View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Queen Mary Research Online Living between languages: The politics of translation translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Gilmour, RH For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/5860 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact
[email protected] 1 Living between languages: the politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Rachael Gilmour, QMUL, June 2012 [final draft post-refereeing] As published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47(2), June 2012, pp. 207-227. Abstract This essay examines the notion of “translational writing” – literary texts which bear the traces of multiple languages, foregrounding and dramatizing the processes of translation of which they are both product and representation – through detailed examination of two recent novels set in London: Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005), and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). Both novels are narrated by their female protagonists, whose movement between linguistic planes defines a distinctively feminized, translingual identity. Each works to destabilize the assumed relationship between language and national belonging, in part by recasting London as a space of translation: a city of immigrants defined by its polyglossia, and a node in a deterritorialized transnational linguistic order.