The AALITRA Review A JOURNAL OF LITERARY TRANSLATION No. 9, November 2014 The AALITRA Review Editor: Brigid Maher (La Trobe University) The Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA) Special Advisory Editor: Brian Nelson is a national organization that promotes an (Monash University) interest in all aspects of literary translation. Layout Editors: Jonathan Beagley, Lara In addition to publishing The AALITRA Gardner Review we distribute news of events and conferences relevant to translators. Editorial Board: AALITRA sponsors public lectures and Esther Allen (Baruch College, City events on literary translation and holds University of New York), Harry Aveling periodic conferences with university (Monash University), Peter Bush bodies interested in the theory and practice (Barcelona), John Coetzee (University of of literary translation. 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A JOURNAL OF LITERARY TRANSLATION Number 9, November 2014 Chi Vu The 1.5-Generation Vietnamese-American Writer as Post-Colonial Translator 5 Christopher Newton On a Blind Retranslation of Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder 19 Xin Huang Reading an Incomplete Nobel: Goldblatt’s Translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out 42 Paschalis Nikolaou Resonant Scenes: Classical Translation and Poetic Work from Simon Armitage, Josephine Balmer, Anne Carson, Stanley Lombardo and Alice Oswald 53 Wen Jun and Zhang Review of Francis R. Jones, Poetry Translating as Expert Action 62 Mi Séverine Hubscher- Sofia’s Story in Translation: Leaving Shanghai 64 Davidson and Jill Leatherbarrow Li Wang Mu Dan and his Poem “Hymn” 73 Paul Melo e Castro Henrique de Senna Fernandes: By Train and by Tram to the South China Seas 79 CONTRIBUTORS 95 Published by MONASH UNIVERSITY ©Monash University 2014 The 1.5-Generation Vietnamese-American Writer as Post-Colonial Translator1* CHI VU Abstract This essay explores contemporary transnationalism through the creative texts written by Vietnamese-born 1.5-Generation authors residing in the USA, in order to define the generational impact on this emerging literature. I use post-colonial translation theory to examine how the process of migration produces a cultural and linguistic gap for these authors in relation to their readership, and to identify the creative strategies used by these authors in response to it. Introduction The 1.5 Generation is a cultural construct that has become increasingly used within a variety of academic disciplines. This diasporic generation is comprised of those who have memories of their birth country, are conscious of being bicultural and are at least conversationally bilingual (Danico 6). They are technically part of the first generation, in that they were born overseas and are immigrants themselves. Earlier literature describes characteristics of this population without using the specific term, as the concept of the 1.5 Generation is relatively new; it has therefore yet to develop agreed-upon parameters (Bartley and Spoonley 67). Different theorists have applied the concept to those who migrated before the age of twelve, middle to late adolescence, or even to young adults; many theorists consider very young children who migrated before school age to be second generation (Park 141). Given the significance of the linguistic and cultural knowledge involved in literary production, the term “1.5 Generation” in this essay refers to authors who experienced migration as children aged between six and sixteen years, including experiencing some of their formative socialization, and therefore language acquisition, in the country of origin. Conversely, members of this Generation need to have arrived in the country of settlement at a young enough age to attend school and to experience non-work related socialization. In the first section of this article, I propose that the Vietnamese diaspora is not only dispersed geographically but also linguistically; each generation internalizes the dominant language to a different extent, and this results in a linguistic dispersal across generations in each country of settlement. I explore how a cultural and linguistic gap exists for diasporic writers. Strikingly, the cultural and linguistic gap experienced by first-generation authors differs from that experienced by the 1.5 Generation. In subsequent sections, I examine texts by 1.5-Generation authors Lan Cao and Linh Dinh to identify the creative strategies they use to resist invisibility, stereotyping or linguistic colonization, and propose that these strategies change as the cultural and linguistic gap shifts over time and in diverse circumstances of cultural production. I suggest that 1.5-Generation authors do, indeed, have to redefine their positioning with each new creative work, to (re)translate themselves along a shifting continuum of otherness. The article concludes by theorizing the 1.5 Generation’s relationship to language itself. The Vietnamese diaspora is said to have emerged in 1975 after the Vietnam War,2 in which the communist North defeated the pro-western South Vietnamese government and unified Viet Nam after 1975. Vietnam’s post-colonial status is contextualized by French colonialism, 1 *This article first appeared inKunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture 32.1 (2010): 130-146. We are grateful to Anne Collett, editor of Kunapipi, for permission to reprint it here. 2 I use the phrase “Vietnam War” not in the Western sense of a war fought by the USA and its allies against North Vietnam (mirrored by Vietnam’s description of it as the “American War”). Instead, I use “Vietnam War” to recognize that it was also a civil war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. 6 Chi Vu American neo-colonialism during modern times, and nearly a thousand years of Chinese domination in pre-modern times. As with other post-colonial nations, structures of inequity and oppression remain in place after Vietnam achieved independence from foreign powers. In the late 1970s and 1980s, over one million people fled South Viet Nam to settle in countries such as the USA, Australia, France and Canada. The result is a Vietnamese diaspora as social form which remains “an identified group characterized by their relationship-despite-dispersal” (Vertovec 3). The Vietnamese diaspora is not only dispersed geographically but also linguistically. After settlement, Vietnamese migrant communities increasingly adopt the dominant language of the host country. Generally, first-generation migrants do not become as assimilated as their second-generation children. The linguistic diaspora therefore occurs both geographically as well as across the generations within each country of settlement. In between the first and second generation is the 1.5 Generation. Linguistic dispersal Post-colonial theory describes how the process of migration “translates” the subject into object; first- and 1.5-Generation authors would have been members of the dominant culture if they had remained in Vietnam, but post migration and settlement they became members of a minority culture. Unlike the first generation, however, the 1.5-Generation authors re-orientate themselves linguistically after migration to produce Anglophone creative texts. These texts are therefore consumed by a readership that is partially or primarily from a different culture. I suggest these authors are faced with a cultural and linguistic gap that requires their performance as “translators” between the mainstream and minority cultures. Post-colonial theorists are increasingly reappropriating and reassessing the term “translation” itself, and recognizing the role that translation played during colonization. “Who translates whom becomes a crucial issue. Questions of cultural familiarity, the implied construction of the audience, the problems of constructing the ‘other’ have particular relevance in this context” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 204). Unequal power relations between cultures were supported by centuries of translation as a one-way process for the benefit of the colonizer, rather than as