vision,” in New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches, ed. Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendes and Lucinda Newns, Rowman and Little­ field International (2018). Her edited volume Affective Geographies: Mapping Cities and Regions in Post-1945 Translocal Fiction and Film has been accepted for publication by Brill (co-editor: Imola Bülgözdi). Dr. Györke has been a Visiting Scholar at Indiana University (2002-2003), the University of Bristol (January 2015), King’s College London (June 2015), the University of Leeds (June 2016 – October 2016; January 2018), and a Research Fellow with Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University (2012-2013). Kathryn Hellerstein is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, specializing in Yiddish, and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include a translation and study of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s poems, In New York: A Selection, Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky, and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, of which she is co-editor. Her monograph, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987, won the Barbara Dobkin Prize in Women’s Studies for the 2014 National Jewish Book Award, and the Modern Language Association 2015 Fenia and Yakov Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies. Hellerstein’s translations, poems, and scholarly articles on Yiddish and Jewish American literature have appeared in journals and anthologies, including American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (University of California Press, 1986), to which she was a major contributor. Her Women Yiddish Poets: An Anthology, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Hellerstein’s current projects are China through Yiddish Eyes: Cultural Translation in the Twentieth Century and The Rosewaters and the Colmans: Jewish Identity in Two Cleveland Jewish Families (1840-1915). 332

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Dejan Ilić received his PhD degree in Comparative Gender Studies from the Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest. He published books of essays Osam i po ogleda iz razumevanja (2008) [Eight and a Half Essays in Interpretation], Tranziciona pravda i tumačenje književnosti: srpski primer (2011) [Transitional Justice and Interpretation of Literature: The Serbian Case], Škola za “petparačke” priče (2016) [School for Pulp Fiction], and Dva lica patriotizma (2016) [Two Sides of Patriotism]. In 2003, he established “Fabrika knijga” (“Book Factory”), a publishing house specializing in books covering the former Yugoslavia and the events of the 1990s therein. He lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. Michael Kandel has been editing at the Modern Language Association for more than twenty years. Making good use of his PhD, he translated several Polish writers, among them Stanislaw Lem, Andrzej Stasiuk, Marek Huberath, and Pawel Huelle, and edited, for Harcourt Brace, several American writers, among them Jonathan Lethem, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Morrow, and Patricia Anthony. He is the author of a few science fiction novels and short stories. Grace Ledbetter is Professor and Chair of Classics, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Honors Program at Swarthmore College. She specializes in Ancient Philosophy, Greek Poetry, and Greek myth in 20th Century performing arts. Her book, Poetics Before Plato: Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry (Princeton University Press 2003), examines theories of poetry in the early Greek literary and philosophical traditions. She has also published on Plato, Homer, Sophocles, Greek myth in opera, and the Stoic theory of emotion. Recent publications include “Truth and Self at Colonus” (in P. Woodruff, ed. The Oedipus plays of Sophocles: Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford 2018) and “The Power of Plato’s Cave” (in P. Destrée and R. Edmonds eds. Plato and the Power of Images, Brill 2017). Jasmina Lukić is Professor of Gender Studies at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and she has been a Julian and Virginia Cornell Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College (2014/15). Her publications include the monographs Drugo lice (The Other Face), Metaproza: čitanje žanra (Metafiction: Reading the Genre), and an edited volume Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe (with Joanna Regulska and Darja Zaviršek). She has pub333

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lished widely on South Slavic literatures and women’s writing. Her recent research is in transnational women’s literature and gender, including book chapters “Gender and Migration in Post-Yugoslav Literature as Transnational Literature” and “The Transnational Turn, Comparative Literature and the Ethics of Solidarity: Engendering Transnational Literature.” Madalina Nicolaescu is Professor of English at the English Department of the University of Bucharest. She has published widely on Renaissance Drama and women’s writing. Her publications on women’s writing include books co-edited with Maria-Sabina Draga, such as Between History and Personal Narrative. East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millennium (ed.), Vienna and Berlin: Litverlag, 2014; Rewriting the Body, (ed.) Bucarest: Editura Universitatii, 2007; Women’s Voices in Post- communist Eastern Europe. Vol I. Rewriting History (ed.), Bucarest: Editura Universitatii, 2005. Her books on Early Modern Theatre include Meanings of Violence in Shakespeare (2004), Ec-centric Mappings of the Renaissance (1999) and Protest and Propaganda in 16th Century English and German Theatre (1996). She has edited two volumes on Shakespeare and translation: (In)hospitable Translations: Fidelities, Betrayals, Rewritings (2010) and Shakespeare Translations and the European Dimension (2012). Adelina Sánchez Espinosa is senior lecturer in English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Granada. She is currently scientific coordinator for GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus joint master’s degree in Women’s Studies and Gender in Europe and Principal Investigator at UGR for GRACE: Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe, an MC H2020 R+D project. Her research focuses on the sexual politics of late Victorian literature and textual and visual cultures of equality in Europe. Among her most recent publications are the essay “Thomas Hardy and His Readers: Contradictions of the Rebellious Serial Writer” (Between, Vol. 6 No. 11, 2016) and book chapter “Feminist Ethics of Responsibility and Art Therapy: Spanish Art Therapy as a Case in Point” (with Ángela Harris; Routledge, 2017). Azade Seyhan is Research Professor in the Department of German and German Studies at Bryn Mawr College, in Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania. She was the Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2019). Seyhan is the author of Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism 334

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(University of California Press, 1992); Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton University Press, 2001); Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (The Modern Language Association of America, 2008); and Heinrich Heine and the World Literary Map: Redressing the Canon (Palgrave, 2019). She was a pioneer of the study of Turkish-German literatures in the United States, beginning with her co-editorship of the special issue of the New German Critique on “Minorities in German Culture” in 1988. She has lectured and published widely on Critical Theory, Romantic Idealism, transnational women writers, modern Turkish literature, and displaced and exiled writers and academics, such as Nâzım Hikmet, Heinrich Heine, the Iranian-German writer SAID (pseudonym to avoid persecution and always in capital letters), and the Turkish-German-British writer, Aysel Özakın, among others.

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adaptation, 27, 35, 39, 58, 98, 139, 140, 145, 147, 148, 269, 275 adaptation theory, 140, 141 Adey, Peter, 178, 182, Afanas’ev, Aleksandr, 267, 275, 276 Agoston-Nikolova, Elka, 5 Ahmed, Rehana, 27 Albahari, David, 14, 127, 284, 286, 287, 291–94, 329 Alexander, Meena, 39 Ali, Monica, 7, 19, 20, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42 Alvstad, Cecilia, 61 Andrić, Ivo, 266, 267, 290 Appadurai, Arjun, 2, 55, 66 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 21 Apter, Emily, 22, 60 Apuleius, 259 Aralica, Ivan, 14, 283, 285, 286, 296 Arias, Rosario, 163, 167, 168 Arsenijević, Vladimir, 294 Ashcroft, Bill, 28, 109, 169 Ascari, Maurizio, 55 assimilation, 11, 20, 29, 39, 196, 199, 304 Attar, Samar, 80–82 autobiography, 79, 80, 86, 105, 107, 108, 111, 155, 158, 184, 196 Azadibougar, Omid, 74, 78 Baena, Rosalia, 56 Bai, Xuefei, 63 Baker, Mona, 64, 298 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 246 ballet, 4, 139 classical ballet, 142, 146–51 neoclassical ballet, 151

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Bangladesh, 7, 20, 27–35, 41 Bassnett, Susan, 22, 24, 58, 64, 66, 67, 145 Barman, Sandra, 64 Basile, 259 Baum, Frank, 225 Bauman, Zygmunt, 8, 95–97, 101, 102, 107, 108, 111 Bazdulj, Muharem, 291 Beckett, Samuel, 81 Bellos, David, 251 belonging, 7, 12, 38, 40, 41, 42, 52, 68, 73, 79, 100 Ben-Amos, Dan, 279 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 23, 42, 81, 171, 211 Benvenuti, Giuliana, 48 Benwell, Bethan, 27 Berman, Antoine, 84, 85, Bhabha, Homi K., 21, 22, 28, 41, 97, 107 Bialik, H. N., 317 Bicec, Lilia, 8, 67, 72, 73 biculturalism, 100 Bielsa, Esperança, 64 Bladek, Marta, 210 Blagojević, Jelisaveta, 136 Blažević-Kreitzman, Neda Miranda, 294, 295, 329 Bocancea, Cristian, 201 Boccaccio, 259 Boehmer, Elleke, 179 Bogatyrëv, Pëtr, 258, 266 borders, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 19, 21, 22, 47, 52, 60, 61, 62, 63, 79, 85, 86, 89, 98, 117, 118, 120, 133, 135, 189, 202, 208, 211, 214, 218, 257, 258, 293

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Borges, Jorge Luis, 267, 273, 275 Bosinelli, Rosamaria, 63 Bowlby, Rachel, 174, 176 Boym, Svetlana, 185, 278 Brah, Avtar, 20, 24 Braidotti, Rosi, 12, 57, 100, 188, 189, 208, 210, 214–21 Breckenridge, Carol A., 21 Brick Lane, 7, 19–42 Brinkerhoff, Jennifer, 194, 195, 200 British literature, 20, 42 Brontë, Charlotte, 33 Brown, Robert, 247 Buell, Lawrence, 21 Burn, Stephen J., 55 Bush, Stephen, 66 Byron, 246 Calderón, Jorge, 102 Capussotti, Lidia, 197 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Ludwig Dodgson), 12, 225–30, 247 Casanova, Pascale, 14, 86, 281, 282, 289, 290, 292, 293, 296, 297 Castle, Gregory, 108 Ceserani, Remo, 48 censorship, 8, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 264 Central and East Europe, 5, 14, 120, 121, 134, 303 Central and South European literature, 171 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 21 Chambers, Iain, 173 Chatzidimitriou, Ioanna, 103 Chaucer, 259 Cheah, Pheng, 15 Cheref, Abdelkader, 105 Cheung, Marta, 62 China, 15, 62, 303–26 city, 10, 11, 35, 86, 87, 128, 155–69, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188, 263, 294, 310, 314, 316 cityscape, 87, 89, 156, 157 Classicism, 10, 152 French Classicism, 146

INDEX OF NAMES AND CONCEPTS

Greco-Roman Classicism, 150 Russian Classicism, 146 Clifford, James, 25, 29, 208 consecration, 14, 281, 290, 292 Coppola, Manuela, 197 Cordingley, Anthony Courtivron, Isabelle de, 67 Croatia, 9, 14, 127–33, 183, 281–97 Cronin, Michael, 59, 61 Curti, Lidia, 205 Ćosić, Bora, 283, 285, 291 Ćosić, Dobrica, 14, 283, 286, 291, 296 dance, 9, 10, 12, 139–53, 213, 214, 217, 249 Dante, 240 Danticat, Edwidge, 79, 80 Daskalova, Krassimira, 135 Davis, Kathy, 117, 118 de Beauvoir, Simone, 62 de Certeau, Michel, 161 de Courtivron, Isabelle, 67 defamiliarization, 107, 187, 227, 228 DeKoven, Marianne, 135, 169 Deleuze, Gilles, 51, 98, 103, 107, 214, 215 Derrida, Jacques, 81, 100, 109, 111 deterritorialization, 2, 51, 103, 107, 108, 214 Di Giovanni, Elena, 63 diaspora, 11, 20, 24, 25, 27, 41, 42, 49, 50, 52, 89, 91, 195, 196, 199, 200, 207, 221 diasporic narrative, 79 Dickinson, Emily, 39, 246 Dimock, Wai Chee, 21 Disch, Lisa, 135 dislocation, 63, 67, 80, 176, 195, 208, 212, 324 displacement, 12, 14, 25, 55, 79, 80, 84, 107, 112, 155, 179, 183, 184, 189, 214, 215, 217, 221, 286, 287, 292, 294, 295 Djaout, Tahar, 82 Djebar, Assia, 8, 9, 82, 91, 95, 103–11 Dobychin, Leonid, 227, 228 domesticity, 173 337

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Donadey, Anne, 105–7, 109 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 251–53 Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina, 5, 11, 12, 207, 329 Dragulin, Sabin, 193 Drašković, Vuk, 14, 283, 286, 291, 296 Dryden, John, 240 Duppé, Claudia, 210 Dundes, Alan, 262, 269, 277, 278 Eber, Irene, 303, 306 Elias-Bursać, Ellen, 5, 14, 234, 281–302, 329 Eliasova, Vera, 5, 10, 11, 171–91, 329 empathy, 8, 89, 163, 313 empathetic solidarity, 8, 89 Engels, Friedrich, 21, 90 Enjoe, Toh, 249, 250 epistolary, 27, 31, 72 émigré experience, 180 estrangement, 202, 212 grotesque estrangement, 228 essentialists, 39, 40, 52, 145, 283, 285, 295 Evans, Mary, 117, 118 exile, 6, 8, 9, 12, 21, 55, 67, 79–93, 98– 112, 179, 183, 185, 187, 188, 189, 209, 215, 250, 260, 324, 335 fairy tale, 71, 225, 233, 241, 259, 260, 262, 265, 268, 271, 274, 275, 277 fakelore, 269 the familiar, 24, 31, 36, 39, 171, 174–80, 188 Fantone, Laura, 205 Faragó, Borbála, 1–16, 330 Federici, Eleonora, 47–78, 330 female empowerment, 11, 31 feminism, 32, 48, 49, 54, 119–25, feminist ethics, 53 feminist theory, 4, 50, 117, 121, 123 Fernández Hoyos, Sonia, 5, 8, 9, 95–115, 330 Ferré, Rosario, 89, 91, flânerie, 26, 155, 159 Flotow, Louise von, 57 folklore, 13, 14, 257–78

folktales, 13, 91, 257–78, 306 Forrester, Sibelan, 1–16, 257–80, 330 Fortunati, Vita, 5, 7, 8, 47–78, 331 Frank, Soren, 204 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 5, 7, 9, 19– 45, 51, 52, 98, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 126, 127, 133, 135, 158, 172, 331 Frost, Robert, 240 Gabler, Hans Walter, 44 Gaddis, Rose Marilyn, 63 Gaitskill, Mary, 233 Gallagher, Terry, 249, 250 Galvin, Cathy, 210 Garstenauer, Therese, 136 Gauch, Suzanne, 105, 106 Geesey, Patricia, 113 gender, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 34, 35, 39, 49, 50, 53, 57, 58, 59, 61, 66, 119, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 145, 174, 193, 203, 205, 277, 278, 284, 287 gender regimes, 9, 121, 122, 123, 124 generation, 9, 31, 39, 83, 84, 92, 120, 123, 125, 127, 130, 131, 133, 134, 241, 247, 249, 252, 262, 281–84, 291, 293, 320, 326 generational literacy, 9, 117, 126, 132, 134 Gentzler, Edwin, 22, 24 Ghaussy, Soheila, 104, 106 Ghiteanu, Serenela, 113 Ghose, Sagarika, 209 Gilroy, Paul, 39, 42 Glenny, Misha, 210 global, 3, 7, 21, 40, 41, 47, 48, 49, 55, 59, 60, 63, 83, 97, 98, 118, 119, 126, 173, 179, 184, 194, 207, 208, 214, 220, 221, 243, 245, 292 globalization, 2, 4, 8, 21, 25, 47, 48, 49, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 74, 95, 96 Goebel, Walter, 4 Godard, Barbara, 57 Godayol, Pilar, 57 Gonzenbach, Laura, 266, 267, 270, 271 Gracki, Katherine, 105 Grewal, Inderpal, 49 Griffiths, Gareth, 28

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Grigan, Gabriel, 194 Grimm, Jacob, 225, 259–61, 268–75, 277 Grimm, Wilhelm, 225, 259–61, 268–75, 277 Grossman, Edith, 245 Grosz, Elizabeth, 4, 5 Guattari, Félix, 51, 103, 107, 214 Györke, Ágnes, 5, 10, 155–70, 332 H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], 26, 33 Haase, Donald, 257, 265, 268, 273, 274, 275, 277 Hansen, William, 260 Haraway, Donna, 57 Hawkesworth, Mary, 135 Hearn, Lafcadio, 306 Hegel, G.W.F., 88 Heine, Heinrich, 81, 90 Helgesson, Stefan, 61 Hellerstein, Kathryn, 5, 14, 15, 303–27, 332 Hemon, Aleksandar, 127, 295 Henitiuk, Valerie, 58, 59 Heyvaert, S., 92 Hoffman, Eva, 66 Holden, Philip, 158 Holmquist, Ingrid, 155 Hokeson, Jan Walsh, 66 home, 3, 11, 14, 25, 29–42, 65, 80, 83, 86, 87, 104, 105, 111, 130, 166, 169, 172– 83, 196, 199–203, 210, 211, 212, 219, 221, 266, 270, 274, 286, 290, 293, 294, 319, 320, 321, 324, 326 Homer, 240, 247 Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 9, 10, 139, 141– 45, 146, 147, 148, Hong Kingston, Maxine, 89 Hoxha, Enver, 68, 70 Huberath, 243, 248, Hůlová, Petra, 295 Huston, Nancy, 8, 9, 95, 98–103, 111 Hyun, Theresa, 62 identity, 2, 4, 8, 38, 39, 40, 41, 48, 56, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 72, 73, 81, 85, 91, 92, 102, 109, 133, 134, 144, 156, 158, 173, 175, 187, 203, 215, 220, 229,

INDEX OF NAMES AND CONCEPTS

231, 234, 274, 277, identity politics, 79, 83 Imbarus, Aura, 195, 196, 199, 204 immigration, 24, 39, 83, 188 internet, 60, 193, 200, 202, 203, 204, 250, 252 intellectuals, 244 critical intellectuals, 14, 282, 283, 285, 290, 291, 297 intersectionality, 123, 124, 125, 134 Isaković, Antonije, 14, 283, 296 Islam, 33, 35, 40, 41, 82 Iyer, Pico, 179, 180 Jakobson, Roman, 258, 266, Jameson, Fredric, 213 Jay, Paul, 2 jazz, 152 Jergović, Miljenko, 291 Johnson, Barbara, 57, 294 Johnson, Samuel, 240 Jović, Dejan, 129 Joyce, James, 7, 20, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 292 Kabeer, Naila, 36 Kafka, Franz, 51 Kai-shek, Chiang, 315 Kambourov, Dimitar, 187 Kamuf, Peggy, 93 Kandel, Michael, 5, 12, 13, 239–55, 333 Kaplan, Caren, 49 Kassabova, Kapka, 11, 12, 207–21 Katz, Dovid, 304 Kellman, Steven, 66 Khadra, Yasmina (pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul), 82 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 82 Khudiakov, Ivan, 260, 275, 276 Kiš, Danilo, 14, 282, 283, 285, 290, 291, 297 Klimko-Dobrozaniecki, Jubert, 295 Kolářova, Kateřina, 125 Kolozova, Katerina, 136 Krasznahorkai, László, 295 Kristeva, Julia, 101 Kundera, Milan, 202, 282 339

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Laforest, Marie-Helene, 205 Laliotou, Ioanna, 194 language, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 12, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 41, 47, 51, 55, 59, 60, 61, 64–69, 72, 73, 79–87, 89–92, 98, 99, 100, 102–9, 111, 118, 119, 120, 127, 144, 147, 148, 149, 173, 189, 196, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217, 219, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 234, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245, 246, 248, 258, 261, 263, 264, 270, 272, 273, 274, 278, 281, 282, 287, 288, 289, 294, 295, 303, 304, 308, 309, 324 original language, 19, 22, 81, 149, 242, 247, 259 Ledbetter, Grace, 5, 9, 10, 139–54, 333 Lee, Raymond L. M., 96 Lefevere, André, 22, 24, 61 Lem, Stanisław, 13, 241, 242, 243, 246, 247 Lesser, Wendy, 67 Lessing, Doris, 155, 156 Levinas, Emmanuel, 53, 54 Lewycka, Marina, 203 Lezard, Nicholas, 209 Lieberman, Sharon, 279 Lievois, Katrien, 114 Linke, Gabriele, 210 Lionnet, Françoise, 50, 52, 126, 135 literature, 1–8, 20, 21, 22, 25, 42, 47, 48, 51, 55, 56, 58, 62, 65, 67, 84, 85, 91, 95, 98, 103, 172, 173, 179, 183, 184, 187, 188, 189, 204, 207, 211, 213, 227, 229, 242, 248, 252, 259, 260, 263, 265, 270, 281, 285, 289, 290, 291, 293, 296, 297, 304, 305, 306 national literature, 1, 3, 51, 188, 285 women’s literature, 3, 8, 95 world literature, 2, 7, 14, 21, 22, 58, 62, 173, 257, 287, 297 literary criticism, 3, 4, 13, 65, 98, 234, 245, 246 literacy, 9, 64, 107, 123, 135, 262, 267 transgenerational literacy, 117, 126, 131, 132, 134

transnational literacy, 9, 117, 119, 120, 126, 134 life narratives, 55, 56 linguistic borders, 6, 13, 211, 257 liquidity, 8, 9, 95, 96, 97, 105, 108, 111 Lord, Albert B., 258 Luca, Ioana, 210 Lukić, Jasmina, 1–16, 51, 117–36, 139, 184, 188, 333 Lyon, Dawn, 197 Mahfouz, Naguib, 44 Maier, Carol, 58 Malabou, Catherine, 100 Mandanipour, Shahriar, 82 Manguel, Alberto, 97 Mann, Heinrich, 88 Mansfield, Katherine, 10, 11, 171, 172, 173, 176–80, 181, 184, 189 Markish, Peretz, 317 Marković, Veselin, 294 Márquez, Gabriel García, 245 Martel, Yann, 250 Marx, Karl, 21, 87, 90 Massadier-Kenney, Françoise, 58 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 242 McLeod, John, 156, 157 memoir, 15, 184, 208, 210, 213, 217, 219, 290 memory, 8, 20, 56, 79, 80, 81, 86, 89, 91, 92, 126, 183, 211, 212, 231, 258, 264, 266 Mercer, Kobena, 52 migration, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 48, 49, 52, 56, 58, 60, 65, 67, 68, 84, 120, 133, 179, 183, 207, 208, 210, 213, 214, 221 fictional narratives on migration, 7, 19–42, 155 on-fictional (on-line) narratives on migration, 195 Romanian migrant women in the United Kingdom, 11, 193–205 migrant writers, 7, 51, 67, 195 Milošević, Slobodan, 14, 286, 296 minor literatures, 51, 103 minor transnationalism, 50, 120

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Miroiu, Mihaela, 136 Mladinov, David, 294 mobility, 3, 10, 11, 19, 20, 26, 29, 49, 98, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176–86, 188, 194, 200, 203, 204, mobile imagination, 10, 11, 171–77, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188, 189 modernism, 20, 26, 27, 38, 123, 139, 149, 151, 152, 176, 229, 304 modernist women writers, 171 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 49 Molodowsky, Kadya, 317 Moretti, Franco, 22 Morpurgo, Ioana Baetica, 11, 195 Mortimer, Mildred, 103 Moslund, S. Pultz, 206 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 239 Mudure, Mihaela, 121, 122 Munson, Marcella, 66 Murdoch, H. Adlai, 104, 105, 109 myth, 9, 10, 65, 91, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 187 narrative, 7, 10, 11, 13, 20, 26–30, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 52, 55, 56, 65, 67, 70, 71, 79, 83, 86, 87, 91, 117, 122, 123, 126, 131, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 147, 150, 156, 157, 158, 159, 164, 166, 168, 183, 185, 189, 193–97, 199, 200, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 213, 225, 227, 259, 266, 273, 274, 287, 289, 294, 295, 307, 311, 313 Nabokov, Vladimir, 186, 240 Nastuta, Sebastian, 197 nation-state, 2, 4, 5, 47, 48, 61 nationalism, 13, 21, 39, 41, 49, 54, 141, 260, 287, 310, 313 critical nationalists, 14, 282, 283, 297 Nicolaescu, Madalina, 5, 11, 193–206, 334 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 81, 91, 149 Ning, Wang, 62 Niranjana, Teswajni, 66 nomadism, 12, 73, 96, 100, 188, 189, 214, 215, 216

INDEX OF NAMES AND CONCEPTS

nomadic self, 219 nostalgia, 25, 29, 39, 42, 67, 70, 152, 162, 164, 165, 182, 187, 213, 215, 278 Novak, Slobodan, 14, 283, 285 Novershtern, Avraham, 304, 305, 313 Nović, Sara, 295 Nussbaum, Martha C., 56, 226 Obreht, Tea, 295 ON-zone, 1 Ong, Walter J., 257 orality, 103, 106, 257, 277, 274 Orlando, Valerie, 114 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi, 8, 82, 83–92 Page, Ruth, 195 palimpsest, 87, 103, 105, 108, 156 Palumbo-Liu, David, 55 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 19, 23, 24, 25, 42 Parsons, Deborah L., 160 Passerini, Luisa, 197 Pavić, Milorad, 14, 286, 296 Pekárková, Iva, 10, 11, 172, 180–83, 184, 185, 186, 189 Pekić, Borislav, 14, 283, 285, 290, 291 Perfect, Michael, 27, 36 performative space, 10, 163 Perrault, Charles, 262 Pištalo, Vladimir, 294 plurilingualism, 7, 86 poetic justice, 226, 233, 234, 316 Pollock, Sheldon, 21 Poole, Susanna, 205 postcolonialism, 2, 26, 28, 29, 33, 41, 48, 50, 61, 62, 65, 66, 79, 98, 156, 158, 213 postcommunism, 207, 208, 210 postmodernism, 4, 55, 95, 249, 283, 297 postmodernists, 14, 172, 282, 284, 286, 290, 291, 296, 297 Prabhu, Anjali, 110 Price, Leah, 97 Procter, James, 43 psychogeography, 159, 161 Pushkin, Alexander, 13, 239, 240, 241 Puyi, Henry, 312 Pym, Anthony, 60 341

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INDEX OF NAMES AND CONCEPTS



Pynchon, Thomas, 248 Rabassa, Gregory, 245 Rabelais, François, 246 racism, 24, 29, 31, 40, 197 Ravitch, Melech (pseudonym of Zekharye-Khone Bergner), 15, 303–26 Regulska, Joanna, 136, 333 re-mediation, 147–49 Riccardi, Alessandra, 23 Rich, Adrienne, 57 rivalry, 281 Robbins, Bruce, 21 Roberts, Michèle, 66 Robinson, Gemma, 43 Robinson, William I., 47 Rose, Ellen Cronan, 155 Roth, Philip, 290 Rushdie, Salman, 26, 66, 109, 164 Said, Edward, 28 Sakai, Noaki, 63 Sánchez Espinosa, Adelina, 5, 8, 9, 95– 112, 334 Sandu, Dumitru, 193 Santaemilia, José, 57 Saramago, José, 66, 242 Sassen, Saskia, 47, 48 Satrapi, Marjane, 82 Saussy, Haun, 97 Schabio, Saskia, 4 Schäffner, Christina, 59 Schlechta, Karl, 93 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 265 Schultermandl, Silvia, 48, 50, 52 science fiction, 13, 241, 242, 243, 249, 250, 289 Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva, 118 Sejranović, Bekim, 294 self-translation, 3, 6, 8, 9, 66, 67, 79, 80, 82, 85, 89, 90, 92, 99, 103, 107, 111 Selimović, Meša, 291 Sennett, Richard, 114 sexuality, 36, 125, 272, 278 Seyhan, Azade, 1, 2, 5, 8, 20, 42, 51, 55, 59, 65, 79–92, 98, 105, 107, 189

Shafak, Elif, 65 Shakespeare, William, 29, 247, 288 Shari, Charad, 207 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 246 Shih, Shu-mei, 50, 52, 54, 126 Shtiker, Meyer, 306 Siassi, Guilan, 107, 108 Simon, Sherry, 57, 63, 66 Singleton, Mary Ann, 155, 156 Sirghie, Daniela, 197 Sizemore, Christine W., 155–57 Slaymaker, Doug, 91 Slavova, Kornelia, 121, 122 Smilevski, Goce, 295 Smith, Helen, 5 Smith, Sidonie, 199 Snell-Hornby, Mary, 59 Sokolová, Věra, 125 solidarity, 8, 9, 25, 49, 51, 52, 86, 89, 105, 110, 111 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 282 space, 7, 10, 11, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 41, 42, 48, 50, 54, 56, 61, 87, 88, 89, 91, 98, 100, 105, 107, 110, 118, 120, 121, 122, 132, 155, 156, 158, 159, 163, 172, 173, 175, 177, 182, 187, 188, 189, 203, 207, 208, 211, 212, 213, 216, 220, 229, 230, 264, 294 transitory space, 163, 165, 166, 168 Spahić, Ognjen, 295 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 22, 64, 110 Sprague, Claire, 155 St-Pierre, Paul, 63 Steadman, Jennifer Bernhardt, 110 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich, 304 Stasiuk, Andrzej, 250 Sterne, Laurence, 248 success stories, 39, 194, 200 symbolism, 139, 148, 309, 317 Šoljan, Antun, 14, 226, 283, 285, 291 Štivičić, Tena, 9, 127, 130, 133, 134 Talib, Ismail S., 66 tango, 12, 207, 208, 209, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221

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Tasić, Vladimir, 294 Tawada, Yoko, 89, 91 Terzić, Ajla, 294 Tester, Keith, 96 theatricality, 166 Thompson, Mark, 294, 297 Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl, 2 Tiffin, Helen, 28 Tito, Josip Broz, 282, 284, 285 Toelken, Barre, 258, 276 Topol, Jáchym, 295 topos, 12, 225, 231 transcultural, 1, 7, 20, 21, 24, 42, 56, 63, 268, 275, 277, 304, 326 translanguage of solidarity, 9, 105, 110 translingual, 66, 304 transnational transnational city, 162, 163, 166, 168 transnational feminist theory, 50 transnational literature, 1–15, 47, 48, 51, 65, 67, 85, 189, 257 transnational literacy, 9, 117, 119, 120, 126, 134 transnational space, 10, 155, 156, 168 transnational turn, 4, 21, 48, 58, 188, transnational women’s writing, 95 translation cultural translation, 7, 15, 22–31, 34, 41, 42, 58, 64, 82, 107, 303 mistakes in translation, 247 translating tropes and devices, 240 translation theory, 6, 13, 63, 140, 141, 263 translation studies, 5, 6, 7, 22, 24, 47, 48, 56, 57, 58, 60–64, 119, 257, 265 translational, 7–9, 19–28, 42, 62, 67, 87, 89, 90, 105, 266 translator, 6, 12–15, 22, 23, 56–64, 66, 67, 81, 109, 239–53, 257, 261, 264, 268–75, 277, 281, 287, 289, 290, 293 translator’s agency, 56–58 translingual, 66, 304 transculturality, 56, 63 transmediation, 10, 141

INDEX OF NAMES AND CONCEPTS

transport, 31, 34, 41, 79, 83, 84, 86, 91, 99 trauma, 8, 55, 88, 89, 90, 179, 195, 197, 198, 204, 207, 209, 217, 218, 286, 292 trauma of dislocation, 80, 208, 212 traveling concept, 123 traveling theory, 117–120 travelogue, 14, 15, 250, 303, 306, 311 Trivedi, Harish, 66 Tuin, Iris van der, 123, 124, 125 Tuwim, Julian, 13, 239–44, 249 Tymoczko, Maria, 22, 24, 60 Überfremdung, 83, 84 Übersetzung, 83 the unfamiliar, 31, 171, 178, 180 Ugresić, Dubravka, 1, 5, 10, 11, 12, 14, 127, 172, 183–89, 225–35, 284, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292, 293, 294 untranslatability, 22, 86, 92 Upstone, Sara, 27 urban, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164, 168, 171, 173, 179, 181, 193, 284, 286, 309 urban space, 10, 155, urban palimpsest, 87 Veličković, Nenad, 284, 291 Venuti, Lawrence, 22, 24, 145, 244 Verdery, Katherine, 207 Vorpsi, Ornela, 8, 67–73 Vrkljan, Irena, 283, 291 Walcott, Derek, 41 Walker, Alice, 30, 35 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 26, 97 Walder, Dennis, 66 Warner, Marina, 257, 260, 262, 268, 272, 273 Watkins, Susan, 156 Watson, David, 61 Watson, Julia, 199 Whitman, Walt, 246 Williams, David, 1, 294 Wilson, Elizabeth, 167 women women’s identity, 65, 72, 134, 175, 183, 203 343

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INDEX OF NAMES AND CONCEPTS



women’s writing, 8, 10, 171, 172, 184, 215, 216 Wood, Michael, 64 Woolf, Virginia, 7, 11, 20, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 108, 171, 172, 173–76, 177, 178, 179, 187, 189 Wordsworth, William, 240 Yelin, Louise, 156 Yiddish, 14, 15, 303, 304, 306, 307, 308, 311, 313, 317, 326 Yiddish literature, 15, 304, 305, 309, 313, 317, 324

Yifeng, Sun, 62 Yugoslavia, 12, 124, 127, 128, 183, 184, 281, 282, 285, 286, 290, 291, 295, 296 Zaviršek, Darja, 136, 333 Zimra, Clarisse, 107, 108, 110, Zipes, Jack, 257, 260, 261, 264–74, 277 Zhongli, Yu, 62 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 247 Živković, Zoran, 291

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