Mihaela Moscaliuc
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ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: TRANSLATING EASTERN EUROPEAN IDENTITIES INTO THE AMERICAN NATIONAL NARRATIVE Mihaela Diana Moscaliuc, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Sangeeta Ray Department of English The purpose of this study is two-fold: to examine the absence from current cultural studies on immigration and ethnicity of the Eastern European American as a conceptual entity, and to propose and implement a new methodology of reading immigrant autobiographical narratives that seeks to make transparent the cultural and linguistic processes of translation through which immigrants negotiate their identities in America. Part I provides the methodology and contextual framework I employ in the re-examinations of Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) and Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1989). The historical contextualization focuses on two periods that determined conceptual shifts— the two decades of anti-immigration sentiment that led to the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, and the decades following World War II, when post-Holocaust consciousness opened the door to the institutionalization of a Jewish identity that both encompassed and effaced the Eastern European one at the same time that Cold War politics hindered the development of an Eastern European immigrant space of articulation. A brief analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Displaced Person” (1954) will underscore the dominant culture’s difficulty in conceptualizing Eastern European difference and its place in the American national narrative. After arguing for the need that we differentiate between immigrant and ethnic narratives, I introduce the concept of “palimpsestic translation” and develop a critical paradigm that weds translation theory to the genre of immigrant autobiography and to narratives of immigration at large. Parts II and III contribute to the reconceptualization and partial reconstitution of the Eastern European immigrant American space through a close re-examination of Antin’s and Hoffman’s immigrant narratives as “palimpsestic translations.” The two analyses address issues of historicity, literary and historical visibility, and translatability, as they pertain to and illuminate each text. The conclusion briefly assesses the status of Eastern European American studies and outlines the contribution of my proposed reading paradigm to the resuscitation of a critical and theoretical interest in Eastern European American identities. Finally, I situate my study within the larger call for a reconsideration of the relationship between Translation Studies, American and Cultural Studies, and Ethnic Studies. TRANSLATING EASTERN EUROPEAN IDENTITIES INTO THE AMERICAN NATIONAL NARRATIVE by Mihaela Diana Moscaliuc Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006 Advisory Committee: Professor Sangeeta Ray, Chair Professor Sheila Jelen Professor Marilee Lindemann Professor Peter Mallios Professor Donald Pease Professor Vladimir Tismaneanu @Copyright by Mihaela Diana Moscaliuc 2006 Acknowledgments I am grateful to my committee members for their assistance and guidance, to the Dartmouth Summer Institute for the Futures of American Studies—and to Professor Donald Pease in particular—and, most of all, to my Romanian and American families, friends, and mentors, without whose encouragement and belief in me this work would not have been completed. A million thanks to my husband, Michael, for his love, trust, and unconditional support. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Part I 1. Toward a historicized reading of the Eastern European 1 immigrant space Translating eugenics in the language of American exceptionalism 8 Cultural and ideological paradigms of othering 26 2. The Eastern European immigrant Other in the American literary 31 imagination: the Displaced Person 3. On sustaining distinctions between immigrant and ethnic literature 44 4. Immigrant narratives as palimpsestic translations 55 Theorizing the palimpsestic translation 59 Rethinking source-text validation in translation theory and practice 66 Translation as divestment of agency and tool for Americanization 75 Part II Mary Antin: domesticating translation as Americanization 88 “America is no Polotzk”: autobiographical articulations in translation 106 Translating the “I”: dreaming in private English, de-translating national 121 statistics Epistolary Negotiations: “Everything I write is autobiography” 139 Foreignizing attempts: (dis-)gendered and (de-)ethniticized translations 148 Appendix: Anzia Yezierska 161 Part III Un-cursing Columbus: Eva Hoffman and the post-modern domesticating 166 translation “Mind the Gap”: translating the Cold War Other 184 Translating cultural negative capabilities 195 Double-voiced in-betweenness and bicultural triangulations 204 Cultural untranslatability: hypothetical equivalencies 214 Domesticating the site of difference 226 Appendix: Andrei Codrescu 232 Conclusion 238 iii References 249 PART I 1. Toward a historicized reading of the Eastern European immigrant space Although America has never extended its direct domination to Eastern Europe, its imperialist projects and international politics remain intimately intertwined with the fate of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Literary representations and self-representations of Eastern European immigrants in America—as they emerge from immigration narratives and other literary texts—insist on the existence of such an inextricable connection. Besides offering the usual imaginative pleasures, these autobiographical and fictional characters illuminate, re- enact, and disguise some of the historical and political dialogues (or lack thereof) between the two trans-Atlantic spaces. Often regarded by historians and other scholars as “third world” in terms of economy and governance, conferred an exclusive “second world” slot in the nomenclature of World Power, yet deemed dangerous and impenetrable by the first world, the communist Eastern Europe functioned, during the Cold War, as a transferable metaphor, serving to invoke any number of sentiments from anxiety and pity to scorn and fear. When deployed in contexts that examine the reverberations of imperialism and colonialism, the term “Europe” manages to co-opt and at the same time discount the region that approximates South-East and Central Europe.1 One of 1 This space will be referred to as “Eastern Europe” throughout this study. Although the qualification “Eastern” is somewhat of a misnomer, as it blurs the geographical and political distinctions between East, South, and Central Europe, I will adopt it for one other reason besides its convenient conciseness: it encapsulates popular conceptualizations of this space from a Western perspective. In Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: iv the most deficient deployments of the Eastern European space takes place in Postcolonial discourses. Postcolonial scholars neglect to acknowledge the complications arising when Eastern Europe is included—even if inadvertently— within the concept of “Eurocentrism.” Thus, Eastern Europe is misguidedly ascribed to the same Eurocentric space from which imperialism and colonialism emerged, and which current theories have turned into a generative site of contestation. By using “Europe” indiscriminately, cultural theorists and other scholars inscribe Eastern European non-imperialist histories onto a homogenized image of Europe as part of the imperial West. Eastern European countries, this facile equation implies, engaged in processes of conquest and cultural domination just as their Western counterparts did. Scholars might not mean to make this claim. In fact, if brought to task, many would probably agree that Eastern Europe’s experience with imperialism, internal colonization, and the Cold War place it at the periphery of, or outside Eurocentrism. Most likely, Eastern Europe is not even conjured in these scholars’ minds when they refer to “Europe.” The second world2 figures as a negligible variable, a space that, in being neither center, nor margin, has not “earned” Stanford University Press, 1994), Larry Wolff argues that while during the Renaissance the division of Europe had been between the south and the north, the Enlightenment produced a conceptual re-arrangement of Europe along East-West coordinates, with the Ottoman Empire lands, which were deemed backward and uncivilized, as “Eastern”. Americans too use the term to iterate the dichotomic relation between East and West, in which the former has been construed as primitive, traditional, communist, and generally peripheric, and the latter as modern, liberal, capitalist and central. The term “Eastern Europe” is itself an exonym, for its constituent peoples never refer to themselves by that name. 2 Originally, the “first world” and “second world” were constructed as bi-polar categories that reflected the division of power between the industrialized capitalist world (led by the United States) and the industrialized communist world (led by the Soviet Union); the “third world,” a term coined by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1953, designated countries and peoples non-aligned with either country and its sphere of influence, and who were subject to poverty and exploitation. Since the fall of the communist regimes, historians and other scholars have engaged in numerous debates regarding the notion of “second world,” which seems