An impossible necessity: translation and the recreation of linguistic and cultural
identities in contemporary Chinese American literature
by Martha J. Cutter (excerpt)
A writerly process of translation also helps Kingston mediate the conflicting gender roles
she has inherited as a Chinese American. Looking up words and translating them makes
it possible for Kingston, as previously noted, to understand that China is not a land where
they "sell girls [and] kill each other for no reason" (205). Translation enables Kingston to
understand more clearly the actual treatment of women in China, but it also enables a
recreation of her understanding of Chinese gender structures, as the text's concluding
chapter, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," demonstrates. In this chapter, writerly
translation produces a positive reconciliation between two seemingly dissociated and
antipodal cultures, as well as a productive reconsideration of gender roles.
On the cultural level, the last chapter reflects a reconciliation between the Chinese and
the American, the mother's world and the daughter's. Because a translation gives voice to
both the source text and the translator's unique perspective, some translation theorists
argue that it should be viewed as coauthored; thus, according to Barnstone, translation is
"the work of two artists, or a double art" (13).(27) Literally, Kingston's final chapter is
the product of at least two artists (Kingston and her mother), as Kingston states: "Here is
a story my mother told me. . . . The beginning is hers, the ending, mine" (206). In a more
metaphorical sense, however, this chapter is also collaborative, a double art, for Kingston
translates her mother's story while also revising and rewriting it so that it can be her own:
calling herself "an outlaw knot-maker" (163) she twists this traditional story of Chinese
culture into a new and unique Chinese American design. The original Chinese story is
based on the life of Ts'ai Yen, the first great woman poet of China. Ts'ai Yen was
captured by an invading army in AD 195 and then spent twelve years in "barbarian"
lands. Finally, she was rescued and returned to her own land, leaving her two children
behind. As Cheung explains, then, "The Chinese version highlights the poet's eventual
return to her own people, a return that reinforces certain traditional and ethnocentric
Chinese notions" ("`Don't Tell'" 171). The original version also emphasizes separation
between not only the "barbarian" and the "Chinese," but also between the mother who
returns to China and the children who remain in the foreign land.
Kingston's retelling of this story does not avoid the idea of cultural and linguistic
dislocation, for she tells us that Ts'ai Yen's "barbarian" children do not speak her
language and even make fun of their mother's speech (208). However, Kingston's version
suggests that translation overcomes this separation. When Ts'ai Yen hears the "barbarian
music," she begins singing Chinese songs that cross the barriers between cultures: "Ts'ai
Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the
barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch
barbarian phrases about forever wandering" (209). The songs also function as a bridge
between the mother's language and the children's: "Her children did not laugh, but
eventually sang along when she left her tent to sit by the winter campfires" (209). In
Kingston's version of the story, Ts'ai Yen finds a way of bridging the barriers that have
been erected between the new "barbarian" world and the old world of China, the world of
the children and the world of the mother.
Read on a metaphorical level, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" suggests that Kingston
has found a way of deconstructing the binary oppositions that separate mother and
daughter, China and America--a way of translating across the borders. In telling this story
with her mother, she creates a reconciliation between her mother's world and her own.
Kingston says that Ts'ai Yen "brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of
the three that has been passed down to us is `Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,'
a song that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well" (209). In choosing to
conclude her work with the three words "It translated well," Kingston suggests the
symbolic meaning of translation as a trope for cultural reconciliation and
intergenerational conjunction. Although this process is fraught with conflict, in this story
and in the book as a whole Kingston creates a translation that allows her to break down
the opposition between East and West, and to take strength from the interplay and
interpenetration between her disjunctive cultural and linguistic terrains.
Source:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n4_v39/ai_20171495/pg_12/