THE IDEA OF TRANSLATION: EXPLORING LINGUISTIC A N D C U L T U R A L INTERSTICES IN EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS by Sujniko Nishizawa B.A. Japan Women's University, 1978 M . A . The University of British Columbia, 1997 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE D E G R E E OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES Language and Literacy Education THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA March 2005 ©Sumiko Nishizawa, 2005 Abstract The number of overseas and immigrant students enrolled in post-secondary institutions has been increasing throughout North America, resulting in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. In response to this major social change, Canadian college and university educators seek ways to integrate students of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds and nurture mutual understanding. The challenge of educators, as well as both native English-speaking and English language learning students, is to understand how norms and values shaped by language and embedded in texts, classroom tasks, and interpersonal relationships are translated across cultures. This idea of translation offers a lens through which the intersections of languages and cultures may be richly explored. This study examines how different conceptions of translation operate in socioculturally diverse classroom spaces, while pointing to strategies for reducing barriers to productive and harmonious learning. The study first analyzes various conceptions of translation. It focuses on a hermeneutic concept of language as interpretation, helping us perceive an emerging new space where languages and cultures meet and interrelate. The study also analyzes sociocultural and political effects of translation, in particular, approaches derived from cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Using translations between Japanese and English as examples, the study examines how asymmetrical relations of power construct national identities. Then the focus shifts to post- secondary education. The study examines and interprets the conceptions of translation reflected in textbooks and literature in two curricula areas—college preparatory E L L courses, and first-year English literature courses—in order to clarify how these texts embody particular educational principles and values. As applied in this study, the hermeneutic conceptions of translation illuminate the educational potentialities of texts. Conceptions of translation derived from postcolonial and cultural studies demonstrate how texts can manipulate representation of power and historicity, and hinder opportunities to embrace differences and to create inclusive learning environments. Conceptions of translation with hermeneutic interest, on the other hand, suggest that texts can open up a border world—a third, in-between space—where newness can emerge. The study illustrates how this space, a borderless generative space and a locus to share and appreciate difference, can enrich the educational experience of students and teachers alike. I V TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of contents iv Acknowledgements vii Prologue 1 Chapter One The Ground of Inquiry 4 1.1. Departure 4 1.2. The Purpose of My Study: Exploring How Language Constructs Difference 8 1.3. Research Focus: Exploring the Border World through Translation 13 1.4. Inquiry 16 1.5. Analyzing Texts through the Conceptions of Translation 19 1.6. Lost in Translation 24 1.7. Mapping the Journey of Inquiry 3 0 Chapter Two The Paths of Inquiry 33 ILL Translation Studies 33 11.2. Hermeneutic Approaches 36 11.2.1. Hermeneutic Motion . 40 11.2.2. Post-structuralist and Deconstructionist Approaches 43 11.2.3. Metonymy 48 11.2.4. Box Effect 53 11.2.5. Polysystem Theory 57 11.3. Sociocultural/Political Approaches 59 II 3.1. Third Space 60 11.3.2. Translating Nationhood 63 11.3.3. Transforming Self 65 11.3.4. Post-colonial Translation 69 V Chapter Three Translation in Japan 79 II. 1. Living in Translation 79 III. 2. Issues 81 111.3. Developments: Seeking "pure language" 82 111.4. Creating Language at the Border 88 111.5. Empire of Signs: Translation in Metonymic Centre-less Space 93 111.6. Ambivalent Post-colonial Japan 98 111.7. Translating Japanese Literature: Construction of Nation and Race 101 III. 8. Translating the Identity of the East 109 III. 9. Contemporary Literature/not Literature 114 III. 10. Third Space 118 III. 11. Future of Ambivalence 123 Chapter Four Texts and Tasks: College Preparatory E L L Courses 128 IV. 1. Second Language Learning Theories 129 IV. 1.1. Lost in Second Language Acquisition Canon 130 IV. 1.2. Functional and Sociocultural Perspectives 136 IV.2. What E L L Students Read in the Classroom 144 IV.3. Translating/Translated Texts 147 IV.4. Japan as a Lost Sign 161 IV.5. Possibility/Impossibility of Creating a Space 170 IV. 6. Using Literature in the E L L classroom 179 IV.6.1. Creating a Space for Students' Translation 182 IV. 6.2. Analyzing Texts 187 IV.6.2.1. The Other Family 187 IV.6.2.2. The Border World 193 Chapter Five Texts and Tasks: First-Year English Literature Courses 200 V. l . The Literature Classroom • 202 V.2. Theory, Interpretation, and Translation 206 V.3. Intertextuality as Translation 213 V.4. A Post-colonial Approach 217 V.5. Translation in the Classroom 219 V. 5.1. Translation in the Classroom: The Role of the Text 219 V I V.5.2. Translation in the Classroom: The Role of the Student 226 V.6. Literary Texts and Translation 231 V.6.1. Current Literary Anthologies 232 V.6.2. Self-Translation: Framer and Framed 235 V.6.3. Much Ado About Noticing 243 V.6.4. The Flow of the River: Heart of Darkness 251 V. 6.5. Post-colonial Literature: Blurring Borderlines 262 V. 7. Future: Translation as Lived Experience 275 Chapter Six Implications 278 VI. 1. Hermeneutic Conceptions of Translation and Educational Agendas 278 VI. 1.1. Ambiguities of Language 279 VI. 1.2. Cultural Imperialism in Translation 281 VI.2. Hermeneutic Conceptions of Translation Enacted in the Classroom 289 VI.3. Research Implications 295 VI.4. Towards Globalization 297 Epilogue 304 References 308 vii Acknowledgements This dissertation began one sunny morning on April 28, 1992, when I arrived at the Vancouver airport with two big suitcases and student visa. I would not have made this long journey without the support of many people—friends, teachers, students, even strangers—who have enriched my life in various ways and contributed to transforming my perspectives and values as well as to my undertaking this work. From them I have learned that no self can be completed without the Other. I would like to acknowledge and thank my Committee members, John Willinsky, Margaret Early, and Ted Aoki, for their interest in my research and support through a long period of intellectual struggle. John Willinsky, my supervisor, whose book Learning to Divide the World inspired me originally to develop my ideas, provided me with his abundant knowledge, experiences, vision, and understanding of issues related to socio-cultural aspects of language, literacy, and literature, anti-racism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism. His doctoral seminars enabled me to learn about many writers and thinkers in diverse fields; their texts and words formed the foundation of my work. He himself is an exceptional writer who has been my primary source of guidance. Margaret Early, my first professor at the University of British Columbia, has supported me academically and personally since I embarked on my challenging journey at the university ten years ago. I am always appreciative of her advice and her expertise in the field of language education. Ted Aoki has been my inspiration. He introduced me to the works of Homi Bhabha, Derrida, and others of whom I had had little understanding, and guided my exploration of spaces between languages and cultures, helping me to appreciate my first language, Japanese, as a source of insight rather than as an impediment. His warmth, understanding, and contribution in shaping my ideas and exploring with me translation theories and studies have enriched this work immensely. Without the V l l l support and encouragement of these three Committee members, I would not have been able to complete this dissertation. I feel privileged and grateful for the connection to their professional and personal lives. I would also like to thank my university examiners, Drs. Patricia Duff, Karen Meyer, and external examiner, Sherry Simon, whose constructive feedback helped me complete the final dissertation. Dr. Duff was one of my first professors at UBC, and her classes, publications, and approach to research helped me build the foundation of my research. Dr. Meyer encouraged me in her graduate seminar to reflect upon my own experiences when I was in the early stage of my dissertation. Many friends deserve my gratitude for their constant moral support and intellectual guidance. In particular, I owe special thanks to Janet Allwork for her friendship, intelligence, and selfless support. She has been my instructor of English literature, my editor, and best friend. She has read the numerous drafts of the dissertation over take-out Chinese food, tea and cookies for years and has provided me with her wonderful editing skills and feedback. I also thank Tom Whalley for his professional knowledge and personal experience in intercultural communication and English language education. His understanding of Japanese language and culture also helped me develop ideas and reexamine issues related to Japan. Terry Loughrey read my draft and provided me with his expertise in English language education and literature. My close friend, Melanie Yip, has helped me with her computer skills and friendship. The photograph of the three girls was only possible because of her. I also thank former students of Dr. Ted Aoki—Pat Palulis, Anne Bruce, Franc Feng, Bruce Russell, and Craig Worthing—for their insights and support. I cherish the memory of our gatherings at Pat's apartment where, snowed under with books, we shared and discussed ideas. This dissertation would not have been possible without the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, for which I am very thankful. ix Finally, I would like to thank my family whose love and understanding have helped me reach this memorable step in a never-ending journey. In particular, my deepest gratitude goes to my late father and my mother who, from their home across the Pacific Ocean, never failed to believe in me. 1 Prologue In two continents separated by the Pacific Ocean, three girls were born in the 1950s. These three girls—Melanie, Janet, and Sumiko—met in Vancouver some thirty years later. Their stories are nothing extraordinary, similar to those of many people in North America today. Melanie's great grandfather, Yip Sang, from China, settled in Vancouver as a trading businessman in the late 1800s and built the first brick building constructed in Chinatown. His descendants have established themselves in the Asian community as prominent business people (Francis, 2000). At a Yip family reunion, more than a hundred people gather. Melanie's parents were born in Canada, but her mother was sent back to China where she lived until she was sixteen due to World War II; when she came back, she had to sit in the back of a classroom with the 7-year olds, because there was no ESL classroom back then. Melanie was born and raised in Vancouver, and learned to speak Cantonese from her grandmother at home. Later she went to a school where there were very few non-Caucasian children. Janet's parents came from London, England in 1947 and settled in Vancouver when the British made up almost 70% of British Columbia's population (Francis, 2000). Unlike her older siblings who were born in England, Janet was born and raised in Vancouver. Now all her immediate family live in Canada, but she still has relatives in England. Sumiko was born and raised in Tokyo, as Japan underwent significant changes resulting from the devastation of World War II. She came to Vancouver as an international student after quitting her teaching position and later, establishing her life on new soil, became an immigrant, one among 24.3% of British Columbia's immigrant population in 1996 (ibid.). When they were little, the lives of these three little girls seemed simpler. Life was not full of surprises. They went to school with friends who were much like them. Their spaces were familiar, secure, solid. They look content within their frames. When these girls met later in their lives, they liked each other. They found many things in common such as favorite books and music. But, at the same time, they sometimes thought the other was different. For example, the expectations of friendship were different. Their concept of "private" was different. Language differences made things more difficult. They confronted things considered not common or usual within their framed space, because they had already learned what was common and usual. They had learned to see the world within their frames. What did these frames do? Did these solid lines belong to the inside or the outside or neither? The frame prevented the outside from coming in and the inside from going out. Within the frame, they had learned about people who lived outside, but it was just knowledge constructed within their frames, a curriculum taught them so to speak. About these frames, John Willinsky (1998) writes that we learn to divide the world. We "are schooled in differences great and small, in borderlines and boundaries, in historical struggles and exotic practices, all of which extend the 3 meaning of difference. We are taught to discriminate in both the most innocent and fateful ways so that we can appreciate the differences between civilized and primitive, West and East, first and third world" (p. 1). We translate each other. "Trans" suggests a journey, a searching for new space. "Transing," however, can be futile and dangerous. Walter Benjamin (1968) in his "The Task of the Translator" says that "[a]ny translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translation" (p. 69). Is that what we have learned? 4 Chapter One The Ground of Inquiry The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land Hugo (qtd. in Said, 1979, p. 259) 1.1. Departure For some decades now, the number of overseas and immigrant students in post-secondary education has been increasing throughout North America. Not only have Canadian colleges and universities experienced changes in enrollments, they have also experienced rapid change due to globalization and immigration, resulting in culturally and linguistically diverse populations in classrooms and the wider community (Cummins, 1996). These students and their communities have brought diverse sociopolitical, socioeducational, and sociolinguistic forces into Canadian society, reshaping and recharacterizing learning. A United Nations report has declared Toronto, for example, the world's most multicultural city, where "in some urban schools, fifty to sixty different languages can be heard in the hallways" (Kooy& Chiu, 1998, p. 80). Canadian colleges and universities as learning organizations are therefore in the grip of social change. Educators, in particular instructors within these post-secondary school classrooms, are expected to respond, integrating students of diverse cultural backgrounds into classrooms, and nurturing mutual understanding and communication in a complex learning environment. Students too are expected to share with other students their different experiences and perspectives and participate in constructing an inclusive learning environment. The challenge is that instructors too have acquired particular norms and values, a particular 5 philosophy of learning, and particular classroom practices so natural to them that they may not even recognize these as culturally specific. These cultural norms and values are reflected in classroom tasks and activities and relationships between teacher and student. As a result, overseas and immigrant students participating in these classrooms may find themselves in what feels like an alien environment. In addition to linguistic challenges, students face sociocultural differences which create invisible boundaries they may feel unable to transcend. Discouraged, these students may tend to fall into silence, decline to participate, or retreat into their own cultural groups. The boundaries are reinforced by national stereotypes, and media often contribute to disseminating those stereotypes. Educators and students must work together to overcome such negative images, analyze the situations and their causes, and find possible solutions to cultivate a learning environment and society to which everyone can belong. Living in Canada has helped me reconceptualize my perspectives of myself as a Japanese woman and my role in Japanese and Canadian societies. In the last ten years, I have felt challenged to break many internal boundaries shaped and formed in Japanese society and to cross borders to meet and share with people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, perspectives, values, and beliefs. As I challenge boundaries and cross borders, I travel between times and spaces, and discover moments and spaces I have failed to recognize. When I was teaching in Japan, I met only a few "foreign" students in my classes. I first met a Korean-Japanese student in my grade one class. Through her, I realized how the Koreans in Japan had been oppressed. In kindergarten, she and her parents had used a Japanese name to protect her from racial discrimination. But a stronger realization came after coming to Canada, when I met a young Korean-Japanese college student who shared with me her experiences. She is a fluent Japanese speaker; I did not know her Korean nationality until she told me. She was discriminated against in Japan, and her classmates bullied her. She could not understand why she was treated 6 differently, even though she spoke Japanese and did not look different from other Japanese students. She left Japan because she did not see any potential for building her career there. She was happy studying at a community college in Canada and had no intention of going back to Japan. In Vancouver, she was just a young Asian student. No wonder another male Korean student said that he could never marry a Japanese woman; it was unthinkable. Chinese students also told me what they learned about Japan in their Asian history classes in China or Taiwan; Japanese were invaders, enemies. I was shocked to realize from these incidents that for them this was not past history but a living reality. A few summers ago, I was given an opportunity to teach a group of Japanese university students who came to Vancouver to study the English language and Canadian culture. I chose "people" as one of the themes of their Canadian studies. We discussed people who are part of Canadian society, and how and what they have contributed to constructing Canada today. Students shared their experiences living and studying in Vancouver and were able to appreciate how people from diverse cultures have enriched Canadian society. We later watched the video produced by the British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF), Life without Fear, portraying racism in Canada from the perspectives of students, teachers, counselors, and professors, analyzing problems and seeking possible solutions. I wanted to help these Japanese students reflect upon their lives in Japan and discuss the problem of racism in Japan. What struck me, however, was that the majority of Japanese students had little awareness of the existing racism in Japan. One student even wrote "I wasn't aware of issues of racism in Canada, because we don't have racism in Japan." How could they be so oblivious to the reality? Racism creates higher and deeper borderlines and forces people to entrench mental boundaries or frames. Within these boundaries, many Japanese feel protected and secure. I too 7 had felt protected and secure, a Japanese woman comfortably established in Japanese society. How could I not have known? Like these Japanese university students today, my sixteen years of elite private school education did not acquaint me with the essential realities of my country's history. But I wonder who is responsible and whom we can blame. Politicians? Educators? Yet, I was once an educator who was supposed to know and be able to teach social justice to children. I feel ashamed. I didn't. Japanese teachers today talk about globalization in education. However, they do not seem to feel that introducing anti-racism is a way to reach such goals, perhaps because they fear facing a problem they do not know how to deal with. Even though Japanese scholars recently have begun to examine Japan through a post-colonial perspective—considering the colonization of China, Taiwan, and Korea, and the displacement of aboriginal peoples from their original lands—their research has not yet helped educators transform the content and pedagogy of Japanese education. Many Canadian educators, however, are transforming educational content and pedagogy. Canadian classrooms can offer rich prospects for learning, and educators have promoted multicultural education, trying to help teachers and students understand and embrace cultural differences. Working with educators in different fields, the BCTF has, for example, published many resource books to raise teachers' awareness and aid their lessons. The federal and provincial governments have funded projects, such as the Asia Pacific Initiative, to encourage multicultural education in the classroom. Multicultural education maintains that "cultural diversity is a valuable resource that should be preserved and extended," and that the "maintenance of cultural diversity is crucial to the survival of democracy," seeking "justice for all students" (Blackman, 1992, p. 6). In response, schools have implemented a variety of projects for students to increase awareness and promote harmony through videos, books, games, fine arts, and food. They plan festivals of various cultures, add ethnic food to their 8 lunch menus, or teach different languages. A challenging question remains, however. How much do these projects really help students not only understand difference but also transcend boundaries and share the same space with students of other languages and cultures? Trying sushi, or participating in Chinese New Year celebrations may be enjoyable but rarely help students transform their perspectives, a goal educators espouse. As Neil Bissoondath, a Trinidad-born Canadian writer, points out, such multicultural efforts are often "superficial and exhibitionistic," "indulging] in stereotype, depending] on it for a dash of colour and the flash of dance" (1990, p. 190). In some instances, recognizing differences may even deepen them, reinforcing stereotypes or increasing racism. In today's classrooms, there are many Janets, Melanies, Sumikos, and more, sharing the same space and time, or so it seems. And yet, they might not be sharing as much as we hope, because of the solid frame within which they have learned to live. In the same classroom, sitting next to each other, they might continue to be just learning the distance between countries, cultures, and people. Or, they might feel left alone outside of the frame, and thus be struggling in vain to enter into somebody else's frame. The frame continues to exclude, even though it seems there is a lot of space available between frames. Why can't they meet there? Can't they create a different frame—a porous frame so that they can go beyond divisions? 1.2. The Purpose of My Study: Exploring How Language Constructs Difference This study explores how language constructs difference: first, through investigating the nature of language, and second, through examining the sociocultural construction of language, as it appears in textbooks and literature often chosen for study in college preparatory English language learning (ELL) and English literature classrooms. The historical construction 9 of language inevitably shapes images and perceptions which interract and create solid frames around us, dividing the world. Language is fundamental, enabling us to create and communicate ideas. Thoughts cannot be formed or expressed without language. Without language, there is an accumulation of feelings and emotions which I would not be able to describe or even recognize. The "meaning of a word is its use in the language," Wittgenstein (1958, p. 20e) suggests in his Philosophical Investigations. Language does not have immediate access to reality, but it dictates our relationships with the world. No wonder a word like "learning" evokes different images and different spaces to different people. He also states that "naming is like attaching a label to a thing," (p. 7e) and as a name is used, the thing begins to take on the meaning. We can think of students' attempts to understand each other, to interact comfortably, as a process of constantly translating/interpreting others and being translated by others. They do so through language, spoken or thought. Even when they speak the same language, English or english (with accents and grammatical errors), they might not speak the same language, because the meaning of a word in use varies depending on cultural backgrounds. Words are embedded in a culture where the meaning is constructed though use. Once students are in regular college/university courses, they are expected to communicate in North American English, and there is no other english recognized. This may create barriers and miscommunication when students perform tasks, discuss issues, and write papers. For some, "classroom" means a place to sit quietly, listening to the lecture and taking notes, while for others it means a place to discuss issues and exchange ideas. As Foucault argues, a discourse is a socially constructed system of statements within which the world is understood, and it determines the relationship among people. Language thus creates socio-cultural boundaries. Babies begin to interact with people 1 0 surrounding them, whose language helps them shape reality, and understand ideas, thoughts and feelings. As their grandparents, parents, teachers, friends, and other people in society tell stories to them and instill in them what is right, good, and appropriate, language constructs norms and values, helping them perceive who they are in their society. They also read and watch stories. They live in the narrative of society and the myriad social interactions unfolding among them as they narrate their lives to construct/re-construct their identities. German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1992) wrote of a man that the "form of his concepts, the way and means of connecting them, is outlined for him through the language in which he is born and educated" (p. 38). When it is acquired we are framed within the power of language: "Every human being is.. in the power of the language he speaks; he and his whole thinking are a product of it. He cannot, with complete certainty, think anything that lies outside the limits of language" (ibid.). Language shapes our lives, and helps us define who we are, where we are, and how we live. Ashcroft (2001) thus defines language as "a social medium for individuals rather than a self-sufficient system of inner relationships" (p. 65). When these spaces change, however, when for example, people move across boundaries into a space constructed by a different language, their lives can become chaotic, because "to have a language is to have a particular kind of world, a world that is simply not communicable in any other language" (Ashcroft, 2001, p. 59). In this new world, a new language maintains different norms, beliefs, values, and ideas. Even a simple word like "friend" requires newcomers to understand expectations different from what they may have associated with the word "friend" in their own language. A new language begins to perform in their lives and to narrate unfamiliar stories, surprising them, and confusing them. Despite their attempts to move from "here" to "there," they often lose their location. Both students and educators need to explore the process of how meaning is constructed in different cultures, which in turn 1 1 provides them with valuable opportunities to learn about people from other cultures and share boundaries with them. In her work with First Nations, Celia Haig-Brown (1990) discusses the notion of boundary. She suggests that the border world is a world in which non-Native people and First Nations peoples work together to bring change to the existing conflicts and struggles pertaining to First Nations. They "negotiate reality" and mutually create reality in their intersecting worlds; their "reality is mutually constructed in the border world" they inhabit (pp. 239-240), and creates the space they share. Not only does language construct society and people's identities, it also constructs the identity of the Other and excludes that Other outside the boundaries. Or perhaps the Other is within a frame, but shut out from majority discourse. Recalling his childhood experience when he was left behind by other children in a deep hole at a construction site, Barthes (1977) captures such feeling. Being excluded is not always being outside; it is being alone in a hole, confined in the dark, helpless, even though he can see blue sky above him. Language is capable of labeling and categorizing Others, making stereotypes, and building particular images. Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) is a pioneer work examining this issue, suggesting that the Orient was constituted by the European mind. He writes that the "Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West" (p. 5). Influenced by Foucault's notion of discourse as a socially constructed system of statements within which the world is understood, and that determines the relationships amongst people, Said discusses the power of the English language—a language of the empire, once used as an instrument of colonial domination—and its production of "truth." In his Learning to Divide the World, Willinsky (1998a) discusses this power of English pertaining to the current North American classroom and specifically to language education, suggesting that students need to understand "how the world was divided by the 12 intellectual project of imperialism and how those divisions continue to weigh on our thinking about, in this case, native speakers and the learning of English" (p. 194). Pennycook (1998), in his English and the Discourse of Colonialism, also argues for "the importance of understanding English in its colonial context," (p. 19) asserting that English language teaching theories and practices are products of colonialism, derived from "broader European cultures and ideologies that themselves are products of colonialism" (p. 19): [Colonialism and post-colonial struggles] have produced and reduced nations, massacred populations, dispossessed people of their land, culture, language and history, shifted vast numbers of people from one place to another. And they are also the ground on which European/Western images of the Self and Other have been constructed, the place where constructions of Superiority and Inferiority were produced.(p. 19) Using language to exercise power and maintain control is not limited to English. Just as British colonialism enforced English education in India, the Japanese language was a tool used to colonize Korea and China and the other nations included in "the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere"; so were French, Dutch, and Portuguese in Africa. Language is essential for constructing and disseminating ideas of democracy and globalization, but can be a dangerous instrument for dominating countries, overpowering people and creating hierarchy among them. Investigating as well as theorizing language are thus the central issues of my research. The notions discussed above have helped me make sense of what I have experienced. Wittgenstein's concerns with language help me realize that reality is not only described by language, but language constructs "reality." I have learned and acquired knowledge in Canada, knowledge which I did not possess in my first language, Japanese. I have learned the ways in which the English language is utilized. On first coming to Canada, I tried hard to become another person, one who speaks English beautifully; understands history, politics, and society; 13 and has a fulfilling career. I wanted to be somebody who was comfortably invisible, whom nobody would ask where I was born or what I ate for breakfast. But it was impossible. Not only my English, but also my Japaneseness constantly reminded me of boundaries 1 could not cross. And yet I became a somewhat different "me"; I was no longer within the Japanese boundaries when I visited my family and friends in Tokyo. This realization first made me miserable; I belonged nowhere. But at the same time, I felt I began to develop a space of possibilities through my friends, colleagues, and studies. Kondo (1990) writes about what I have experienced: "Identity is not a fixed 'thing,' it is negotiated, open, shifting, ambiguous, the result of culturally available meanings and the open-ended, power-laden enactments of those meanings in everyday situations" (p. 23). When I encountered a concept like the border world, my experience suddenly started to make sense. I have been transformed in the space between languages and cultures where I am no longer a stranger, now sharing life with people who were, I thought, on the other side of a border. 1.3. Research Focus: Exploring the Border World through Translation I would like to explore how language has been utilized to create boundaries throughout history, and how, if at all, the border world has been constructed/deconstructed in education. I choose translation as a lens for understanding how difference operates, because translation theories and studies have theoretical links to intercultural studies and to the philosophical investigation of language, which remains as the fundamental focus here. Translation has been discussed through linguistic, socio-cultural, historical, political, and economic perspectives, all of which are closely related to international and immigrant students' experiences. In its fusion of two worlds, the act of translation is the act of situating oneself on a border, a border from which emerges an independent entity that is at once neither and both of 14 its constituent parts. Translation is thus closely linked to educational issues today, as the classroom is occupied by students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Also, language learning involves translation. Octavio Paz (1992) writes that when "we learn to speak, we are learning to translate; the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows" (p. 152). Translation between two languages is, he suggests, thus "not essentially different from translation between two tongues" (ibid.). When learning vocabulary, expressions, and their usages, students are constantly translating words between their first and target languages. They often depend on dictionary translation, being unaware of historical, social, or political connotations of language. Language educators, whose backgrounds are often related to linguistics, tend to be concerned with teaching students how to speak grammatically correctly with little accent, just like applied linguists who "aim to determine the kind of'equivalence' that makes a 'good' translation" (France, 2000, p. 6). France (2000) points out that two elements of criticism in translation have prevailed—accuracy and acceptability. Similarly, language teachers are likely to require their students to speak and write accurately, in speech acceptable to the target culture. Teachers may not be as concerned about what is happening for students in the process of translation. On the other hand, students who learn a new language constantly encounter barriers caused by the social construction of language. Dictionaries do not always help them acquire the language appropriate to their new society. They might have to deconstruct or reexamine norms, values, beliefs, and learn when and how to speak properly. They struggle, trying hard to transform themselves into someone who can speak and write the "right" language, and learn adequate, acceptable usage, which seems the only way for them to assimilate successfully into 15 their new society. At the same time, they may find themselves in their target language as Other. The language has constructed their identities, and people perceive them accordingly. They have little choice but to accept this construction of themselves as Other—to appropriate this identity constructed for themselves by others. The target language, particularly English, imposes on them its power, resulting in their first language, including its sociocultural norms and values, becoming inadequate, even inferior. A translation theory "always rests on particular assumptions about language use," (Venuti, 2000, p. 5) and language use in an educational context can be said to rest on theories of translation. When translating, one language is interpreted to another language. But because two languages maintain different historical, political, social, and cultural contexts, there is no objective, accurate, equal translation possible. Since the 1970s, translation research has developed theoretical perspectives, including the viewpoint of minorities in history, such as colonized peoples, and has considered the inherent political power in language, especially in the English language. Educational theory and practice, as well as students' experiences are not static but fluid and changing. Language helps us analyze and evaluate such processes and enables us to craft transformation. Examining different conceptions of translation will allow me to investigate the intersections of language historically, politically, and culturally in order to explore future educational possibilities. Because of its nature of crossing boundaries between different languages and cultures, re/searching translation will also help me explore the possibility of generative space between languages and cultures. 16 1.4. Inquiry I would like to explore the different ways in which translation is conceptualized in English-language teaching/learning for post-secondary students and within higher education more generally as well as the ways in which translation conceptualizations appear, and fail to appear, in classroom resources. Translation is one lens through which to examine how cultural difference is being cast, and to appreciate its consequences for students who are living in the third space of an additional language. The reason why translation offers content which is pertinent for us to discuss in education today is that any study Of translation includes an investigation of the nature of language, includes the critical analysis of transferring difference (linguistic, historical, social, and cultural), and includes an examination of self and other. Learners of English tend to be absorbed by its historically-constructed power; they may even feel compelled, in order to cross borders, to abandon their first language and culture as inferior. This, however, is impossible, since in the English language, they belong to the Other and dwell on the other side of the border. A major barrier to the success of integrating native English-speaking (NE) and English language learning (ELL) students is the challenge, both for educators and for students, to understand how norms and values, shaped by language and embedded in texts, classroom tasks, and interpersonal relationships, are translated across cultures. Some researchers of language teaching and learning have viewed the process of language learning as social, and have explored the social construction of the learners' identities through using the target language in the classroom while engaging with the task of language learning, helping educators perceive how learners' identities are constantly re/constructed. Various conceptions of translation may also provide educators with ways of creating possible spaces for students, spaces in which students speak their own "englishes" and share whatever difference their "englishes" can communicate. 17 Translation has received little attention in educational settings to date. Thus, I will examine how different conceptions of translation operate in socioculturally diverse classroom spaces in ways that pose frames^arriers to productive and harmonious learning. Underlying these explorations are the following questions: 1. What are the prevailing ideas about translation, especially as these relate to a sense of a socio-cultural interactive space? 2. How are the various conceptions of translation implicitly enacted in educational settings, in particular, through teaching/learning of the English language and through literature in translation? 3. How might concepts of translation derived from post-colonial and cultural studies help us construct the border world/third space where difference meets and is shared? I will take a qualitative approach to research which assumes that processes and meanings derive from the socially-constructed nature of reality based on relationships between the researcher and the researched (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). My research is linked to the positions of hermeneutics and critical theory, as both maintain that understanding and meaning are constructed through social life. Hermeneutics perceives the fluidity of present situations and interprets cultures from given situations and contexts, while cultural theory perceives reality as shaped by "a congeries of social, political, cultural, economic, ethnic, and gender factors . . . crystallized (reified) into a series of structures that are now (inappropriately) taken as 'real,' that is, natural and immutable" (Guba & Lincoln, 1994, p. 110). Hermeneutics, or interpretation, is "the very condition of human inquiry itself (Schwandt, 1994, p. 119). Hermeneutics today is understood as the "theory of textual interpretation and analysis" (Sedgwick, 1999, p. 165). I also take the stance of a critical researcher, concerned with socially- and historically-constructed power relations which make the relationship between signifier and signified unstable. The following quotation from Kincheloe and McLaren (1994) 18 summarizes the position of "a criticalist. . .as a researcher or theorist who attempts to use her or his work as a form of social or cultural criticism and who accepts certain basic assumptions" (p. 139): That all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations that are social and historically constituted; that facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from some form of ideological inscription; that the relationship between concept and object and between signifier and signified is never stable or fixed and is often mediated by the social relations of capitalist production and consumption; that language is central to the formation of subjectivity (conscious and unconscious awareness); that certain groups in any society are privileged over others and, although the reasons for this privileging may vary widely, the oppression that characterizes contemporary societies is most forcefully reproduced when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary, or inevitable; that oppression has many faces and that focusing on only one at the expense of others (e.g., class oppression versus racism) often elides the interconnections among them; and finally, that mainstream research practices are generally, although most often unwittingly, implicated in the reproduction of systems of class, race, and gender oppression, (pp. 139-140). Critical theory's epistemology is to assume that the researcher and the researched object are interactively linked, with "the values of the investigator (and of situated 'others') inevitably influencing the inquiry," and findings "therefore value mediated' (ibid). Critical theorists take dialogic/dialectical methodology to "transform ignorance and misapprehensions (accepting historically mediated structures as immutable) into more informed consciousness (seeing how the structures might be changed and comprehending the actions required to effect change)" (ibid.). Similarly, Norton Peirce (1995) discusses critical research as a researcher of language education. She points out that critical research "rejects the view that any research can claim to be objective or unbiased" (p. 570). It assumes that "inequities of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation produce and are produced by unequal power relations in society" (pp. 570-571). This study will not examine all of these but will consider one small aspect of them such as race and ethnicity. Critical researchers locate "their research within a historical 19 context," aim to examine "the complex relationship between social structure" and "human agency," and are interested "in the way individuals make sense of their own experience" (pp. 571-572). And the goal of their educational research is "social and educational change" (p. 572). Hermeneutics, and critical theory and research, as described by these researchers have helped me formulate research methods, questions, analyses, and my position as a researcher. A poststructuralist theory of language also encourages me to take this journey; it maintains that "linguistic communities are perceived to be heterogeneous arenas in which language is implicated in the struggle over meaning, access, and power" (Norton Peirce, 1990, p. 108). Norton Peirce (1990) discusses the poststructuralists' position, suggesting that for poststructuralists, meaning "is not 'owned' by the speaker/writer, by the linguistic system, or by the hearer/reader; it is a product of speaker, sign, and hearer, all of which are enmeshed in time, place and society" (p. 111). This approach to language helps me investigate the nature of language and its power which is able not only to construct boundaries, but also to embrace the possibility of constructing the border world. 1.5. Analyzing Texts through Conceptions of Translation In this study, I will examine, interpret, and analyze written texts through which I will explore pedagogical implications arising from conceptions of translation and consider educational possibilities that translation can bring into post-secondary classrooms. I will primarily examine textbooks used in college preparatory E L L (English language learning) courses,1 and first-year college and university English courses. Textbooks embody particular 1 I use the term "ELL," found in the work of Marylyn Low (1999) who resists the commonly used term, ESL, arguing that ESL "has the potential to connotate second as inferior, substandard, not first, supplementary, 20 educational goals and values to which students are exposed and by which they are influenced. In Understanding Curriculum, Pinar et al. (1995) writes that "textbooks are the beginning": It is an understatement to observe that curriculum is not simply those materials made by experts or by textbook writers; textbooks are the beginning ... .What is in question is what the reconceived field has studied: what has been made, what is made, what can be made, what might be made of human knowledge in our time, for our ends, given the great political, racial, aesthetic, and gender issues of our day? There is no devaluation of the "tradition" when we use the simple and bureaucratic word "textbooks." Tradition and textbooks are the ground against which, in honor of which, all curriculum study can be said to occur and proceed, (p. 858) An educator's role is to help students move beyond what is written in the textbooks and explore what kind of knowledge they provide, what is hidden, what is missing, and how they can reexamine their understanding of the world. Translation can help us to perceive such possibility. My conceptual analysis takes a position derived from both content and narrative analysis, in particular, feminist research. Different disciplines emphasize different elements in examining and analyzing a text: "content analysis," "discourse analysis," "archival research," "literary criticism" (Reinharz, 1992). In her Feminist Methods in Social Research, Shulamit Reinharz (1992) discusses feminist content analysis and points out that analysis of texts "has become a significant enterprise in feminist scholarship" (p. 150). She suggests that many feminist scholars use content analysis to challenge "the cultural expression, production, and perpetuation of patriarchy, ageism, and racism" (ibid.) through which gender is socially constructed. Such scholars use personal diaries, biographies, children's books, fiction, articles from magazines and newspapers, billboards, and other texts to identify underlying social norms and values. Indeed, Reinharz (1992) points out that disciplinary boundaries are fluid, and she subsidiary, subordinate," and that "the quantification of second languages and cultures . . . detracts from the richness of language and cultural complexities in which all language learners dwell" (p. 3). I support her perspective. Furthermore, for many students, English may be their third or fourth language, and thus ELL 21 emphasizes the importance of production of knowledge over rigid ideas of discipline boundaries. Such fluidity also implies that a theory of qualitative textual analysis is underdeveloped and other theories must be relied upon such as "literary criticism, linguistics, computer science, and cognitive psychology for models for assessing the quality of documents" (Manning & Cullum-Swan, 1994, p. 463). Another model found in sociology recognizes three types of text analysis—content analysis, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. Content analysis, here understood differently from the feminist researchers' sense, is "a quantitatively-oriented technique by which standardized measurements are applied to metrically defined units," and "has been unable to capture the context within which a written text has meaning" (p. 464). Discourse analysis, often used by language educational researchers as well, is the "functional analysis of discourse" which is defined as a communicative event involving either or both oral and written language in context, to "show and to interpret the relationship between . . . regularities and the meanings and purposes expressed through discourse" (Nunan, 1993, p. 118). It is often used to analyze the different types of interactions that occur in language classrooms. Narrative analysis, the third type of text analysis, takes various analytic forms perhaps emphasizing "the role of form in conveying meaning in a narrative," or, more systematically, using rules and principles to "seek to exhaust the meaning of a text" (Manning & Culllum-Swan, 1994, p. 464). In narrative analysis, it is therefore important to recognize that the researcher is also the interpreter of the text. This relationship between text and reader is significant. My reading and analyzing texts will take the poststructuralists' position that the meaning of a text is constructed less by the author's own consciousness than by the text's seems a more appropriate term than ESL. 22 place within linguistic-cultural systems, systems in which the very idea of translation plays a strong role in how meaning emerges when working across languages. Attention must be paid to the reader, as Barthes suggests. The author's being in a particular space and time—the different social, political, and narrative circumstances at particular moments in history—shapes language and text. Ashcroft (2001) writes about the significance of language in post-colonial discourse, stating that "to have a language is to have a particular kind of world," and that the "written text is a social situation" (p. 59): The binary between the 'sender' of meaning and the 'receiver' of meaning tends towards a view of meaning itself as fixed by the sender, and invokes an ostensive and static view of the meaning process. Without a view of language as transformable, we can have no proper theory of transformation, (p. 59) This is the issue of translation, in particular, post-colonial translation, challenging the power of language and questioning the possibility of conveying a different culture in "colonizer's English." The various conceptions of translation help me perceive which social situations and cultural values and beliefs are communicated in the texts, and how these particular views influence and shape students' learning. Examining the conceptions of translation reflected in texts is thus relevant. I will approach texts hermeneutically; as people and society are changing constantly, interpreting cultures within given situations and contexts is more appropriate than seeking grounded understanding within a universal framework. As I have my own sociocultural background which informs my interpretation of the world through language, the notion of intertextuality applies to how I read and interpret a text within the framework offered by my research questions; the text is "the performance by author and reader of a multitude of writings that cross and interact on the site of the text.... it exists in the continuing time of its intertextual production, which includes the texts of its future" (Heath, 1998, p. 259). As Denzin (1994) writes of qualitative social science research, "there is only 23 interpretation" (p. 500). Different paradigms and perspectives exist, and the function of each piece of writing differs, but my approach is similar to that of the post-structuralists (e.g., Denzin, 1994; Norton, 1995; Richardson, 1991) and non-modernists (e.g. Aoki, 1993). Denzin and Lincoln (1994) summarize this position and mine: There is no single interpretive truth. Interpretations are narrative, or storied, accounts. Interpretation-as-storytelling may privilege any of a number of different narrative positions. These positions refer back to the major paradigms and interpretive positions, (p. 481) Denzin (1994) discusses post-structural interpretive styles, particularly cultural studies perspectives, feminist perspectives and interpretive interactionism, and suggests that "poststructuralists celebrate uncertainty and attempt to construct texts that do not impose theoretical frameworks on the world" and "are sensitive to voices and to multiple perspectives" (p. 511). As I read books and listen to stories, I interpret and construct meanings. Certain words may invoke certain memories and emotions, which might affect my analysis. Denzin (1994) states that interpretation is an artful political process, producing "understanding that [is] shaped by genre, narrative, stylistic, personal, cultural, and paradigmatic conventions" (p. 507). The writer's gender, race, ethnicity, and class position provide him/her with a "unique self in the text, a self that claims to have some authority over the subject matter that is being interpreted" (p. 502). Richardson (1994) suggests that writing is "a method of inquiry, a way of finding [my]self and [my] topic" (p. 516) and writes about the significant role that language plays: Although we usually think about writing as a mode of "telling" about the social world, writing is not just a mopping-up activity at the end of a research project. Writing is also a way of "knowing"—a method of discovery and analysis. By writing different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable, (ibid.) Language "does not 'reflect' social reality, but produces meaning, creates social reality" (p. 24 518). This study aims to discern what social reality the language of textbooks provides: "Language is how social organization and power are defined and contested and the place where our sense of selves, our subjectivity is constructed" (ibid, emphasis original). Language is how educational social scientists inform their research and develop new knowledge and understanding, and, through language, educators gain insights into students' learning processes and effective teaching practices. My interpretation seeks not to provide solutions but to play a role akin to discovery or posing. Interpretive texts allow us to participate in their discussions and encourage us to reflect upon our perspectives and values. I would like to invite readers to interact with my research and develop dialogues with it. In this way, my interpretive research will help us construct and reconstruct meaning, and knowledge will thus be constructed collaboratively. 1.6. L o s t in T rans la t ion The post-secondary classroom today includes students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, many of whose first languages are not English. The classrooms in North America can thus be said to consist of "translators" from many cultures and languages. When they read a text, they are always at work between languages, trying to search for the meanings in English, which are socially constructed and often vertically defined—signifier and signified—within a particular frame. The problem with this work is, as Eva Hoffman (1997), born in Poland but resident in Canada from age fourteen, writes, that "the signifier has become severed from the signified" (p. 114). A word, she argues, is just a sign and does not carry a meaning. This is clear when, in her autobiographical narrative Lost in Translation, she reflects on learning English: 25 The words I learn now don't stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. "River" in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. "River" in English is cold—a word without an aura. It has no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze of connotation. It does not evoke, (p. 114) A dictionary gives her the concept of river in English, but her translation of river moves away from dictionary definitions, because her Polish "river" was conceptualized through her life in Poland. As she is unable to translate her Polish river to an English one, she has to move between languages and experiences to create her own river. Her translation of river shifts from the vertically defined one to the horizontally expanding one—without finding a space to settle. Hoffman's voice echoes with that of an E L L student in my own research (Nishizawa, 1997), who describes how English had become her language: I write a diary. I started to write it in English after I came here. I recently realized that I can feel English. When I wrote "I'm depressed," I didn't really feel I'm depressed.. .you know what I mean. But, now sometimes when I write "I'm depressed," I can get the sense of how it feels like. (p. 167) Her translation of the feeling of depression cannot be found in a dictionary, as she initially does not feel the word. Her experiences do not translate back to the English word. She moves between languages and begins to find the space in between where her feelings and words are connected. In this instance, this student is moving beyond the phase of what Pavlenko and Lantolf (1997) identify through Hoffman's voice as "loss of the frame of reference and the link between the signifier and the signified" (p. 1). Gerda Lerner (2003) shares a similar experience moving from one language to another. Her experience helps us realize how significant a role translation plays in E L L students' lives. Lerner came to the United States from Austria in 1939 when she was eighteen, fleeing from anti-Semitic violence. After undergoing obstacles many immigrants experience, she became a prominent scholar and university professor. She recalls thinking that "losing one's mother 26 tongue is inconceivable" (p. 275). Yet, language "is not a dead body of knowledge; language changes year by year, minute by minute; it lives and grows" (ibid.). Like Hoffman, she lost her native German language in order to claim her life in a world of English. Translation helped her make that possible, as she has "worked for years on translations and lived for decades in translation" (p. 274). She writes that "German, like most European languages which developed through centuries of feudalism, has a rich variety of dialect and intonations, which mark not only region but also class. British English of the upper classes and the cockney speech of the lower London classes retain that function, but English in America reflects region more than class," (p. 276) which made it difficult for her to translate what she heard: "I usually could not catch the exact meaning without doing the translation... .1 had to guess at the whole meaning. For a person like me, who is committed to precise definition and precise expression, this was a form of torture" (ibid.). Both Hoffman and Lerner suggest that when E L L students study English, they have to translate while searching for meaning. But this struggle is often futile since there is no exact word in their "mother tongue" that conveys the same meaning. Even when a dictionary gives meanings of the word, the word does not come to E L L students, because of their different experiences and the norms and attitudes specific to their cultures. The English word "hug," for example, does not exactly exist in Japanese. Although Japanese people hug babies and children, they do not usually hug each other in the way that North Americans or Europeans do. Even after eleven years living in Canada, I still do not hug my Japanese friends, my sister, or my parents, because that is not the way I feel I can express my love. I have other ways to communicate my feelings for them. When I look in my English-Japanese dictionary, it tells me the meaning of hug: an embrace, tight squeeze. These are actions, but a dictionary cannot explain the emotions and feelings attached to the word or evoked by the word. A Japanese 27 "embrace" is a much more private gesture. This is one reason that E L L teachers often tell students not to translate. But students have to do so in the process of learning English and encounter difficulty due to socially-constructed meanings. Lerner's experience further suggests how language is politically situated in society. After World War II began, Lerner felt that her native language of German was something to be ashamed of, and her rejection of German became strong: "I no longer wanted to speak German; I was repelled by the sound of it; for me as for other Americans it had become the language of the enemy" (p. 277). Acquiring English was exciting and made "a qualitative difference in the way I lived" (ibid.). What she speaks about is the power that language holds, reflecting social and political circumstances. Different languages are not equal, as they reflect the divisions of nation and race. People are judged by what language they speak, which in turn shapes their self-perception and the perception others hold of them. Lerner's English is marked by her accent, so she was never completely included in an English-speaking frame. She also had to accept mispronunciation of her German name, saying of the mispronunciation, "I came to use it myself and have done so for fifty years" (p. 279). Although her ethnicity is marked by language, the very identification of herself—her name—cannot be truly identified. By accepting a mispronunciation as her name, she is like many E L L students who change their names in English, surrendering their identities to the authority of English. They are always in a space of translation. What helped Lerner transcend her negative feelings towards her German self, it seems, was returning to her German ties, and realizing an in-between space created by translation. Lerner gave up speaking, writing, thinking, and feeling in German. She spent nearly twelve years writing in English a semi-autobiographical novel, which was ironically first published with success not in English but in Austria in a German translation. This experience made her 28 recognize how translation reunites people once disconnected by the war. Her reunion with her younger sister also reminded her of her roots. They were separated through emigration, and her sister went to Switzerland, England, and Israel. First they communicated only through English, as her sister speaks Hebrew at home. What reunited them was music. Their childhood memories and familiar yet forgotten songs brought them back together in the German language. They sang in German with their memories together and began to share in German their lives since separation. But their German was no longer the same German they spoke and sang when they were little. Their language was a language created through translating German, English, and Hebrew. This is the language which now speaks their lives. Although few E L L students will become professional writers like Lerner or Hoffman, Lerner's and Hoffman's struggles between German or Polish and English overlap with students' experiences of drifting between frames of languages. Hoffman experiences the impossibility of translating one language to another. Lerner first abandons German.to become an "English writer," but translating languages has made her realize where she likes to dwell. Hoffman's river in English rests in a space of river/not river. Similarly, Lerner writes English which is created by a space intersecting German and English and perhaps her sister's Hebrew. Where is this space? This is an important issue in translation as well as in education. Thus, while this study will explore conceptions of translation, it will also help educators and students comprehend the process of students' learning experiences, which may lead them to approach teaching and learning differently. Just as Lerner abandons German in order to establish her identity as a speaker of English, other language learners construct/reconstruct their identities, an identity that Norton (2000) defines as "how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space and how the person understands the 29 possibilities of the future" (p. 5). This identity reconstruction requires decisions. Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) suggest that either by necessity or by choice "adult bilingualism requires agency and intentionality (similar to crossing class lines)" (p. 174): It is through intentional social interactions with members of the other culture, through continuous attempts to construct new meanings through new discourses, that one becomes an equal participant in new discursive spaces, but apparently not without a cost, (ibid.) Lerner concurs: "I was young enough to start anew. . . . But there is a cost to it, greater than I ever wanted to admit to myself (p. 275). Lerner has recovered part of what she lost. But many E L L students' losses may never be recovered unless they become aware of what they have lost and gained and why. If they have control over their decision-making processes, their losses may be minimized. This study thus employs translation as a lens through which to examine education, demonstrating how the classroom has been divided by language, and how it can be re/formed through the active embrace of the different races, nations, and cultures that constitute it. Translation tends to be narrowly conceived as a primarily linguistic activity,2 whereas a hermeneutic approach addresses the meaning of language as sociocultural/political production. Viewed hermeneutically, translation becomes a process of .aligning, though imperfectly, different worlds constructed by different languages. This thesis argues that linguistic approaches to translation, to English translation in particular, may have needlessly exacerbated the sense of boundaries between races, nations, and cultures, while those ideas of translation derived from hermeneutics offer opportunities for educators and students to reduce barriers to understanding self and other, and to create a space in which they can redefine the meaning of language in a way that articulates the lived experience of all students. 2 Linguistics here means the scientific study of language and its structure, distinct from sociolinguistics 30 1.7. Mapping the Journey of Inquiry In this Chapter, I described how my journey has begun, leading me to cross the Pacific Ocean and enabling me to see the world through translation. As a Japanese woman, immigrant, student, and teacher, I have attempted to locate barriers and challenges that Canadian educators and students are exposed to and to discuss how the idea of translation can help dismantle barriers. Because I have moved from Japan to Canada, and because I have chosen to speak English, I am able to see a space between languages and cultures, a space that is now a significant site to be examined. I believe that the idea of translation helps me find ways to make sense of this space I am in. Although I speak english with a Japanese accent and make many errors, my english is the very language that has made it possible for me to translate and transform my perspectives of myself and others and to explore possibilities in socioculturally diverse classroom spaces. In Chapter Two, various conceptions of translation are analyzed. The history of translation, as George Steiner (1998) writes, goes back to Cicero and Horace, but this study focuses on the last four decades, since translation studies only became an academic discipline in the 1970s. The study mainly explores a hermeneutic approach to language use, rather than viewing language as the instrumental communication of objective information, in which "meanings are either based on reference to an empirical reality or derived from a context that is primarily linguistic" (Venuti, 2000, p. 6). I will show how such conventional approaches to translation often create asymmetrical power relations and define national identities as though they were static.3 Hermeneutic conceptions of translation, in contrast, perceive language as which is the study of language in use (Mitchell & Myles, 1998). 3 Ruth Evans (2000) writes that, conventionally, "translated texts are believed to provide a transparent window onto the cultures they represent and to facilitate cross-cultural understanding" (p. 153). A post-colonial approach to translation argues against such a view by examining "the role of translated texts in 31 socially and historically constructed, thereby helping us explore a space in between languages and cultures. In Chapter Three, the study discusses translations between Japanese and English as examples and explores the impact of different conceptions of translation. Translation has been essential for Japan and Japanese people to learn about and emulate the world, both East and West, and Japanese scholars have examined the roles of translation for decades. However, their works have few connections to translation studies in the West, and their ideas have hardly been discussed outside of Japan. Translations between English and Japanese illustrate how the practice of translation has contributed to the production of a particular kind of knowledge about self and other. The study can highlight challenges bridging languages and cultures, and power relationships constructing particular images and stereotypes as national identities. In Chapter Four, the inquiry narrows to post-secondary education. In this chapter, the study examines and interprets the conceptions of translation reflected in textbooks and literature for E L L students. I will discuss conceptions of translation operating in the classroom through textbooks and/or literature and what these mean for learning. Since the main objectives of language learning are to acquire linguistic and pragmatic competence, and to help students adapt to a new social environment, textbooks may reinforce the world view through an Anglo-American perspective, which in turn may locate E L L students on the periphery as Other. Hermeneutic conceptions help us re-examine textbooks and explore how they can be used to encourage students to reflect upon their own experiences and feel they are equal imposing hegemonic cultural values and masking colonial violence" (ibid.). Correspondingly, some scholars in English language education have also examined "the accelerating global spread of English, and the urgent socio-economic, ideological and ecological issues raised as a consequence of this spread (Seidlhofer, 2003, p. 7). The issues of language varieties and standard language (e.g., Quirk, 1990) and of English as a tool of linguistic and cultural domination (e.g., Phillipson, 1992) have remained controversial in applied linguistics and language education (Seidlhofer, 2003). 32 participants in the society. In Chapter Five, the study examines and interprets the conceptions of translation reflected in anthologies and literature for students of first-year English literature courses. As translation can bridge cultures, applying hermeneutic conceptions of translation to literature may help students develop awareness of how norms and values are shaped by the historically-and socioculturally-constructed frames, which may lead students to perceive their identities as shifting and emerging through interaction with others. Literature provides students with an effective learning environment, as they encounter many characters' lives in different frames and times. Chapter Six concludes the study by offering possibilities for culturally diverse post-secondary classrooms today. I will discuss the pedagogical and research implications of the study as well as suggestions for future research. I will show how hermeneutic conceptions of translation are closely related to educational agendas and curricular issues today, and how they help us understand the educational experience of learning across languages. The study may be able to help students realize the cultural and linguistic spaces in which they dwell, and in which they transform their identity as they interact with each other. This is just the beginning of my new journey. I have found a space to dwell, but now I face a new challenge through which I need to find ways to help other educators and students to come out from their own frames and encourage them to dwell in a shared space where all worlds, their own included, are "foreign land." 33 Chapter Two Path of Inquiry One should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised and into which a discourse on translation is translated. (Derrida, 1985, p. 166) ILL Translation studies An early recorded account suggesting the need for translation is the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9), when we are told that the Lord scattered different languages abroad over the face of all the earth. But translation studies have been an academic discipline only since the 1970s, beginning with works of James Holmes (1972) and George Steiner (1975). The label "Translation Studies" was first introduced by Andre Lefevere in 1978, who suggested that this discipline is concerned with issues raised by the production and description of translation (Bassnette, 1991). Before that, the examination of the processes of translation was not perceived to be a significant field of study. As Susan Bassnett (1991) writes in her Translation Studies, translation "has rarely been studied for its own sake" (p. 1) and has been "perceived as a secondary activity, as a 'mechanical' rather than a 'creative' process, within the competence of anyone with a basic grounding in a language other than their own" (p. 2). The translated text was considered to be inferior to the original text. In recent decades, however, translation studies have been developed, and multiple theories have emerged, akin to the proliferation of literary theories such as formalism and structuralism, concentrating on the nature of language and its structures in contrast with reader-oriented theories emphasizing readers' experience and interpretation. Much of the work is still based on formal linguistics and, as English professor and translator, Lawrence Venuti (2000) suggests, has tended to "assume a scientific or value-free treatment of language," (p. 4) 34 such as exploring the relationship between source language and target language. Polysystem theory, initiated by Itamar Evan-Zohar from Tel Aviv, however, draws attention to the fact that translation was "ignored by historians of culture" (Bassnett, 1993, p. 141) and offers a systematic assessment of such questions as "why do some cultures translate more and some less?"; "[w]hat kinds of texts get translated" (p. 142).4 In the 1980s and the 1990s, post-structuralists have observed problems inherent in translation's political power, and thus translation has come to be seen as an issue of political struggle. Many women writers have also begun to discuss translation from feminist perspectives which challenge "the old binary notion of translation" and focus "on the interactive space between [original and translated] texts" (Bassnett, 1993, p. 156). In this chapter, I will analyze several conceptions of translation developed during the last four decades. I will focus on "interlingual translation," the term introduced by Roman Jakobson's often-cited essay (2000) "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation." Jakobson takes a semiotic approach to translation, stating that "the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further alternative sign" (p. 114). He categorizes translation into "three ways of interpreting a verbal sign" (ibid.)—intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation. Interlingual translation, my concern here, is "an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language," (ibid.) the process by which the source language (SL) is translated into the target language (TL). In this process of transfer, Jacobson argues that "there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units, while messages may serve as adequate interpretations of alien code-units or messages," stating that equivalence "in difference is the 4 Lawrence Venuti (1998) points out that translation patterns indicate the "overwhelming domination of English-language cultures" (p. 160). For example, the United States in 1994 published 51,863 books of which 2.74 percent were translations. Among these 1,484 translated books, 374 books were from French originals, followed by 362 from German, Chinese at 55, and Arabic at 17, showing the relatively small 35 cardinal problem of language and the pivotal concern of linguistics" (ibid.). Equivalence relates to accuracy or correctness. Equivalence is one of the key concepts pertaining to the development of translation theories (Venuti, 2000), though Jakobson regards it as irrelevant and unattainable. Other key concepts are autonomy which relates to "the textual features and operations or strategies that distinguish it from the foreign text and from texts initially written in the translating language," (Venuti, 2000, p. 5) and function, which suggests "the potentiality of the translated text to release diverse effects" (ibid.) including the communication of information, the production of a response, and issues related to "cultural, economic, and political agendas" (ibid). Theories of interlingual translation, Venuti (2000) suggests, always rest "on particular assumptions about language use," (p. 5) and those assumptions can be divided into two categories: instrumental and hermeneutic: An instrumental concept of language leads to translation theories that privilege the communication of objective information and formulate typologies of equivalence, minimizing and sometimes excluding altogether any question of function beyond communication. A hermeneutic concept of language leads to translation theories that privilege the interpretation of creative values and therefore describe the target-language inscription in the foreign text, often explaining it on the basis of social functions and effects, (p. 6) This study places emphasis on the latter—a hermeneutic conception of language—which I believe is essential in education. In particular, concerning linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms, language involves multiple perspectives through which delivering "objective" information seems impossible. As Jacobson suggests, all types of translation involve interpretation; we communicate with each other through interpreting, constantly searching for the meaning of what we hear or read. Interpretation can vary among people who have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This study first explores several conceptions among interest of publishers in such languages. 3 6 hermeneutic approaches to translation, and second, explores a sociocultural approach to translation in which "translation" is interpreted not just literally but as an idea, in order to examine how language performs when moving from one culture to another. (In subsequent chapters, the broader term "hermeneutic conceptions of translation" will be used to embrace both these approaches.) Analyzing the conceptions of translation hermeneutically shows us the dangers inherent in traditional approaches to translation which risk creating asymmetrical power relations and defining national identities as though they were fixed. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation, on the other hand, open up a space in which the meaning of language can be both contested and deconstructed. This opening allows educators and students to reexamine their knowledge and perceptions of the world and the Other.5 II.2. He rmeneu t i c App roaches Although the study focuses on the last four decades, I would like to begin this section with an earlier study in hermeneutics. In the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, translation theory was "rooted in German literary and philosophical traditions, in Romanticism, hermeneutics, and existential phenomenology," (Venuti, 2000, p. 11) which helped to develop the idea of autonomy of translation, considering the translated work as independent from the original text. Among works of theorists and practitioners, Walter Benjamin's 1923 essay, The Task of the Translator has influenced many scholars in its hermeneutic approach to translation 5 Lacan distinguished "the other" and "the Other." The other (small "o") "resembles the self which the child discovers when it looks in the mirror and becomes aware of itself as a separate being," being used to define "the identity of the subject" or "the colonized others who are marginalized by imperial discourse" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1999, p. 170). On the other hand, "the Other (capital "0")" is called "grande-autre" in "whose gaze the subject gains identity," used to discuss the "subjectivity of the colonized... continually located in the gaze of the imperial other" (ibid., pp. 170-171). • 37 studies. Hermeneutics originates with Hermes, "the messenger god of the Greeks, and suggests a multiplicity of meanings" (Mueller-Vollmer, 2000, p. 1); Hermes had to understand and interpret the gods' messages and translate their intentions to mortals. The term is related to the Greek word hermeneuein, meaning to understand (Robinson, 2001). Hermeneutics derived from Friedrich Schleiermacher and has been developed by followers such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Friedrich Schleiermacher writes that hermeneutics is the art of understanding. He suggests that psychological interpretation and grammatical interpretation are equally important, and that the "successful practice of the art depends on the talent for language and the talent for knowledge of individual people" (cited by Bowie, 1998, p. 11): By the former we do not mean the ease of learning foreign languages, the difference between mother tongue and foreign tongue does not matter for the moment,—but rather the living awareness of language, the sense of analogy and difference, etc. (ibid.) In "On the Different Methods of Translating," Schleiermacher (1992) writes about the relationship among author, translator, and reader, saying there are two paths for a translator who wants to bring the author and the reader together: "Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader" (p. 42). He prefers the former as he is concerned with the cultural context of the original texts, though the latter is a common practice.6 Nineteenth-century theorists like Schleiermacher were already concerned about cultural and social functions of language, and accepted the creative nature of translation. 6 This issue of domesticating or foreignizing strategies is discussed in the later section of this Chapter about 38 Bowie (1998) suggests that hermeneutics maintains a tension between "the idea that the interpreting subject should surrender to the transformative power of the text and the idea that the meaning of a text can only emerge via the creative initiatives of its interpreters," (p. 241) and this tension has been seen as "the heart of philosophy" (ibid.). Sedgwick (1999) points out that the discussion of the Other can be linked to interpretation, which is the product of reconstructing the interpreter's preconceptions, and that interpretation is "an unlimited, open-ended process" (p. 167). Meaning is thus not fixed but fluid, negotiated. One hundred years later, Gadamer (1999) writes that language is the medium of hermeneutic experience, and considers translation as interpretation: The translator must translate the meaning to be understood into the context in which the other speaker lives. . . . the meaning must be preserved, but since it must be understood within a new language world, it must establish its validity within it in a new way. Thus every translation is at the same time an interpretation . . . . the translation is the culmination of the interpretation that the translator has made of the words given him. (p. 384) He also embraces the connection to "the other world": "the other world we encounter is not only foreign but is also related to us. It has not only its own truth in itself but also its own truth for us" (p. 442, italics original). Bowie (1998) writes that the "power of Gadamer's position lies in its valorization of the open encounter with the 'Other,' whether simply as other people, great art, or other cultures, which is able to transform the subject who engages with that other" (P- 243). Linked to Schleiermacher's insight into the translation process, Walter Benjamin maintains the autonomy of translation, assuming the translated text's status as independent from the original. This is discussed in his work The Task of the Translator in 1923, first written as the preface to his translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens. He suggests that post-colonial translation. 3 9 translation creates an in-between space at the boundaries between languages and cultures. His essay has influenced the works of many thinkers and critics interested in the nature of translation. His concern is with the afterlife of translation: A translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life. The idea of afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity. (Benjamin, 1968, p. 71) Benjamin (1968) argues that languages "are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express" (p. 72). He takes an example of the German word, brot, and French word, pain, to say that these words " 'intend' the same object (bread), but the modes of this intention are not the same" (p. 74). These words are therefore not interchangeable; however, they mean the same thing as they refer to the same object: "Al l suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole—an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language" (Benjamin, 1968, p. 74). Pure language is hidden for Benjamin, and the task of the translator is not to restore or preserve the original but to reach out to pure language; "it is translation which catches fire on the eternal life of the works and the perpetual renewal of language" (ibid.). Pure language thus departs from current standard usage of language, "reviving Schleiermacher's notion of foreignizing translation, wherein the reader of translated text is brought as close as possible to the foreign one through close renderings that transform the translating language" (Venuti, 200, p. 12). The language emerged through translation is neither one nor the other, but exists in an in-between space created by the connection between languages. Benjamin's work has influenced post-structuralist thinkers such as Derrida (1985), 40 Paul de Man (1986),7 and later the post-colonial translation theorist and critic, Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) who states that "Benjamin's notion of historicity may help us to deconstruct the totality of history that Derrida sees as a founding metaphor of logocentrism" (p. 162). Peter Bush (2001) suggests that "the impurity of his pure language becomes part of a materialist reading of language and a championing of the hybridity of culture" (p. 196). Works rooted in Benjamin and developed by post-structural and post-colonial thinkers thus help educators perceive the possibility that a new space can be created by students of diverse language and cultural backgrounds. n.2.1 Hermeneutic Motion The thinkers discussed above have led others in the last four decades to perceive that translation studies have theoretical links to philosophical investigations of language and intercultural studies (Gentzler, 2001). In his 1975 work, After Babel, George Steiner, following Benjamin's work, has made a significant contribution to translation studies, offering a hermeneutic approach to language. His conception of translation is significant as it indicates the nature of language and implies the potential power relationship between SL and TL. Benjamin distinguishes between words as a reference to a concrete object and words as having potential within themselves, independent of user and object and belonging to language which the translator seeks to grasp, leading Steiner to discuss the nature of language. Steiner (1998) writes that the "use of language is the use of a system of rules. These rules must be consistent if the propositions which they inform are to have meaning" (p. 170). Steiner argues that 7 In referring to Benjamin's pure language, Paul de Man (1986) writes: "this movement of the original is a wandering, an errance, a kind of permanent exile if you wish, but it is not really an exile, for there is no homeland, nothing from which it has been exiled. Least of all is there something like... a pure language (p. 92). 41 language is not "instrumental in communicating meaning but constitutive in reconstructing it," and "it is the individualistic aspects of language, 'the privacies of individual usage,' that resist interpretation and escape the universalizing concepts of linguistics" (Venuti, 2000, p. 124). For him, it is the use of language which constructs the meaning. Steiner's perception of language is articulated by Wittgenstein. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein (1958) is concerned with the nature of language and makes a claim which helps us understand the limits of language and its potential power. He takes an example of language use between a builder and an assistant to describe the term "language-game" and suggests that this language-game consists of "language and the action into which it is woven" (p. 5e); thus, "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life" (p. 8e). His concerns with language help us realize that reality is not described by language, but language can construct "reality." Ashcroft (2001) writes that worlds "exist by means of languages, their horizons extending as far as the processes of neologism, innovation, tropes and imagination will allow the horizons of the language itself to be extended" (p. 70). In a way, we cannot live in a world outside of language, yet language may enable us to extend our world. Steiner approaches translation from the concept of "hermeneutic motion," "the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning" (1998, p. 312) to describe four stages through translation. First there is "initiative trust," that "something . . . to be understood" (p. 312), which is "at once most hazardous and most pronounced where the translator aims to convey meaning between remote languages and cultures" (p. 371) such as Japanese in the context of English translation. The second movement is "aggression" where the translator is "incursive and extractive" (p. 312). Steiner refers to Heidegger's notion of understanding as "an act, on the access, inherently appropriative and therefore violent" (ibid.). This aggression or penetration seems to suggest the imperialistic nature of translation. The third movement is 42 "incorporation" or embodiment; he notes though that while "all decipherment is aggressive and, at one level, destructive, there are differences in the motive of appropriation and in the context of'the bringing back'" (p. 315). However, this is incomplete; "having caused disequilibrium.. the hermeneutic act must compensate" (p. 316) in order to restore balance, which is the final stage, "restitution": The original text gains from the orders of diverse relationship and distance established between itself and the translations. The reciprocity is dialectic: new 'formats' of significance are initiated by distance and by contiguity, (p. 317) In this work, Steiner not only delineates the process of translation but also suggests how power relations between languages may perform. In particular, if the translator ends his/her work at the second or third movement, source culture can be aggressively appropriated. English translation of other languages may likely end here, pointing to the same danger that educators face when they "translate" the student's language based on their own sociocultural framework. Steiner's final stage, restitution, can, however, bring both distance and contiguity into equilibrium, which suggests that the restitution movement can reach the "contact zone" discussed by Mary Louise Pratt (1991). In her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalion, Pratt perceives the space between colonizer and colonized as significant. She uses the term "contact zone" to "refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict" (p. 6). Through this contact zone, colonized people's "traditional lifeways" (p. 54) have been disrupted, and "the violence and destruction" (p. 55) have been glimpsed: "Contact zone" is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. By using the term "contact," I aim to foreground the 43 interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A "contact" perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and "travelees," not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. (P- 6) Translation may be a "contact zone" where languages and cultures interact.8 Steiner's hermeneutic motion illustrates the path of such interaction. Applying this contact zone notion to translation in Quebec, Sherry Simon (1999) writes: We "find that Western society as a whole has turned into an immense contact zone, where intercultural relations contribute to the internal life of all national cultures" (p. 59). These notions help to analyze the phenomenon of translation, in particular, the translations between English and "remote" languages, as Steiner describes. Steiner's work remains important, since "by exploring the geopolitical, ideological, and social-psychological aspects of translation," he has helped "recent studies of translation as imperialism" (Robinson, 1997, p. 99).9 This sociopolitical development of translation will be discussed in later sections. n.2.2. A Post-structuralist and Deconstructionist Approach Both Benjamin and Steiner view translation as an independent form of writing. This "relative autonomy" has become the common theoretical assumption of those who perceive translation as "enacting its own processes of signification which answer to different linguistic Pratt (1991) writes in "Arts of the Contact Zone" that the "idea of the contact zone is intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that underlie much of the thinking about language, communication, and culture that gets done in the academy" (p. 179). 9 In contrast to Steiner, some feminist scholars, such as Nicole Brossard and Kathy Mezei, reject writer-oriented or reader-oriented criticism. They perceive the translator as both reader and writer: "I write 44 and cultural contexts" (Venuti, 2000, p. 215). More importantly, the movement of post-structuralism and its impact on psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism have made "theorists more aware of the hierarchies and exclusions in language use and thereby point to the ideological effects of translation, to the economic and political interests served by its representations of foreign texts" (p. 219). Bowie (1998) suggests that the development of hermeneutics has led post-structuralism to consider itself as "renouncing hermeneutics' metaphysical goal of finding the text's original meaning" (p. 241). Since structuralists see "the world as having no absolute existence at all but as being entirely constructed by the text," they would not allow non-textual experience of the world, nor potentially, for any world outside the text" (Ashcroft, 2001, p. 64). Ashcroft asserts that "the text is crucial in the way we 'have' a world, but the world does exist, and the worldiness is constructed within the text" (ibid.). This is the time when a deconstruction and post-colonial reflection upon translation emerges, challenging classical Western philosophical notions of reality and knowledge to say that reality and knowledge are productions of certain discourses. These movements challenge, as well as deconstruct, fundamental notions of translation.10 The meaning of a word defined in a dictionary is established through how language has been used in the past: "the structure of a language, its system of norms and regularities, is a product of events, the result of prior speech acts" (Culler, 1982, p. 95): The possibility of meaning something by an utterance is already inscribed in the structure of the language. The structures themselves are always products, but however far back we try to push, even when we try to imagine the "birth" of language and describe an originary event that might have produced the first structure, we discover that we must assume prior organization, prior differentiation. (Culler, 1982, pp. 95-96) my reading and the reading has rewritten my writing" (Bassnett, 1993, p. 156). 1 0 I use the term "deconstruction" discussed in Edwin Gentzler (2001). Gentzler writes that while "certain practitioners distance themselves from the term 'deconstruction' in favor of 'affirmative productivity' (Vance, 1985: 135-6), for the sake of clarity I will use the term deconstruction" (p. 145). 45 This ambiguity of meaning is reflected in readings, interpretations, and translations, and discussed in Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of translation in his Des Tours de Babel (1985). He "translates" Benjamin's Task of the Translator and complements his text "with regard to some larger whole, some wider context, some purer language" (Graham, 1985, p. 26). As the title suggests, he begins with questioning "Babel," saying that the '"tower of Babel' does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues"11 but "exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics" (p. 165). Babel represents "not only the multiplicity of languages but also the impossibility of a certain construction or completion due to something like a formal l i m i t . . . . of the word, for Babel is precisely the confusion of meaning and reference" (Graham, 1985, p. 27). Derrida's theoretical point, Gentzler (2001) writes, is that "there is no pure meaning, no thing to be presented behind language, nothing (in an absolute sense) to be represented," and accordingly translation is seen as "a process constantly in operation in single languages" (p. 167, emphasis in original). Meaning is never present as it is differential and deferred: "differance" "designates both a 'passive' difference already in place as the condition of signification and an act of differing which produces differences" (Culler, 1982, p. 97). Octavio Paz (1999) sees translation from the perspective of Derrida's deconstruction as a chain of signification: On the one hand, the world is presented to us as a collection of similarities; on the other, as a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely original 1 1 The translator of this text notes that "tongue" is used mostly to translate the French "langue," and the singular language is used to translate "langage." In English, a single word, "language," covers both French "langue" and "langage." 46 because language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation—first from the nonverbal world, and then, because such sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase, (p. 154). His view suggests that translation is not a marginal or subordinate activity but a primary one, and that it is the only possibility. He further contends that literal translation is not translation; rather, it is "a mechanism, a string of words that helps us read the text in its original language" (ibid.). Thus the "original text never reappears in the new language.. .yet it is ever present because of the translation" (p. 155). Niranjana (1992) also suggests that Derrida's essay delineates the colonial use of translation, and that the work of Benjamin has become important to post-structuralists. Deconstructionists "go so far as to suggest that perhaps the translated text writes us (emphasis in original) and not we the translated text," (Gentzler, 2001, p. 146) thus undermining the authorship and authority of the original: While not offering a specific "translation theory" on its own, deconstruction.. .does "use" translation often both to raise questions regarding the nature of language and "being-in-language" as well as to suggest that in the process of translating texts, one can come as close as is possible to that elusive notion or experience of differance, which "underlies" their approach, (ibid.) Deconstruction can be seen as a reading strategy that resists Western universalist discourses by refusing to accept the authority of the original. Foucault is also influential as he challenges such discourses. In his essay "What Is an Author?" in Language, Counter-memory, Practice (1977), he addresses authorship and deconstructs traditional notions of original authorship, of original texts, and of translation equivalence. He discusses the author as "the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or statements, lying at the origins of their significance, as the seat of their coherence" (Foucault, 1977, p. 14). He thus argues that the author is a function of discourse; "the function of an 47 author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society" (Foucault, 1977, p. 124). Gentzler (2001) suggests that "Foucault prefers not to think of the author as an actual individual, but as a series of subjective positions, determined not by any single harmony of effects, but by gaps, discontinuities, and breakages," (p. 150) and Foucault's conception of "the Modern versus the Classical Age" (p. 150) articulates the movement of translation theories. He helps us challenge the notion that translation is inferior to the original. The relationship between the original and translation, however, has been established through the notion that an author is the owner, as Foucault suggests, ignoring the role of a translator. For Foucault, the author is the ideological figure, allowing readers to believe that the meaning of language is clearly defined and understood. Asserting the death of the author suggests that language does not posit a simple ultimate meaning, helping educators to see the opening of a space where multiple meanings can be negotiated and shared by students. Expanding his critique of language, in his The Order of Things, Foucault (1994) argues that in the Classical period "to know nature is, in fact, to build upon the basis of language a true language, one that will reveal that conditions in which all language is possible and the limits within which it can have a domain validity" (p. 161); "language was a form of knowing and knowing was automatically discourse . . . . it was only by the medium of language that the things of the world could be known" (p. 296). Language, however, has since the end of the eighteenth century become "one object of knowledge among others, on the same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the history of events and men" (ibid.). As the author becomes a function of discourse, "dissolving into the text writing itself," (Gentzler, 2001, p. 152) the question becomes where the discourse of the text emerges. For Foucault, a discourse is a socially-constructed system of statements within which the world is understood, and it 48 determines the relationships among people. For translation studies, Foucault's work raises the question of the originality of the initial text, and thus "other determining factors emerge with regard to what can and cannot be thought within a particular discourse" (Gentzler, 2001, p. 153). The ideas developed by deconstructionists such as Derrida and post-structuralists such as Foucault make "interpretation a process of free association in which anything goes, though it does concentrate on conceptual and figural implications rather than on authorical intentions" (Culler, 1982, p. 110). DI.2.3. Metonymy Within semiotics, the conception of metonymy is derived from linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Jakobson (1990) in On Language establishes the two structural relations in code and message—similarity (equivalence) and contiguity (temporal and spatial neighborhood)—and the corresponding tropes of metaphor (similarity) and metonymy (contiguity). Discussing the tension between the two, he suggests that they are the fundamental functions of language in operation. Jakobson argues that poetry is metaphorical while prose is metonymic. The conception of metonymy is not defined within the work of translation; however, it provides us with a valuable perspective for translating languages. Together with metaphor, it can delineate how language defines a space and how a space allows language to perform. Octavio Paz (1992) sees Jakobson's notion in translation, saying that all translation "utilizes the two modes of expression to which.. .all literary procedures are reduced: metonym and metaphor" (pp. 154-155): The original text never reappears in the new language (this would be impossible), yet 49 it is ever present because the translation, without saying it, expresses it constantly, or else converts it into a verbal object that, although different, reproduces it: metonym or metaphor. Both, unlike explicative translations and paraphrase, are rigorous forms that are in no way inconsistent with accuracy. The metonym is an indirect description, and the metaphor a verbal equation, (ibid., p. 155) The notion of metonymy can be found long before Jakobson in relation to translation, when, in 1813, Schleiermacher wrote a treatise, later published and translated as "On the Different Methods of Translation." Schleiermacher (1992) writes that the activity of translating is different from merely interpreting due to a translator's ambiguous relationship to language. In order to help readers to comprehend "the spirit of the language that was native to the writer" and to see "his peculiar way of thinking and feeling," the translator can offer only "his language" (p. 39). Schleiermacher points out that there are two approaches—paraphrase and imitation—that a translator might take; neither in his opinion can be regarded as good translation. However, paraphrase and imitation can be linked with Jakobson's metaphor and metonymy: Paraphrase seeks to overcome the irrationality of languages . . . . labors its way through an accumulation of loosely defined details, vacillating between a cumbersome "too much" and a tormenting "too little." In this way it can perhaps render the content with limited precision, but it completely abandons the impression made by the original... .Imitation, on the other hand, submits to the irrationality of languages. It concedes that no replica of a verbal work of art can be produced in another language that would correspond exactly in its individual parts to the individual parts of the original... .A work of this kind, taking into account the difference of language, morals and education, is supposed to be, as much as possible the same thing for its readers as the original was for its own readers; by trying to maintain this sameness of reaction, one sacrifices the identity of the work, (pp. 40-41) Paraphrase, like metaphor, is a vertical space within which the translated work conveys "limited precision" but "completely abandons" the spirit of the original. Imitation, like metonymy, is a horizontal space which provides an impression similar to the original but loses "the identity of the work" (ibid., p. 41). Although he did not explore the connection of the two, 5 0 he suggests that translation involves both vertical and horizontal movements between languages. The intersecting two movements, in other words, the relationship between metaphor and metonymy, is conceptualized by Lacan, following the work of Jakobson: Lacan is in fact attempting to deal with specific linguistic concepts employed by Saussure and other linguists, the "vertical" paradigmatic mode of language and the "linear" (horizontal) syntagmatic mode, which is another way of stating the opposition of synchrony ("the axis of simultaneities") to diachrony ("the axis of successivities"). (Wilden, 1981, p. 247). Through the interaction of metaphor (condensation, similarity, the paradigmatic) and metonymy (displacement, contiguity, the paradigmatic), signification or meaning is created: Metonymy represents the connection of "word to word" (mot a mot) in the signifying chain, or the combination of signifier to signifier (S... S'), and represents the subject's desire: metaphor—the substitution of "one word for another one" in which the first signifier is occulted and falls to the level of the signified while retaining its metonymic connection with the rest of the chain—represents the symptomatic passage across the bar of the Lacanian algorithm (s/s'). (Wilden, 1981, p. 113) Although this conception has not been discussed in translation studies, it helps to locate language in vertical (metaphor) and horizontal (metonymy) ways, indicating the process of translation and framing. Vertical translation creates a frame around language, whereas horizontal translation allows a space to expand, and the intersection of the two provides us with possibilities for shared space. In this intersection of metaphor and metonymy, identified as "Metonymy" with a capital " M , " Ted Aoki (1999) encourages educators and students to dwell: It is in this space of between that our teachers.. dwell, likely finding it a space of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty but simultaneously a vibrant site. It looks like a simple oppositional binary space, but it is not. It is a space of doubling;, where we slip into the language of "both this and that, but neither this nor that." (p. 181) Derrida's Aporias (1993) unfolds such language of "both this and that, but neither this nor that"—experiences of the borderworld: "the nonpassage, the impasse or aporia, stems from the fact that there is no limit. There is not yet or there is no longer a border to cross, no opposition 51 between two sides... .There is no longer a home [chez soi] and a not-home [chez I'autre]" (p. 20). Metonymy for Lacan is a displacement from signifier to signifier, which is the necessary condition for metaphor. Displacement through language is the translator's struggle. This struggle can be found in E L L students who lose their ways in a horizontal space, searching for meaning in English while teachers and NES students dwell in a vertical space, framed by English. Roland Barthes in his Mythologies discusses the role that metonymy can play. Barthes (2000) states that "myth is a language" (p. 11): in semiology, myths are conceived as sign systems, a relationship between signifier and signified through which cultural values and beliefs are defined. He writes about a semiological chain through three dimensional patterns—the signifier, the signified, and the sign, using the example of a sentence written in the Latin textbook, simply meaning "because my name is lion," which signifies "something else": I am faced with a particular, greater, semiological system, since it is co-existensive with the language: there is, indeed, a signifier, but this signifier is itself formed by a sum of signs, it is in itself a first semiological system (my name is lion). Thereafter, the formal pattern is correctly unfolded: there is a signified (I am a grammatical example) and there is a global signification which is none other than the correlation of the signifier and the signified; for neither the naming of the lion nor the grammatical example are given separately, (p. 124) He argues that the signifier presents itself in an ambiguous way: it is at the same time meaning and form, one full (the meaning) and one empty (the linguistic form), and the signified is "determined"; "it is at once historical and intentional; it is the motivation which causes the myth to be uttered" (p. 118). The concept "can spread over a very large expanse of signifier'" just as a word can "serve as a signifier to a concept filled with a very rich history," (p. 120) suggesting metonymy: We constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but we restore it to a state which is still 52 mystified, (p. 159) The interpretive movement assumes the possibility that any sign can reinforce the value or belief embedded in language of a particular culture. The metonymic function is important for a post-colonial perspective. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989) suggest that the concept of metonymy offers the possibility for transforming dominant discourse. Citing Bhabha's analysis of metaphor and metonymy, they write that the text as metaphor "imposes a universalist reading because metaphor makes no concessions to the cultural specificity of text" while the text as metonymy "symptomatizes the text, reading through its features the social, cultural and political forces which traverse it" (p. 52). They argue that language variance as metonymy of cultural difference is "a feature of all post-colonial texts" (p. 59): The writer "function" meets the reader "function" in the writing itself which dwells at the intersection of a vast array of cultural conditions. Such writing neither represents culture nor gives rise to a world-view, but sets the scene of a constitution of meaning. The strategies which such writing employs to maintain distance and otherness while appropriating the language are therefore a constant demonstration of the dynamic possibilities available to writing within the tension of'centre' and 'margin.' (p. 59) Translating language metonymically thus creates a space for language variance and allows translators/readers to examine a constitution of meaning. The conception of metonymy can be found in literary criticism. In her reading of Proust, Kristeva (1996) sees Metonymic doubling. She suggests that the process that Proust refers to as an 'analogy' or a 'metaphor' is quite different from the process that formal rhetoricians have described," (p. 212) implying the ambivalent character of the metaphor. She writes that "a Proustian analogy forms a condensation between two attributes, it functions as a metonymy... .a spatial connection—the by-product of the sign—provides a metonymic basis for most of Proust's metaphors" (p. 216). Although metonymy is intrinsic to metaphor, if 53 metonymy allows "action to occur within the space it creates, it requires characters who can fulfill their destiny through that very action" (p. 217). Ashcroft (2001) in his discussion of post-colonial literature writes that the "historical privileging of metaphor in identity is manifested yet again by this propensity to see truth predicated on a process of cultural incorporation. Such uses of language are metonymic" (pp. 78-79). This use of metonymy "overturns an attractive but decidedly Eurocentric theory of language development" (ibid. p. 79). Aoyagi (2003) agrees, saying that Bakhtin's carnivalesque is the embodiment of metonymy, producing a revolutionary space, by breaking a metaphoric vertical space. Metonymy thus plays a crucial role for transforming the framed dominant discourse. In the classroom , especially in E L L classes, languages and cultures are often approached metaphorically, assuming a definite meaning carried by language. But if students are given an opportunity to provide or even contest for such vertically signified meaning, they—both native- and non-native speakers of English—may be able to analyze language critically and reexamine their perspectives through different frames. H.2.4. Box Effect The conception of "box effect," or "Cassette Effect" in Japanese, was named and introduced by Yanabu Akira (1976), a Japanese scholar of translation and intercultural communication. (The conception "Cassette Effect" is loosely translated as "box effect" from the French "cassette" or small box.) Yanabu's theory has been developed from structuralism and from existing translated work. The box effect illustrates the translation process by which an idea new to a culture remote from the SL (source language) is introduced. Yanabu perceives the ambiguity of language which performs within a metonymic space through translation. 54 When a new idea is delivered through translation, there is no existing word to capture its meaning; so, a new word is created to translate the idea. Since the idea is new, so is the word; the meaning of the word is not clearly defined. Its novelty attracts people who begin to try it out, and eventually such a new word finds a place in society. Remember Wittgenstein. Language shifts and expands its meaning within the box that holds it, because the meaning of language is unstable while its meaning is ambiguous. Yanabu examines Eugene Nida's "science" of translation where equivalence is the focus. Nida applies Chomsky's generative grammar to translation based on biblical texts and suggests that a religious message is often difficult to communicate because of different cultural contexts: "meaning cannot be divorced from the personal experience and the conceptual framework of the person receiving the message" (Gentzler, 2001, p. 52). The difference between Nida and Chomsky is that Nida is concerned with cultural context. In seeking "to find the closest possible "equivalence," (Nida, 2000, p. 129) Nida discusses two basic orientations: first, formal equivalence and second, dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence focuses on the form and content of TL, and "one is concerned that the message in the receptor language should match as closely as possible the different elements in the source language" (ibid.). Dynamic equivalence, on the other hand, is concerned that the "relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message" (ibid.). Nida argues for dynamic equivalence and points out that "the linguistic and cultural distance between the codes used to convey the messages" (p. 130) is significant, in particular, when the distance is remote such as between English and Japanese. Gentzler (2001) observes that Nida "does not trust the readers to make up their own minds; in order to achieve the intended response, he has license to change, streamline, and simplify," and thus he "provides an excellent model for translation that involves a manipulation of a text to 55 serve the interests of a religious belief, but he fails to provide the groundwork for what the West in general conceives of as a 'science'" (p. 59). Nida, however, fails to consider the fact that language can shift its meaning as it is being used. Yanabu recognizes that fluidity of language. Dynamic equivalence is preferable, Yanabu argues, but existing Japanese words created by translation often result from pursuing formal equivalence (intentionally or forcefully). In translating English to Japanese, translators have traditionally translated noun to noun, verb to verb, adjective to adjective (or adverb in Japanese). New pronouns have been created in Japanese as there were originally few. A sentence structure (subject-verb) has also been established to reflect a typical translated sentence. However, as Nida contends, when language moves from one frame to another, one context to another, the meaning has to be transformed. Consider the word "futon," originally Japanese but now commonly used in English. The Japanese futon, traditional bedding used over centuries, is defined as follows: A thick bedquilt and a mattress; A set of mattress and quilt bedcover, both stuffed thick with cotton wool. They are spread on the tatami floor at night when one sleeps, and stowed away in a large closet in the morning. A blanket is also used together with the futon in cold weather (Yamaguchi & Kojima, 1979, p. 141) The idea of the English futon (phonologically the same as Japanese) was imported, and because there was no existing language to capture such an idea, the word "futon" was maintained. However, the sign, futon, has produced a meaning different from its original Japanese as it is used and adapted to North American culture: A futon is a piece of furniture which consists of a thin mattress on a low wooden frame which can be used as a bed or folded up to make a chair. (Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, 1995, p. 691) Although both the Japanese futon and English futon function as bedding, the English fiiton does not exist in the Japanese context, nor the Japanese futon in the English context. The 56 meaning of "sushi," a popular Japanese food in North America, also has shifted, expanded, and evolved within Yanabu's box, a space created by translation. North Americans may think that Japanese people often prepare and eat sushi at home. But in Japan, sushi comes in far fewer varieties, is usually prepared by professionals, and is eaten on special occasions. The English word, sushi, thus signifies a different entity from the Japanese word, sushi. Sushi has become hybrid as it has been adapted for North American culture. Futon or sushi appear to be cases of formal equivalence, as they deal with noun to noun translation of the same concept—bedding or food. Yanabu suggests, however, as these examples illustrate, that such equivalence is impossible, because language performs not within a vertically framed space but in a horizontal metonymic space in the process of translation. Umberto Eco (2001) would agree: "Uttered in different countries, [translated words] produce different effects and they are used to refer to different habits. They produce different stories" (p. 18). Yanabu argues that our world is framed where the meaning of language is vertically defined. When encountering a new idea or sign, people try to adjust to it within a closed framework because that makes them comfortable and secure, but they are often not aware of a space generated by the chain of signification. The idea of the box shows that translation is not transformation which originates from the same structure, he contends, but is rather deconstruction in which nothing is definite behind language. Yanabu demonstrates that E L L students might understand the meaning of language differently from the dictionary definition, which may prevent them from delivering their thoughts the way they intend. Instead of expecting E L L students to acquire vertically defined meanings of language, educators, together with students, should explore how the meanings of language can be constructed. Yanabu's theory will be examined further in Chapter Three. 57 n.2.5. Polysystem Theory Polysystem theory was developed by Itamar Even-Zohar, a scholar from Tel Aviv, in the early 1970's. He and his colleagues, focusing on the role of translated literature in a particular literary system, define literature as a polysystem of "interrelated forms and canons that constitute 'norms' constraining the translator's choices and strategies (Venuti, 2000, p. 123). Considering the translation's socio-cultural dimension, polysystem theory refers "to the entire network of correlated systems—literary and extraliterary—within society, and developed and approached.. .to attempt to explain the function of all kinds of writing within a given culture—from the central canonical texts to the most marginal non-canonical texts" (Gentzler, 2001, p. 114). The theory emerges not from "major" literatures or languages such as German, French, or Anglo-American, but from "minor" literatures and languages such as Hebrew where, due to lack of a canon of literary work, people have to depend upon translated texts to provide depth and variety: To "understand one's past, one's identity, an understanding of translation in and of itself is crucial; translation ceases to be an elite intellectual 'game,' a footnote to literary scholarship, but becomes fundamental to the lives and livelihood of everyone in the entire region (and maybe the world)" (Gentzler, 2001, p. 105). Because of its origin, polysystem theory helps us to examine translation particularly involving "minor" languages and literatures, such as Japanese. In "The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem," Even-Zohar (2000) argues for the importance of considering translated literature as a system: "I conceive of translated literature not only as an integral system within any literary polysystem, but as a most active system within it... .Whether translated literature becomes central or peripheral, and whether this position is connected with innovatory ("primary") or conservatory ("secondary") repertoires, depends on the specific constellation of the polysystem under study" 58 (p. 193). Literature, through translation, can bring new features (both principles and elements) into home literature. He discusses three circumstances in which translated literature can take a central position: first, when "a literature is "young," in the process of being established"; second, when "a literature is either 'peripheral' (with a large group of correlated literatures) or 'weak,' or both"; and finally, when "there are turning points, crises, or literary vacuums in a literature" (p. 194). For instance, in the Hebrew literary polysystem, between the two world wars literature translated from the Russian assumed an unmistakable central position, while works translated from English, German, Polish, and other languages assumed an obviously peripheral one. Moreover, since the major and most innovatory translational norms were produced by translations from the Russian, other translated literature adhered to the models and norms elaborated by those translations, (pp. 195-196) Shuttleworth (2001) suggests that polysystem theory provides scholars with important insight: "to view translation as one specific instance of the more general phenomenon of inter-systematic transfer"; "to focus on the translated text as an entity existing in the target polysystem in its own right"; "to suggest explanations for translation phenomena.. within the more general context of inter-systemic transfer" (p. 178). Polysystem theory offers educational potential, as it provides educators with a new way of exploring what E L L students can bring to the classroom, taking their part in shaping new ideas and thoughts. Some scholars (e.g., Lefevere, 1983; Genzler, 2001) point out the incompleteness of polysystem theory; nevertheless, it demonstrates "an advance in the development of translation studies, specifically, and translation theory in general" (Genzler, 2001, p. 123): By expanding the theoretical boundaries of traditional translation theory, based all too frequently on linguistic models or underdeveloped literary theories, and embedding translated literature into a larger cultural context, Even-Zohar opened the way for translation theory to advance beyond perspective aesthetics, (ibid.) Even-Zohar writes that "not only is the socio-literary status of translation dependent upon its position within the polysystem, but the very practice of translation is also strongly subordinated 59 to that position" (p. 197). His conception helps to analyze translated literature in relation to the development of literature within the target language. Polysystem theory has recently addressed the issues of imperialistic translation, questioning ideology in translation (e.g., Robyns, 1994).12 A hermeneutic approach to conceptions of translation reveals the ambiguous nature of language particularly when crossing borderlines between frames. Such ambiguities are often unnoticed because one language tends to define the meaning vertically, commonly accepted by native speakers of the language; however, they vanish when language performs across cultures. If ambiguities are realized, critically examined, and shared among students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, the classroom can become a frameless space where students can equally contribute to build knowledge. The following section explores further how these ambiguities are created historically and culturally. II.3. Sociocultural/Political Approaches This section expands its focus on language that creates a generative space to include in that space sociocultural and political elements. Exploring language as historically and ideologically constructed helps educators analyze the student's sense of cultural hierarchy which may place some students outside of the frame. The following conceptions are not always directly concerned with practical translation activities; yet, they address issues crucial to education while being linked to the conceptions of translation discussed in the previous section. Because language produces meaning as it is used, and because language constructs a world view, translating nation, self, or culture is problematic. This section is divided into four 1 2 Robyns is regarded as a descriptive theorist, and "it would be wrong to conclude that there is an 60 sub-sections; however, the issues overlap and evolve into a final sub-section on post-colonial translation studies as they address ideological concerns and inequities in translation. n.3.1. Third Space Because it evokes interaction, translation has the potential to crack the solid lines of a frame and create a new space—a border world, the contact zone. Homi Bhabha (1990) offers a way of theorizing this space which he calls a Third Space, the space produced by the process of displacement and transformation within and across cultures. His conception of Third Space is interpreted by translation scholars as an interstitial space created by translation.13 Bhabha (1994) suggests that multiculturalism implies a host society or dominant culture which defines itself within its own "grid" and defines everyone else—everyone culturally "different"—as outside the grid. Third Space, he argues, has "a colonial or post-colonial provenance" (p. 38): "For a willingness to descend into that alien territory.. .may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an z'wfernational culture, based . . . on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity" (ibid.). He (1990a) asserts that the "articulation of culture is possible not because of the familiarity or similarity of contents, but because all cultures are symbol-forming and subject-constituting, interpellative practices" (p. 210): Cultures are only constituted in relation to that otherness internal to their own symbol-forming activity which makes them decentred structures—though that displacement or liminality opens up the possibility of articulating different, even incommensurable, cultural practices and priorities, (pp. 210-211) He argues further that "the act of cultural translation denies the essentialism of a prior given isomorphism between descriptive theorists" and post-colonial theorists. (Evans, 2001, p. 153). 1 3 See, for example, Michaela Wolf (2000) "The Third Space in Postcolonial Representation," or Yangsheng Guo (2002) Chinese Translation of the West: A History for a Global Era. 61 original or originary culture," which enables us to see that "all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity"; "the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges"; rather it "is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge" (p.211). Bhabha's Third Space is not an identity but an identification, "a process of identifying with and through another object, and object of otherness, at which point the agency of identification—the subject—is itself always ambivalent, because of the intervention of that otherness" (ibid.). Hybridity "bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like a translation, so that hybridity puts together the traces of certain other meanings or discourses," and the process of hybridity gives rise to "a new arena of negotiation of meaning and representation" (ibid.).14 If a complete translation of subjects or of form of culture is impossible, his notion of Third Space is what translation might be able to offer, as Bhabha (1994) suggests: [Translation] is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ {enonce, or propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or 'tolls' the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices, (p. 228) In his discussion of The Satanic Verses, Bhabha writes that if "hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream... .it is the dream of translation as 'survival' as Derrida translates the 'time' of Benjamin's concept of the after-life of translation, as sur-vivre, the act of living on borderlines" (p. 227).1 5 He suggests that the newness of migrant or minority discourse as 1 4 Ashcroft (2001) terms hybridity "horizontal," as it demonstrates "the complexity of subjectivity and the potency available to any questioning of boundaries" (p. 187). This horizontality can help us perceive the "blurring of boundaries as a strategy of empowerment" (p. 188). 1 5 Translation can be a dangerous task, as it may open up "a space of discursive contestation" (Bhabha, 1994, p. 226). Consider the Japanese scholar and translator, Igarashi Hitoshi, who translated Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and was killed in his university office in 1991, a year after it was published in Japan. Another Japanese scholar, Imaba Shigemi (1996) writes that Igarashi translated the book, as Igarashi, as a Japanese, was searching for a space of conciliation between the conflicting Anglo-American world and the Islamic world; he could mediate between the binary opposition of right and wrong, and help achieve real internationalization—not an international control. He, as a translator, might have hoped to create a third 62 cultural translation is similar to Benjamin's "foreignness of languages," which describes the "performativity of translation as the staging of cultural difference" (p. 227). Bhabha moves into the performativity of translation as the possibilities of survival: I am more engaged with the 'foreign' element that reveals the interstitial; insists in the textile superfluity of folds and wrinkles, and becomes the 'unstable element of linkage,' the indeterminate temporality of the in-between, that has to be engaged in creating the conditions through which 'newness comes into the world, (ibid.) Bhabha (1994) suggests that "it is the 'inter'—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture," and by exploring a "Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves" (p. 39). If we can become "the others of ourselves," a place would be frameless. Searching for and building such in-between spaces—the border world or the third space—holds hope for future education. For Celia Haig-Brown or Mary Louise Pratt, this border world might be the intersecting space created by colonizer and colonized.16 Ted Aoki (1996) writes about a bridge between spaces, such as East and West, saying that educators and business people tend to think about crossing a bridge between two places, but that "we are in no hurry to cross over; in fact, such bridges urge us to linger," because they "are dwelling places for people," inviting them "to transcend instrumentalism, to understand what it means to dwell together humanly" (p. 6). The Third space provides educators with a new perspective, suggesting that the classroom can be a generative space in which students become hybrid, observing otherness as a part of themselves. space, searching for fragments of Benjamin's vessel. This cost him his life. 1 6 Pratt (1991) does not discuss the contact zone in terms of Bhabha's exact sense of generative third space, "the complexities of interaction in the contact zone," (p. 44) but maintains the possible space created by both the colonizer and the colonized. 63 n.3.2. Translating Nationhood If translation can create a third space, translation can release nation and race from a rigid frame. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation uncover the complexity of nationhood in relation to race. For example, if someone is biologically "pure" Japanese or even "mixed" Japanese, recognized by her physical attributes, she is perceived as a member of the Japanese race and thus belongs to the framework of Japan. One's race, religion or ethnic origin is commonly (and often wrongly) considered to identify the individual and to fix where they belong. A flag or national anthem may symbolize the United States, Canada, or Japan, but even within a nation where diverse ethnic groups coexist, such symbols do not always translate as an individual's nationhood. What does it mean to be Japanese then? As meaning, "Japanese" has been constructed geographically, historically, and politically through Western dominant discourse. Barthes writes (2000) that the "meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions. When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains" (p. 117). The emptiness of the form calls us into constructing meaning. Nationhood is a construct of the dominant culture; the "oriental" subject is the result of the European imperialist desire to conceptualize the identity of colonized subject. By creating stereotypes, and constructing inaccurate cultural attributes, the imperial power is able to control the identity of the Other. Even after "Western society as a whole has turned into an immense contact zone, where intercultural relations contribute to the internal life of all national cultures," (Simon, 1999, p. 58) race is what divides people into the hierarchical framework and continues to reinforce the static link between race and nation. The media or translated books contribute to the production of the stereotyped images. 64 This "immense contact zone" has created the identities of individuals whose race or nationality is lost in the untranslatable. In his "Turning In, Turning Out: The Shifting Formation of'Japanese Canadian' from Uprooting to Redress," Roy Miki (2003), who was born in Winnipeg in 1942 as a sansei (the third generation of Japanese descent) and is a writer as well as professor of English writes about hyphenated Japanese-Canadian identity: Even if "Japanese Canadian" (JC) has been a given—or what has been given [him]—for more years than memory can safely retrieve, it has never remained static and autonomous; rather it has been contingent and mobile, producing in its mediated relationships a network of signifying effects—effects that have been unpredictable, sometimes turbulent, sometimes imprisoning, sometimes liberating, and sometimes dumbfounding, (p. 25) Miki examines the history of how the "Japanese Canadian" identity has been constructed and shifted through "negotiations with a powerful network of social, political and cultural formations already premised on their 'alien' status" (p. 31). "Japanese Canadian" was a construct reflecting the political maneuver of multiculturalism; once "enemy alien" they later became "friendly Canadianized alien" (p. 29). The naming he suggests is powerful: As many cultural theorists have cautioned, naming is always a situated act with differential consequences depending on who is doing the naming, who is being named, and how the name signifies in its social, political, and cultural effects. As a naming of a group of Canadian subjects, "Japanese Canadian" needs to be approached as a construct that has never been stable in its referential reach, and yet it has also been historically attached to those who have both identified themselves and have been identified through its circulation, (p. 41) The term "Japanese" is equally unstable, and for Miki signifies a meaning different from mine. In the 1970s, he went to Japan and lived there, making him realize that he would never be Japanese in the crowd of Tokyo, even though he "was transparent" with his "Japanese-identified body" (p. 27). At this point he turned away "from Japan as a point of origin" and came back to "Canada as the site of future critical work" as a Japanese Canadian (ibid). How can the individual translate the self? The concept of nation as equal to race does 65 not help Miki to translate who he is. It not only works against those whose physical attributes differentiate them from the dominant culture, but also, in Miki 's case, those who look like the dominant culture. In his Nation and Narration, Bhabha (1990) writes that nations, "like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye" (p. 1): Such an image of the nation—or narration—might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force, (ibid.) He reminds us that the construction of discourse of the nation is "the Janus-faced ambivalence of language" (p. 3). The nation-space is always "in the process of articulation of elements," and thus understanding "the performativity of language in the narratives of the nation" is critical (ibid). Education systems too often drive a nationalism which excludes the other, reminding educators of the significance of freeing language from such a force. n.3.3. Transforming Self The idea of translation is used to explore issues related to identity. When moving from one culture to another, one language to another, not only a world changes, but also identities shift. Many E L L students may experience an "identity crisis," a concept introduced by Erik Erikson (1963) to describe the sense of loss resulting from being separated from their home culture. Who am I? Many philosophers have searched for the answer. Plato in the Phaedo argues that we are made of body which is seen and changing, and soul which is unseen and unchanging; soul is eternal. For Descartes, "I think therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum). The self is independent and thus one's mind establishes absolute certainty about oneself. Others argue 66 the unstable nature of the self. Hume argues that "I" is a bundle of sensations, constantly changing as one has new experiences; Merleau-Ponty explores human experience and the identity of "the subject—the experiencing 'self—with the bodily organism" (Abram, 1997, p. 45): Most of us are accustomed to consider the self, our innermost essence, as something incorporeal. Yet, consider: Without this body, without this tongue or these ears, you could neither speak nor hear another's voice. Nor could you have anything to speak about, or even to reflect on, or to think, since without any contact, any encounter, without any glimmer of sensory experience, there could be nothing to question or to know, (ibid.) For Merleau-Ponty, the experience is thus not independent from the body, but the body—"the sensuous and sentient life" (ibid.)—experiences the world. Translating oneself challenges not only the fluidity of the self but also the uncertainty of whether or not "I" is a completely free and equal individual. George Mead (1977) analyzes the self which is constructed through interacting with others: the " T becomes self-conscious only in so far as it can imagine how it is seen by others, and responds accordingly" (Edger, 2001, p. 185). Naoki Sakai (1999) agrees: the "relation to the self cannot be determined unless the relation to the other has already been determined"; "when dealing with the problem of identity in cultural and social contexts.. the relation to the other logically precedes that to the self—the process in which "the comparative framework of Japan (the self) and the West (the other) is installed" (p. 51). The sociologist Emile Durkheim also questions the liberalist concept of the individual, arguing that the individual is "a product of society" (Edger, 2001, p. 184). Foucault's works on madness and sexuality suggests that the self is constructed within discourses (the dominant group in society constructs the identity of the self and the other), leading to Said's analysis of Orientalism. In translating herself, Fan Shen (1998) writes of her experience of learning English, an 67 experience which has shaped her identity. She writes that her ideological (the system of values that she acquired through her sociocultural background as Chinese) and logical (the natural way she organizes and expresses her thoughts in writing) identities had to be modified and redefined in studying English composition. To "be yourself," as many writing instructors suggest, is a cultural value promoting individuality which she finds difficult to grasp: In China, "I" is always subordinated to "We"—be it the working class, the Party, the country, or some other collective body. Both political pressure and literary tradition require that "I" be somewhat hidden or buried in writing and speeches; presenting the "self too obviously would give people the impression of being disrespectful of the Communist Party in political writing and boastful in scholarly writings. The word "I" has become a synonym for selfishness in China, (p. 124) As a "Chinese person, in the fullest sense of the term, with a Chinese identity already fully formed" (p. 127), she has to learn what it means to be "I" and "self in a society where people speak English. When she writes a composition in English she has to "wrestle with and abandon . . . the whole system of ideology which previously defined" her (p. 125). She writes that learning to write in English is "in fact a process of creating and defining a new identity and balancing it with the old identity" and suggests that the traditional advice of E L L instructors such as "Be yourself or "Don't translate" is not helpful to Asian students, as it implies that students should abandon their original language and culture. Her experience illustrates how conceptions of translation can help us reconsider the ways in which we approach language in educational settings. In "Second Language Learning as Participation and the (Re)construction of Selves," Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) analyze language learning from a sociocultural perspective.17 They follow George Mead's argument that "because of the personal agency involved in shaping a life, it was necessary to develop a methodology 'that would provide information 1 7 See Chapter Four for further discussion. 68 about the person's own self-interpretation of his or her actions'" (p. 158). Examining autobiographical works of writers whose English is not their first language, they discuss the path to self-translation. They argue that this "border crossing" is "a profound struggle to reconstruct a self (p. 174). The participants of their study have to translate themselves in narratives from old to new; "crossing a cultural border is about 'renarratizing' a life" (ibid.): Their personal narratives and, consequently, their 'self were constructed in a time and place constrained by conventions that differ from conventions of their present time and place . . . . To overcome this difficulty, they are forced to reorganize, and in some cases, organize anew, the plots of their life stories in line with the new set of conventions and social relationships sanctioned by the new community in which they find themselves, (p. 172) Rushdie (2001) would agree: "[b]orn into one language, Urdu, I've made my life and work in another. Anyone who has crossed a language frontier will readily understand that such a journey involves a form of shape-shifting, or self-translation" (p. 374). As Spivak (2000) writes, "language may be one of many elements that allow us to make sense of things, of ourselves . . . . Making sense of ourselves is what produces identity" (p. 397). The struggle to translate the self is similar to the translator's struggle. As language shifts, meaning shifts. As the relationships with others change, meanings change. The self is almost a chain of translation. The individual, if such a concept exists in society, perceives the self by translating/interpreting the relationship with other people within the culture through language. In a sense, the self is already a product of translation. When border-crossing occurs, the individual is forced not only to translate the self into a new language, but also the relationship with people in a new culture where she is translated by other people, which is in turn translated by her. In his discussion about Merleau-Ponty, David Abram (1997) ponders "the event of perception," (p. 50) reflecting on the impossibility of perceiving "the interior density" beneath the surface. He talks about the clay bowl resting on the table: 69 While examining its outer surface I have caught only a glimpse of the smooth and finely glazed inside of the bowl. When I stand up to look down into that interior, which gleams with curved reflections from the skylight overhead, I can no longer see the unglazed outer surface . . . . There can be no question of ever totally exhausting the presence of the bowl with my perception; its very existence as a bowl ensures that there are dimensions wholly inaccessible to me—most obviously the patterns hidden between its glazed and unglazed surfaces, the interior density of its clay body. If I break it into pieces, in hopes of discovering these interior patterns or the delicate structure of its molecular dimensions, I will have destroyed its integrity as a bowl; far from coming to know it completely, I will simply have wrecked any possibility of coming to know it further, having traded the relation between myself and the bowl for a relation to a collection of fragments, (p. 51) How do I know who I am? I might be able to translate myself but only through the gaze of an Other. Self-translation is like understanding this bowl. I might be able to perceive a part of myself in relation to a particular view of a particular group of people, but I am never able to perceive myself as a whole. Even if I attempt to see "the interior density," I simply "wreck any possibility of coming to know" the self. n.3.4. Post-colonial Translation A post-colonial18 approach to translation provides translation studies with an important direction as it concerns the production of knowledge constructed and manipulated by the use of translation under imperialism.19 Since the 1980s, translation studies have developed beyond a European focus, to include scholars in India, Africa, and Latin America I use hyphenated "post-colonial," suggested by Ashcroft (2001): "the hyphen is a statement about the particularity, the historically and culturally grounded nature of the experience it represents... The hyphen in 'post-colonial' is a.. .political notation which has very great deal to say about the materiality of political oppression" (p. 10). He argues that "postcolonial" has come to "represent an increasingly indiscriminate attention to cultural difference and marginality of all kinds, whether consequence of the historical experience of colonialism or not" (ibid.). 1 9 Ashcroft (2001) defines post-colonial studies which "developed as a way of addressing the cultural production of those societies affected by the historical phenomenon of colonialism. In this respect it was never conceived of as a grand theory but as a methodology: first for analysing the many strategies by which colonized societies have engaged imperial discourse; and second, for studying the ways in which many of those strategies are shared by colonized societies, re-emerging in very different political and cultural circumstances" (p. 7). 70 (Bassnett, 1991). Post-colonial literary theories have emerged and problematized Western traditions of thought and literature which marginalize and exclude those of non-Western origin. The history of translation reflects this power of language, providing us "with a uniquely accessible series of selective, cultural constructions of'other' and therefore with a mass of privileged material to observe the workings of cultural self-definition" (Hermans, 2000, p. 15). The post-colonial approach to translation focuses upon the politics of translation, as it exposes the traditional Enlightenment view of understanding the Other and examines translation as the site of a power struggle; translated texts, it argues, produce hegemonic cultural values. Theorizing language and culture has been the central issue in post-colonial literature. Although the study of the effects of imperialism upon colonized societies had a long history outside the West, it arrived in the Western academy in the 1970s. The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1989) is the first critical reader of post-colonialism20 (Moore-Gilbert, 1997). In it, they suggest that the concept of post-colonial discourse is derived from Foucault's sense of discourse as "a system of possibility for knowledge" and "grounded on a struggle for power—that power focused in the control of the metropolitan language" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989, p. 167). Truth, they argue, is "what counts as true within the system of rules for a particular discourse," and power is what "annexes, determines, and verifies truth" (ibid.). In his Orientalism, Said (1978) also discusses power and its production of truth. The Orient is not "an inert fact of nature" or "merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either" (p. 5, emphasis in original). The Orient was constituted by the European mind. He writes that "the Orient is an idea that has a history and a 2 0 The prefix "post" seems to be problematic as to how it defines historical periods. For example, Aijaz Ahmad (1992) argues that colonialism can mean anything from back to the Incas to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and thus becomes "a transhistorical thing, always present and always in process of dissolution in one part of the world or another" (p. 9). Others say that the term includes 71 tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West" (p. 5). Ashcroft et al. (1989) suggest that the "struggle for power over the truth in some sense 'mimics' the metropolitan impulse of dominance," (p. 168) and critics such as Homi Bhabha address this problem. Post-colonialism has been examined and discussed in regards to different conditions: colonized countries such as in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean; internally colonized European communities such as the Irish; Third World 2 1 pre- and post-independence nations; the European-settled ex-colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, and indigenous peoples in those countries; and diasporas resulting from slavery and forced migration. As well, class, gender, race, and sexual orientations have been studied within those contexts. Even though translation is "always embedded in cultural and political systems, and in history," (Bassnett & Trivedi, 1999, p. 6) it tended to be seen as an aesthetic act; thus post-colonial translation studies address ideological problems which had been hitherto disregarded. Recent translation criticism particularly addresses this issue: Translation does not happen in a vacuum, but in a continuum; it is part of an ongoing process of intercultural transfer. Moreover, translation is a highly manipulative activity that involves all kinds of stages in that process of transfer across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Translation is not an innocent, transparent activity but is highly charged with significance at every stage; it rarely, if ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors or systems. (Bassnett & Trivedi, 1999, p. 2) Vicente Rafael (1988), a post-colonial critic, in his study of Spanish colonization in the Philippines, for example, suggests that translation for the Spanish was meant to reduce the Tagalog language and culture to "accessible objects for and subjects of divine and imperial decolonized/neocolonized cultures under the control of capitalist economies. 2 1 Ashcroft et al. (1995) write that post-colonial theory rejects the "egregious classification" of First and Third World and "contests the lingering fallacy that the post-colonial is somehow synonymous with the economically 'underdeveloped" (p. 3). I agree with their position but will continue to use this term, because I feel that it can usefully contextualize the Japanese situation later in my discussion. 72 intervention," and for the Tagalogs, it "was a process less of internalizing colonial-Christian conventions than of evading their totalizing grip by repeatedly marking the differences between their language and interests and those of the Spaniards" (p. 213). Similarly, Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from 'The Tempest' to Tarzan (1991) or Tejaswini Niranjana's Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context (1992) argue that translation has been involved in appropriation of the vanquished cultures. This standpoint leads some scholars to reject English as a hegemonic "world language," contesting the use of the English language for such purposes. These scholars criticize others who work within English as elitist and disengaged from post-colonial theories as these are still Westernized and not yet speaking of the colonized situations and their people. Other scholars perhaps "give up translating altogether, since translation, however respectful of the origin, is always also appropriation" (France, 2000, p. 10). Niranjana (1992) in Siting Translation argues that translation is a significant site for challenging representation, power, and historicity, saying that translation "as a practice shapes, and takes shapes within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism" (p. 2). Like Cheyfitz, Niranjana reveals how translated texts function as instruments of colonialism. British colonialism enforced English education in India, and Orientalist translation of English language texts constructed the cultural hierarchy and distorted images of India and its cultures. She states that her work belongs to "the larger context of the 'crisis' in 'English' that is a consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decolonizing world" (p. 5). She criticizes the liberal humanist ideology which "endorsed and was perpetuated by the civilizing mission of colonialism" and is reflected in discourses of literature and criticism. This is what Derrida calls the logocentric or ontotheological metaphysics involving "all the traditional conceptions of representation, 73 translation, reality, unity and knowledge" (ibid). She begins making her point as she describes the translation work of William Jones who was sent to India in 1783 to serve the Supreme Court in Calcutta under Britain's need to "obtain information about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Company" (p. 11). She then delineates how translated legal, literary, and educational texts were used as a means of British colonization. Such Orientalist translations of Indian language texts manipulated people to accept the authority of translated texts and the cultural identity constructed through translation. In her concluding chapter, she shows three different translated texts of the poem written in Kannada, a South Indian language, to suggest her notion of the practice of translation that is "speculative, provisional, and interventionist" (p. 173). By challenging hegemonic representations of the non-Western world, her work has contributed to translation studies, pursuing an agenda close to what Robinson (1993) suggested when he wrote that "a radical exploration of the liberatory effects of literalism, pursued vigorously and unflinchingly enough, might well break important new ground in the quest for a solution," even if this "may be the task for translation theorists in the years to come" (p. 124). Post-colonial scholars reveal the historically-constructed imperial power of English, resulting in placing non-English speaking people and their cultures on the margins. Educators must realize that such power relationships established in English affect students' perceptions of self and other, and that these perceptions may even unintentionally create boundaries or hierarchy in the classroom. Gayatri Spivak (2000), in her essay The Politics of Translation, also explores translation as a cultural and political practice through a feminist, post-structuralist lens. Post-structuralism, she writes, "has shown some of us a staging of the agent within a three-tiered notion of language (as rhetoric, logic, silence)"; we "must attempt to enter or 74 direct that staging, as one directs a play, as an actor interprets a script. That takes a different kind of effort from taking translation to be a matter of synonym, syntax and local color" (p. 399). Like Derrida, de Man, or Niranjana, Spivak is concerned with the rhetoric which "may be disrupting logic in the matter of the production of an agent, and indicating the founding violence of the silence at work within rhetoric," and suggests that rhetoric "must work in the silence between and around words in order to see what works and how much" (ibid). The translator, she writes, first "must surrender to the text" (p. 400); she "must solicit the text to show the limits of its language, because that rhetorical aspect will point at the silence of the absolute fraying of language that the text wards off, in its special manner" (ibid.). She claims that translation is the "most intimate act of reading"; a translator "cannot surrender to the text, cannot respond to the special call of the text" unless she "has earned the right to become the intimate reader" (ibid.). She suggests that the relationship "between logic and rhetoric, between grammar and rhetoric, is also a relationship between social logic, social reasonableness and the disruptiveness of figuration in social practice" (p. 403). This is important for translating Third World literatures, because "without a sense of the rhetoricity of language, a species of neocolonialist construction of the non-western scene is afoot" (p. 399). Her essay illustrates that the rhetorical process and power of translation are political and suggests that "[different social situations can change the political valence of a translation" (p. 338), and that political practice might bring about social change. As translation has been used to facilitate colonization and to construct representation, the choice of particular texts chosen to be translated into particular languages is an important issue for post-colonial scholars of translation. As meaning is socially constructed, English as the language of translation may appropriate and domesticate the original texts. Venuti (2001) suggests that such "domestication," involving an "adherence to domestic literary canons both 75 in choosing a foreign text and in developing a translation method" has been a common practice in the French and English translation traditions (p. 241). Domestication in translation can be used to serve a social and political agenda and thus be seen as a form of colonization. Scholars who are concerned about socio-cultural and political context, on the other hand, utilize "foreignization," which "seeks to evoke a sense of the foreign" (p. 242): A "foreignizing strategy can signify the difference of the foreign text only by assuming an oppositional stance toward the domestic, challenging literary canons, professional standards, and ethical norms in the target language" (ibid.). Even though foreignization leads readers to get lost in translation, it at the same time helps them appreciate difference and encourages them to move into the intersection of two texts to explore further. Post-colonial writers use different strategies to translate texts. One example is maintaining native language words in the English texts. Considering "links between the constitutive nature of meaning, and the transformative use of language," Ashcroft (2001) suggests that a writer can "represent his or her world to the colonizer (and others) in the metropolitan language, and at the same time, to signal and emphasize a difference from it" (p. 75).2 2 Those who see English as a hegemonic "world language" perceive that post-colonial theories are still Westernized; they insist that such Westernized post-colonial theories should be rejected and disengaged from post-colonial studies. Responding to this call to reject English, some post-colonial writers capable of writing in English choose instead to write only in their native tongue. Others argue that such a nativist approach creates the polarization which Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) talk about in regard to post-colonial translation practice in India. The question is whether "the Empire can translate back only into English, or into that lower or 2 2 The term "metonymic gap" is used to define such writing: "a cultural gap is formed when appropriations of a colonial language insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language, or concepts, 76 at least lower-case variety of it, english,"23 or if "a post-colonial thrust is being written equally or even more abundantly in languages other than English" (p. 11). If a work is not translated into English, however, it is likely to remain unknown to post-colonial discourse. Ngugi wa Thiong (2003) in his "Imperialism of Language," translated from the Gikuyu into English, embraces the role that translation plays: Through translations, the different languages of the world can speak to one another. European languages have always communicated with one another such that today it is possible to read nearly all the classics of Russian, French, or German literature and philosophy in any of those languages, thanks to the art of translation, (p. 180) What concerns him is that "there is very little mutual translation between African languages and, say, English and French. And the colonial dominance of English and French in African lives had made African languages so suspicious of one another that there is hardly any inter-African communication" (ibid.). He suggests that English must "work hard to remove" such negative qualities as racism, sexism, national chauvinism, and negative images of other nationalities and races so as to meet the criteria of acceptance as a language for the world" (p. 181). That is what he assumes fosters democracy among nations. Other post-colonial writers, like Salman Rushdie, write in English, because, as Bassnett and Trivedi write, Rushdie "has already translated himself into becoming an English-language writer"; "the fact of his having abandoned both his native language and his native location has played a crucial constitutive role" (p. 12). They support writing in English, arguing that for many Third World writers like Rushdie such "translingual, translocational translation has been the necessary first step to becoming a post-colonial writer" (p. 12). Rushdie (2003) acknowledges that its "continuing use of the old colonial tongue is seen as a allusions or references that may be unknown to the reader" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1999, p. 139). 2 3 Ashcroft et al (1989) distinguish English which refers to " 'standard' British English inherited from the empire" from english which refers to the language it "has become in post-colonial countries" (p. 8). 77 fatal flaw that renders it forever inauthentic" (p.248). He points out, however, that a "generation of gifted Indian writers in English is bringing into English their many different versions of the Indian reality, and these many versions, taken together, are beginning to add up to something that one might call the truth" (Rushdie, 2002, p. 375). That is what English language Indian writers have achieved: They "have found literary voices that are as distinctively Indian, and as suitable for any and all the purposes of art, as those of other English-language writers in Ireland, Africa, the West Indies, and the United States" (Rushdie, 2003, p. 250). The works of post-colonial translation embody the challenge of transcending the imperial and asymmetrical relationships sustained by language. Perhaps students in the classroom unconsciously inherit and accept the power that English possesses. Realizing how English has established and reinforced boundaries among races, nations, and cultures helps educators reduce such barriers. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation suggest that transforming the use of language, as well as the world defined by language, is possible, and students may see a space beyond frames, a space in which they are both self and other. In this chapter, I have examined the conceptions of translation first through a hermeneutic approach, and second, a socio-cultural approach. The rethinking of language and its role in the classroom through conceptions of translation can fuse differences among students, creating hybrid individuals whose knowledge is enriched by diverse perspectives derived from linguistic and cultural differences. The following chapter will apply hermeneutic conceptions of translation to translation work in Asia, particularly in Japan, and analyze how the conceptions and ideas of translation already discussed are observed in translated texts, and how the work of translation has performed pertaining to the construction of self and other. This chapter will form the 78 groundwork for an analysis of textbooks and literature which can further the goals of cultural hybridity in post-secondary classrooms. 79 Chapter Three Translation in Japan The change of language changes us. Al l languages permit slightly varying forms of thoughts, imagination, and play. (Rushdie, 2002, p. 374) The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it. (Barthes, 1982, p. 6) III.1. Living in Translation I have learned about the world through translation. Numerous foreign books translated into Japanese—from my childhood favourites, such as Winnie the Pooh, Curious George, or Anne of Green Gables to writers such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James to name a few—have not only provided me with the pleasure of reading literature but have also enriched my world view and knowledge of history, geography, politics, and cultural diversity. The only language I could read competently was Japanese, so without translation I would not have had access to world literature nor to many thinkers and their ideas in philosophy, sociology, psychology, and so on. But I took this access for granted, being unaware of how dependent I was upon translation, and how crucial this access was to my education and life. Not until coming to Canada did I realize that translated texts had influenced me to construct a particular "reality" of the world and its peoples and to locate myself within this "reality." I always considered that as a Japanese I was off-centre and accepted the cultural inferiority which many Japanese feel to Westerners; however, in Japan I had neither clearly perceived myself as Other nor had I been concerned about how I was perceived by others as Other. Since crossing the Pacific Ocean, I have become conscious of my location as a Japanese woman in Canada where different peoples coexist in society. People in North America 80 generally do not know much about the Japanese beyond stereotypes found in superficial accounts of popular culture. I have encountered occasions when people expected me to be submissive, certain that this is the norm in Japanese society. Yet I did not realize the extent to which the literature and popular culture account of the West I had been exposed to had also told me only a part of the story. Other parts of the story were filled in when meeting students from China, Taiwan, or Korea. Listening to the stories that I have delineated in Chapter One, I was struck by the fact that history is not just about the past but about the present and future; history continues to frame relationships among those who share the same space and time. I felt deeply embarrassed then, realizing that I had never been taught nor fully reflected on a significant part of Japanese history, and that I had read very few works of literature of other Asian countries. Translated texts allowed me to believe that I knew about the world well, but these texts, deliberately chosen by publishers, educators, librarians, in fact gave me only limited access to the world as well as selected views presented as though they were universal. This process of selection had also eliminated Japanese textbooks that presented views of the world conflicting with those approved by the Ministry of Education.24 Translated texts play a significant role in the production of knowledge, enabling people to read literature and to encounter ideas and thoughts to which they do not have access otherwise. The limits lie in what kind of knowledge translation provides. Translated texts in English have typically created and reinforced particular images or stereotypes of people who dwell in non-English speaking worlds. In this chapter, I will explore the impact of the different conceptions of translation discussed in the previous chapter, using translations between Japanese and English as examples. These illustrate how the meaning of language shifts across 2 4 The education ministry in Japan reviews textbooks (Grade 1 to 12) before distribution, and only ones which are approved by the government can be used in schools. This censorship is controversial particularly 81 borders, and how translation between Japanese and English has contributed to the production of particular kinds of knowledge about self and other, and to the construction of unbalanced power relations and national identities. Reflecting upon Japanese-English examples may help educators recognize how volatile and fluid language can be, and how significant it is for them to help students realize the richness that the cultural and linguistic spaces they occupy can offer. III.2. Issues The whole issue of translation in Japan is characterized by ambivalence. Japan has always been dependent upon translation to obtain information and new ideas from overseas. Translation has thus had a strong impact on the development of Japanese culture and played a significant role not only in the field of literature but also in the modernization of Japanese society as a whole. But translation has put Japan in a conflicted position. On the one hand, a nationalistic and economically powerful Japan has tried to overpower other Asian countries whose very languages are the source of Japanese. On the other hand, Japan has accepted the hegemonic power of the West (particularly the United States) and aspired to First World status, reflected in its enthusiasm to translate "the West," its values and knowledge. Japan has nevertheless discouraged the translation of contemporary Japanese literature into English because this contemporary literature is considered to be a product of Western influences and thus insufficiently representative of a pure Japanese canon. Japanese literature and translation need also to be examined politically since together they have contributed to the representation in the West of Japan, Japanese culture, and Japanese women, while at the same time reinforcing a cultural hierarchy among the Japanese. These over publishing history textbooks about Japanese responsibility in the war. 82 ambivalences make it important to examine the history and politics of translation and literature in Japan. Yet translation studies are not an established field in Japan. The development of translation studies in the West, in particular, the recent movement of a post-colonial approach, thus provides a mechanism to analyze translation work in Japan. III.3. Developments: Seeking "pure language" People spoke "Japanese" long before a writing system was invented. Up until the late 1800s, Japanese speech and writing took very different forms, leading some scholars even to question the definition of Japanese as one closed system. One such scholar, Yanabu (2003), suggests that the two forms of Japanese—speech and writing—have different functions: writing functions as means of communicating with outsiders, speech with insiders. Adding to this complexity, the Western writing system has shaped the Japanese writing system. He points out, for instance, that until the late 1800s, writers did not have the concept of the sentence as a unit. Taking translated English sentences as a model, Japanese sentence structure, punctuation system, and grammar have been created to enable Japanese to express logical thoughts in writing. This has served further to separate writing from speech. He further argues that this two-tier system of language has shaped Japanese culture and thought systems. Writing is not a form of speech and has been shaped by confronting, rejecting, and guarding against speech. As a result, speech has become a language of insiders, while writing has obtained formal status, which is used to contact outsiders and is available for translation to exchange ideas and thoughts. The development of translation in Japan can be examined in four different periods of history (Kondo & Wakabayashi, 2001) and together it leads us to an intriguing inquiry: Is there an original Japanese? As history reveals, Japanese is a translation of other languages, and what we think of 83 as original is often the product of interrelationships among cultures. Initially, translation meant translating Chinese and Korean texts into Japanese. This is a crucial period for examining the Japanese language, because in the process of translating Chinese into Japanese, Japan imported a written language and developed a writing system. In other words, the Japanese language is the product of translation. The Japanese needed this translation in order to obtain information about foreign civilizations—the advanced Confucian culture—so as to advance its own. Chinese characters were imported into Japan in the fifth century through Japanese scholars who were educated in China; the Japanese adopted the Chinese writing system and later modified it and created their own writing system to be used alongside Chinese. By the ninth century, the Japanese had developed an annotation system which enabled them to read Chinese texts without translation, and many new words were integrated into the Japanese language along with their new concepts.25 Around the seventeenth century, Chinese literature was translated, and contributed to the development of popular Japanese fiction. Even after the written forms were established, the relationship between China and Japan remained important, each influencing the other language's development. Guo (2002) points out this relationship: In some areas the Japanese use Chinese characters in their archaic and/or Japanized senses, which are often misleading to Chinese audiences. In other areas, the Japanese have created, and are creating, many terms and expressions with Chinese characters, which are visually new but semantically, etymologically and lexically intelligible to the Chinese. This unique cultural reciprocity played its historical role when China was in the cultural predicament of linguistic disorientation at the turn of the 20 t h century, (p. 170) Translation has played roles in shaping and reshaping Japanese and Chinese, through which new meanings are produced. The second period of translation activity occurred when Portuguese and Dutch language The Japanese language is ideographic, its script borrowed from China. This type of script can be developed on its own apart from the spoken word, making it easier for the Japanese to read the Chinese 84 and texts reached Japan through Christian missionaries in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, requiring the Japanese to find an equivalent for various Christian words, such as God and heaven, and to translate missionary texts into Japanese. The Portuguese and the Dutch also brought Western knowledge and culture, which stimulated the Japanese to develop dictionaries and translation practices. Translation created language, which in turn produced meaning. By 1639, the military government felt Christianity was destabilizing its power and decided to close the country, isolating it, with the exception of a few trading partners, from the international community.26 This period of isolation ended when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in 1853 and demanded that Japan open its doors to the United States. This incident led Japan to the third period of translation activity, as well as the turning point in its translation history. In 1867, military governance came to an end, and the emperor regained his power; the country's vigorous restoration and modernization27 began. Having fallen behind other civilizations, Japan needed to import as well as translate technology, politics, and the arts from overseas. With the push to modernize, "the Japanese appeared to have been assigned to the status of second-term, or silent, interlocutors whose interests, hereafter, were to be represented to themselves by another," and "the interaction has resembled the relationship between ventriloquist and dummy" (Harootunian, 1993, pp. 197-198). In this period, Japanese scholars had to translate new concepts and ideas developed in the West. Their efforts to script. 2 6 Japan was an empire from around 200 CE and emperors were regarded as divine until the end of World War II in 1946, though between 1186 and 1867 the military held the real political power. 2 7 Miyoshi (1991) argues that in Japan the term "modern" does not signify modernism or modernization, since "the universal application of a historical periodization based on one historical system would be senseless as well as ethnocentric" (p. 12). He observes that Japanese historians and cultural theorists take different stances, such as those who embrace Westernization, those who deplore it, or those who are anti-progress and anti-West. I use the term "modern" to refer to the period between 1867 and the 1970s, and "contemporary" to refer to the post-1970s. 85 translate concepts and ideas which could not be described by existing Japanese created new words. These newly coined words, the product of translation, became "Japanese" as they were used by the Japanese over the years; again, language produced and established meaning. This illustrates the complexity of the Japanese language. Written Japanese, in particular, was developed though translating Chinese, which in turn was used to translate Western culture. The language that the Japanese use today is in fact a translation of a translation. Biguenet and Schulte (1989) would call this "the reconstruction process": "Words have the potential of expanding the boundaries of their lexical meanings and the dynamics of semantic possibilities through their specific contextual placement" (p. xi). Translation is about unlimited construction and reconstruction. At the same time as this third period of translation was underway in Japan, "the Qing Dynasty turned its eyes from the West to Japan for advanced learning," (Guo, 2002, p. 170) as a result of China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). Many Chinese went to Japan to be educated; the number grew to more than ten thousand by 1906. Guo suggests that this movement led China to translate "Japanese or Japanese translation of Euro-American works into Chinese" (p. 171). A large number of Japanese works were translated: Under "the title of A General Encyclopedia, [translators of Japanese] included books of and on religion, philosophy, literature, education, politics, law, geography, history, natural sciences, industry and commerce" and by the "Sun Yat-sen Revolution (1911), the majority of textbooks used in China's secondary and post-secondary schools were translated or re-translated from Japanese" (ibid). While Japan was busy translating Western ideas and concepts into Japanese, China was translating these translated ideas and concepts into Chinese: Chinese translators "were importing new Western ideas whose Chinese equivalents had been created or invented by the Japanese using Chinese characters" (ibid.). However, the two languages performed differently 86 in the different cultures. Guo further suggests that "many Chinese words created by the Japanese out of traditional Chinese contexts were endowed with foreign and alien meanings. Consider his example, ge min (revolution): ge (change) min (fate, destiny) as a word can be found in the Book of Changes. However, in that context, it means "changing the mandate of heaven," whereas revolution is defined as and popularly understood to be a successful attempt by a large group of people, often using violent methods, to change the political system of their country, (p. 173) The Japanese word "democracy" in Chinese ( S i ) means "masters of the people," the opposite of its English meaning. Such Japanese words nevertheless survived and matured, later becoming part of the Chinese language. Regardless of political circumstances, the endeavour of both Japan and China to translate had a similar intention—the desire to excel and advance. They both wanted not just knowledge for its own sake, but power. Gaining knowledge meant achieving power. Translation ushered modern ideas and values into Japan, enabling the Japanese to study political systems, law, medicine, science and technology, and literature in various foreign languages, in particular, English, French, Russian and German. Many literary works were translated by translators who were writers themselves, and their struggle to translate original texts as accurately as possible while maintaining their artistic forms led them to create new forms. By the 1920s, most of the major literary works in the West had been translated into Japanese. This third period ended during the Second World War, when the Japanese government banned foreign books as well as the use of English. The fourth period of translation activity began after the war and continues today. Under the American occupation, Japan sought to restore political and economic stability and power, and translation again became critical in order to obtain current knowledge of Western norms, values, culture, and technology, whatever was needed to further the Japanese desire to 87 emulate the West and to acquire First World status.28 In the 1950s, more American literary works than European were translated into Japanese, as the United States and the English language became symbols of power and prosperity. At the same time, the economic and social conditions in Japan became capitalist, "symptoms common in global hegemonic societies" (Miyoshi, 1991, p. 61). Even though the Japanese are dependent upon translated texts, a translation theory has not been fully developed. The main concern at this stage seems to be the linguistic aspects of translation—the differences between the Japanese language and Indo-European languages—and the difficulty of preserving the aesthetic value of a work to be translated. The politics of translation have not yet been fully explored. In a collection of essays published in the 1980s in Japan, for example, translators argued about whether or not literal, word-for-word, translation provides readers with more authentic original texts, even if it creates unidiomatic texts (Bungaku, 1982). The issues of how to translate culture have also become important. Though some translators advocate free translation, literal translation seems dominant. This might stem from the fact that the Japanese have become used to reading unidiomatic translated works as they learn English by word-for-word translation at school (Kondo & Wakabayashi, 2001). Critiques of translating Japanese literature into other languages rarely appear, and the number of Japanese literary works translated into English or other European languages is far fewer than works of American, British, or French literature translated into Japanese. The history of the translation of Japanese shows that the language we speak is already The American military government of occupation lasted from August 1945 to April 1952; the Japanese accepted American democracy as a result of their resentment of Japanese militarism. The new constitution in which the emperor became a symbol of the state was drafted by American officials and adopted by the Diet in 1946. As the Cold War intensified, Japan became clearly an ally of the United States who rebuilt and used Japan's former military bases as their own military bases, a practice which was endorsed by a security treaty in 1952. 88 a product of cultural exchange and learning about the Other. Language is attached to who we are and where we are from, yet our roots emerge not always from definite framed spaces, but often from generative spaces of cultural interchange. Recognizing this language fluidity can help students reconsider their roots and their cultural norms and values. III. 4. Creating Language at the Border The history of translation in Japan also suggests that the necessity of translation has made the Japanese and other people aware of the Other and of the borderlines between languages. But at the same time, it reveals that this borderline is not solid and stable; rather, it is ambiguous, contradictory, and destabilized by translation. Meanings are not fixed. Translation is an effort to counter the indeterminacy of meaning as it holds that some degree of correspondence is always possible. Language is alive and can write us differently. As we have seen, after 1867 translation became crucial, and many new words were created by using Chinese characters to interpret Western thoughts, transferring them into "Japanese." After World War II, instead of creating new words, many English words were transformed into another form of Japanese by using a syllabary called katakana. This process simply adjusts the pronunciation of English and transcribes it: For example, colourful becomes jiyy71/ (pronounced close to "karafuru"). The dictionary gives its definition as something like "many colours" or "lively," but once it is transferred to katakana, it loses such definition and becomes a word of ambiguity. A word steps outside of a vertical space of signifier and signified into a horizontal space of a chain of signification. jdyy/V, which "sounds like English," attracts people to use the word, while its meaning is incomplete, hovering around the word. This ambiguity is what people appreciate, keeping a word mysterious and attractive. 89 This phenomenon is what Yanabu (2001) calls the Cassette Effect, discussed in Chapter Two. Yanabu describes the ambivalent relationship between the colonizer's English and the colonized's Japanese; copying ideas, norms, or values of English into Japanese shows the desire to emulate the colonizer's culture, but not entirely. Using katakana to mark them as foreign, alien, implies that there is something to admire, yet something from which to keep a distance. In his MSR^fifflrt* (loosely translated as What is Translation?), Yanabu (2001) examines Japanese words originally translated from English and discusses how these words have been "performed." As noted earlier, translation has influenced the modern Japanese language, and one of the prominent influences is on pronouns. In speech, the Japanese omit the subject (including pronouns) as long as the subject is clear to the speaker and the listener; when they need to refer to a third person, they tend to use names or demonstrative pronouns and nouns (i.e. "that person," instead of "she"), whereas English has to have a subject. Barthes (1982) emphasizes this need, writing "how can we imagine a verb which is simultaneously without subject, without attribute, and yet transitive, such as for instance, an act of knowledge, without knowing subject and without known object?" (p.7). Pronouns are now used more commonly in writing Japanese. Traditionally, as a Confucian society, Japanese did not have the concept of the individual, though there was a word "person" or "people." The Chinese character person/people (A) , originally a pictograph meaning relatives and neighbours, suggests that two persons are supporting each other; later Confucius expanded the character's meaning to represent "humanity." Pronouns, in particular "I," "she," "he," were a difficult concept to grasp. As many works of literature were translated into Japanese, however, the necessity of pronouns increased which also affected writers of Japanese literature. Yanabu suggests that generally Japanese sentences tend not to address 90 individuals as they do in English; they prefer ambiguity, avoiding targeting particular individuals. Yanabu writes that when the word "he" was created, it was initially used for English "he" or "it" and created a box effect. As writers used "he," they began to explore its usage and meaning, which opened a new world to them. Barthes (2000) would call this the signifier of myth, presenting itself "in an ambiguous way" (p. 117). The word "he" calls for a writer to fill up an "impoverished" form creating a new framing: "One believes that the meaning is going to die, but it is a death with reprieve; the meaning loses its value, but keeps its life, from which the form of the myth will draw its nourishment" (p. 118). Analyzing Japanese literature written around the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Yanabu illustrates how "he" was utilized in different works and produced a different "he." Japanese "he" or "she" today has been used and understood as a third person singular due to English education. Japanese use "he" or "she" to indicate a third person, boy friend/girl friend, themselves, and its use will remain like this, Yanabu suspects. Because it was created by translation, the word remains unsettled. A word created by translation tends to become a noun in Japanese, and for a verb form, a Japanese auxiliary verb or a particular verb ("do" in English) are added to the nouns to transfer their meanings. Western ideology entered Japan through translation after the Meiji restoration period in the late 1800s. The concepts of equality of individuals, human rights, and liberty stem from that time. These concepts are, however, not completely equivalent to the English ones. "Right" (as in human right), for example, was translated into Japanese by using Chinese characters, meaning "weight" or "power." Living in a hierarchical society, the concept "power" was easier for the Japanese to understand than the individual-centred "right." As a result, the translated word "right" was used to reflect both "right" and "power," which confused people, as they are conflicting concepts. Yanabu suggests that people eventually disregarded the meaning of 91 "power," but the remaining meaning "right" does not exactly carry the same concept that the English "right" maintains. "Freedom" or "liberty" had to trace a similar path through translation. Even today these translated words have not yet established vertically signified meanings. When Japanese civilians were recently captured as hostages in Iraq, for instance, the government criticized them for being irresponsible citizens who ignored the government warning not to travel to Iraq and caused psychological and financial turmoil to the nation and its people. After they were released unharmed, the government requested them to reimburse partial costs of their rescue, since they, as reckless individuals, had burdened Japan and occasioned the outlay of much taxpayer money. The hostages, who were peace-keeping volunteers and journalists, defended their entry into Iraq, stating that they, as individuals, had the right to pursue what they believe is right, and the freedom to do so. This story triggered controversy internationally. European and North American journalists were puzzled by, and then critical of, the Japanese government's treatment of the hostages. They suggested that the hostages, as representatives of Japan, demonstrated Japanese people's willingness to help people in Iraq; they were national heroes. Nationalism is translated differently in these different cultures. The Japanese government expects Japanese nationals to share a common identity and unity; citizens should obey and pursue the same goals that the government has. European and North American nationalism suggests the nation must accept citizens' self-determination, freedom, and individual rights, within certain limits often constitutionally defined. For the Japanese government, "right" means "power" whereas for the hostages it means individual entitlement or respect for their initiative. No wonder miscommunication happens among speakers or writers of different languages. But translation reminds us of challenges and possibilities. Because of translation's uncertainty, if we are aware of it, we can explore the 92 depth and breadth of language and its meaning, before making judgments about what is said or written. Translated language continues to perform differently among people. But their attempts and struggles to interpret concepts and transfer meaning in different languages generate possibility in language, helping people to explore different ideas and values. The task of the translator is to narrow the gaps between languages. Yet, when it is translated, language performs on its own, continuously shifting and searching for where to dwell. As Derrida argues, meaning is always differential and deferred. When a new word is created, it is, as a symbol, arbitrary. Readers then interpret it, construct/reconstruct its meaning— the translator "dies" at this point. Often, initially new words remain alien and foreign, triggering sometimes contradictory ideas. This contradiction deconstructs the frame, however, and creates the condition of maintaining a shared space. Language begins to and continues to write us, as deconstructionists would argue. Yanabu's observation of translated Japanese language can be seen as akin to Steiner's final stage of hermeneutic motion or restitution, as it suggests that distance and contiguity merge into equilibrium. Translating a foreign language into Japanese illustrates how the meaning of language shifts, expands, or sometimes is redefined while crossing borders, and how translation contributes to modifying or even transforming norms and values. The classroom consists of multiple frames in which students "translate" language in various ways. If both educators and students spend more time exploring this performative nature of language, they might achieve better understanding of self and other. 93 III. 5. Empire of Signs: Translation in Metonymic Centre-less Space Translated language in Japan has performed a significant role in constructing Japanese thoughts and minds, and culture, as discussed above. Because of its instability, however, translated language never settles at the centre. Rather, as Yanabu's box effect has shown, it dwells in the periphery—the border world, shifting and expanding. Since the Japanese language, especially the written one, is a translation, the framework of Japanese seems centre-less. The language that has written Japan and the Japanese is on the periphery. In his book, $%£>M& (loosely translated as The Thought of Myth), Yanabu (2002) further examines this location of translated language in his discussion of the word "emperor." He argues that even though the Emperor has been considered to symbolize29 Japanese society with his place at the centre of Japanese culture, the Japanese word "emperor" is in fact a production of translation and is thus located within a cultural boundary. According to Yanabu, the word "emperor" originally came from China where it was used in astrology as the name of a star. After being brought to Japan, this new word lost its original meaning and created a new concept—an emperor. Yanabu assumes that the uncertainty and novelty of a new word captivated the Japanese mind. Because its meaning was unknown, it looked mysteriously significant and valuable. It consists of two Chinese characters (^H) , one meaning "sky," and "nature," and "god," and the other meaning "great king"; so it was suitable to represent an emperor. Later the Emperor became "the Emperor of the Empire of Great Japan," translated from "the Empire of Great Britain." In Japan, however, the word did not indicate any geographical distinction but represented authority and power, the desire to achieve the same power that the Empire of Great Britain had attained. There is more evidence of translation complexity in relation to the Emperor. The 94 Three Sacred Treasures of the Imperial House that Japanese emperors have inherited are also believed to have been brought from China or Korea. The Emperor's formal attire came initially from China and later from Europe, and continues to show the influence of European cultures, such as French, German, and English. I remember a photograph of the previous Emperor and Empress dressed like the European Imperial Family in the guest room of my grandparents' house, a common feature even ten years after World War II. The Emperor was once the ruler of Japan and was considered a god, the ultimate being of the nation, and yet his role was the construction of translation and located in the intersection of cultures and languages. But nobody seemed to be bothered by such a contradiction. For my grandparents' generation, the Emperor was the nation and a god; people fought for the sake of the Emperor. The Emperor dwells in an ambivalent space. The centre is impossible to identify without locating the margin. But if the Emperor dwells on the periphery, where is the centre? One thing that we learn from the construction of the term Emperor is that what we think is the centre or mainstream may be an illusion, constructed by language in order to identify the border. Just because language occupies the centre, it does not mean the centre exists. If we shift language, we may illuminate the centre-less circle in the classroom. Such absent-centred space is discussed by Japanese psychologist, Kawai Hayao (2003), who examines Japanese mythology and discusses the Japanese mind in # J ^ J # ^ y l ^ ' & (loosely translated as Mythology and the Japanese Mind). He analyzes two creation myths— (Kojiki) (712) and B#0& (Nihonshoki) (720)30—and observes that these The Constitution of Japan defines the Emperor not as a ruler but as the symbol of the nation. 3 0 Kojiki is translated as the "Record of Ancient Matters" which "relates mythological stories and historical events of ancient Japan"; Nihonshoki is translated as the "Chronicles of Japan" including myth, legend, and archives, "a long series of official compilations of the ancient chronicles of Japan." Both are considered "the most valuable sources of information on the ancient history, religion and culture of Japan" (Yamaguchi & Kojima, 1979, pp. 291-293). 95 myths played roles in creating a nation with the Emperor as its centre in relation to China or Korea. Interestingly, however, the opening of Nihonshoki indicates that it is a translation from Chinese texts. Rather than identifying a Creator of the world, Japanese myths teach that the world evolved from chaos or shapeless conditions naturally giving birth to many gods in the process. Kawai suggests that the most significant characteristic derived from Japanese mythology is the idea of balancing power among the gods. In iff^fB (Kojiki), Kawai observes, three triads—each consisting of three gods—appear. He regards these triads as empty-centred, because there is no mention of a god, except a name, that seems to be located at the centre. Kawai observes that the number three is crucial: "one" suggests totality; "two" suggests binary opposition, separation, contradiction; but three connotes a stable and balanced state. This triad, based on polytheism, is different from the Trinity. Kawai argues that the fundamental elements of Japanese mythology are what he calls ^"StWMWM (the empty-centred balanced structure). No god has ultimate authority, or represents exclusively good or evil. Gods confront, contradict, yet eventually restore equilibrium. This equilibrium empties the centre. Kawai further contends that the empty-centred balanced structure embraces newcomers, because even if such acceptance causes confrontation and contradiction, it eventually maintains balance, coexisting within contradiction. Unlike Yanabu who perceives the Emperor on the periphery, however, Kawai perceives that the Emperor dwells in the centre-less centre, as a symbol. Translating Japan as an empty-centred space and the Emperor in a centre-less centre has been noted elsewhere. In his analysis of Japan, Empire of Signs, Barthes (1982) perceives Japan as empty of meaning: "Text and image, interlacing, seek to ensure the circulation and exchange of these signifiers: body, face, writing; and in them to read the retreat of signs" (p. xi). Barthes observes and locates Japanese culture not at the border but outside of the system 96 of Western culture. His experience of translating Japan is free from Western metaphysics' pursuit of meaning. Japan demonstrates a space of deconstruction in which language disturbs and shifts its meaning; signifier never reaches signified—a metonymic space. Graham Allen (2003) suggests that for Barthes, Japan "provides limitless opportunities for a release from meaning, for a pleasurable floating among empty languages, empty signs" (p. 71). Allen writes that one example of such empty signs is haiku: The "West moistens everything with meaning, like an authoritarian religion which imposes baptism on entire peoples," but haiku, Japanese poetry, is "to suspend language, not to provoke it" (pp. 70-72). Because a haiku consists of only seventeen syllables in three lines (five, seven, five syllables respectively), the reader has to read empty spaces between the lines. Just as Japanese flower arrangements value empty spaces between flowers, haiku requires a reader to float between signs. Barthes suggests that haiku illustrates ambiguity, articulated by Derrida's deconstruction of "no thing to be presented behind language." Barthes perceives Tokyo as the centre-less space: "every center is the site of truth, the center of our cities is always full. . . . : To go downtown or to the center-city is to encounter the social 'truth,' to participate in the proud plenitude of'reality'" (Barthes, 1982, p. 30). But Tokyo offers paradox: "it does possess a center, but this center is empty" (ibid.). He finds this emptiness at the Emperor's residence: The entire city turns around a site both forbidden and indifferent, a residence concealed beneath foliage, protected by moats, inhabited by an emperor who is never seen, which is to say, literally, by no one knows who. Daily, in their rapid, energetic, bullet-like trajectories, the taxis avoid this circle, whose low crest, the visible form of invisibility, hides the sacred "notion." (ibid., pp. 30-32) He concludes that "the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject," which is what the Japanese language is. Allen (2003) argues that Barthes "reads Japan as a text which remains, ultimately, unreadable, beyond the recuperation 97 (discovery) of the kind of stable and finite meaning for which reading traditionally seeks" (pp. 73-74). Considering the works of Yanabu, Kawai, and Barthes, one might suggest that the story of the Tower of Babel is also about the empty-centred world. The Lord scattered different languages over the face of the earth, expecting clash, conflict, and hostilities. Difference separates people, creates struggle, but it also helps them learn how to coexist. Perhaps translation mediates such a process. Although the biblical story and Japanese mythology are derived from different beliefs, their difference may lie either in perceiving an invisible god at the centre or perceiving god as an empty symbol. Kawai concludes that combining the empty-centred balanced structure and the unified-centre structure may be a solution to our future. He points out that people tend to show indecisiveness when they face a crisis that requires an individual decision in the empty-centred balanced structure. Depending upon others, they may behave irresponsibly. But he also suggests that the unified-centre structure has revealed its problems in history. The works of Yanabu, Kawai, and Barthes provide us with possibilities of how to recreate the classroom. Many cultures disagree, confront, or contradict. Translating each other can eventually take us to the centre-less, balanced space. There is no definite answer. The process we seek to find meaning helps us create balance. When reading texts in the classroom, both teachers and students may assume there is a definite meaning, and to reach that meaning is to understand the text. Barthes' analysis of Japan tells otherwise. There is no ultimate meaning to seek; the reader thus re-creates the text, becoming a writer of translation. Barthes' reading of Japan also links to the idea that translation is Metonymy, a space of doubling, not a simple oppositional binary space. In the classroom, there are many translators who are in a space of doubling. Both students and teachers share their translations and explore differences. 98 They have to know that they can never reach definite centre, because there is not one to reach. I have illustrated how hermeneutic conceptions of translation help us understand how the Japanese language and culture have been shaped through translating ideas and thoughts, and how translation has played its part in shaping national identities. In the following sections, I will focus on literature translated both from and into Japanese and discuss translation through sociocultural and political approaches. III.6. Ambivalent Post-colonial Japan The cultural productions of Japan in the twentieth century have been "inextricably enmeshed with the developments of Western colonialism and non-Western nativism" (Miyoshi, 1991, p. 41). Japan has experienced two major restoration periods—at the end of the 19th century and again after the Second World War—both times reconstructing its political and economic status in the world by relying on foreign power and control, particularly by the United States. Unlike India or other countries where the colonial language functions as a national language, Japan has never lost the Japanese language nor been completely dominated by a colonial power; however, the Japanese social and cultural values have been formed under the political and economic influence of the United States, since the United States occupied Japan after the war and provided financial support to restore the country while establishing military bases and directing the Japanese government to draft a constitution. Consequently, the Japanese often feel that they are second-rate citizens and think that they should try hard to emulate the West. At the same time, there has always been resentment and resistance to being westernized and to losing their own "cultural values." The Japanese identity is complex and ambivalent. Despite Japan's sense of marginality, the translation of Japanese literature has not 99 been folly examined from a post-colonial perspective, perhaps because post-colonial studies are "based in the 'historical fact' of European colonialism, and the diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1995, p. 2). Since the term "post-colonial" has been used to discuss various cultural, economic, and political issues, "the tendency to employ the term 'post-colonial' to refer to any kind of marginality at all runs the risk of denying its basis in the historical process of colonialism" (ibid). Certainly Japan has never been officially colonized; rather, Japan was a colonizer. Nationalism, bringing the desire to gain power over neighbouring countries, transformed Japan from a Third World country to a first-world-like country; Japanese imperialism eventually resulted in the invasion and subjugation of other East Asian countries. Despite this history, the post-colonial approach nevertheless helps us examine Japanese attitudes towards translation, and norms and values shaped through translation, because certain Japanese literary works which were chosen to be translated into English or other languages, together with books written by Westerners about Japan and its people, have influenced the West's construction of their view of Japan and the Japanese. Said's notion of Orientalism applies to Japan. The Japanese experience of representation and oppression might therefore well render it a candidate for post-colonial studies.31 The problem is that many Japanese have failed to reflect upon their ambivalent state and have engaged enthusiastically in the pursuit of westernization. The work of Sakai Naoki (1999) provides an opening perspective. In Translation and Subjectivity, he suggests that 3 1 Applying the concept "post-colonial" to non-colonized nations can be found in other scholars' works. For example, Sherry Simon (1999) examines the situation of Quebec as post-colonial. She writes that as a "French-speaking political community, implicated in the cultural dynamics of North America and receiving immigrants from across the globe, Quebec can be said to participate fully in the contradictions and tensions of contemporary post-coloniality" (p. 59). Yangsheng Guo (2002) suggests China has undergone the process of translating the West to re-define China, an experience that thus reflects colonial and post-colonial contexts—the impasse between Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism. 1 0 0 Japanese literature "has not been placed in the configurative mimetic relationship with another national literature that is not the literature of the imperialist nation-state" (p. 22). And thus "the identity of Japanese literature as a national literature has never been figured out in relation to the peoples who were colonized or subordinated by those imperialist nations" (p. 22). This may suggest that historically Japan wants to identify itself as a colonizer, emphasizing its power comparable to the West. China and Japan seem to have followed similar paths. Rey Chow (1993), professor of literature in the United States, argues that territorially independent countries such as China and Japan illustrate how imperialism works; "imperialism as ideological domination succeeds best without physical coercion, without actually capturing the body and the land" (p. 8). China, she suggests, "perhaps because it is an exception to the rule of imperialist domination by race, land, and language involving a foreign power, in fact highlights the effects of the imperialistic transformation of value and value-production more sharply than in other 'third world' cultures" (p. 9, emphasis original). The ability to preserve territorial and linguistic integrity in China means that "as a 'third world' country, the Chinese relation to the imperialist West, until Communists officially propagandized 'anti-imperialism,' is seldom purely 'oppositional' ideologically; on the contrary, the point has always been for China to become as strong as the West, to become the West's 'equal" (p. 8). This goal to reach First World status appears similar to that of Japan; but, perhaps because of being a capitalist society, Japan does not seem entirely able to resist imperialism or to rise up against imperialism. 101 III.7. Translating Japanese Literature: Construction of Nation and Race Examining Japanese literature in translation and English books portraying Japan helps us recognize how literature has contributed to the Western construction of Japan and the Japanese. Although translated European and Western literature has provided the Japanese with knowledge of and ideas about Western culture since the seventeenth century, translations of Japanese literature32 were not available in the West until the 1960s and the 1970s.33 The selection of books, which is controlled by the publishers (mostly American), has also been limited to a few writers, namely Tanizaki Junichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, and Mishima Yukio, 3 4 and these writers "established a canon of Japanese fiction in English that was . . . based on a well-defined stereotype that has determined reader expectations for roughly forty years" (Venuti, 1998, p. 72).3 5 As the English translation of texts was translated into other European languages, so, too, were the stereotypes. All of these writers have had a particularly strong impact on the production of the popular image of Japan in the West. Harootunian (1993) suggests that Mishima, for example, "produced an ideology of cultural totalism to serve the political and economic systems" (p. 217). Mishima wanted to reclaim totality "secured by imperial sovereignty and closely resembling the ideological representations of emperor and community that were being made Miyoshi (1991) questions the definition of Japanese literature, since literature "as a discipline is a historical product of European colonialism and nationalism" (p. 17). Modern Japanese literature was formed during the modernization period in the late-1800s, and a Department of National Literature was established at a national university only in the mid-1880s. He argues that "it is not just intraliterary categories, or genres, that need to be reimagined, but also the whole idea of literature itself, which is taken for granted only at great risk" (p. 18). 3 3 In 1974, for example, a collection of novellas, Accomplices of Silence, by Masao Miyoshi, was published in which his introduction discussed the modern Japanese novel. He writes that Japanese literature was unknown to the outside world, except for some classic translation and haiku in the 1950s. 3 4 Japanese writers' names are written in Japanese order, family name first, except Japanese-Americans or Japanese-Europeans. 3 5 In the hierarchy of languages translated into English, Japanese ranks sixth after French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Italian (Venuti, 1995, p. 502). 102 during the 1930s" (p. 217). What made Mishima known to the West was his suicide, "seppuku," cutting open his abdomen with a Japanese sword. Mishima is also very well known in England, Kazuo Ishiguro (1993) suggests, because his image, the way he died, fits the Western readers' stereotype of Japan, and this view has helped these readers "remain locked in certain prejudices and very superficial, stereotypical images of what Japanese people are like" (p. 167). Kawabata, who also committed suicide, provided the West with another traditional Japanese image as he identified himself "as belonging essentially to the tradition of Zen philosophy and aesthetic sensibility pervading the classical literature of the Orient, but he went out of his way to differentiate emptiness as an attribute of his works from the nihilism of the West" (Oe, 1994, p. 113). They seem to be remembered not by their works but their lives, representing Japan and the Japanese. This is an example of how translation can create frames, define vertical signification, and construct facade. Few seek to examine what is happening behind this facade. In discussing Fowler's (1992) analysis of Japanese literature, Venuti (1998) writes, "not only did the translated fiction often refer to traditional Japanese culture, but some novels lamented the disruptive social changes wrought by military conflict and Western influence; Japan was represented as 'an exoticized, aestheticized, and quintessentially foreign land quite antithetical to its prewar image of a bellicose and imminently threatening power'" (p. 72). Moreover, these books were translated by American university professors and read mostly by academics and intellectuals. One such American academic and translator, Donald Keene (1982), addresses his concerns regarding translating Japanese literature into English. He writes that since translators take the initiative to determine which texts will be translated, the texts have to be found and recommended to publishers. If books are written in European languages, publishers usually have somebody who can read the original work, which is not often the case 1 0 3 with Japanese texts. Consequently, most of the time, only texts which either translators love or scholars in Japanese literature recommend are likely to be translated, but these works might not be of interest to non-academic readers or benefit the publishers financially. And publishers tend to publish a book only when they think it is marketable. For example, publishers became interested in publishing Kawabata's work only after he received the Nobel Prize. Recently, the situation has been changing. Because of Japan's economic growth, people overseas have become interested in learning about Japan and the Japanese language. Japanese has been extensively taught and studied as a foreign language throughout the world and particularly in the United States since the 1980s; however, "most of the world continues to rely upon translation for its knowledge of Japan and of Japanese literary art and culture" (Miller, 1986, p. 177). The current state of the translator's art in Japan leaves much to be desired. An American critic, Roy Andrew Miller (1986) argues that if "the Japanese language itself today appears to call out for defence against much of what is said and written about it, then surely so also does the reader of translations—who if anything is even more vulnerable, and thus even more in need of defence, in this matter of translations from the Japanese" (p. 177). Translators' inadequate understanding of the Japanese language or their distorted view of Japan may further misrepresent stories beyond what is inevitable in translation. Miller (1986) takes an example from Enchi Fumiko's novella, Onnamen (originally published in 1958). Enchi is one of the most important modern female writers (Miyoshi, 1991, p. 206), and there are very few English (or other language) translations of modern Japanese female writers' works. 3 6 Miller compares and contrasts the original Japanese text with the text Masks translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (1983), and addresses a review by John Updike who relies upon the translated text, to illustrate how the translator "has departed from the 104 original" (Miller, 1986, p. 180). One of the passages that Miller discusses demonstrates how a translator might indulge herself in "orientalism" (p. 183): In the course of a description of early plum blossoms flowering in the precincts of a Shinto shrine, the [Carpenter's] translation has one of the characters remark, "It's very Japanese, yet there's something of China in this scenery, too." . . . . The original, as it turns out, says nothing of the sort. . . . The spectacle of a Japanese in a Japanese novel saying of something that it is "very Japanese" naturally attracted Updike's notice, (ibid.) Miller's translation of the same passage is " . . . of course this sort of scene is 'Japanese,' but actually, China is much involved with it as well" (ibid.). Miller (1986) argues that Carpenter's "violation" (p. 184) is most dangerous and most likely to "interfere with the communicative role of translations as bridges between one literary culture and another" (p. 184). Translators, he concludes, "must be willing to confront the English-language reader with translations that do not necessarily conform to preconceived notions of what a text must sound like and say" (p. 220). This example may illustrate their difficulty reaching the final stage of Steiner's hermeneutic motion. Even when the translators overcome the second "aggression" movement, the third movement—"incorporation"—challenges them: "We encircle and invade cognitively. We come home laden, thus again off-balance, having caused disequilibrium throughout the system by taking away from 'the other' and by adding, though possibly with ambiguous consequence, to our own" (Steiner, 1998, pp. 316). Language tends to operate within our preexisting signification. When we find familiar meaning in language, we tend not to question it. Books about Japan written in English have also reinforced Westerners' perspectives of Japan as Other. They are more likely to be translated into other languages because publishers and translators can easily read the English original. Once these books become See Miyoshi's (1991) analysis of Enchi's work. 105 well-received, they are in turn translated into Japanese. Even if they promote stereotypes, the Japanese seem to accept what they deliver; there has not been strong objection to such translations. These texts often contribute to making the Japanese define their cultural identity as Westerners construct it. Even if a text is a scholarly work, what is written is from the western writer's perspective. The challenge for educators is to educate students and themselves to read critically. Pfeiffer (1996) points out this misrepresentation in a cultural theory using the classic work of cultural anthropology, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (originally published in 1946), by Ruth Benedict. It defines Japanese culture as a "shame" culture, relying on external sanctions for good behavior, as opposed to a "guilt" culture, relying on an internalized conviction of sin represented by the West. This book was translated into Japanese and became a best-seller in Japan. The Japanese people seemed simply to accept her observation and were persuaded to theorize Japanese culture as a shame culture. Pfeiffer argues that Benedict's analysis was "overdrawn," portraying the Japanese as "too bound to duty and social position, too concerned with their reputation" (Pfeiffer, 1996, p. 190). He points out the fact that Benedict was assigned to study the Japanese under pressure from the military who wanted to know about "the 'morale' of the Japanese" (p. 191) in order to have better control at the later stages of World War II. The result is that "images of cultures and of their degeneration into stereotypes . . . take precedence" (p. 192). An American journalist, Patrick Smith (1997), also questions Benedict's theory and suggests that once we "recognize the conflict beneath the surface, we understand that group identity had more to do with coercion and power than with tradition and culture. . . .[tjhere is nothing especially 'Japanese' about what we call the Japanese character or personality" (p. 56). Miyoshi (1991) also writes that there are fundamental faults in Benedict's assumptions, and that she "has been 106 all along gazing at no one but herself (p. 87). Yet for many Japanese, Benedict's version of Japanese culture and identity is the one they embrace as authentic and authoritative. This tendency to create stereotypes and the Japanese tendency to accept them has continued without much resistance. For example, the recent bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (1997) captured the attention of the media in exploring this "mysterious" Japanese woman's occupation, geisha. This book, "a stunningly popular novel that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks," (Struck, 2000, p. C6) sold four million copies in English and has been translated into 32 languages. T V programs too have been produced. Doug Struck of the Washington Post reported that this book unfolds "true" stories of geisha and informed the West that the geisha, known as "beauty and elegance," live in the "flower and willow world" in Kyoto and serve wealthy men as "prostitutes" (ibid.). Yet the woman who is considered to be the model for this book now criticizes the author for creating a false image of geisha. Golden responds that the book is fiction (Struck, 2000). Whether or not Golden's book tells a true story is not the issue. What matters here is that the novel reinforces the stereotype that the geisha is a representation of the traditional Japanese woman. He has simply written a nostalgic memoir which reflects what Westerners expect Japan and Japanese women to be like. As it portrays Japan as the Other, the book has reasserted the stereotypical view of Japanese women as obedient and submissive. But again, the Japanese do not seem to contest this type of representation. The book has been translated into Japanese but arouses a different response from that received in the West. What matters to the Japanese seems not to be the issue of representation of women, but the issue of translation itself—the translation has changed the book. Writer and editor, Jennifer Hanawald (2000), reports that the Japanese used in translating Memoirs of a Geisha was too genuine to be an English-translation, including "a manner of expression that was unique to geisha society in 107 Kyoto and for which there is no English equivalent" (p. 1). Hanawald suggests that this observation indicates a successful translation: On the one hand [the Japanese] say, it uses specialized language that the original author could never have known, yet it still takes the time to explain things about the culture that are obvious to Japanese readers . . . . the charm that you feel when you read the book in English, which evokes a feeling of the exotic, is lost in the Japanese version, in which it seems as if Golden is hiding the fact that he is a foreigner, (ibid.) Perhaps Golden is not hiding but disappeared (or died a Foucaultian death) when the book was translated. Is the translated book successful because the language of the translated text is genuine? Or did the Japanese translator fail to translate the original language in his "domestication" of English to Japanese? Yet, the original context Golden wrote about is in fact Japan; did the Japanese translator domesticate English in portraying Japan to the Japanese? If the language had not been domesticated, might the translation have been criticized as "inauthentic"? How does the translated Japanese version serve Japanese readers, since it seems not to capture the sense of exoticism so central to the original text? When does the translation so differ from the translated text that it constitutes a different work? There are more questions than answers. One thing is clear: translated texts dealing with a particular culture create challenges, not just for translators, but for readers, including teachers and students. This also provides opportunities for readers to learn about the representation and construction of difference as revealed through the translation process. This example reminds us of how to read texts about particular cultures. Instead of receiving what the text conveys uncritically, we should explore the perceptions of a particular culture as they are delivered through the text. If these views settle easily and make sense to us, we should doubt such comfort. Stereotypes are comforting. The essentialist perspective, a space of vertical signification, defines the terms Japan and Japanese, confines them within a frame, and does not move beyond these definitions. We must read texts so as to deconstruct 108 such essentialist readings. Criticizing essentialist or post-modern theories of identity, in Reclaiming Identity, Moya (2000) argues that "a theory of identity is inadequate unless it allows a social theorist to analyze the epistemic status and political salience of any given identity and provides her with the resources to ascertain and evaluate the possibilities and limits of different identities" (p. 7). She suggests that essentialist conceptions are "unable to explain the internal heterogeneity of groups, the multiple and sometimes contradictory constitution of individuals, and the possibility of change—both cultural and at the level of individual personal identity" (p. 10). She argues for realist accounts of identity, believing that "subjectivity or particularity is not antithetical to objective knowledge but is constitutive of it" (p. 17). In the classroom, students are "heterogeneity groups," and their identities shift through interacting with others. The classroom is thus an ideal space for sharing different perspectives and experiences. Social and cultural identities are constructed and are being constructed through interacting, interpreting, translating others. They need to learn how language governs thought and influences our perception of Other. 109 III.8. Translating the Identity of the East Translation provided by the West reflects what the West wants to see in the Other, and creates for the Other a cultural identity. In her Writing Diaspora, Rey Chow (1993) begins her introduction by questioning the sinologist Stephen Owen's criticism of the English translation of Chinese poetry (and new Japanese poetry) which Owen regards as not worth being translated because it is too westernized. Chow argues that Owen's criticism is based on a sense of loss which creates "anxiety over his own intellectual position" (p. 3); "the Orientalist blames the living 'third world' natives for the loss of the ancient non-Western civilization, his loved object" (p. 12). The Japanese professor of literature, Karatani (1998), calls this "the aesthetic stance," arguing that Western academics do not want to consider Japan as a westernized country which can offer intellectual and ethical criticism; rather, they want to think that Japan should only offer something aesthetic such as Ukiyo-e and Zen. He discusses an exchange between two Nobel-prize winning novelists—Oe Kenzaburo of Japan and Claude Simon of France—to illustrate his point. Simon criticizes Japan for its invasion of Asia, even though as Karatani tells us, his native France has its own past as colonizer. Karatani observes that Simon reproached Japan but at the same time did not neglect to say that he was moved by Japanese calligraphy. This attitude is not necessarily traditional "but rather is rooted in modern science and aesthetics, which together produce the ambivalent worship" (Karatani, 1998, p. 147). Social science, based on modern natural science, looks down on the Other as a mere object of analysis, and an aesthetic stance worships the Other ambivalently, deeming it beautiful but "intellectually and ethically inferior" (p. 147): Colonialism and imperialism are accused of being sadistic forms of invasion and domination. But the most typical subversion of colonialism is its aestheticentrist way of appreciating and respecting the other. . . . Orientalism could never be characterized 110 as an attitude that neglects the other but as that which exists within the aesthetic exceptionalization of the other. . . . Aestheticentrism refuses to acknowledge that the other who does not offer any stimulative surprise of a "stranger" lives a life "out there." (p. 153) Nostalgia and aestheticism, with their emphasis on the exotic and traditional, stifle the emergence of a contemporary literature which embraces current social and political realities and instead reinforces the marginalisation of the "Oriental" Japan. In The Scandals of Translation, Venuti (1998) argues that identity formation is grounded in "domestic ideologies and institutions," and "engaged in an ethnocentric reduction of possibilities, excluding not only other possible representations of foreign cultures, but also other possible constructions of domestic subjects" (p. 82). The English- language canon of Japanese fiction, he suggests, is a good example, since it has been maintained by "a network of translators and institutions" (p. 82). What these translators and institutions contribute seems crucial to the formation of cultural identities. New York based translator and writer, Sabu Kosho (1998), points out similarly that in "the domain of Japanese modern thought, those writers who played the crucial role in criticizing the social formation have not necessarily attracted a Western readership... .Those writers whose works represent the fantastic Japan cast in the Westerners' mind—aesthetic Japan as opposed to critical Japan—are persistently sought out" (p. 102). In her discussion about the teaching of Asian literature in American universities, Chow (1993) argues that Asian literatures such as those of China, Japan, and India have been marginalized, as "the elitism which stresses the importance of non-Western cultures by way of a hierarchical evaluation of their 'excellence' or 'superiority' actually collaborates with the minimalization of those non-Western cultures" (p. 125). The Asian classical literatures are highly respected, whereas modern and contemporary literatures are considered inferior because 111 they are too Westernized or "tainted by hybridization" (p. 126) and thus lack quality: The alliance of nativist elitism and institutional Orientalism produces hegemonic paradigms of thinking and method that have as powerful an impact in determining the objects worthy of study as military, economic, and religious aggressivity did in producing accounts of "Asia" in the past. (p. 126) She argues that this politics allows "culture" in classics to be preserved but "disables the pursuit of literature as an ongoing historical discourse" (p. 126). She urges teachers of Asian literatures to realize that literature provides students with the "necessary information and tools of analysis for the propagation of cultural and even military domination" (p. 138). Chow's discussion also illustrates how Japanese literature is taught in Western universities. The academics tend to divide Japanese literature into two periods, one between the 1890s and the 1970s in which writers experienced both the modernization of Japan and the First and Second World Wars, and the other after the 1970s in which writers are of the post-war generation. The former literature, called "junbungaku," or pure-literature, is valued more by the academics and literary critics than the latter—contemporary literature. Among the literary texts which the academics value, only the works of a few carefully selected writers have been translated, read, and established in the English-language canon of Japanese fiction (Venuti, 1998). As a reason for this, Venuti (1998) suggests that "the institutional programs developed to improve cross-cultural exchange between the United States and Japan continued to be dominated by a professional group of university professors and corporate executives (the latter mostly publishers and booksellers)—men whose formative experiences have been shaped by World War II" (p. 73). Familiarity with Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima "became the mark of a literary taste that was both discriminating and knowledgeable, backed by scholarly credentials" (p. 76). Not only the Western Japanese-specialists, but also Japanese academics and critics, consider Japanese literature in a similar way; "junbungaku" and only certain 112 contemporary Japanese literature, they assert, are worth reading. Yet some popular contemporary literary works which are not in the category of "junbungaku" and have been translated into English are commercially more successful and widely read. Concerning "junbungaku" and contemporary literature, polysystem theory offers some insights into the process of how Japanese literature has evolved. As discussed in Chapter Two, polysystem theory suggests that, unlike in Anglo-American or Western European cultures, in younger or smaller nations translation plays a significant role and maintains a primary position. Translation "fulfills the need of young literature to use its new language for as many different kinds of writing as possible" (Gentzler, 2001, pp. 116-117), and adopts new ideas. One can assume that even Japanese "junbungaku" was influenced by translation, as many pre-war Japanese writers studied abroad. Post-war writers can be included in another social circumstance that polysystem theory suggests: "established literary models no longer stimulate the new generation of writers, who turn elsewhere for ideas and forms" (ibid.), and they introduce new elements into a literary system through translated texts. Even-Zohar, who originated polysystem theory, suggests that when translated texts take a primary position, "the borders between translated texts and original texts 'diffuse' and definitions of translation become liberalized, expanding to include versions, imitations, and adaptations as well" (ibid., p. 118). For a place like Japan where translation has been crucial for the construction of knowledge, polysystem theory may offer an explanation for literature's cultural heterogeneity and instability, its constant differing and changing. Thus contemporary literature, inexorably influenced by translation, has departed from "junbungaku." In Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, Japan's leading contemporary novelist Oe Kenzaburo (1994) discusses modern (pre-1970) and contemporary (post-1970) Japanese literary writers, saying that both groups of writers are strongly influenced by European works; 113 they studied and translated these works into Japanese and used them to create a narrative for their new age. Modernization brought Japan an encounter with the West, provided confidence, and stimulated a desire for material gains. Then the Japanese undertook the invasion of China, went through World War II and suffered their eventual defeat and devastation. The whole country suffered; however, for the first time "freedom of expression was established and guaranteed, and, with it, previously suppressed literary energy burst forth," and "while people had the greatest difficulty satisfying their material needs, the moral issues they found addressed in the literature of the time were at their highest tide" (Oe, 1995, p. 47). In the 1960s, economic growth led the Japanese to pursue material desires, while many post-war writers who were concerned about neglected political and moral issues participated in the protest movement against the United States-Japan Security Treaty. The writers' experiences of the pre- and post-war eras are reflected in their works. Dependent upon and influenced by translation, Japanese literature brings a reader sociocultural perspectives about Japan. Like any world literature, Japanese literature cannot reflect a single definitive society or culture. The reality of translation in a world of multiplicity precludes such purity and exclusivity. The translated Japanese literature into English has constructed and continues to provide particular images of the Japanese race and nation as Other, reinforcing stereotypes. At the same time, the translation of English or other literatures into Japanese has reshaped and even transformed the world view of Japanese writers and readers, moving perhaps beyond the frame created by others. Even though it has been physically colonized and has even practiced imperialism as a colonizer, Japan was industrialized many decades after Western Europe and North America, and a post-colonial approach to translation helps to explain how, historically, international perspectives have been shaped. The writers who were born in post-war Japan, who were, like myself immersed in translated books, 114 may have perceived Japan and the world differently from those who experienced the war, may even have moved to an emerging space of hybridity. III.9. Contemporary Literature/not Literature In the 1970s, as literary readership declined in Japan, new trends emerged among writers who were born after the war. Academics such as Oe (1994) felt that Japanese literature had begun to decay, as translated works from Europe and the United States outnumbered Japanese literary works. Another leading Japanese writer, Ooka, was concerned about the political and cultural implications of "junbungaku's" disappearance, as a society of increased consumption replaced books with comics and the stage with T V and the whole entertainment industry (Miyoshi, 1991). Among contemporary young writers, Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana have written best-sellers and captured a young readership, and their works have been translated into English. Oe (1994) notes that their works are politically disaffected and reflect the youth culture of Japan and the West, while evoking "a response bordering on adulation in their young readers" (p. 50). Oe sees literature as a means to "create a model of a contemporary age which encompasses the past and future, a model of the people living in the age as well" (p. 66). For him, contemporary Japanese literature rarely meets these expectations. He cites a few writers, other than Yoshimoto or Murakami, who maintain "a sense of real power and efficacy of literature," although they experience "a cold winter of dwindling sales" (p. 52). Miyoshi (1991) suggests in his Off Center that the writers in the post-1970 era write mostly of the "boredom and sterility of managed society, which they carefully nurture so that they may plausibly postulate style and snobbery as a cure" (p. 233). He argues that Murakami writes what the "foreign buyers like to see" (p. 234) and questions the American readership 115 who are impressed with his work. Similarly, Miyoshi criticizes Yoshimoto's books as having "no style, no poise, no imagery" (p. 236). His concern is that the works of "the bearers of light into the 1990s and beyond," such as Oe whose work "deserves full-scale studies," (p. 238) have been marginalized by those of Murakami or Yoshimoto, writers whom he sees as un-Japanese, reflecting the westernized, Americanized Japan of which Miyoshi despairs. Venuti (1998) reads the works of Murakami and Yoshimoto differently, suggesting that they have projected "the image of highly Americanized Japanese culture at once youthful and energetic, [and therefore] it can implicitly answer to current American anxieties about Japan's competitive strength in the global economy, offering an explanation that is reassuringly familiar and not a little self-congratulatory: the image permits Japanese economic power to be seen as an effect of American cultural domination on a later, postwar generation" (p. 75). Furthermore, Venuti argues, "linguistic and cultural differences introduced by any translation can permit a foreign text that seems aesthetically inferior and politically reactionary at home to carry opposite valences abroad" (p. 87). He takes a passage from Yoshimoto's Kitchen and compares two versions, one from an American translator and one from Miyoshi: Steeped in a sadness so great I could barely cry, shuffling softly in gentle drowsiness, I pulled my futon into the deathly silent, gleaming kitchen. Wrapped in a blanket, like Linus, I slept. (Yoshimoto, trans. Backu, 1993, pp. 4-5) I placed the bedding in a quiet well-lit kitchen, drawing silently soft sleepiness that comes with saturated sadness not relieved by tears. I fell asleep wrapped in a blanket like Linus. (Yoshimoto, trans. Miyoshi 1991, p. 236) Venuti shows how these different translations of the same passage project different images. He argues that Miyoshi's translation brings with it no sense of Japaneseness and conveys nothing of Yoshimoto's style as does Backu's translation which evokes the spirit of Yoshimoto's young Japan. In Miyoshi's translation, Venuti (2000) is concerned about "the prevalence of 116 fluent strategies that make for easy readability and produce the illusion of transparency, enabling a translated text to pass for the original and thereby rendering the translator invisible" (p. 341). He argues that this fluency is appropriative and imperialistic; instead, he suggests "foreignizing" is the better strategy. In contrast to Miyoshi's text, Backu's text, he suggests, is a good example of foreignization. She does not cultivate "a seamless fluency that invisibly inscribes American values in the text" as Miyoshi does, and instead develops "an extremely heterogeneous language that communicates the Americanization of Japan, but simultaneously foregrounds the differences between American and Japanese culture for an English-language reader" (Venuti, 1998, p. 85). The Americanization of Japan is a reality, one which Venuti would argue deserves the reflection and analysis that literature can provide. Jay Rubin (2002), a professor of Japanese literature and translator of Murakami's works, writes about this challenge of translating post-war Japanese writers' work. He finds that "the closeness of Murakami's style to English can itself pose a problem for a translator trying to translate it 'back' into English: the single most important quality that makes his style fresh and enjoyable in Japanese is what is lost in translation" (p. 289). These young post-war writers like Murakami or Yoshimoto have projected the image of neither "exoticized nor aestheticized" Japan, but of a highly Americanized Japanese culture (Venuti, 1998, p. 75). Lila MacLellan (2000), a Canadian writer who is familiar with contemporary Japanese society, reviews Yoshimoto's Asleep, describing her works as well received by Japanese high school and college students today because Yoshimoto "could so casually, and poetically write about the moments of melancholy and joy that mark coffee shop meetings between friends or telephone conversations with the boyfriend of the moment," and yet her works, as Maclellan writes, make her readers "invariably recognize the impermanent quality of innocence and happiness and learn how to move on" (p. H9). Though Maclellan says 117 "there's no denying elements of melodrama and girl manga (popular comic book) moments in her novels," (ibid.) she suggests that Yoshimoto's works have helped "young Japanese women understand themselves better (and opened the door for other young women writers now popular in Japan)" (ibid.). Yoshimoto's work, whether or not politically uninvolved or disaffected, cannot be separated from what Japan has gone through after the war; she and her readers are products of post-colonial Japan. Before dismissing her work, it needs to be examined, historically and politically, as part of postwar Japanese literature. Murakami, Yoshimoto, and others like them may be "hybrid," the product of transculturation. Their works are criticized perhaps because they portray Japan as colonized, a view that not many Japanese may be willing to accept. The translator's challenge also delineates how the meaning of language shifts and performs differently while fusing into something new. Jay Rubin (2002) explains how Murakami's work "crosses linguistic boundaries" and raises "important questions about translation, retranslation, commercialism and the effect of the globalization of literature" (p. 273). When Rubin translated the great Meiji novelist Natsume Soseki he treated "the text more as an untouchable artifact," but when translating Murakami's work, he sees himself "as part of the ongoing global process of creation and dissemination" (p. 282). His feeling of taking part in Murakami's work suggests that Murakami's language is hybrid, shaped through interaction between English and Japanese—already a product of translation. Translating Murakami's hybrid Japanese may create a new space where the "global process of creating" occurs. In this space, students learn about self and other as not separated but connected. Studying only canonical works of literature deprives students of such a learning experience. 118 III. 10. Third Space The relationship between Japanese literature and translation illustrates how powerful translation can be in forming cultural identities and "constructing representations of foreign culture" (Venuti, 1998, p. 67). But translation also offers the potential of creating a new space where cultures and languages interconnect—a generative space in which readers can reflect upon themselves and the Other and re-examine and reconstruct their values and beliefs. Translators, too, approach their works differently as they sense constantly shifting intercultural relationships. Andre Lefevere (1998) writes that the "important point is that shifts and changes in the technique of translating did not occur at random" (p. 12): Rather, they were intimately linked with the way in which different cultures, at different times, came to terms with the phenomenon of translation, with the challenge posed by the existence of the Other and the need to select from a number of possible strategies for dealing with that Other. We are, therefore, finally beginning to see different methods of translating as well as different approaches to translational practice as contingent, not eternal, as changeable, not fixed, because we are beginning to recognise that they have, indeed, changed over the centuries, (ibid.) As current translators approach their work differently, they also translate books which have not been translated. In 1991, an American journalist, Alfred Birnbaum, for example, edited the anthology Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction to seek to challenge the academic canon and reach a wider English language audience with the most recent Japanese fiction. And because his book challenged the academic canon, he could publish it only with a branch of a Tokyo-based publisher (Venuti, 1998). Birnbaum avoids Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima, the writers most frequently translated, and chooses, instead, writers who "were born and raised in an Americanized postwar Japan," whose fictions are "what most people really read" (1991, p. 1). Ted Goosen (1995), a Canadian writer and translator of Japanese literature, also states that Japanese "serious literature" is under attack by the baby boom generation who "seek to forge a space to express their own experience" (p. 12). Even 119 though he recognizes Oe as "the most interesting and relevant novelist in Japan," (p. 10) he also supports younger writers. For these younger writers, "Oe's clarion call to rectify the sins of the past, challenge the abuses of the present, and question the moral and cultural direction of the future is yet another instance of the old guard's impingement on the new" (p. 12). Goosen reads Japanese literature and has translated both modern and contemporary Japanese literature including Murakami and Yoshimoto. He suggests that Murakami "uses the vacuum of postmodern consumerist existence as a taking-off point, fashioning popular sagas," (p. 13) and that Yoshimoto "has crafted a surreal, evocative landscape based in part on the ubiquitous genre of Romance manga ('Japanese comics,' although their range and importance make this translation quite inadequate)" (ibid.). He argues that these young writers are "most definitely engaged in the underlying social and spiritual issues of the times" (ibid.). These young writers' works touch readers who share such social and spiritual issues. For example, in memory of her father who suffered brutal treatment from Japanese soldiers in World War II, Canadian writer and editor, Madeleine Thien (1999) writes about her experience of reading Murakami's work. She reports that Murakami once said that his father's wartime memories had a profound influence on his writing. Thien reflects upon the memory of her father and Murakami's work and finds that for Murakami "the Second World War is an open wound in Japanese history" (p. E8). She writes that "[o]ut of love, respect and grief, the Asian children of Second World War survivors have sought to commit their parents' stories to paper" (p. E8). Even though her father fought against Japan and suffered, she finds a connection with Murakami and sees Japan "differently, as a culture fraught with denial, but also rich with artists and writers like Haruki Murakami—insistent second- generation voices urging a clear-eyed, healing revisiting of the past" (p. E9). It is not Tanizaki or Mishima, but Murakami, who has helped her see Japan differently and transcend her and her father's painful 120 memory, giving birth to something more productive—her passion to write. Translation has enabled her to explore her journey as well as Murakami's where she finds the space they can dwell together. This space might be the space of possibility and hope that transforms enemies/victims/colonized into human beings. Yet without translation, Thien would never have found a shared space in Murakami's work. People read and take that reading into their lives, and it is a reader who "translates" and decides whether or not a text is worth reading. Goosen (1995) argues that Westerners are "inheritors of a centuries-long pattern of thought, Orientalism, that posits an antithetical Oriental Other against whom we can define ourselves" (p. 17). He writes about the value of shared discussion and reflection which opens up a new space in our consciousness: To characterize the Japanese as groupist imitators, for example, indirectly voices our wishful assumption that Westerners are quintessentially individualistic and creative; in the same sense, by elevating the idea of "Oriental wisdom," we signal our concern that our own culture has grown too logical and neglectful of spiritual concerns. Disentangling the web of stereotype and prejudice that shapes our view of Japan, therefore, means unravelling our own self-image: one starts out asking, "Who are these guys?" and ends up with the inevitable rejoinder, "Who the hell am I? (pp. 17-18) Like Thien, like Goosen, readers of Japanese literature in translation have found a new space. Literature in translation, not only contemporary work but also other works, have inspired writers and readers and helped them perceive a space between different cultures and languages, enabling them to share and reflect upon their cultural identities. Ted Aoki (2000) in his discussion of translating the Western notion of individualism into Japanese suggests that "absolute translation is an impossibility," and that "translation is ever incomplete and partial, and further that on-going translation is ever on-going transformation, generating newness in life's movement" (p. 8). This newness in life's movement is the possibility of translation. And this space is Bhabha's Third Space. Bhabha (1994) suggests that the "very concepts of 121 homogeneous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or 'organic' ethnic communities—as the ground of cultural comparativism—are in a profound process of redefinition" (p. 5). Japan is facing this redefinition: The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with 'newness' that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent 'in-between' space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present, (p. 7) Bhabha's Third Space illustrates the experience of Thien and Goosen after encountering the translated books of Murakami. Murakami's work itself is also Third Space, incorporating ambivalent thoughts of pre-war and post-war generations, Japan and the United States, Nationalism and Colonialism. Bhabha writes what the production of meaning requires: These two places [the I and the You are] mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation . . . . It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity: that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew, (pp. 36-37). By exploring this Third Space, "we may elude the polarity and emerge as the others of our selves" (p. 39). Translation makes it possible to enter into such a space. Third Space can also be found in traditionally defined canonical works of literature. The translator Eileen Kato (1997) writes that there is "ample evidence that James Joyce, Ireland's most famous exile, was, among other things, a jappyknowledgist" (p. 1). She examines Joyce's Finnegans Wake and suggests: A close examination of his Japanese allusions demonstrates that he knew indeed what they meant and that they were painstakingly and unerringly fitted into a preordained and faithfully followed scheme to buttress the central theme of this complex and chaotic-seeming work, (ibid.) 122 She argues that Finnegans Wake has links to the Japanese Noh play3 7 Kakitsubata (Iris), of which a translation was available to Joyce. When she went to Japan, she met a Japanese man from whom she learned the symbolism underlying Kakitsubata and realized that symbolisms found in Finnegans Wake such as "an excessive preoccupation with color, bridges, thunder, and lightning, and the rainbow" (p. 4) overlap with Japanese ones. Meeting this Japanese man helped her not only better learn about Noh plays, but also reexamine Joyce's work. She observes that "the greatest satisfaction [Joyce] could have derived from his growing acquaintance with Japanese language and literature would have been finding confirmation of the feasibility of what he had been aiming at and experimenting with for years," and that his language was "a sensational innovation" in his time (p. 5). One of the examples she provides is Joyce's reference to "shirokuro," the combination of Japanese words "shiro" (white) and "kuro" (black). Kato argues that Joyce was referring to Yin-yang,3 8 one of the important elements in Kakitsubata. Kato writes that Finnegans Wake is "a verbal masterpiece of Celtic interlacing," and each "illumination is an intricate interweaving of a multiplicity of strands, all distinct and every one a necessary part of the overall design that it enhances" (p. 14). Kato's analysis suggests that Joyce may have found a third space inspired by translation of a Japanese Noh play and its language and created such space in his work. In turn, his work has helped Kato, who was born in Ireland and is now a Japanese citizen by marriage, dwell in a third space. A third space, however, neither preexists, nor can be found within a space of 3 7 Noh is a traditional Japanese drama "developed in the 14th century from religious sources and folk myths. It is characterized by its highly stylized acting, unique vocalization, wooden masks and elaborate costumes, and above all its symbolism and severely simplified setting and performance style" (Yamaguchi & Kojima, 1990, p. 48). 3 8 Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1991) defines that yin means "the feminine passive principle in nature that in Chinese cosmology is exhibited in darkness, cold, or wetness" (p. 1368) and yang means "the masculine active principle in nature.. .exhibited in light, heat, or dryness" and together they produce "all 123 metaphysical/metaphorical signification. If they are willing to explore a space of on-going translation, readers may discover interlacing meaning. Reading texts has such potential, encouraging readers to examine preexisting knowledge, discover new understanding of other cultures, and transform values and beliefs into new light. Studying literature may provide students with a third space, and experiencing such a space helps students better perceive a constantly shifting self and other. They can appreciate layers of a language and cultural interchange which have shaped and are shaping them. III.ll. A Future of Ambivalence As discussed previously, many critics suggest that the Orientalists have constructed "enigmatic" Japan and have not wanted readers to see beyond their construct. They say that after the Second World War, the United States' occupation forces turned Japan into a westernized country by disseminating American values, ideas and culture, and in that process the Japanese identity got lost. But this westernization is not just a product of the United States post-war occupation and political, and economic control, but also a result of the willingness and desire of Japan to become a First World nation. Oe (1994) suggests that the Japanese government's and Japanese corporations' lack of critical reflection is to be blamed: Japan has pursued competitive consumerism and thus become known primarily through Sony or Honda, and humanistic values have been left behind—the "thoughts and hopes of the Japanese people have not been expressed" (p. 33). Perhaps translation in Japan has never reached the point where Benjamin's vessel can be completed; Japan has taken fragments from others but lost many of its own fragments. Like Oe, Miyoshi (1991) feels that it is "reasonable to expect more attention from that comes to be" (p. 1365). 124 Western intellectuals, if Japan's intellectual production is as appealing and useful to the targeted buyers as, say, the productions of Sony, Toyota, or Nikon" (p. 219); Japanese writers are ambivalent about whether "they are speaking from the position of First World or Third World intellectuals," (p. 219) and perhaps this ambivalence is the very concern that should be addressed. As Miyoshi and Oe suggest, in Japan's intellectual climate, Western cultural theories are discussed not critically but superficially, and then discarded for the next theory. Translation generates theories and ideas, as well as entailing much real and necessary practical work, but colonization does not happen simply as a result of that; the problem arises from the Japanese acceptance of the colonial power and authority of the West. Both Oe and Miyoshi suggest that although, through translation, Japanese intellectuals have read and digested various political and cultural theories and ideas, they have failed to develop their own thinking; they read, accept, and discharge ideas when a new theory displaces the old. Oe (1994) argues that "there has been, and still is, a tendency to think that an intellectual effort has been made merely by transplanting or translating new Western concepts into Japanese; and this belief is held by both the translator and those who read translations" (p. 87). Miyoshi (1991) makes the same point, saying what is absent is "any indication of the awareness of the meaning of these critics and theorists [Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, for example] in the context of both English studies in Japan and Japanese society/culture itself (p. 285). When a modern Japanese literature emerged, writers had strong needs to search within a Japanese framework for Japan's unknown future, but as the country gained economic power and prosperity, this sense was lost. Oe (1994) calls this chronic problem an ambiguity; Japan is located between "two opposite poles of ambiguity," as the "modernization of Japan was oriented toward learning from and imitating the West, yet the country is situated in Asia and 125 has firmly maintained its traditional culture" (p. 117). The Japanese need to locate theories and criticisms within Japan's own social and historical context. Writers of contemporary Japanese literature, and a majority of Japanese critics and theorists, are products of post-war Western (particularly American) influences—a metaphoric colonization. Whether or not they are aware, they tend to accept knowledge produced by Western thinkers and scholars without questioning it. Or perhaps contemporary writers struggle with ambiguity existing in their Americanized values and life styles, and writing is a way to express their frustration. This is why they have captured a young readership in Japan even as their works tend to be disregarded by scholars and critics. Translation has helped the Japanese to learn about Westerners, and those works have led them to construct and perceive themselves as the Oriental Other. For the Japanese, there is always the borderline between different languages and cultures, and they have yearned to cross this borderline. The Japanese, however, as a result of being mentally colonized, have created a mock-West and have failed to perceive a space in which translated works would have offered the Japanese the occasion to reexamine their lives and identities constructed after the Second World War. Contemporary Japanese literature translated into English has offered a very small readership in the West the opportunity to perceive changes in Japan and explore themselves in relation to Japan; the Japanese tend not to analyze Western literature or other written work translated into Japanese in similar ways. For most people in the West, the Japanese are either strangers or stereotypes. Even today, Oe (1994) wonders " i f the image now being presented to the world isn't of a people more unfathomable than ever"' (p. 54). Oe urges politicians, bureaucrats, and business leaders, as well as contemporary writers to respond to this crisis. He feels that hope lies among certain young Japanese writers and critics who have begun to recognize new literary movements in China and Korea and study Asian literature, which, he believes, will lead the Japanese away from "a narrow, aggressive nationalism, towards a more open future" (p. 55). Ted Aoki (1996) discusses "East and West" and suggests that we should "move away from the identity-centred 'East and West' and into the space between East and West" (emphasis original, p. 6). He writes that the "labels, 'East' and 'West' suggest two distinct cultural wholes. . .each identifiable, standing distinctly, and separated from each other," and this "has been the dominant Western modernist imaginary deeply ingrained by the works of historians, anthropologists and the like" (p. 5). He suggests that educators and business people tend to think about crossing a bridge between two places, but that "we are in no hurry to cross over; in fact, such bridges urge us to linger," because they "are dwelling places for people," inviting them "to transcend instrumentalism to understand what it means to dwell together humanly" (p. 6). There is no longer East and West but spaces emerging between the two in which people embrace and talk about their differences equally. Translation of literature can offer such a bridge where people linger and ponder. Exploring literature in translation helps us appreciate the opportunity provided by texts to reflect upon history and its resulting relationships among different nations. Texts also help us reexamine our perspectives and recognize the power of language to shape our thoughts. Students need to examine what forces have made them who they are today. Literature provides them with rich resources to discuss these forces. They also need to realize what translated literature—not just the literature of the past but contemporary literature in a post-colonial era—can offer to the readers of the West or other parts of the world, a borderless, generative space and a locus to share and appreciate difference. The history of translation in Japan suggests that any language can be hybrid, or a product of translation, evolved through cultural exchange. Translation between English and 127 Japanese illustrates how much translation can contribute to the production of new knowledge and to intercultural exchange, but at the same time points to the danger that translation can be used to shape particular images of other cultures, a process which often creates stereotypes, as a post-colonial approach to translation indicates. Japan and China have struggled to emulate the West while the West only wants to see Japan or China as the enigmatic Other. In reality, however, Japan has lost its fragments along the way. There is hope, nevertheless, as contemporary writers and their translated works promise, that newness has been emerging and reaching people beyond frames. Willinsky (1998) writes that it "is simply too easy to teach English as if it were the soul of civilized knowing, the heart of great literature, and the very tongue of democracy," (p. 191) yet that is what Japan admires and is eager to receive, resulting in the development of a "Westernized" Japanese language and literature. But, in fact, English too has been developed through translating other languages: Much of the vocabulary of English was imported after the original formation of Anglo-Saxon, with estimates for the proportion of "loan words" running as high as two-thirds. Less well known is the degree to which direct translation proved to be the vehicle of this newfound English. (Willinsky, 1994, p. 104) Perhaps English has constructed unbalanced power relationships, because the vessel of English may not have considered its fragments of non-Western languages and their perspectives. Learning about the hybridity of language and the history of language and its power/no-power may help students find intersections in which differences and similarities coexist. Chapter Four Texts and Tasks: College Preparatory E L L Courses 128 "Therm, maybe it's time you began to learn the true names of things. There is a language in which all things bear their true names, and deed and word are one. By speaking that tongue Segoy raised the island from the deeps. It is the language dragons speak." (LeGuin, 1991, p. 133) In the previous chapters, I have discussed various hermeneutic conceptions of translation, and explored, through examples of translations between Japanese and English, the impact of these different conceptions as they contribute to the construction of language and culture. I have attempted to delineate how translation studies enable us to perceive a new cultural and linguistic space, in which learning can take place. In this space, students can recognize both the hegemonic construction of the Other and the transformative possibilities of an emerging hybridity. Translation can provide a framework for better understanding of the educational experience of learning across languages and cultures, which is a critical issue in today's classroom. In this chapter, textbooks of college preparatory E L L courses are explored. I will briefly analyze current issues raised by Second Language Learning (SLL) theories,39 and examine and interpret hermeneutic conceptions of translation reflected in textbooks, which may shed new light on the teaching and learning of English. Applying hermeneutic conceptions of translation to the field of teaching E L L students through an examination of textbooks enables us to recognize how these textbooks may deliver particular world views. These constructed Anglo-American perspectives place E L L students on the periphery as the 3 9 Mitchell and Myles (1998) define "second languages" as "any languages other than the learner's 'native language' or 'mother tongue,' including "both languages of wider communication encountered within the local region or community" and "truly foreign languages, which have no immediately local uses or speakers" (p. 1). 129 Other, reinforcing their feelings of inferiority and alienation and a desire to transform themselves by discarding their past. Although recent SLL theories have developed through sociocultural and sociolinguistic perspectives, many textbooks for college preparatory E L L courses perceive the acquisition of linguistic and pragmatic competence as the main objectives of language learning. E L L educators need to help their students recognize, as translation studies suggest, that what they are learning is not just one language, but history, power, and ideology embedded in language. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation offer an approach which encourages E L L students to reflect upon their border crossing experiences, recognize their location and language as hybrid, and feel that they are equal participants in the classroom and effective contributors to the society. IV. 1. Second Language Learning (SLL) Theories How E L L students acquire English and what kinds of learning environments best provide students with effective learning are two of the questions that researchers of E L L have explored. Earlier work in SLL mostly focused on the students' acquisition of grammatical, lexical, and phonological forms. This approach, based on formal linguists' views of language, held the stage until recent times. Research in SLA (Second Language Acquisition) does not have a long history. The "surge of empirical work that informs current thinking did not begin until the late nineteen sixties" (Ellis, 1994, p. 15).40 In recent years, however, SLL research has developed and enriched the perception of S L A and language learning, drawing upon a number of disciplines, including work from sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, examining issues of identity and difference, to explore culture. Researchers of these positions 4 0 Ellis (1994) writes that "the term 'second' is generally used to refer to any language other than the first language. In one respect this is unfortunate, as the term 'second' when applied to some learning settings, such as those in South Africa involving black learners of English, may be perceived as opprobrious. In such settings, the term 'additional language' may be both more appropriate and more acceptable" (p. 11). 130 view the language learning process as "essentially social," reflecting Vygotskian sociocultural theory (Mitchell & Myles, 1998, p. xi). They also view the learner as "essentially a social being, whose identity is continually reconstructed through the processes of engagement with the L2 and its speech community," which is explored in research on second language socialization (ibid.). I V . 1 . 1 . Lost in S L A Canon The main goal of S L A research is to describe and explain learners' acquisition of communicative competence, and teachers of E L L have aimed to have students achieve such competence.41 The E L L agenda has also focused on improving students' linguistic proficiency.42 However, SLA research has not generally focused on the E L L students' experience of moving from one world, or frame, constructed by one language, to another—an experience of translation—nor focused on the "inequitable relations of power between language learners and target language speakers" (Norton, 2000, p. 3). Norton (2000) writes about two approaches within the SLA canon. One focuses on individual difference and regards a good language learner as "one who seeks out opportunities to learn the language, is highly motivated, has good attention to detail, can tolerate ambiguity and has low levels of anxiety" (p. 3). The second focuses on group differences and regards a good language learner as one who has close social connection to the target language group. Either way, she argues, the SLA canon does not adequately address or conceptualize the relationship between the 4 1 "Communicative competence consists of the knowledge that users of a language have internalized to enable them to understand and produce messages in the language. Various models of communicative competence have been proposed, but most of them recognize that it entails both linguistic competence (for example, knowledge of grammatical rules) and pragmatic competence (for example, knowledge of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behaviour in a particular situation)" (Ellis, 1994, p.696). 4 2 This proficiency refers to "a learner's skill in using" the language in a variety of tasks, contrasted with the term 'competence' which refers to "the knowledge of the [language] a learner has internalized" (Ellis, 1994, p.720). 131 language learner and the social world. One of the seminal thinkers in SLA research is Stephen Krashen, who developed a set of five basic hypotheses for SLA, one of which is known as input hypothesis; "exposure to comprehensible input is both necessary and sufficient for second language learning to take place" (Mitchell & Myles, 1998, p. 126, italics original).43 Mitchell and Myles (1998) write thatKrashen's ideas have been highly influential in shaping research agendas, many of which are reported in Rod Ellis (1994). Ellis (1994) points out some issues related to SLA research. First of all, researchers have different definitions of "acquisition" of language and disagree about how to measure acquisition. Empirical data has been collected and analyzed, and researchers have examined the contributions to learning of internal factors, such as learners' communication strategies, and external factors, such as social situations, and how they interrelate; but no full explanation of acquisition has been provided. Ellis discusses the turn in SLA to studies of "the effect that instructions of various kinds have on second language (L2) acquisition," (p. 17) as opposed to studying learners in a naturalistic environment, as was generally done earlier. The classroom "constitutes an ideal setting for examining the key theoretical issues because it is possible to observe closely how input is made available to the learner and what kinds of output learners produce in specific classroom contexts" (Ellis, 1994, p. 563). This classroom research can be applied to L2 pedagogy, and many researchers (e.g., Ellis, 1993; Nunan, 1991; Widdowson, 1990) have addressed the relationship between research and teaching, and suggested how teachers can employ various techniques or activities to facilitate students' L2 acquisition. SLA's focus on communicative competence and linguistic proficiency is apparent in Krashen (1985), differentiates acquisition from learning: Acquisition refers to the "subconscious process identical in all important ways to the process children utilize in acquiring their first language," and learning refers to the "conscious process that results in 'knowing about' language" (p. 1). 132 many textbooks. Though the textbook is only a blueprint, adapted by the teacher to suit the particular needs and interests of a classroom, it nevertheless communicates an agenda. Consider a reading textbook, Mosaic 2 (Wegmann & Knezevic, 2002), written for high intermediate to low advanced E L L students, which is one of a "five-level, four-skill comprehensive ESL/EFL series designed to prepare students for academic content" (p. iv): The themes are integrated across proficiency levels and the levels are articulated across skill strands. The series combines communicative activities with skill-building exercises to boost students' academic success, (ibid.) Like other E L L reading textbooks these days, Mosaic 2 is organized so that students' four skills (speaking, listening comprehension, reading and writing skills) are improved. The reading content has cross-cultural variety, as the title of the textbook suggests; however, the main objectives of the textbook are communicative competence and linguistic proficiency; E L L students' social environments are not critically examined. Issues are presented abstractly, in a format that steers away from personal engagement. For example, the first chapter, entitled "Language and Learning," consists of two readings about issues of learning English. Each provides a different perspective about learning English, one considering English as an imperialistic language and the other as a valuable, universal language. These two readings can generate effective discussions about what it means to learn English. They provide examples of English that define the meaning and identities of others from an Anglo-American perspective, a perspective that may not be shared by people of non-English speaking worlds. The readings can help E L L students realize how English may have placed them on the periphery, and how English tends to take control over what is happening in the world. The first reading is by a Native American who finds that the definition of English does not properly signify his Native culture and world. The author writes about issues of translation, suggesting how English may have misappropriated his culture. 133 The second article shows how English has prevailed in the world and how important it has become in media, international business, diplomacy, and youth culture. This language textbook, however, does not focus upon content issues. Rather, it focuses on providing students with exercises which help them improve their grammar, for example, finding synonyms, finding verbs with precise meanings, or completing summaries. There are some discussion questions about the readings, but they are mostly reading comprehension or questions which do not encourage critical analysis, for example, "In your opinion, why do people in many parts of the world study English? Why are you studying English?" (p. 13). Another reading in this textbook treats Japanese culture stereotypically. The chapter, "Sex and Gender," begins with a Wall Street Journal article entitled "For Better or Worse, Arranged Marriages Still Thrive in Japan" which is about how Japanese people meet their spouses through arranged marriages. Although this article was published in 1983, it is presented as though this were a fact of life in today's Japan. The textbook asks readers: "What do you think of this practice?" and "From the first phrase of the title, what can you infer about the author's point of view on arranged marriages?" (p. 38). Fill in the blanks exercise and multiple-choice comprehension questions provide after-reading activities which are focused on improving linguistic proficiency. There are rather general discussion questions such as "What are some of the advantages of arranged marriages? What are some of the disadvantages?" (p. 45). The questions do not include the possibility that social practices in Japan have changed. Moreover, one of the discussion questions asks, "According to the article, at what age is a woman expected to marry in Japan? A man? What do you think is the ideal age to marry? Why?" (p. 45). Like the questions from the "Language and Learning" chapter, these questions do not allow students to explore the possibility of shifting roles of men and women 134 in Japan nor apply that consideration to their own cultures. Failing to address such ideas, these treatments, miss educational opportunities in favour of an emphasis on the acquisition of linguistic proficiency. Another E L L textbook series, Tapestry, also reflects an S L A emphasis on linguistic proficiency and communicative competence. This series, designed for E L L students at post-secondary institutions in North America, is popular among E L L educators. The textbooks are designed based on the concepts and curriculum developed by Robin Scarcella and Rebecca Oxford, whose focuses are the individual E L L learner in the communicative classroom, learner strategies, relatedness of four skills, theme-based learning using authentic materials, and task-based instruction through which students can develop communicative competence. The Tapestry curriculum includes such topics as E L L students' border crossing experiences, cultural understanding, and global issues, to help students adapt to the new social environment through English. In Thresholds in Reading, one of the Tapestry series targeting high-intermediate E L L learners, Low, Cunanan, and Bonkowski (2001) acknowledge that E L L students may feel inferior, and that therefore it is a guiding principle of this text to emphasize "understanding and valuing [of] different cultures" (p. viii): Many ESL books and programs focus completely on the "new" culture, that is, the culture that the students are entering. The implicit message is that ESL students should just learn about this target culture, and there is no need to understand their own culture better or to find out about the culture of their international classmates. To some ESL students, this makes them feel their own culture is not valued in the new country. Tapestry is designed to provide a clear and understandable entry into North American culture. Nevertheless, the Tapestry Program values all the cultures found in the ESL classroom, (ibid.) Another principle is empowering learners: Language learners in Tapestry classrooms are active and increasingly responsible for developing their English language skills and related cultural abilities . . . . Some cultures virtually train their students to be passive in the classroom, but Tapestry weans them from passivity by providing exceptionally high-interest materials, colourful and motivating activities, personalized self-reflection tasks, peer tutoring 135 and other forms of cooperative learning, and powerful learning strategies to boost self-direction in learning, (p. vi) Yet despite these words, the focus of this series is placed not on raising students' awareness of how North American society locates them, but instead on linguistic proficiency. Consider the chapter "Alternative Education" which explores and examines traditional and alternative schools. Five readings are given introducing a variety of types of learning such as co-operative education and the Montessori method. The methods chosen are foreign to many E L L students who are not given opportunities to share and examine education with which they are familiar. Many Asian E L L students, for example, feel comfortable listening to lectures and taking notes, rather than being involved in active discussions. Certainly, sharing such experiences and learning about other approaches could potentially help them see the value of different approaches, but the textbook does not promote such exploration. It simply provides comprehension questions, summary writings, keyword exercises, and the like, thus allowing a language focus to erase the values expounded by the authors. Another chapter, entitled "Native Voices" includes seven readings related to "North American Indians," discussing stereotypes and diversity of Native American traditional cultures. After the readings, comprehension questions, true-false questions, and keyword exercises focus on linguistic proficiency. This focus is transparent, when, at the end of the chapter, students evaluate their learning. They are asked to evaluate whether they know more vocabulary and have acquired stronger reading comprehension, an ability to guess vocabulary from context, take notes. After all these language skill criteria, they are finally asked whether they learned about Native Americans. "Learned" is vague: it can simply mean that students have obtained more information, and does not suggest any critical analysis of Native American cultures. Nor does the text provide any. Guy Cook (1998) points out that SLA, as a discipline, derives from children's 136 first-language acquisition, a field which encompasses behaviorism, Chomskian nativism, and functionalism. He questions whether approaches to adult learners should not be different. Language acquisition is not only a matter of the kind of input or tasks students are provided with, but also a journey between languages during which they have to find a space where they feel the language as their own. When cultures clash, students often try to give up their original space and surrender to the new one—a language which for them does not evoke memories and emotions. The SLA canon from which most language textbooks derive addresses the transfer from E L L students' first language (LI) to L2 but does not explore issues of translation such as those suggested by Hoffman and Lerner who share the experience of moving from one language to another, introduced in Chapter One. IV.1.2. Functional and Sociocultural Perspectives Some S L A researchers have approached language learning broadly, adopting a functional/pragmatic approach to L2 learning. They claim, usually based on naturalistic case studies, that "language development is driven by pragmatic communicative needs, and that the formal resources of language are elaborated in order to express more complex patterns of meaning," and they have contributed to "our understanding of interlanguage systems" (Mitchell & Myles, 1998, p. 117) 4 4 Other researchers focus on language learning as social, rather than individual, because interaction plays a central role in language learning. Vygotskian sociocultural theory and language socialization theory are particularly influential and relevant to my study. Mitchell and Myles (1998) write that sociocultural theory "views language as a 'tool for thought'" and is thus "critical of'transmission' theories of communication": "Dialogic 4 4 Selinker (1972) coined the term interlanguage to refer to the "systematic knowledge of an L2 which is independent of both these learner's LI and the target language" (Ellis, 1994, p. 710). 137 communication is seen as central to the joint construction of knowledge" (p. 161). Students' translation can occur in this process of dialogic communication. Vygotsky and colleagues who support him view human actions as a reflection of social practices, determined by sociocultural circumstances. Vygotsky (1978) argued that social interactions help children develop their cognition, and that there are two developmental levels—the actual developmental level and the zone of proximal development (ZPD) in which learning can most productively take place under the guidance of experts (e.g., parents, teachers, more skilled peers, etc.). Bruner (1983) discusses a similar notion—scaffolding—in which the expert's cooperative efforts to support novices in their completion of a task eventually enables them to become competent members of their social group. Most of the Vygotskian studies have examined oral discourse and do not focus on how the expert's use of language affects the novice's perceptions of self and other and the world view, elements which this study attempts to explore. Recent research in SL English teaching derived from thinkers such as Vygotsky has challenged theories in previous S L A literature. Researchers have begun to explore the transitional process, focusing on learners' self-reflection about their learning (e.g., Lantolf, 2000; Norton Peirce, 2000); in other words, they examine the process of translation in a wider sense. Bonny Norton's (1995, 2000) notion of social identity, which proposes a theory of language learners' "investment" rather than the previously theorized "motivation," is an example of such recent reconceptualization. Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) also argue for sociocultural theory and analyze personal narratives to examine how E L L individuals "who have abandoned their original cultural surround and have struggled to take on a new surround" (p. 23) construct a new sense of identity. They use the participation metaphor (PM) instead of the acquisition metaphor (AM), seeing language learning as the struggle for 138 participation. They state that " A M focuses on the individual mind and the internalization of knowledge, which is crucial for the study of what in SLA, while P M stresses contextualization and engagement with others . . . in its attempt to investigate the how" (p. 156, emphasis original). They point out that in S L A research, first-person narratives have been marginalized as less reliable and less valid than third-person reports, and writers who are now bilingual have not been the focus of mainstream linguistic research. They argue, however, that first-person narratives—telling life stories of struggling to cross cultural and language borders—reveal the stages of L2 learning and thus provide us with legitimate sources of data. These legitimate sources are "not about probability due to chance in a random sample, but about meaningfiilness or importance" (p. 61). The sources are about translation, illustrating E L L students' challenges in reconstructing their norms and values, and losing self as they are made to live in another language. In order to conceptualize the stages of transformation of social identity, Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) examine seven written personal narratives—published autobiographical works of academics or writers who have established their lives in new cultural and new language environments. They choose writers whose first languages are considered minority ones in order to address the issue of power. They intend to explore "an atypical experience of adults who attempt to become native speakers of their second language," and how their learning process affects the reconstructing of their identities. They analyze the phases of loss (loss of one's linguistic identity, loss of all subjectivities, loss of the frame of reference and the link between the signifier and the signified, loss of the inner voice, first language attrition) and recovery and (re)construction (appropriation of others' voices, emergence of one's own new voice, translation therapy, continuous growth 'into' new positions and subjectivities). Rewriting of one's life story is translation therapy, "the final stage of the healing process, 139 prompted by the need to translate oneself, to ensure continuity by transforming and reintegrating one's childhood into one's new past" (Pavlenko and Lantolf, 2000, p.168): Without this move, one would be left with an unfinished life in one language, and a life, begun at midstream, in another. The necessity of binding the two halves together prompts the authors to look into their past from a position of double displacement: in time as well as in cultural space, (ibid.). Considering translation as it connects their past and present, one language to another, one culture to another, may help students make sense of their experiences. Their two lives are bound, and their losses can be minimized. Pavlenko and Lantolf cite numerous passages from the writers' texts and analyze and explain how each phase is revealed in them. Their analysis suggests that first, "these memoirs as artifacts created in the writers' second languages establish that linguistic border crossing in adulthood is possible, critical age notwithstanding"; and second, "the ultimate attainment in second language learning relies on one's agency" (p. 169). They claim that agency, the active control over one's circumstances, is crucial, and that those who fail to attain agency ultimately "never set out to translate themselves in the first place, never intended to fit into the new social networks, to negotiate new subjectivities of gender, adulthood, parenthood, etc. of the host culture" (p. 170). In the E L L classroom, teachers can help students find agency, reflecting upon the process of translation and the role that language plays. Hoffman's and Lerner's cases suggest that E L L students' English, acquired through translation and retranslation, is not the same English language that instructors generally aim to teach—linguistically accurate and fluent English. Learners are in a third space where English is hybrid, consisting of their L I and English. In pursuit of "pure language," Benjamin (1968) writes that a "real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more 140 fully" (p. 79). E L L students' L I should not be "covered," and its light should not be "blocked." The educators can also help E L L students realize that "linguistic border crossing" transforms not just the students' language but themselves. Benjamin uses "fragments of a vessel" to explain this: Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel, (p. 78) A "greater language" is not a complete unity—it is fragmented. E L L students' identities created in a world of L I do not translate as exactly the same individuals in a world of English. Like fragments of a broken vessel, E L L students' English may be a patchwork of two languages, and in that patchwork, they become new individuals, like a new vessel, yet maintaining fragments of themselves in L I and in English. Another model based on a sociocultural approach is language socialization. Language socialization is a concept initially developed by Schieffelin and Ochs (1986) and embraces two major areas of socialization: "socialization through the use of language and socialization to use language" (1986, p. 163). Language learners as novices acquire linguistic and sociocultural knowledge through interacting with people engaged in social activities. This perspective assumes that language learning goes well i f it happens within a meaningful social context. Although many earlier studies (e.g., Heath, 1983, 1986, 1992; Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin, 1986) examined interaction between children and their caregivers in L I development, many recent ethnographic studies have examined the language socialization in bilingual and multilingual settings both of children and of adult learners of L2 (e.g., Crago, 1992; Donato, 1994; Duff, 1992, 2002; Kobayashi, 2004; Morita, 2002; Nishizawa, 1997; Willett, 1995). 141 Some language socialization research explores social and political issues in classroom culture. Harklau (2003) has conducted research in a high school in New York, focusing on four immigrant students from different sociocultural backgrounds. As students are socialized into the classroom culture through communicative practices, they search for what it means to be an immigrant. She argues that immigrant students' identities are multiple, unstable, shifting, and conflicting; "they were constantly reinvoked and reshaped through students' interactions with teachers and texts" (Harklau, 2003, p. 92). Students' struggles are even explored in their silence. Pon, Goldstein, and Schecter (2003) have examined immigrant Chinese high school students in Toronto. They suggest that native English-speaking students feel frustrated by immigrant Chinese students' reluctance to participate in class discussions, or even perceive them as a threat to maintaining the quality of education. They find what they call students' linguistic 'double binds': Chinese immigrant students maintain silence because either they fear their pronunciation will "become an object of ridicule," or they fear other students perceive them as 'showing off if they speak out. Their research reveals the complexity of the identity re/construction process. The researchers suggest that use of their first languages may empower students, and that teachers and students must "work with and through immigrant students' feelings of embarrassment, frustration, and anger" (Pon, Goldstein, & Schecter, 2003, p. 126). The research points out that sharing social space with people who speak other languages and who have different lived experiences is challenging. But tackling such challenge brings "all stakeholders face to face with the marginalizing legacy of colonialism. From this sorry place we can all move forward toward a more responsible pedagogy" (pp. 126-127). Reflecting recent sociocultural perspectives on research, some E L L textbooks address sociocultural aspects of language learning. Another book in the Tapestry series, 142 Culture Connection (Wegmann, Knezevic, & Werner, 1994), designed for low-intermediate reading classes, acknowledges that culture is "a high-interest topic for ESL students" and learning about culture is "an aid to learn English" (p. xii): They are curious about North American customs and attitudes and enjoy learning about them . . . . The language-culture connection is deeply embedded in virtually all linguistic and social aspects of communication . . . . If students are encouraged to observe and examine cultural differences, and the similarities that underlie them, they can avoid making false assumptions about what they hear and read. They are then more likely to give correct messages, rather than forcing English words into preconceived patterns from their own culture, (ibid.) These statements suggest that learning about North American culture helps students see how their own perceptions may differ from those of North Americans, and that acquiring North American perspectives helps them avoid "false assumptions" about North Americans. Such an approach places North America at the centre, and encourages E L L students to see the world within a frame created by English. E L L students are not given an opportunity to consider how North Americans make "false assumptions" and stereotypes about the other. Although the textbook claims that students will "see and value themselves and their own heritage as an important part of a many-cultured world," (ibid.) the contents seem to cover rather superficial aspects of cultural diversity, such as the great diversity of foods in North America, or different holidays and celebrations. One chapter, entitled "How important is a name?" addresses the issue of names and identities, an issue closely related to E L L students' everyday lives. Questions about changing names may create interesting discussions among E L L students, many of whom have English names as they are easier for other people to pronounce. However, questions such as "How many of the students use their real names in English? How many use a different name?" do not ask students to reflect upon how they feel about changing their original names to English ones. After the questions, idioms (unrelated to names) and popular North American names are introduced followed by a true/false exercise 143 and questions such as what names they like best for women and men, or whether there are lucky names or unlucky names and why. Then there are readings about North American last names and changing customs for women's surnames, followed by comprehension questions. If the textbook is designed to help students "see and value themselves," it should encourage students to explore how they arrived at the decision about their names, and what influenced their choices. It might even have suggested that they could help North Americans learn how to pronounce their original names, as an equal cultural exchange. Students can learn language more effectively in a meaningful cultural context. But if they are to recognize their place in society and be able to value themselves, critical examination of how they are perceived and understood by North American society is crucial, and as I have shown, texts like Mosaic and Tapestry do not provide for that. Scarcella and Oxford (1992), Tapestry editors, useHanvey's typology (1976, 1987) to name four different levels of cultural awareness as goals for their textbooks; first, information about facts, stereotypes and deficiencies; second, shallow comprehension; third, in-depth comprehension; and finally, empathy. Most textbooks are designed to meet the goals of levels one and two. They write that "cultural understanding is best viewed as a long-lasting, ever deepening process . . . that can reach different levels, rather than as the collection of tidbits of cultural trivia" (p. 187). However, they also write that level four, empathy, can be achieved for those "self-selected few ESL students who plan to stay in the United States for the greatest part of their lives and who need to adjust as quickly as possible, to develop true empathy with U.S. people and cultural norms" (ibid.); many other E L L students who eventually return to their home countries do not need or desire the level of empathy. They also write that "sometimes our students want to preserve their own cultural understandings and behaviours without becoming too much changed or acculturated during their stay in the 144 United States" (p. 186), and the process of achieving true empathy "takes years even at its most rapid pace" (p. 187). Their view implies that achieving the level of empathy is not a realistic goal in a few years, and that textbooks are thus not designed to help students reach it. IV.2. What E L L Students Read in the Classroom Not only has the signifier become severed or adrift from the signified, E L L students sometimes encounter a signifier which has no corresponding signified in their self-translation. To illustrate this, I can recount my own experience. A Japanese E L L student newly arrived in Canada is in an advanced reading and writing E L L classroom. She is motivated and eager to learn not only English but also North American culture; she wants to be able to belong to the society where everything seems different from what she has known—language, people, lifestyle, and the school system. In the class, she is given reading material discussing the gun control issue in the United States and is asked to discuss her thoughts on this subject with her fellow students. She reads the article, translates (in the narrow sense of translation) words and sentences, but cannot translate herself into one that can relate to this issue. Having guns is dangerous, isn't it? She has always lived in a country where guns and gun-control have not been social issues; she has never thought about the subject thoroughly, although she is vaguely aware that it is a controversial one in North America. She does not have enough vocabulary or understanding of social context to discuss the issue. Many other students in the class also seem to have difficulty forming their thoughts. The instructor sees these silenced students and asks "so what do you think, Sumiko?" The silence continues. She cannot say or write much and is embarrassed that she does not know much about this issue. For her and other students in the class, translation is challenging not only because a word signifies a different concept, but also because there is no concept to be signified. 145 Clearly the instructor's intention was to help students think critically about current social issues in North America so that they would become competent members of society. Indeed, such articles can generate interesting discussions. But for E L L students who are new to North American society, asking their opinions about these articles may simply render them passive recipients of the positions the articles argue for. They feel obliged to put themselves into the frame of a society whose borders are closed to them; their old frames are also closed and abandoned because they are now inappropriate. Selective and limited perspectives and linguistic knowledge do not help them translate the concept well. Even if students do learn about issues like gun control, they are not interpreting within a context that permits them to construct meanings in English. When planning a lesson and choosing texts and readings, instructors have to be aware that if they fail to recognize students' cultural translation process, they might force students simply to comply with what texts and readings tell them, regardless of the biased views these sources might convey. Any investigation of E L L texts, and the ideology behind them, has much to learn from the sociology of literacy. Researchers explore language and literacy among people from linguistic minority groups in a multilingual setting, pointing out the asymmetrical power relationships among different ethnolinguistic groups: The power relations in different settings are rooted in specific historical processes, in the development of a post-colonial order, in international labour migration, in the movement of refugees, in minority rights movements or in global changes of a social and political nature, but in the contemporary world, there are broad resonances in the ways in which these power relations are played out in local sites. Tensions arise between parents and local schools about the language and literacy education of their children. (Martin-Jones & Jones, 2000, p. 1) These researchers perceive literacies45 as social practice, "ways of reading and writing and 4 5 Martin-Jones and Jones (2000) write that they use the term 'literacies' in plural "to signal a critique of the a-social, a-historical skill/ability understanding of reading and writing" (p. 4). Brian Street (2000) points out that there is a danger of reification: "In characterising literacy as multiple, it is very easy to slip into then assuming that there is a single literacy associated with a single culture, so that there are multiple 146 using written texts that are bound up in social processes which locate individual action within social and cultural processes" (Martin-Jones & Jones, 2000, p. 5). From this perspective, some researchers (e.g., Baynham & Masing, 2000; Jones, 2000) have examined mediation. Similar to the relationship between expert and novice discussed in language socialization, people who are bilingual or multilingual and familiar with particular kinds of texts play the role of literacy mediators in different kinds of literacy events. Thus, mediation is a social practice that challenges the power status quo. Likewise, in his discussion of a critical language awareness approach, Norman Fairclough (1992) writes that educators should "expose learners to views about standard English, including the critical views," and "raise with the learners the question of whether and why and how dominant rules of'appropriateness' might be flouted and challenged" (p. 15). Appropriateness models "block a critical understanding by ideologically collapsing political projects and actual practices, and they block a creative and critical language practice by foregrounding normativity and training in appropriate behaviour" (p. 53). Fairclough suggests that language educators (including SLL and literacy practitioners) should encourage students to see that "appropriate" English is embedded in social history and power. He does not suggest that students do not need to learn appropriate English; rather, they "should be encouraged to develop the ability to use standard English in conventional ways when they judge it to be necessary to do so, because they will be disadvantaged if they do not develop that ability" (p. 54): At the same time, they should be encouraged to see their own relationships and struggles as members of various communities as continuous with the relationships and struggles out of which the sociolinguistic practices, doctrines and attitudes of their speech community have been generated, (ibid.) literaties just as there are, supposedly, multiple cultures" (p. 18). He argues that culture is "a process that is contested, not a given inventory of characteristics," and thus "one cannot simply line up a single 'literacy' with a single 'culture'" (p. 19). 147 In this way, students are equipped with the capacities and understanding which are preconditions for meaningful choice and effective citizenship in the domain of language" (ibid.). Post-colonial translation clearly reveals the point that Fairclough claims—the hegemonic power of English and asymmetric relationships between languages. Raising critical awareness of the power embedded in Standard English helps students conceptualize their learning and reconstruct themselves, enabling them to open up a new dwelling space, one that, as Ashcroft (2001) puts it, "is a meeting of languages, and it is a meeting which continually offers dimensions of expression by which English will continue to be transformed" (p. 81). Texts should be used not to have students assimilate to existing Anglo-American societies, but rather to help students and instructors alike to explore a generative space. IV.3. Translating/translated texts Textbooks designed for E L L students can play significant roles in language learning, providing them with opportunities not only to learn language but also to familiarize themselves with a new society, and help them reexamine their understanding, perspectives, and values. Textbooks are one of the. Richards (1998) points out that while "the roles of teachers, teaching, and learners have been the focus of a vast body of discussion and research over the years, much less attention has been given to textbooks" (p. 125). Nevertheless, the textbooks are one of the "most commonly found elements in second and foreign language classrooms around the world," (ibid.) and "primary source of teaching ideas and materials" (ibid., p. 127): "Clearly, textbooks do have the potential for assuming some of the responsibilities that teachers might wish to assume themselves, such as planning a syllabus, 148 selecting topics and content for teaching, and devising engaging learning experiences" (p. 140). By reviewing research, Richards writes that textbooks provide teachers with a variety of professionally produced resources as well as different views based on a "systematic and carefully developed syllabus" (p. 129). Students also appreciate textbooks as "an authoritative and accessible tool that can both facilitate learning and make it more enjoyable" (ibid., 130). Richards also points out potentially negative consequence of the use of textbooks, one of which is reification. Reification "refers to the unjustifiable attribution of qualities of excellence, authority, and validity to published textbooks, a tendency often supported by the promotional efforts of publishers" which may result in "teachers failing to look at textbooks critically" (Richards, 1998, P. 131). Other research (Woodward, 1993, cited in Richards, 1998) suggests that "reading teachers tend to follow textbooks more rigidly" than subject matter teachers. Numerous recently published textbooks designed for advanced E L L students aim to help students become competent members of society by providing readings related to current sociocultural issues. Reflecting contemporary North American demographics, the trend also is to include authors from many cultural backgrounds—translators of diverse perspectives. They address diverse issues such as family, education, gender roles, class, religion, and cross-cultural encounters. These textbooks have the potential for creating a space where E L L students share their struggle in translating concepts, ideas, feelings, and so on. But the limitation is that readings are selected by editors who are often uninformed about translation from other cultures. The textbooks examined earlier, Mosaic and Tapestry, endeavour to focus on language and culture but nevertheless maintain the weight of emphasis on linguistic proficiency. The textbooks I will look at now are even more explicit in their focus on 149 language and culture. Among numerous possibilities, I will mainly examine two textbooks to illustrate the presence/absence of prospects for generating a third space in which horizontal translation is allowed, and to analyze how the language and content of textbooks help or disrupt learning. They are titled New Directions (ND) (Gardner, 2001), which targets E L L students in the United States and The Language We Share: a Canadian Cross-Cultural Reader for Learning English (LWS) (Karpinski & Lecompte, 1999). I have chosen these textbooks because they are often found in college bookstores for college preparatory E L L courses. They both include multicultural and multilingual issues, yet organize and approach them differently. Since N D aims to help students improve their writing skills whereas LWS is a reader, N D provides students with more skills-related exercises than LWS; the exercises encourage students to work with idioms, synonyms, parts of speech, figures of speech, paraphrasing, and denotations and connotations. Nevertheless, the two texts are similar, in that both take an integrated approach to the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills necessary for students who wish to study at college or university or pursue employment opportunities. The content also covers similarly current themes—cross-cultural communication, racism and stereotyping, gender roles, education, and work—to help students explore different cultural norms, values, and beliefs. In addition, LWS includes readings pertaining to newcomers' personal histories in Canada and their memories of the pioneer experience. In my examination of these books, I will focus mainly on readings related to Japan and the Japanese, the ways in which they are introduced and annotated. In these textbooks, the thematically organized readings are accompanied by biographical notes of the writers, and background information, vocabulary lists, pre-reading activities, comprehension questions, ideas and suggestions for discussion and writing 150 assignments. The tasks in the textbooks facilitate students' understanding of the readings, provide insights, and help students reflect on their experiences and share them with their fellow students and instructors. The approach in both textbooks to language and literacy assumes that language skills can be acquired effectively in meaningful contexts. Despite their similar approaches to reading, these two textbooks' goals differ. In the preface, N D states that the text "challenges students to expand their horizons—to question their own cultural preconceptions and to reinterpret old habits, views, and biases . . . . Through its multicultural readings and stress on the social and cultural forces shaping human experience, students gain an appreciation of cultural diversity. Thinking about old things in new ways and new things in new ways, students learn about themselves and the world around them" (p. xxii). In LWS, the "multicultural scope of the readings provides a framework for empowering students who themselves often come from different backgrounds and who are looking for ways to affirm their cultural identity" (p. v). While N D seems to suggests that students are acculturating into a new world, where their "old" self and perspectives can be discarded, LWS encourages students to search for who they are and their dwelling space. ND does not encourage students to translate, but to accept "new ways." Their old thinking has become irrelevant. LWS seems to concern itself with students' journeys across borders and their translating processes, encouraging them to search for their new and hybrid cultural identity. But what is cultural identity? What does the question "Who am I?" mean? In the two textbooks, the approach to self-identification differs, reflecting two views of how to educate newcomers. N D states the following. Most of the pieces are written by contemporary American authors of different ethnic backgrounds, including African, Asian, Greek, and Jewish, and three are by writers from India, France, and England. (For lack of a more precise term, the word American is used throughout the book to refer to someone from the United States). A 151 conscious effort has been made to include an equal number of female and male writers. Although most of the selections focus on cultural patterns in the United States, several explore prominent values, beliefs, and practices of other countries, (p. xxiii) LWS states its approach: The reader includes 56 short selections of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, all written by Canadians. They present a variety of voices raging from critically acclaimed authors to professional journalists, social activists, aspiring writers, and award-winning students. The views of these authors reflect their diverse ethnic and cultural background, race, gender, social class, language, and religion, (p. v) Both textbooks appear to select authors carefully from various backgrounds, and yet these two passages convey slightly different messages: N D acknowledges different ethnic groups who are called Americans whereas LWS identifies authors as Canadians whose voices vary. N D also assumes the existence of cultural patterns in the United States which differ from those of other countries. N D seems to present many frames which coexist in a country named the United States. LWS, on the other hand, embraces authors as Canadians, whatever different voices they may carry. In LWS, using the language of Benjamin's fragmented vessel, authors are seen as whole vessels, their ethnicity incorporated or carried into their writing. Translating self is a crucial part of E L L students' lives in English, and as I discussed in previous sections and in Chapter Two, self is a product of language; when language shifts, self is transformed. This difference becomes apparent in the first chapters. N D chooses the theme "Cross-cultural Communication" and excerpts a section from a text called "American Values and Assumptions" written by a foreign student adviser at the University of Iowa. It "explores prominent values, beliefs, and cultural patterns in the United States" (p. 4). In it, the author states that the "most important thing to understand about Americans is probably their devotion to 'individualism'" (p.5); the subheading is "Individualism and Privacy." This is followed by other subheadings, "Equality," "Informality," "The Future Change and Progress," "Time," "Achievement, Action, Work, and Materialism," "Directness and Assertiveness." 152 These subheadings suggest what Americans value, and assert, encouraging readers, particularly newcomers, to learn American values in order to become competent members of society. I had difficulty reading through this idealistic and rather simplistic text which stereotypes who Americans are: Americans are generally less concerned about history and traditions than are people from older societies. "History doesn't matter," many of them will say. "It's the future that counts." They look ahead, (p.9) Who are "people from older societies"? Treating history as not as important as the future would puzzle many people, including Americans. What about aboriginal people? What about recent wars initiated by the United States? The present does not exist without the past. Our political or cultural beliefs and assumptions are shaped by our education which is embedded in our history. Beyond political commentary, there is an important point to make about translation here. When I was told by an E L L student from Taiwan that she learned in her history class that the Japanese were her enemies, I was reminded that we have to live through the past. Until she made that comment, I had not given much thought to people like her grandparents who as a result of colonization might have been forced to speak and study only in Japanese. Learning about other people's frames—beliefs, assumptions, values—helps us recognize such boundaries and provides us with the opportunity to break them. Then actual translation can begin. If people just look ahead without reflecting on the past, they may never be able to dismantle their frames; thus no translation is possible. Feel-good statements notwithstanding, the present emerges from the past, and the past cannot so easily be discounted. E L L students are unlikely to challenge the author's construction of American identity, since the purpose of this text is to help students learn "intercultural communication" in which students are encouraged to acquire what Americans think and imitate how they behave so that 153 they might successfully cross borderlines and be transferred into their frame. Yet their translation is disrupted, even severed; they are forced to move into a frame structured by particular values, but can do so only if they can cross cultures with a border rather than an abyss between them. LWS, on the other hand, considers the history of emigration as a starting point, beginning with stories of arrival in the first Unit. Instead of presenting particular norms and values as something that E L L students should learn, LWS encourages them to reflect on the lives and perspectives of people who have immigrated to Canada, reflect on the history through which the present is built. Unit Nine "Memory: Revisiting the Past" asks readers: "Why do most people want to hold on to their memories, good ones or bad? Is it always good to keep the past alive? When can revisiting the past be fruitful? .... Why is it important to share memories of the past with others?'" (italics original, p. 269). This unit includes pieces by five Canadian authors who were either born in Canada or emigrated to Canada and share their memories related to social, cultural, and race issues. It also includes one First Nations woman's work. Some stories are written from a child's viewpoint. Discussion questions help students to learn about histories of people in Canada and explore and examine different perspectives. In one instance, two authors who grew up in South Africa, one as a white Jewish boy and the other as a black boy, offer their memoirs of South African life and their thoughts on the issue of apartheid. The questions ask students to examine the authors' attitudes towards white/black South Africans, or to compare familiar forms of racism students have experienced to the South African racism portrayed in the stories. Important to consider is that these authors' Englishes are not all the same: Their English is what their lives are translated into. The readings reveal different cultural and ethnic perspectives, and hermeneutic conceptions of translation help us to examine them not through 154 cultural difference but through language. Hoffman's river, as discussed previously, is not the same river as other people's rivers; her river is about memory, geography, and culture. That is a why reading text written by authors from different language backgrounds is valuable, providing students with an opportunity to reflect upon their own frames, translate others', and share their translations, which can open a new space created by different translations. Another Unit takes as its text a poem by Joy Kogawa entitled "What Do I Remember of the Evacuation?" She is introduced as follows: Joy Kogawa was born in 1935 in Vancouver; she is a nissei, a second-generation Japanese Canadian. After the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), Japanese Canadian civilians were rounded up by the Canadian government and deprived of their possessions. Then they were transported to labour camps away from the British Columbia coast. Kogawa and her family were evacuated to Slocan, British Columbia, and later to Alberta. The experience of this forced migration of innocent people is the basis of much of Kogawa's poetry and fiction. She has been active in the legal fight for compensation for Japanese Canadians unfairly treated during World War II, which led to the government's official apology in 1988. (p. 271) LWS asks students to think, in prereading exercises, about how war disrupts the lives of ordinary people, and later encourages them to discuss the statement that "those who forget the past will never learn" (p. 273). Joy Kogawa's poem begins with a question "What do I remember of the evacuation?" and depicts what she remembers about her family, other families, scenery, people who gave her a puzzle to play with on the train, in contrast to others who spat on her. This is a poem written through the eyes of a six-year old; she does not understand why she was removed from her house and discriminated against. At first, she was even excited to be going on a trip. Soon after, however, she sees people "[abandoning everything, leaving pets and possessions at gun point" (p. 272). She misses her dolls. The poem capturing her fragments of memories ends: And Tim flew the Union Jack When the war was over but Lorraine 155 And her friends spat on us anyway And I prayed to the God who loves A l l the children in his sight That I might be white, (p. 273) This is the voice of a child, and yet her words are powerful, triggering each reader's emotions and thoughts on war, family, racism. As the Unit title suggests, this poem is a memoir and a revisiting of the past. This poem, or any other memoir, does not deliver accurate or objective truth. It is solely this girl's translation/interpretation of the events within a world that she lived in. However, this poem itself does not encourage students to move into any particular frame, such as that of a Japanese Canadian. Rather, it presents them with raw issues of war and racism, which can be translated or processed into many different forms that students' own experiences with war or related suffering and pain suggest. The poem leaves a space for students to seek meaning, allowing them to move horizontally. N D also includes a memoir of the removal, in a chapter entitled "Stereotyping and Discrimination," by the Japanese-American Jeanne Wakatsuki. There is a further occasion for understanding translation in the introduction, which begins as follows. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor (the American naval headquarters in Hawaii), leading the United States to enter World War II. Viewing Japanese Americans on the West Coast as a threat to U.S. security, President Roosevelt signed an order in February 1942 authorizing the removal of all people of Japanese ancestry from important "military areas. ". . . . Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, was born in California in 1935. When she was seven years old, she and her family were sent to the first internment camp, in Manzanar, California, where they remainedfor three and a half years. After the war, Houston studied sociology and journalism at San Jose State University, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1956. Together with her husband, the novelist James D. Houston, she wrote Farewell to Manzanar (1973), a record of her family's life in the camp. The following selection is the second chapter of the book, (italics original, p. 81) In contrast with LWS's introduction of Joy Kogawa, a certain political tone emerges even in this introduction. As I translate the phrase "the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor," "leading" the United States to enter WWII, I feel negative images and value judgments about the Japanese 156 and am put in a particular frame. The introduction also resonates with the "History doesn't matter" statement, implying that the United States does not discriminate against past enemies; although Wakatsuki was sent to an internment camp, she successfully earned her B A in the United States after the war. She is now acceptable and accepted. Texts can manipulate readers' perceptions by shaping their translation process according to a particular framed context. Another textbook, Making Peace (MP): A Reading/Writing/ Thinking Text on Global Community (Brooks & Fox, 1995) for advanced E L L students also includes an excerpt from Wakatsuki's book and introduces her as follows: As an American of Japanese descent, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston along with her family was relocated to an internment camp in the United States for three and a half years during World War II. She describes this experience, in collaboration with her husband, in Farewell toManzanar (1973), from which the following selection is taken. In this excerpt Houston tells us about her experiences of growing up as a Japanese American and later marrying an American man, and how in the process she became "enriched with the heritage of both" cultures, (p. 152) M P includes the later part of Wakatsuki's book in the chapter entitled "Living in Two Cultures." The objective of this chapter is to have students reflect upon how culture/education influences identity, and how it strengthens or challenges one's sense of well-being. The text further asks students to explore the notions that Wakatsuki used in her text, such as hybridness or double standard, and encourages them to discuss whether their exploration might help to achieve world peace. MP's purpose in selecting this story for this particular chapter is clear, and her story seems relevant to cultural hybridity. Perhaps because the focus of this chapter is not racism or stereotyping, M P does not need to elaborate upon how WWII started; however, it is interesting to see how these two introductory passages signify different conceptions of the war, the first presenting Japan as enemy, the second presenting a woman's life in the context of war. 157 ND's intention in selecting Wakatsuki's book and the particular passage from it for the chapter on stereotypes and discrimination is not clear because of the way the story is treated.. N D includes stories of sexual harassment and racism in the same chapter and asks students to synthesize them for discussion and writing assignments, which will likely generalize the students' focus and discourage them from recovering specific and individual meanings. Wakatsuki's text, in fact, presents many issues potentially worth discussing and could contribute to deconstructing cultural stereotypes in the process of hybridization, if these were treated effectively. The story in N D begins with how Wakatsuki's father was arrested by the FBI. But this incident "didn't bother [her] nearly so much as the world [she] soon found [herself] in" (Gardner, 2001, p. 81). Because her father had not wanted to be "labelled or grouped by anyone," her family had chosen not to live in a Japanese community and was "the only Japanese family in the neighborhood" (ibid.). Ironically, Japanese culture is often defined as collective, and immigrants have created communities to support each other. The fact that her father does not have stereotypical Japanese values and rejects being grouped shapes Wakatsuki's attitudes towards the Japanese and other Asians. She is an individual who is raised and educated through values different from stereotyped Japanese ones; this is where hybridity emerges. Her story also addresses complex layers of racism. When her father scolded his children, he said "I'm going to sell you to the Chinaman" (ibid.) which made her fear Oriental faces, causing her to scream at "a Caucasian girl who happened to have very slanted eyes" (ibid.). Even though she is Oriental—a term Wakatsuki uses—her father's racist attitude towards Chinese people makes her discriminate against "Oriental faces." This fear continued after she moved to a ghetto where she was picked on by other Japanese because she did not 158 speak Japanese (she "had never spoken anything but English") the way others did—"a rough, fisherman's language, full of oaths and insults" (p. 82). Her experience reveals not only Japanese discrimination against Chinese people but also discrimination by Japanese against Japanese whose language is different from her own. This type of discrimination can often be seen within the community of Japanese or Chinese, or any ethnic group, and thus it is an accessible yet significant issue for E L L students to discuss. Racism is not only about black versus white, or other binary oppositions, but is constructed by boundaries of difference. Wakatsuki's story explores the roots of racism rather than portraying the product of it. The story does not accuse Americans of unjust treatment but tries to make sense of it. In the story, the girl felt frightened to live in a ghetto for two months, but was saved after the "American Friends Service helped [her family] find a small house in Boyle Heights, another minority ghetto, in downtown Los Angeles." (p. 82). As "outright hostility from a Caucasian" grew, and as she heard incidents like "Japanese homes being attacked," and "beatings in the streets of California towns," her family was forced to move to the internment camp in Manzanar surrounded by a "barbed-wire fence" (p. 85). Although her story tells of the severe living conditions in this camp, she tries to analyze the situation from her historically and politically constructed framework as a Japanese-American, saying that the Japanese "were as frightened of the Caucasians as the Caucasians were of us" (p. 84). Thus, "It Cannot Be Helped" as the title of this Chapter suggests. "It cannot be helped" is a translation of a Japanese phrase, shikataga nai, that is historically rooted and often defined by scholars of Japanese studies as a Japanese cultural norm—a resignation to circumstances that other expressions like gaman or endurance express. Ironically, this sentiment is profoundly absent in the American consciousness. This is a frame that Wakatsuki is unlikely to inhabit, but she can appropriate a more "Japanese" identity through its use. Her "it cannot be helped" may 159 dwell in an in-between space derived from translating the context in Japanese and English. Her translation of events does not signify stereotypical Japanese norms and values and thus provides students with an opportunity to examine hybridity and its third space where they can reexamine and redefine racism. There is, however, a missed opportunity, since N D does not invite students to examine the story in this way. The text could have helped students deconstruct their knowledge of the war, the Japanese and Americans, or of racism, by analyzing Wakatsuki's perspective and finding opportunities to question their presuppositions. They could translate their background knowledge from a new angle. Instead, the story may only give students a lighter take on life in an internment camp. On the first night, the girl is in a small barrack where all her family members are squeezed in. She writes: "I didn't mind this at all at the time. Being youngest meant I got to sleep with Mama. . . . I slept with her every night after that until Papa came back" (p. 87). It is almost as if it were okay after all. She was with her family, and her father who was in the "all-male camp for enemy aliens" (p. 83) eventually came back. The ending of the excerpt implies a sense of closure, and no follow-up discussion questions invite students to consider the issues seriously. If students are not challenged to explore their translation of texts, they might overlook the unjust treatment of American citizens during WWII. The implication is "it couldn't be helped," but it is over; we are asked to believe that differences still exist in this world, but not in this racist way. Both Kogawa's poem and Wakatsuki's story can provide a generative translating space where students analyze how race and ethnicity are translated into extended meanings and associations, if only for a time. Many boundaries get created in the text, surrounding Japan, Canada, and the United States, the Japanese, Japanese-Canadians and Japanese-Americans, and in order to break these boundaries/frames, many issues need to be addressed and examined. The Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor are not the 160 Japanese-Canadians or - Americans who were unjustly relocated and deprived of their rights as citizens. LWS includes stories of this unjust relocation, inviting students to interpret the concept from different viewpoints. But N D does not ask students to explore beyond limited and stereotypic perspectives. Even though the war created an enemy and reaction against the Japanese, Japanese-Americans are not Japanese—they are American citizens, which is the point. Within the Japanese-American community, there were people who despised the Chinese, and Japanese-Americans who showed prejudice against other Japanese-Americans. Despite the depth and complexity of the issues, N D does not provide students with much support to analyze these issues. As I have illustrated through Wakatsuki's story, even if the text has potential to generate meaningful discussions, textbooks can discourage such learning opportunities by failing to provide a horizontal translating space. In ND's "Stereotyping and Discrimination" chapter, there are three suggestions for student's reading journals: "Why people discriminate against each other", "[h]ow prejudice and discrimination can be reduced"; and a topic of the student's own choice related to this text (p. 87). These prompts are too general as starting places. There are many forms of discrimination portrayed in the texts, and students need more focus on the issues addressed in the texts to help them challenge their perceptions. After these topic suggestions, N D provides grammar exercises and then presents the next story written by a Jewish writer about his wedding, followed by a poem, Caged Bird, and a cartoon suggesting various kinds of discrimination against smokers, sweet eaters, and homosexuals, without any accompanying discussion questions. At the end of the chapter, N D poses six questions which can be used for writing assignments and class discussions; these exercises, the text claims, "will help develop your ability to synthesize what you read—to combine and integrate information and ideas from different sources" (p. 93). The different sources in this chapter, 161 however, address different issues that cannot easily be synthesized. In fact, the first text presented in this chapter is "I have a Dream" by Martin Luther King, Jr. where issues of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, social class, religion, and stereotypes are suggested for discussion; the second text is about sexual harassment which requires different background knowledge and information for discussion. There is simply too broad a range of issues within this "Stereotyping and Discrimination" chapter to help students concentrate on significant issues, tending perhaps to reinforce prejudices they already have and trivializing the arguments that each author presents. Students have difficulty defining their own boundaries and those of others, difficulty finding space to share; here, their stereotypes are reinforced. This is the challenge of applying sociocultural translation to reading texts. Unless the text invites thorough examination of language, the translation is performed within one's preexisting knowledge and understanding of the world. Translation needs rather to be used to question such knowledge and understanding so that students can dismantle their frame of vertical signification and expand and reconceptualize their frameworks about race, culture, and identity. IV.4. Japanese as a Lost Sign A word like "Japan" or "Japanese" does not seem difficult to translate. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the noun Japanese as "1) a native or national of Japan, or a person of Japanese descent; 2) the language of Japan." It appears to be a simple frame, and people have the vertically-signified concept constructed though history, education, and media. In North America, having Japanese names and being born in Japan are particularly strong signifiers to create boundaries, and often so generalized and stereotyped as to prevent us from contesting their complexity. Race is often translated as nationhood, a construct of the 1 6 2 dominant culture, identifying "people of colour" as the Other, despite the fact that white is a colour (Roman, 1993), and many "people of colour" were born and educated in North America, and speak and write only in English. They are often translated as, for example, either Japanese or hyphenated Japanese. The word "Japanese" illustrates the challenges inherent in the complexities of a word. Both Wakatsuki and Kogawa were born in North America as Japanese-Americans/ Japanese-Canadians, that is as hyphenated citizens. Their identities are recognized as "fragmented vessels"—Benjamin's term. But if a person was born and educated in Japan, her perspectives are assumed by others to be Japanese, even though when she moves from one language to another, her identity has to be translated within the new language and its concepts. Consider Kyoko Mori, the author of Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught between Cultures (1997), who emigrated from Japan to the United States at the age of twenty. Her writing is often treated as representing the Japanese experience and used in some advanced E L L textbooks for first-year reading and writing courses. Her writing is presumed to represent the Japanese, and Japanese culture and society. Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000), however, examine her book and observe that "upon returning to Japan after nearly twenty years of residency in North America, she no longer has a Japanese voice and is compelled to rely on her English, inner and social, voices to participate in the discursive practices of her former native language" (pp. 165-166). Mori (1997) herself portrays how she has become a translator from English when she speaks Japanese: In Japanese, I don't have a voice for speaking my mind. . . . Trying to speak Japanese in Japan, I'm still thinking in English. I can't turn off what I really want to say and concentrate on what is appropriate. Frustrated, I try to work out a quick translation, but my feelings are untranslatable and my voice is the voice of a foreigner, (pp. 16-17) Mori finds it exhausting to speak Japanese all day, because being female through the Japanese 163 language makes her feel inferior to Japanese men: "The language I use should not automatically define me as second best," (p. 12) she writes. She has become American, and English has become hers; she has lost her Japanese language in its original frame and must now translate it through a frame of English and North American, a perspective critical of the roles of Japanese women, a stereotyped signifier. What she has perhaps missed, however, is the understanding of the struggle and transformation of Japanese women and the change in Japanese society in her twenty years away. Her eyes are American, and she sees Japanese men and women through the frame of North American stereotypes. Despite this perspective, her writing is treated as if it reflected a Japanese perspective. Translation can explain why she is not a Japanese writer but a writer of a third space. Part of Mori's Polite Lies is included among sixty readings in the textbook entitled One World, Many Cultures (2001) targeted at freshman composition courses, providing "a rich sampling of accounts by writers who are native to the cultures that they describe, allowing the reader to hear authentic voices rather than filtered journalistic reports" as the textbook describes (Hirschberg & Hirschberg, 2001, p. xv). But someone who is "native to the culture" does not always convey the "authentic voice" of that particular culture, because as a writer in English she or he has moved into a border world, a space created by translation. Mori is in such a space. Her story is in the chapter, "How Culture Shapes Gender Roles," which is described in the Table of Contents as follows: "Mori's insightful analysis of Japanese marriages points out very different expectations from those in America" (p. ix). Even though she is later introduced as an immigrant to the United States, the text does not suggest that Mori writes the story from an "American" woman's perspective of Japanese marriage. Rather, it presents the content as authentic, because she was born and raised in Japan until she was twenty. 1 6 4 The selection portrays women and marriage in Japan just as North Americans expect to see it. Her story begins: If "marriage is like a job in Japan, it is a job that most Japanese women are desperate to get" (p. 195). She writes about her friend, Nobuko, who was regional manager for the Japanese branch of Hilton Hotels, who always traveled to Europe on business, and loved her job. Nobuko suddenly quits her job in order to look for a husband through a marriage-arranging process; she gives up her career goals and is married "to someone who wants a perfect wife to advance his career" (p. 198). Mori recounts too the many school friends who are "intelligent and outspoken women. . . . [but who] put up with getting nothing from their husbands" (ibid.). In comparison with the marriages of Americans, she writes "[i]n my generation, as well as in my mother's or grandmothers', Japanese marriages don't provide women with 'happiness'": I cannot imagine how a traditional Japanese couple starting out with nothing but 'suitability' can feel the same motivation to be happy together when they turn out to be incompatible—which must happen to many couples since their 'suitability' is based on family background, not personalities. I can conclude that they stay together because stability is more important than the happiness of either party. . . . I wonder if personal happiness is an American concept, (p. 199) I am a Japanese woman of her generation, yet I have to disagree with what she states in this section of her work. Perhaps this is what happened to her friends, but they definitely do not universally represent today's (or her generation's) Japanese women. Many women today choose career goals over marriage. Fewer and fewer choose an arranged marriage.46 There are many young married couples who continue working and raising a family together. Japanese society is changing; so are women and men. Sumiko Iwata (1993), who was educated in the United States and is a professor at a Japanese university, has conducted research on Japanese women internationally. She writes in her book Japanese Women: According to recent research, arranged marriages in Japan accounted for only 7.4% of all marriages in 2002 (Vancouver Sun, 2004). 165 Traditional Image and Changing Reality. In "sharp contrast to their mothers, the first postwar generation and their young sisters (born after 1946) are far more actively in charge of their own lives as far as marriage is concerned . . . . They can no longer be described as passive and submissive . . . . Meanwhile, the gradually eroding status of marriage as an institution is among the causes of a radically decreased birthrate and the vigorous advance of women into the labor force, (pp. 92-93) Mori's translation/interpretation of Japanese marriage, at odds with this current research, is what many North Americans choose to believe as true of Japanese society, yet, not knowing her "foreigner's voice," readers translate her writing as coming from a Japanese perspective. The textbook too, in excerpting this section, subverts critical enquiry with questions like "How do Mori's encounters with her old high school friend, Nobuko, make Mori realize the stringent social pressures that govern women's lives in Japan?" (p. 200). This type of leading question reinforces the readers' idea of Japanese marriage in a stereotyped framework, which perhaps the editors of this textbook define as cultural difference. Part of the problem is that there are not many translated books addressing current, social issues in Japan. When editors want to include texts reflecting Japanese cultural perspectives, they thus generally have to choose texts originally written in English, by either native or near-native writers of English, whose frames may be different from those of Japanese people in Japan. Or they have to take already translated literary texts, often canonical ones, which are also discrepant from current Japanese people's lives. These texts fail to challenge stereotyped Japanese norms and values, yet are often considered an accurate representation of Japan. This is a concern in the classroom, and a limitation of translation. The texts may intend to help students gain knowledge about other cultures and to understand difference. But what editors often overlook is that the writers they have selected do not represent one nation or culture. Unless instructors and students together use this kind of text to question its "authenticity" and deconstruct the typically translated 166 notions of race and nation, they will transmit the views as accurate accounts of other cultures. The texts should be read critically, allowing students to question essentialist conceptions of race, nation, or gender, enabling them to see that "the different identity claims cannot be examined, tested, and judged without reference to existing social and economic structures" (Moya, 2000, p. 11). Like Mori, students are changing; so are their norms and values. A further example of complex signification of Japanese is revealed by David Suzuki (1990), Canadian biologist and environmentalist, whose grandparents emigrated from Japan, and who reflects on his connection to Japan: I am a pure-blooded member of the Japanese race. And whenever I go there, I am always astonished to see the power of that biological connection. In subways in Tokyo, I catch familiar glimpses of the eyes, hairline or smile of my Japanese relatives. Yet when those same people open their mouths to communicate, the vast cultural gulf that separates them from me becomes obvious: English is my language, Shakespeare is my literature, British history is what I learned and Beethoven is my music. . . . I am reminded of how Canadian I am and how little the racial connection matters, (p. 181) Suzuki also points out the diversity of the signifier, "Japanese-Canadian," saying that the generation that experienced relocation and incarceration and the generations born after the war perceive the wartime memory differently, and the latter sees the uprooting as "romanticized in the lore of their identity" (p. 30). So who are "Japanese" Canadians? "Pure-blooded" members of the Japanese race who were born in Canada? What if one of their parents is not Japanese? How about Japanese immigrants who emigrated to Canada, like myself? The aftermath of WWII divided this "pure-blooded people" into opposing positions: Japanese Canadians whose unjust treatment during the war was recognized; and other Japanese immigrants who bring with them a colonizing history as a people whose reluctance to acknowledge unjust treatment of neighbouring people caused suffering and pain in many Asian countries. These oppositional positions are not usually translated properly through the 167 word "Japanese." Textbooks can provide useful opportunities to examine the depth and breadth of a word, helping students realize the importance of reading texts beyond frames. The word "Japanese" evokes different memories and emotions to different people, whether or not they are "pure-blooded" Japanese. They possess different space, language, and history. And yet, in North America the word still seems to signify a simple, fixed meaning embedded in the history and politics of North America: enemy aliens. Wakatsuki, writing in her story that she feared "Oriental faces" and screamed at a Caucasian girl who had slanted eyes, illustrates that visual images are powerful signifiers, as Barthes (2000) suggests in his Mythologies—"[visual images] all come down to the status of mere language" (p. 114). When 9/11 occurred, the American media reported that the United States had not received such an unexpected cowardly attack since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, a reference which reminded me of who the Japanese are and continue to be to many Americans. Translating race as equivalent to Nation has been prevalent and seems difficult to undo. "Japan" has been "unthinkable historically outside its relations with the West and with other Asian nations" (Kondo, 1997, p. 56): An overtly schematic narrative of relations with the West would mark a legacy of inferiority symbolized in the "opening" of Japan to Commodore Perry and the defeat in World War II, followed by a postwar economic boom and an increasing sense .of Japanese political confidence as equal or, some might say, even superior to the West. At issue here are inter-imperial rivalries among advanced capitalist nation-states. (Kondo, 1997, p. 56) The Japanese today are framed by this history. In addition, "Japanese are racially marked, the rivalry is laced with familiar Orientalist discourse whose tropes circulate in.. .the realm of politics," as Kondo (1997, p. 56) points out. The translation seems to be done, and there is no room for further translation. Educators should address this issue through reading, helping E L L students see how their identities have been historically and politically constructed, so as to 168 differentiate them from people in the framework of the dominant culture. Understanding where they are positioned may lead students to envision where they want to be heading. Eliminating hyphenation and treating Kogawa, Wakatsuki, and Mori as simply Canadians and Americans might help readers—students and instructors—interpret the texts without prejudice and analyze them critically. Neil Bissoondath (1994), a Trinidad-born, Canadian writer, questions hyphenated identification in his book Selling Illusions, saying that to "be simply Canadian untinged by the exoticism of elsewhere seems insufficient, even unacceptable, to many other Canadians" (p. 105). Taking as an example the sprinter Ben Johnson who won an Olympic gold medal and later lost it because of drug use, Bissoondath states that the "exotic multicultural concept of the ever-lasting immigrant has come to function as an institutional system for the marginalization of the individual: Ben Johnson was, in other words, a Canadian when convenient, and immigrant when not" (p. 107). The multicultural hyphen, Jamaican- Canadian, was a useful way for everyone to distance themselves from a Canadian who failed. On the other hand, Bissoondath says, the writer Michael Ondaatje or Nobel Prize winning chemist John Polanyi are embraced as Canadians to be proud of. Bissoondath asserts that the hyphen makes a distance from "Canadian" that is a "sign of an acceptable marginalization" (p. 112). Cultures that are marginalized are those that Canadians historically have treated as other: non-whites. Discouraging the use of the marginalizing hyphen would not solve the problem, but "it may help deflect some of the resentment, so that in expressing our pain we do not also alienate our fellow citizens" (ibid.). He concludes that differences among people "are already obvious enough without their being emphasized through multiculturalism policy and its growing cult of racial and ethnic identity" (ibid.). Clearly, our society must reach some kind of consistent position on this subject 169 before textbooks can. For some, hyphenation is a significant identification. In their discussion of post-colonialist theories, Selden, Widdowson and Brooker (1997) analyze the idea of "doubleness," a parallel to the contested identification of hyphenated Canadians. The authors introduce doubleness through the work of African-American critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. They suggest that Gates deconstructs the notion of identities "beyond the sheer binaries of black and white" (p. 235). The concepts of "black" and "white" are mutually constitutive and socially constructed: "We are all ethnics," [Gates] concludes in a further essay, "the challenge of transcending ethnic chauvinism is one we all face" (1991). To be American, therefore, is to possess a hyphenated, ethnic identity, to be part of a "cultural complex of traveling culture," but this is not to say it is free of the regulatory effects of power and privilege. For if American culture is best thought of as "a conversation among different voices," this is a conversation, says Gates, "some of us weren't able to join until recently." (p. 234) A hyphenated, ethnic identity, however, seems to signify "race" as groups of people who are racially subordinate, as does "the ambivalent and oxymoronic phrase 'people of color.' In her article "White is a Color!," Leslie Roman (1993) contends that the phrase has become an "important alternative to pejorative 'racial' distinctions made by whites who were not part of the groups we attempted in ignorance to define" (p. 71). Although "Japanese" tends to signify vertically in North America and marginalize various people whose history links to Japan, Miki (2003) suggests that it might be necessary to maintain hyphenation and keep translating the word in order not just to remember but to share and reexamine the past. In one sense, he says, the term '"Japanese Canadian' was liberated to become a floating sign with the potential to take on an unpredictable range of alternate significations" (p. 40). When they see it in textbooks, instructors and students need to interpret this sign critically. What is at issue here is not the accuracy of any particular portrayal of the Other. On the contrary, scholars with detailed and current knowledge of another society can disagree 170 vigorously on what is "true." What is at issue is the uncritical thinking that is indulged, the lack of awareness concerning the source of information about another culture on the part of the publisher, and most profoundly, the educational opportunities lost by not using texts, even in their inaccuracy, as a gateway to a more nuanced understanding of the Other. IV.5. Possibility/impossibility of Creating a Space E L L students know about racism in their own experience. Through the history they have learned, through the media, and through their lived experiences, they have acquired the concept of racism and stereotyping. LWS has a unit on the issue of racism, entitled "Coping with Differences: Racism and Stereotyping," in which six writers share their experiences in different forms: poetry, prose, and essays. We feel the challenges faced by people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds living in mainstream Canada. The first piece, a poem by Alina Tomaszewski, who was born and educated in Poland, discusses political and social discrimination that many educated immigrants face when looking for jobs, even though they are fully qualified to do them. The second article by Yasmeen Siddiqui, "Teach Them Early About Differences," suggests that promoting early education about race relations helps children embrace difference. The third piece, "I Fought to Keep My Hair" is a childhood memoir of Martha Flaherty who was born in Inukjuak as Inuit. Her family was forced by qallunaats (white people) to relocate her home to the far North where she had to hunt for food and make her own clothes and footwear. The title came from her experience of being chased by the "white people" who tried to cut her hair because of their concern about lice. The next story is written by Lise Archambault-Scott, a French Canadian from Montreal, who discusses her experience and perspective on English Canadians in Quebec and her realization of how diverse English-speaking Canadians are. "The Trouble with Kamin's Snack Bar," originally a 171 newspaper article by Jacquie Miller, portrays the misunderstanding caused by certain assumptions and images, in this case, people becoming suspicious and upset just because many male Somalis gather to socialize in the neighbouring snack bar at night. Finally this chapter ends with David Suzuki's story arguing that Canadians should fight against bigotry and describing how people unconsciously discriminate against others, like Canadians of colour. Compared with the content of ND's chapter, "Stereotyping and Discrimination," discussed earlier, LWS's readings are focused around issues of racism and conflict rooted in different sociocultural norms, values, and assumptions. Students can see a common thread to explore, even though the stories unfold in diverse geographical spaces and are told through multiple perspectives; there is no framed world to be signified. Ideas for discussion and suggestions for writing address issues generated by each story, but do not lead students specifically into particular frames. For example, ideas for discussion after Martha Flaherty's story in LWS include the following questions: 1. Are there any other cultures in Canada that have experienced treatment similar to that described by Martha Flanherty? 2. What can happen when two cultures representing different values live together in the same territory? Can you think of any positive outcomes in this situation? 3. Do you feel that it is always necessary to fight for the values you believe in? The following are questions for David Suzuki's story: 1. In the last line of this story, the author says that children are colour-blind. When are children color-blind and when are they not? 2. Do you feel that racism is on the rise, or are there just more reports of racism in the media today? Through these questions, LWS uses stories as a starting-point for discussion, encouraging students to reflect on their own experiences and explore how they and others perceive issues. These stories are mostly personal narratives, derived from authors' experiences and yet inviting E L L students to bring out their own experiences and interpretations, although not 172 asked directly for them. For E L L students who are trying to understand their neighbours and to search for their place in society, the stories open up an in-between space to exchange and share their ongoing translation and explore the differences generated by reading. In contrast, ND's chapter on stereotyping and discrimination suggests the following more limited or leading questions for both class discussions and writing assignments: 1. Which of the readings in this chapter did you like best, and why? Which did you like least, and why? 2. What do the victims of discrimination in "Striking a Nerve," "It Cannot Be Helped," and "Eleven Words That Cast the Power of Bigotry on Honeymoon Couple" have in common emotionally? What similar feelings do they express? 3. Using as evidence material from the readings in this chapter and personal experiences and observations, discuss the extent to which you agree with one of the following statements: a. Stereotyping has little effect on people's lives. b. No culture is free of prejudice. c. The best way to overcome stereotyping and prejudice is through education. Because the issues addressed in this chapter are stereotyping and discrimination, starting with questions about readers' likes and dislikes seems inappropriate. Expressions like "like best" or "like least" might mislead students to feel they can make a judgment according to their personal feelings and preference. Furthermore, these questions mostly focus on demonstrating an understanding of the author's perspective and feelings rather than on challenging students' preexisting knowledge and understanding of the underlying issues. A phrase such as "using as evidence material from the readings" can be interpreted to mean that what is said in the reading accurately represents an ethnic identity, which may lead students to take readings at face value rather than exploring a broader frame. Students need an opportunity to challenge the readings. Asian students particularly have been educated to believe in the authority of the text. Because the readings are in textbooks, these E L L students tend not to challenge but to accept what texts tell them or how they think they should interpret them. The published stories, essays, and articles have a power to impose upon such students the frames they deliver. Even 173 i f the stories are personal accounts of particular incidents or one-sided views, E L L students are willing to believe them because they are supposed to learn from textbooks. When choosing a journalistic text, in relation to cultural diversity, instructors should consider first whether the text provides current information. If not, the text may provide students with stereotypical images of particular societies and cultures, which soon become their "knowledge." The instructor should also encourage questions about the text that do not simply explore content or feelings but instead engage the student in critical and reflective analysis. What can be done to help students develop this critical and reflective analysis? Applying Steiner's (1998) "hermeneutic motion," discussed in Chapter Two, the hermeneutic act of translation to students' learning through texts, can be useful. He envisions a four-stage process—trust, aggression, incorporation, and restitution—which can overlap with E L L students' translation process and learning of texts. Students first surrender to the text, believing it means something important. After this "commitment of trust," (p. 312) students become "incursive and extractive" (p. 313). They read the text and often accept the content uncritically and passively, if it fits to what their stereotypes suggest, or to how people of the West might think or behave, and this learning becomes their knowledge of the world, suggested in the third stage, incorporation. Teachers, too, might feel content at this stage that students have achieved the goal. Stopping at this hermeneutic motion is, however, "dangerously incomplete" (p. 316). Both teachers and students must move further to the next stage: "The translator, the exegetist, the reader is faithful to his text, makes his response responsible, only when he endeavours to restore the balance of forces, of integral presence, which his appropriative comprehension has disrupted" (p. 318). Not simply accepting the language of the text, but reading critically is required, helping students transfer, recover, and reconstruct meaning until reaching the state that Hoffman describes as "making language 174 mine": "the voices enter me; by assuming them, I gradually make them mine" (Pavelenko & Lanrolf, 2000, p. 167). Following this process, E L L students can examine what different frames and boundaries are suggested by the language of the text, and how this language influences their perception and translation. As they share their "translation," they have opportunities to speak and listen to each other. Consider the danger of taking at face value an article in N D about Japanese education by Carol Simons, an American journalist who lived in Japan for six years. "They Get by with a Lot of Help from Their Kyoiku Mamas" is about competition among Japanese students and the roles their mothers play in their education. The rhetorical modes of this writing, as defined by ND, are "comparison and contrast" and "definition," suggesting that the author defines Japanese education and the roles of mothers and compares and contrasts them with their North American counterparts. The danger here is the fact that this article, written by one American journalist interpreting what she learned about education in Japan, can be read as all there is, framing Japanese education and distinguishing it. Social change is also discounted since the article was published in 1987, and the textbook was published in 1996. Even though it takes time to have a book published, the information is of a Japan almost a decade before publication. What could have happened in ten years? Readers have no means of knowing. The article argues that Japanese students have to undergo "examination hell," in order to enter good schools and colleges because the number of seats is limited. Students, she says, go to juku, private cram schools, to study for hours after school to prepare for such competitive entrance examinations. The article shows how this system contributes to the economy. We have here another stereotypical image of "economic giant" Japan who would take advantage of anything to make profits. There are indeed still many juku that Japanese students go to, but many of today's universities must seek ways to attract students, as the 175 number of children has declined; baby boomers have graduated long ago, and the status quo is no longer the same as ten years ago. Publishers must be more sensitive about representing other societies and their systems in ways which do not mislead students into seeing these societies as fixed and defined. Teachers must help students recognize that nothing stays the same. By comparing and contrasting Japanese and North American education, the text creates binary oppositions of cultural values and boundaries. Even though there are issues which can be shared by both North American and Japanese parents, these are not discussed. Instead, by highlighting difference, the text seems to encourage readers to define the Japanese education system as other. The "Kyoiku Mamas" excerpt further compares and contrasts the relationship between mothers and children in Japan with those in North America. Simons reports that for "Japanese women, motherhood is a profession, demanding and prestigious, with education of the child the number one responsibility" (p. 204). She cites another report about Japanese education issued by the United States Department of Education in 1987, saying that "[m]uch of a mother's sense of personal accomplishment is tied to the educational achievements of her children, and she expends a great effort helping them . . . . The community's perception of a woman's success as a mother depends in large part on how well her children do in school" (ibid). One of the questions after the reading asks students with reference to the above statement: "How do you think this perception affects the lives of Japanese women?" (p. 211). The question assumes that the statement is an objective one, describing and defining who Japanese mothers are. I wonder how many Japanese people, particularly women, would agree with this; the statement seems to reinforce the translation of another stereotypical Japanese image of women who stay home and live through their children. Simons observes that Japanese parents rarely leave their children alone, and even 176 sleep with them; the child "is governed with affectionate permissiveness, and learns through low-key signals what is expected and what to expect in return" (ibid.). She compares American children with Japanese children: Many American children are raised with affection and physical contact, but the idea is to create independent youngsters. . . . They spend time playing alone or staying with strangers and learn early that an individual is responsible for his own actions. An American mother in disciplining, is more likely to scold or demand; a Japanese mother is apt to show displeasure with a mild rebuke, (p. 206) The author suggests that there are Japanese who fight the system, but only those who "have lived abroad," who want their children "to be more creative and independent," just like American parents want their children to be. She introduces statistics (out-of-date) to the effect that "Japanese education is considered inferior to that in the United States" (p. 209) because more high school graduates in the United States go on to college than their Japanese counterparts. She also writes about a Japanese woman who teaches Parent Effectiveness Training, "an approach to learning that emphasizes the individuality of the child . . . . an idea long accepted in the West but anathema in group-oriented Japan" (p. 209). This is another value statement, defining individuality as better than group-orientation. This article is presented as a model. To acquire skills to write definition and comparison and contrast pieces is useful, but the content of the writing needs to be examined, with teachers alert to avoiding readings which might marginalise people and societies as inferior or underdeveloped. Texts can help students reconsider such frameworks, allowing hermeneutic concepts of translation to operate. For instance, one of LWS's examples of Definition is "Confessions of a Sinophobe," written by C. Allyson Lee, "a third generation Chinese Canadian who grew up in Western Canada," (p. 162) which questions what it means to be Chinese or Chinese Canadian in North America. Although she felt she belonged with her Caucasian friends, her parents constantly reminded her of her Chinese cultural heritage and demanded that she marry 177 a "nice Chinese boy" (p. 163); she became rebellious at her parents' expectations. Her confession is that there was "an obvious animosity between Canadian-born Chinese (CBCs) and immigrant Fresh Off the Boat Chinese (FOBs)," (p. 164) and she concluded she was sinophobic, disliking FOBs as she felt they "perpetuate[d] negative stereotypes and made the 'rest of us look bad'" (ibid.). The story unfolds that her "sinophobia began to disappear when [she] came out as a lesbian," and that her partner helped her to "have an interest in [her] own heritage" and "form a sense of pride in" her heritage (pp. 164-165). This story does not define who the Chinese or Canadians are; rather, it helps students reflect upon a problematic translation of nation and race, and internal racism between hyphenated Canadians and newcomers. The text provides them with an opportunity to realize how translating and defining identity is an intricate matter. In this way, students can see how language influences their perception, and how they might create a horizontal space of language, which enriches their language learning and self-searching. LWS also includes a short essay, "The Canadian Dream," by Julie-Ann Yoshikuni, "a Japanese Canadian who studies at Centennial College in Toronto," (p. 321) addressing issues of race and self-identity as comparison/contrast writing. Yoshikuni talks about "Continental Genericism," "a term used to conveniently group all members of like continents into a single, homogeneous unit" (p. 322). She is frustrated by questions like whether she speaks "Oriental" and by an expectation that she excels in mathematics and computers because she is Asian. Furthermore, she feels that many people in Toronto think that all Asians are Chinese and, because of her "unmistakable Asian features," (p. 322) identify her as such. Her "Canadian dream come true is simply to be recognized and treated as a Canadian" (p. 323). Her essay illustrates how "race" has often been constructed and translated in the West. Her story is perhaps more inviting and encouraging than ND's "kyoiku mama" story 178 for E L L students who might encounter issues raised by Yoshikuni in their daily lives. Moreover, exploring her "Canadian Dream" may help them understand and cope with their vertically signified status as Other, inferior E L L students. Whether or not they are Asian, E L L students have to challenge and redefine the frames which exclude them. This story is not about a simple and simplistic comparison of Oriental vs. Occidental, but has the potential to expand students' horizons by questioning a binary separation. Comparing and contrasting is intended to delineate differences, thus creating new boundaries and framing subjects. People constantly compare and contrast themselves with others in order to make sure they belong somewhere; their facial features and skin colors are different; they speak accented English; they eat different foods, for instance. They draw a borderline, excluding the unknown to secure their space. Others are pushed away beyond boundaries and trapped within frames, boxed up and labeled. Reflecting North American societies today, many textbooks include readings with multicultural dimensions, and I have attempted to illustrate, through examples related to Japan and the Japanese, how effective or risky this might be when helping students understand different norms and values. Steiner points out that translation can cause disequilibrium. In order to restore balance, students should be able to engage in texts through which they can translate their background knowledge and understanding into a new meaning, rather than being forced to accept particular values dominant in the West. 179 IV.6. Using Literature in the E L L Classroom In previous sections, I examined textbooks which consist mostly of personal narratives, essays, and articles. In this section, I will examine the use of literature in E L L classrooms, because I believe that ideas derived from hermeneutic andpost-colonial approaches to the translation of literature can empower students by helping them understand how language shapes particular norms and values, and how such a framework defines self and other. In this way, students are encouraged to translate meanings beyond the frame of the West and to seek a space where they can reconstruct themselves as equal participants in Western society. Literature has not generally been popular in E L L education. The same limitations that have rendered linguistic proficiency and communicative competence the focus of many E L L textbooks and classrooms have also argued against the study of literature in E L L . Robinson (1989) goes so far as to say that in the post WWII period, "the underpinnings of audio-lingual or cognitive approaches, or contemporary 'communicative' approaches . . . have virtually eliminated literature as an appropriate vehicle for teaching language" (p. 25). When the teacher introduces students to "the literature of a foreign language, [the] communicative ideal too often vanishes" (Collie & Slater, 1987, p. 7), because the teacher may end up lecturing students, explaining and translating texts in ways which discourage E L L students from using language themselves and communicating with each other. Ruth Spack (1985) regrets that literature which "once played a prominent role in language study, has been excluded from both ESL programs and first language composition programs whose central aim is the achievement of linguistic proficiency" (p. 703). Linguistic rather than literary theories undergird these approaches to language education, reflecting the view that achieving linguistic accuracy and fluency is an isolated goal for E L L students. In fact, literature is not only appropriate material to achieve linguistic proficiency, it is also appropriate and highly 180 valuable to explore the indeterminacy of meanings of language that translation studies suggest. Some scholars argue that researchers and teachers need to explore the possibilities offered by the intersection of literary studies and L2 studies, an intersection which has not been fully examined. Widdowson (1979) asserts that traditionally, "language teaching has focused attention on the linguistic sign as symbol, on the development of systematic knowledge," (p. 136) and now it is "linguistics rather than literary studies that prevails as the informing influence" (p. 160). He argues against this trend; textbooks that focus upon communicative competence often present "dissimulations," (p. 165) whereas language learners need to "acquire the ability to achieve meaning through the language," requiring them to be "engaged with texts . . . so as to mediate purposeful interaction," (p. 136) and literature helps language learners pay attention to language in meaningful ways and achieve communicative significance. Although clearly "careful thought needs to be given to how literary texts should be selected and presented so that they are pedagogically effective. . . . literary texts encourage a more effective engagement with language and so increase scope for personal involvement" (p. 180). Translation is about this effective engagement with language. When they plan lessons, language teachers generally set goals for generic learning outcomes for their students, and plan various tasks to promote interaction among students to facilitate learning, but what students bring to the class, and what they experience and achieve in the classroom, vary widely. Literature can help teachers take advantage of these differences among students, to enrich not only their language skills but also their lives, by encouraging students to engage with text more intimately than they can with most non-literary texts. Language learning is so much more than the acquisition of linguistic proficiency and communicative competence. Reading literature can help E L L students to examine the social 181 bodies of ideas depicted in literary texts, and to analyze their own locations, their own identities, within North American society. Widdowson (1979) perceives the useful space between linguistics and literary theories, suggesting that they "might co-exist in co-operative amity" within which "a principled approach to the teaching of literature might be formulated" (p. 160). Other scholars agree. Focusing on students' reading experience, Judith Langer (1995), in her Envisioning Literature, discusses literary understanding and literature instruction. She argues that through literature, students "come to find themselves, imagine others, value difference, and search for justice" which helps them become "the literate thinkers we need to shape the decisions of tomorrow" (p. 1). She argues for envisionment building; envisionments are "dynamic sets of related ideas, images, questions, disagreements, anticipations, arguments, and hunches that fill the mind during every reading, writing, speaking, or other experience when one gains, expresses and shares thoughts and understandings" (p. 9). An envisionment is "always either in a state of change or available for and open to change" (ibid.). As envisionments grow and change, students become enriched by thoughts and experiences, and make sense of themselves, of others, and of the world. Even when students' English proficiency is limited, they are able to and ought to discuss issues that help them build envisionment. VanDommelen (1995) suggests a similar possibility. Just as translation intervenes to deconstruct representation of nation, race, culture, and self, envisionment building tries to achieve transformation of self and other through literature. Other researchers (e.g. Heath, 1996; Lazar, 1993, 1996) also argue that literature invites students to explore issues surrounding philosophical, sociocultural, familial and personal values and norms. They suggest that personal beliefs about, and attitudes towards, students' affiliations with other cultural, religious, political, and gendered groups are 182 reviewed and reconstructed in the literature classroom. Focusing on reader-response interpretation, Duff and Maley (1990) assert that literature provides students with motivational benefits. They write that "literary texts are open to multiple interpretation" which encourages "genuine interaction," and "literary texts are a powerful motivator," helping students bring a "personal response from their own experience" (p. 6). These researchers perceive E L L students' translation of language as a beneficial way to build up new knowledge and understanding of self and other. Because of different backgrounds through which they come to acquire their values and beliefs, students' translations may vary, creating a horizontal space for constructing meaning. Literature offers students a third space where they may dismantle the frames built by "standard," "colonizer" English to which many have been subjected. IV.6.1. Creating a Space for Students' Translation Literature encourages E L L students to translate texts more freely than they do personal essay and non-fiction reading. Lazar (1993) writes that literature is a "good source for developing students' abilities to infer meaning and to make interpretations," because "literary texts are often rich in multiple levels of meaning, and demand that the reader/learner is actively involved in 'teasing out' the unstated implications and assumptions of the text" (p. 19). Translation is an interactive process between a text and translator/reader, and literature can thus be introduced in order to have students experience such a process rather than having them learn about particular values and norms and their boundaries. In this view, students' sociocultural background knowledge and experience are seen as relevant to successful reading comprehension and meaning construction. If E L L students' own values and norms are reflected within a text, then because of this familiarity, they will 183 feel encouraged to interact with the text. As they become confident in exploring a text on their own, they reach higher levels of understanding of the text. But if values and norms presented in a text are not familiar, it is a challenging task for teachers to bring out students' own sociocultural background knowledge and experience and connect these to unfamiliar ones. But this is an opportunity to learn about differences, and reading more widely in world literature helps students inquire how and why they perceive the world differently as the product of their learning, and helps them deconstruct such perspectives. A common viewpoint is that literature "is perhaps best seen as a complement to other materials used to increase the foreign learner's insight into the country whose language is being learnt" (Collie & Slater, 1987, p. 4). Or, literature "can provide students with access to the [Anglo-American] culture of the people whose language they are studying" (Lazar, 1993, p. 16). Certainly, newcomers need to learn unfamiliar sociocultural norms and values in order to integrate into the society and its people. Literature helps them to learn "a full and vivid context in which characters from many social backgrounds can be depicted," and this "vivid imagined world can quickly give the foreign reader a feel for the codes and preoccupations that structure a real society" (ibid.). But this perspective might be problematic, as it implies that E L L students, as Other, should learn a mainstream culture and assimilate into the society they are in. Lazar (1993) discusses this point, suggesting that "reading literature in English does encourage students to become broadly aware of the social, political and historical events which form the background to a particular play or novel," and at the same time, "literature does seem to provide a way of contextualising how a member of a particular society might behave or react in a specific situation" (p. 17). She also suggests that "our response to the cultural aspect of literature should always be a critical one, so that the underlying cultural and ideological assumptions in the texts are not merely accepted and reinforced, but are 184 questioned, evaluated and, if necessary, subverted" (p. 17). Her concern is shared by many recent schools of literary criticism, such as Marxist, feminist, post-structuralist, and post-colonialist. Literature does not need to "teach" E L L students about North American culture or its norms and values but to allow students to explore freely what values and beliefs underlie literary texts. Reading literature from a different time and space is translation, between the world in which a text dwells and the world in which students dwell. Literature itself often portrays the very theme of alienation with which students are struggling, thus freeing them from the normative "difference" and strictures of the West. Literature can help students who are "trapped by their own cultural tendency to reduce, categorize, and generalize," (Zamel, 1997, p. 342) and develop a sense of transculturation defined by Mary Louise Pratt (1992): Ethnographers have used this term to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extent what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for. (p. 6) A polysystem theory of translation as discussed in Chapter Two explains how cultural interaction produces an ongoing process of evolution. This evolution is "not driven by a specific goal but is rather brought about as a consequence of 'the unavoidable competition generated by the state of heterogeneity'" (Shuttleworth, 2001, p. 177). If literature can generate "heterogeneity" among students, they can become agents of transculturation. A polysystem theory demonstrates how students can benefit from interacting with, and translating into each experience; students can explore issues of power and the cultural identities formed by such differences. A polysystem theory suggests the instability of any pure or unique work, as it faces constant infiltration through the interaction of different cultures. Derrida suggests similarly 185 that the original works are unstable as they transform themselves so that it is impossible for translation to reproduce original works. Studying literature thus can invite students to develop critical language awareness. This conception of translation overlaps with critical approaches that Alastair Pennycook (1999) argues for. He suggests that E L teaching should be understood "not as a static body of knowledge and practices but rather as always being in flux, always questioning, restively problematizing the given, being aware of the limits of their own knowing, and bringing into being new schemas of politicization" (p. 329). Critical approaches focus on issues of "class, race, or gender, in which relations of power and inequality are often at their most obvious in terms of both social or structural inequity.. .and the cultural or ideological frameworks that support such inequity" (p. 331). More recently, they also include areas of "sexuality, ethnicity, and representations of Otherness" while exploring their interrelationships. Examining English language education critically, he aims to offer the possibility of transformation and empowerment of E L L students, and affirms that post-structuralism and post-colonialism help us consider notions of power and knowledge. He sees that English itself has global power, and that English language teaching theories and practices are products of colonialism. For this reason, a post-colonialist insight, he suggests, "can... lead further into the historical and political contexts of cultural relations in a global context, raising more specifically the current and historical conditions that construct difference according to race or ethnicity" (p. 344). The conceptions of translation, such as deconstruction, polysystem theory, and post-colonial translation illustrate how this critical approach can be achieved. Pennycook (1999) encourages educators of the English language to look beyond SLA. The field of teaching English to speaker of other languages (TESOL) "has been too narrowly constructed to be of much interest to people outside the area," but now should consider theory and studies developed by educators who are 186 outside the domain of TESOL, who "have started to understand the crucial location of English teaching in the world" (p. 346). This interdisciplinary approach "creating a new object that belongs to no-one" (Barthes, 1986, p. 26) is what language educators need to consider. In language classrooms, the first step to post-colonial approaches is to introduce a variety of literary works which help E L L students to reflect on their experiences. Kooy and Chiu (1998), TESOL teachers, introduce literary works to which E L L students "recognize and bring their own experience" (p. 80). In this way, "the focus shifts away from a lack of English language proficiency (deficit) to knowledgeable individuals with unique ancestries and experiences" (p. 80). But they also "recognize the pitfalls of literature charged with the responsibility of'acculturation'", such as stereotyping cultures and people, and say that "[no one] text or student can be expected to represent a full picture of any culture or people" (p. 81): If North America's cultural fabric is an ever-growing and changing tapestry, then each story, each cultural representation is another thread, and integral piece of the design. At the same time, teachers can welcome the cultural and individual perspectives students bring to further fortify the reading experience, (ibid.) Kooy and Chiu (1998) suggest some works of literature—picture books, drama, short stories, novel, and poetry—that may help students expand their perspectives. They recommend Tales from Firozsha Baag, a collection of short stories by Rohinton Mistry, a Canadian author of South Asian ancestry which "are readily accessible to ESL students and offer topics for rich discussion" (p. 82). Gloria Nay lor's novel, The Women of Brewster Place, "weaves the tales of seven individual African American women as they struggle to survive through interdependence and self-identification, important issues for all adolescents" (ibid.). As students "translate" these literary texts, they can bring new meanings to language which in turn helps them to tell their own lives. 187 Deborah van Dommelen (1995) introduces a short story "My Name" written by Sandra Cisneros, which can be used for beginners. The story unfolds from examining a girl's Spanish name and raises issues of identity, roles of men and women, and family relationships which are closely connected to E L L students' lives. This is a familiar story that many newcomers can share. Remember Gerda Lerner who had a German name that no English speakers could pronounce correctly. Although a name is part of her identity, she had to accept a mispronounced name—a translated name—as her name, in the process of translation. Identity is produced through translation. The literary works invite students to enter a space where translation produces new meanings, and perceive a frame in which they may have been trapped. Literature can help students deconstruct such a frame, encouraging them to construct a third space where they can continue to translate their lives and the lives of others. IV.6.2. Analyzing Texts In this section, I will analyze a short story and a play in which hermeneutic conceptions of translation operate, helping E L L students see a space in language shaped by different sociocultural norms and values, and generating open yet focused discussion. These literary works enrich language learning by sharing different translations of language and of the issues raised in the texts. In this way, students may find a third space in which they are always in the process of translating and being translated. IV.6.2.1. The Other Family The Other Family, by Himani Bannerji, is in the LWS chapter on "Education. Growing up." This story reflects the conceptions of translation, as it enacts the construction of language within a dominant ideology, language that divides the West and the Other. Himani Bannerji was born in what was then a part of India, now Bangladesh, educated in Calcutta, and came to Canada when she was twenty seven. Her story is about a mother and her little daughter who emigrated to Canada. The story does not say where they are from but suggests that they are dark-skinned and dark-haired. The mother observes that her daughter's identity is being translated in Canada, as she becomes independent and has a very different childhood from the mother's. The daughter moves from one frame to another. The mother ponders the wisdom of having taken her daughter "away from her own people and her own language" to "a country named Canada" (p. 97). The girl has begun to live in a vertical space of signification where her concept of language is limited to the language of members of the dominant cultural framework. Unconsciously, the daughter tries to move into this frame at the cost of denying herself. In a key scene in the story, the girl brings home a drawing she completed at school. She explains: "we drew pictures like we do everyday. We never study 189 anything—not like you said you did in your school. We drew a family, our family. Want to see it?" (p. 98). It is apparent when the girl shows her drawing that the clash of two cultures and languages has resulted in the mother and daughter living in separate frames. She has drawn a white family. Through her schooling, she has translated the word "family" into "white family," swallowed as she now is by the colonizer's English. The mother feels anger and sadness: She was trying very hard not to cry. She didn't want to frighten the child, and yet what she saw made her feel distant from her daughter, as though she was looking at her through the reverse end of a telescope. She couldn't speak at all. (p. 98) Their world seems divided by a chasm. The girl has moved into a frame which was made by others, yet she did so in order to belong to a world where her teacher and other students live. This is the struggle that E L L students experience; they want to belong so they try often to abandon what they had—their values, beliefs, even names and appearances. By exploring why the daughter draws a white family, and what the word "family" signifies, students can see how they can be trapped just like the little girl in the story. Then they can see a metonymic space where "family" signifies multiple meanings. Translating the mother's feeling of "distance" can help students reexamine what they have lost, and at what cost they have gained. The story further reveals the need to create a third space. The girl cannot understand her mother's reaction, because "all our books have this same picture of family," and her teacher liked it. The teacher's world, too, is surrounded by a solid and secure frame which blinds the teacher to the need to open a space for the girl, suggesting that teachers might even inadvertedly force students to cross boundaries. But they cannot cross boundaries because there is no horizontal path to tread. When they cross, they fall, become trapped and lost. When moving from one language to another, self is translated into a new language. But does 190 it mean erasing the old self completely? The conception of a third space suggests not. Translation produces hybridity and creates a third space. Students can discern the process as the story unfolds. The mother, despairing, does not give up, and asks her daughter "[w]here are you in this picture? Is this the family you would like to have? Don't you want us anymore?" (p. 99). As she asks, she feels guilty for "putting such a heavy burden on such young shoulders" and for making the daughter not want "to be the same as the others" (p. 99). But the mother fights back: "They" wanted "her" to draw "the family." The way her daughter pronounced the words "they" or "the family" indicated that she knew what she was talking about. The simple pronoun "they" definitely stood for authority, for that uncontrollable yet organized world immediately outside, of which the school was the ultimate expression. It surrounded their own private space. "They" had power, "they" could crush little people like her anytime "they" wanted to, and in "their" world that was the picture of the family. . . . That was yes, that was the right picture, (p. 99) The story directly addresses the same concerns that post-colonial translation does—how the power of language divides the world and relegates people to the role of Other. This is what E L L students and teachers need to consider. The word "family" cannot be translated within one vertical frame of dominant Western discourse but embraces other types of families who are historically excluded. Translation in this girl's classroom is a limiting peformativity of language and erases a non-white "family." The simple fact that a family can be any colour and consist of many members is not always acknowledged. The story reminds us that there are different families, yet even educators sometimes overlook such realities. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation, such as a metonymic space, a third space, and a post-colonial approach to translation, are crucial, providing students with means of reconceptualizing their understanding of self and the world. Students can see this transformation through the girl in the story. That night, after her 191 mother slept, the girl went to the bathroom and "surveyed herself with grave scrutiny"; she "saw the brownness of her skin, the wide, staring, dark eyes, the black hair now tousled from the pillows, the scar on her nose and the brownish pink of her mouth. She stood a while lost in this act of contemplation" (p. 100). This is a symbolic gesture of self-translation. She has to recover herself from "their" world and search for a new identity. The story ends with the girl in the classroom telling her teacher that she has not finished the picture, saying the "books I looked at didn't have something" (p. 100). In her teacher's world now, she realizes that she does not exist, and thus she has to reclaim herself. This is a stage of recovery and (re)construction discussed by Lantolf; the girl retranslates herself and begins to have her own new voice. The story helps students recognize how to challenge the status quo, just as the girl breaks the frame: The little girl was looking at the classroom. It was full of children of all colours, of all kinds of shapes of noses and of different colours of hair. She sat on the floor. . . .worked long at it. . . . Finally it was finished. . . . There they were, the blond family arranged in a semicircle with a dip in the middle, but next to them, arranged alike, stood another group—a man, a woman, and a child, but they were dark-skinned, dark-haired, the woman wore clothes from her own country, and the little girl in the middle had a scar on her nose. . . . "Who are they?" asked the teacher, though she should have known. But the little girl didn't mind answering this question one bit. "It's the other family," she said. (p. 101) The story suggests that her journey has just begun, as her teacher does not seem to learn anything from her picture. The textbook asks readers: What do you think the teacher in the little girl's class could have learned from seeing the girl's new picture? Why do you think the teacher did not address the needs of the different children in her classroom? What should be the role of the teacher in a multicultural classroom? (p. 101) These are questions both teachers and students must ask themselves, generating discussions about the dominant discourse within which race and identity are translated and framed. The story reminds me of my Japanese friends in Canada whose children wanted what they did not have: blue eyes and white parents who speak English without an accent. Why do these 192 children want to be different? What can changing appearances do for them? In the eyes of others, race translates as nationhood. Such limited translation misrepresents them. The journey of departure and reclamation is one that E L L students have to take, and this story offers abundant resources for discussion along the way. Translation is, as Steiner asserts, "aggression" and "penetration" yet eventually goes beyond such colonization to reach "equilibrium." As the girl loses her subjectivities, she experiences aggression and is colonized by the language of "white" people. But further translation, penetration, leads her to discover her new voice. When drawing herself in the family, she is reaching equilibrium where she finds her place in the world. The story provides students with an opportunity to take a journey with the girl, making sense of their lives. The girl's understanding of "family" was once colonized but reclaimed as she breaks a frame imposed by others and discovers a third space for herself and others who once lost and then recovered themselves in translation. This is the calling for E L L educators. In Learning to Divide the World, Willinsky (1998a) points out the current situation in North American classrooms where the number of E L L students has been growing, and suggests that these students "have a right, as part of their education in the language, to see that what they are experiencing with the English language forms part of a history that they are both reliving and changing" (p. 192). This approach is especially necessary since English is often taught "outside of history, with a focus on being able to function in social and academic settings" (p. 193). But this learning needs also to be shared with native English speaking students: "We need to understand how the world was divided by the intellectual project of imperialism and how those divisions continue to weigh on our thinking about, in this case, native speakers and the learning of English" (p. 194). He suggests that the "ESL educator's claim to professionalism, rooted in the academic discipline of linguistics, forms part of a 193 larger Western project of intellectual mastery of the world that, in its applied science of language, can exclude a great number of the language lessons" (p. 208) and encourages English-language educators to "go into this global language trade with their eyes open to English as a national-imperial language with a history that is not yet fully past but stands to be transformed" (p. 207). Pennycook (1998), in his English and the Discourses of Colonialism, also argues for "the importance of understanding English in its colonial context," (p. 19) asserting that English language teaching theories and practices are products of colonialism, derived from "broader European culture and ideologies that themselves are products of colonialism" (p. 19): [Colonialism and post-colonial struggles] have produced and reduced nations, massacred populations, dispossessed people of their land, culture, language and history, shifted vast numbers of people from one place to another. And they are also the ground on which European/Western images of the Self and Other have been constructed, the place where constructions of Superiority and Inferiority were produced, (ibid.) He suggests that English language teaching "echoes with the cultural constructions of colonialism," and "there seems to be a loud absence about such connections in applied linguistics and TESOL . . . . the strange isolation of much thinking in applied linguistics from academic and political work going on outside it" (ibid.). He encourages English language educators to explore the works in colonial and post-colonial studies outside of applied linguistics and TESOL, such areas as geography, history, anthropology, and "the growing volume of work in related areas, such as translation and literary studies" (p. 23). As I have demonstrated, translation studies offer new insights and contributions to this project. And in the light of translation, studying literature offers valuable learning opportunities for dismantling and transforming the power of English. The next example, Guillermo Verdecchia's play, Fronteras Americanas, also has such potential by directly challenging the power and authority of English. 194 IV.6.2.2. The Border World Guillermo Verdecchia is a Canadian playwright who came to Canada from Argentina when he was seven. In his play Fronteras Americanas, Verdecchia portrays his experience of displacement, searching for a place in Canada. This is a play about translating identity and a quest for a third space in which to dwell. Verdecchia uses the word "border" to evoke the space between "here" and "there." His "there" is Argentina, and his "here" is Canada, where his first teacher "forces her mouth into shapes hitherto unknown to the human race as she attempts to pronounce [his] name" (Verdecchia, 1993, p. 33). This is a recurring theme that many immigrants are familiar with. As a character in the play struggles with names, he tries different ones: So you know, I have to come up with a more Saxonical name. And I looked around for a long time till I found one I liked. And when I found the one I wanted I took it. I stole it actually from a T V show—"Broken Badge" or something like that. I go by the name Wideload McKennah now and I get a lot more respect, ese. (p. 24) "Verdecchia" also has to tell his teacher "you can call me Willy" (p. 33). This simple exchange is repeated many times. E L L students frequently change their original names to English names, because they are easier for other people to pronounce, or because they connect them to where they are. When their languages are translated, their identities are translated; they are no longer the same individuals who lived in their "old" language with its sociocultural framework. People live with narratives and construct themselves in the pattern of their grandparents, parents, teacher, friends, and society who tell stories to them and instill in them what is right, good, and appropriate. They also read and watch stories. They are living in the narrative of their lives to construct/re-construct their identities. When their space changes, however, when for example, they relocate, their sense of themselves can approach 195 the chaotic. A new language may begin to perform in their lives and narrate unfamiliar stories, surprising them and confusing them. Translation takes charge of their relocation, and transforms their identity and world view. They feel that they lose their old selves completely under the power of language, but Verdecchia's play tells them that they are becoming "fragmented vessels" constructed through old and new. This play illustrates the process of translation and the choices that immigrants or E L L students can make in its portrayal of various aspects of life where one experiences dis- and re-location and eventually uncovers a space of metaphysical binary opposition, a "centerless space," where a person becomes "the fathomless intimacy of narration" (Aoki, 1996, p. 9). The play demonstrates how translation creates this centreless space where languages interact and construct a new narrative. Verdecchia's play is not difficult reading, and as students translate the voice of the character "Verdecchia" in the play set in Canada, they are invited to reflect upon their own experiences, and to consider their own journeys of past, present, and future: Telling his story, the playwright tells all our stories. How we are torn apart by conflicting impulses to belong and to remain separate. . . . How we want to both stand out and disappear. How we betray ourselves, giving away our very names for the quick trade-off of pronunciation ease and acceptance. How we flirt with self-hatred through our fears. (Kareda, 1993, p. 11) Between the play and their own stories, students begin to recognize a space beyond the metaphoric vertical frame in which they do not have a place to share their stories. Breaking the frame with the help of the play, they can create spaces, "spaces of generative possibilities, spaces where newness can flow" (Aoki, 1996, p. 8). The play tells students that the border is not a line or crossing, but a space in-between. Verdecchia guides students to enter this space: It was really helpful, really good to discover this notion that I could live on a border. . . . I feel much more confident and comfortable—with who I can be and who I might be and who I'm becoming and who I was—than I ever have been in my life. . . . I feel rooted in a way that I never did before, (cited in Harvie, 1997, p. 49) Finding a place on the border is a stage of Verdecchia's recovery discussed by Pavlenko and 196 Lantolf (2000). They argue that "the first language and subjectivities are an indisputable given, the new ones are arrived at by choice. Agency is crucial at the point where the individuals must not just start memorizing a dozen new words and expressions but have to decide on whether to initiate a long, painful, inexhaustive and, for some, never-ending process of self-translation" (pp. 169-170). As E L L students read the play, they realize that their experiences of self-translation can be shared with many others who are lost in their society and that they have a choice to create their own space rather than wandering directionless in the alien framework. The play questions a typical translating process of nationhood and race when "Verdecchia" steps on to the stage and shows a map of America to the audience: We are all Americans. Now—I have to make a small confession—I'm lost. Somewhere in my peregrinations on the continent, I lost my way. . . . I suspect we got lost while crossing the border, (p. 20) "Verdecchia" is American, specifically North American. But in the existing dominant framework, he is not American. When he crossed the border and was translated, he was erased by language. He crossed the border from his "here" to a new place "there": '"The border is transient. The border is dangerous. The border is crass. The food is bad, the prices are high, and there are not good bookstores. It is not the place to visit on your next vacation'" (p. 21). What he found the other side of the border, however, was "no-where," because "there" does not allow him to dwell, providing no place where he can identify himself. His loss is the students' loss—materially, geographically, and emotionally; E L L students know how it feels to be lost. When "Verdecchia" goes back to Argentina, he finds himself displaced. He has already been translated, and thus does not belong to the old "here": A l l sides of the border have claimed and rejected me. On all sides I have been asked: How long have you been? . . . . How old were you . . . ? When did you leave? When did you arrive? As if it were somehow possible to locate on a map, on an airline schedule, on a blueprint, the precise coordinates of the spirit, of the psyche, of 197 memory. . . . I feel Different. I feel wrong, out of place. I feel not nowhere, not neither." (p. 51) Now he has to go back to the border where all the problems begin, and now he finds home on neither side of the border. "Verdecchia," depressed, goes to see a doctor, E l Brujo, who says "[y]ou have a very bad border wound" (p. 70). He searches for his identity and undergoes "a process of constantly drawing it, erasing it, shifting it, and then redrawing it" (Harvie, 1997, p. 49). "Verdecchia" eventually remembers and understands what the doctor said: "The Border is your Home" (p. 74): I'm not in Canada; I'm not in Argentina. I'm on the Border. I am Home, (ibid.) E L L students, like "Verdecchia" in the play, might have tried to emigrate into the frame of the West and found no sense of belonging. They are also now strangers in their homeland, because they have undergone translation. The play is about realizing this process of translation and what students are becoming: I am learning to live the border. I have called off the Border Patrol. I am a hyphenated person but I am not falling apart, I am putting together. I am building a house on the border. And you? Did you change your name somewhere along the way? Does a part of you live hundreds of kilometers away? Do you have two countries, two memories? Do you have a border zone? (p. 77) E L L students do not need to belong to the framework of the West; they have their own home in the border world. They need to realize that this framework of the West can be reconstructed. As they become residents of a third space, they can invite others to visit. They can become the agency to transform the dominant discourse and dismantle barriers. Although his play touches on.many issues of racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and displacement, Verdecchia does not make them particular to immigrants from Argentina. He demonstrates how individuals' particular histories and memories can be shared, and how they can claim their own spaces: "We can go forward. Towards the centre, towards the 198 border" (p. 78). "Verdecchia" suggests that the border world is not a marginalized space; rather it is located towards the centre. Yet there is no centre, because the centre indicates margins. The border world is a centerless space. The border world is located between two languages and two cultures where there is no centre or margins. Building a world in their minds, the play has potential for empowering students to be "transformed in the space between languages with traces of both individual identity and doubled identity" (Bhabha, 1990, p. 211). E L L students are in a third space, a space of translation. Aoki would call it a Metonymic space of doubling: he is neither here nor there, but he is both here and there. Kristeva (1991) calls it "a divided subject" (p. 5): one's subectivity is constituted by both self and other... each one of us both self and other; each subject is inhabited by both self and other. In each one of us there is always a part that is a stranger of the self-other than self. (p. 5) Kristeva (1991) further speaks about the space Verdecchia finds in this play: A paradoxical community is emerging, made up of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent that they recognize themselves as foreigners. The multinational society would thus be the consequence of an extreme individualism, but conscious of its discontents and limits, knowing only indomitable people ready-to-help-themselves in their weakness, a weakness whose other name is our radical strangeness, (p. 195) By analyzing the conceptions of translation reflected in literary works, we may conclude then that stories are places of possibility which can provide both students and teachers with new perspectives, helping them to relocate, reexamine, and perhaps reconstruct themselves. Stories help us perceive the border world evolving and expanding. E L L students need to appreciate that their status is not a stigma but an opportunity; hybridity is not inferiority but strength. Language enables us to share our thoughts and feelings; literature encourages us to explore a map of the unknown world where we can shift our perspectives, values, and beliefs to ones we are not even aware of. Ashcroft (2001) writes in his Post-Colonial Transformation: 199 Here then is the ambivalence of writing in the borderlands, a writing metonymic of the post-colonial—it is both the carving out of the soul, and the path to something else, the conversation of the nightmare into the numinous. This is the essence of post-colonial transformation, the location of experience and an identity that is always pushing beyond itself. Into the horizon, (p. 193) Now I sense that The Third Space is always [t(here)] to be found. In this section, I have examined and interpreted hermeneutic conceptions of translation reflected in textbooks and literary texts for E L L students. I have illustrated how translation can reconfigure language education by offering an alternative focus on the ambiguity and instability of language. But this reconfiguration needs also to be present in regular classrooms where native- and non-native English speaking students interact. Today's classrooms have become Pratt's notion of a contact zone, a heterogeneous community, the new-framed or dismantled-framed space. In this space, students can acquire language, enabling them to speak equally and to communicate with each other. This is the language of translation, and the language of a third space. I will continue to search for such language and spaces in education. The next chapter will examine the textbooks of first-year English literature courses, exploring them in the context of hermeneutic conceptions of translation and of their value for the classroom of multiple cultures and languages. 200 Chapter Five First-Year English Literature Courses Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. (Toni Morrison, 1993, p. 27) This thesis proposes that giving more thought to conceptions of translation among students, teachers, and researchers, has potential for transforming the educational experience of learning not only for E L L students but also for native English speaking students. Together they can dwell in a space where language performs beyond the "'standard' version of the metropolitan language... through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of 'truth', 'order', and 'reality' become established" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989). Students in post-secondary classrooms must work together, breaking frames and boundaries which separate them as "us" and "Other." They are in fact no longer on other sides of cultural or political or linguistic borders but occupy the same space in the classroom as well as in their neighbourhoods. The borderlines are maintained in their minds, the result of familiar narratives they grew up with. Literature offers ample opportunities for students to explore how differences operate within and outside of these ideas of borders. The experiences portrayed in literature are either familiar or unknown; translating these works helps students reflect upon what has shaped them, and the ways in which they perceive and understand their living experience of the world. Terry Eagleton (1998) writes that literature cannot "be 'objectively' defined," leaving "the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not to the nature of what is written" (p. 7). " A l l literary works," Eagleton continues, are "'rewritten,' if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them" and 201 thus "literature is a notably unstable affair" (p. 11). Because of this unstable nature, literature holds potential for different "translations," reconstructing and rewriting the lives of its characters as well as of readers. "Literature is a lens," Willinsky (1998, p. 236) writes in his discussion of Northrop Frye's The Educated Imagination: After distancing the imagination from the reaches of this earth, we can see the cultural history of the nation by looking through that imagination. In this Frye and I are not so far apart. We both want to talk about literature as apart from yet a part of the world, (ibid.) With the help of literature's distance from the "real" world, students are given an opportunity to "translate" the text, connecting the world of people and society portrayed in a literary text with their own lived experiences and cultural histories. In this way, students can see how particular norms and values are constructed in particular societies and reflect upon their own lives where borderlines separate them both by where they live and by how they live. In this chapter, I will discuss what literature can bring to the classroom through the lens of translation, and what ideas of translation can bring to the study of literature. First, I will describe how conceptions of translation have helped me realize the value of literature; and second, explore how the relationship between translation and interpretation, and translation and intertextuality, operates. I will then examine the conceptions of translation reflected in anthologies and literary works often taught in first-year English literature courses. I will choose literature ranging from Shakespeare to works of contemporary writers to illustrate how literature can be approached and read through these ideas of translation. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation enable students to read literature in ways that develop their awareness of how norms and values are shaped by frames—historically- and socially-constructed worlds—and how their sense of self shifts and emerges through interaction with others. In this way, literature 202 helps students better understand issues of diversity and difference, and encourages them to rewrite the narratives of their lives as they seek the meaning of language through the lives of characters in different frames and times. V. l . The Literature Classroom In a phrase pointing to the power of literature to engage the imagination, Louise Rosenblatt (1978) writes that a text is "simply paper and ink until a reader evokes from it a literary work" (p. ix). People who love books are lured to bookstores for what paper and ink can conjure up for them. I still remember in my childhood, even before turning the first page, the excitement whenever my mother bought me a new book. I enjoyed the literary experience because I was free to feel and think about what I was reading, the story taking me to different places in different times. Another of Rosenblatt's insights reminds me that the "reading of any work of literature is, of necessity, an individual and unique occurrence involving the mind and emotions of some particular reader" (1938, p. 32). Context, of course, determines some of this experience. The imaginative freedom I had with my early reading was restrained as I started to study literature formally in a classroom setting. In my school years in Japan, I read and studied both Japanese literature and English literature translated into Japanese. But in the classroom I found that I was not completely free to feel or think as I chose, since teachers taught me about the author's intention or the motivation behind a story, its historical background, and a particular interpretation of the story. This classroom experience nevertheless helped me learn about the world—history, politics, different cultures, values—through literary works. In contrast to reading descriptive, dry textbooks, reading these stories was a much more interesting way to learn. Not until I 203 experienced translating languages and cultures, did I become aware of the limited number of texts available in Japanese translation; and through these texts, which often reflected the Japanese desire to emulate the West, my knowledge and views of the world and people were taught, shaped, even constrained. I hardly had any opportunity in my education to reflect upon neighbouring countries and our shared history. The emergence of this awareness for me began here in Canada. After coming to Canada, my whole life became a translation. I could see how shifting a living space and language transformed my perspectives about the world and myself—a translation enacted. The undergraduate English literature courses I took at a community college particularly helped me see this process..I had previously read some of the books I studied in these courses in Japanese, but the English texts had a different impact on my perception, which made me ponder whether reading a book in different languages and frames changes our interpretations. I began to reflect on my learning experience in Japan, and realized literary texts spoke differently in English from how they did when I read them in Japanese. The meanings of words and concepts expanded, being reconstructed or even deconstructed. Living in two languages and cultures placed me in a world in which translation was a constant and helped me realize much that I had not been aware of, transforming my knowledge and understanding of the world through reading. It was not easy, yet exciting. M y concept of learning had to be translated, too. The classes were challenging, not only because of the language level, but also because of the way they were taught—very differently from what I had expected and experienced in Japan. I had imagined the lessons would be similar to the Japanese literature classrooms of my youth. In Canadian literature classrooms, however, the instructors did not lecture on how to 204 interpret a story but provided students with various activities—small group discussions, peer editing, group presentations—to analyze and critique a story. These tasks left me no choice but to state my feelings and exchange opinions in public, modes of expression with which I felt uncomfortable. For me, the experience of literature was a private one. The formal study of literature was governed by interpretation and critique taught by experts—instructors. In Canada, my fellow students surprised me as they could talk freely about their reflections on a story and even criticize each others' interpretations or opinions. What was more, they could even argue with their instructors, challenging their interpretations, behaviours not considered to be appropriate in Japanese classrooms. Even though I did not feel comfortable talking about my thoughts and feelings, I was fascinated by other students whose interpretations were decidedly individual—sometimes completely different from my own or the instructor's. Yet, I had difficulty participating fully in the classroom activities and discussions, as I was unable to translate my Japanese classroom experiences into Canadian classroom experiences. My past seemed irrelevant, because of the different frames—frames surrounding educational principles and values. I realized also that students' various interpretations of the texts and perspectives of the world were often very much shaped by Western values, which were familiar but not entirely mine. Sharing thoughts and feelings provides students with opportunities to learn about others and possibly embrace differences, but it is challenging because of students' different frames. What E L L students experience and learn in their lives requires a new space, a space of interaction between an existing dominant discourse and their translations. Literature offers this possibility. Because it unfolds in their imagination, literature can offer students a frame-less space, where they can embrace different 205 translations. Translation also helps instructors approach literature in a new way. After coming to Canada, I realized that trends in literary theory influenced the ways in which Japanese literature classes were taught in Japan, and these and other literary trends influenced those classes I experienced in Canada. My Japanese educational experience was in yet another way already in translation. I studied literature translated into Japanese, and my literature instructors in Japan seemed to be strongly influenced by translated theories of New Criticism. Instructors focused on "close reading" of texts and did not discuss social contexts and the author's life. I analyzed language— translated into Japanese, not the original—and found that some cultures portrayed in the texts were historically and socially so alien that we did not feel connection to the stories but learned simply difference. Later in Canada I met instructors who approached literature from literary theories such as poststructuralism and feminism. My reading was proportionately enriched. My classroom experiences have provided insights into the ways that instructors bring to their curriculum and to the classroom their own theoretical biases derived from their own education and philosophical leanings, and the currents of thought moving in their literary universe. Paul Kameen (1999), an English professor, provides personal testimony to this shifting reality: I had been rigorously trained as a New Critical reader for most of my academic life. That whole apparatus and its manner of arranging the relationship among writer, reader, and text seemed, therefore, thoroughly natural to me, the way things of that sort were supposed to be . . . . What had once seemed perfectly "natural" to me was now thoroughly de-naturalized . . . . In short, the whole idea of a natural mode of reading was permanently disabled. There were theories, systems, and approaches, and they were all provisional, temporary, and open to question, revision and, sooner or later, replacement, (p. 102) Recent developments in literary theory that framed my study of literature in Canada 206 have challenged not only the ways in which literature was taught, but also the literary canon itself, posing alternative constructions of knowledge about Self and Other, of West and non-West, of men and women. A post-colonial theory, as I discussed in previous chapters, suggests that Western perspectives of literature "have dominated world culture, marginalizing or excluding non-Western traditions and forms of cultural life and expression" (Selden, Widdowson, & Brooker, 1997, p. 222). Literature in English, including translated work, has in a way constructed and distributed a "universal" world view, which reminds us of the fact that in the nineteenth century, English literature first became an academic discipline at Oxford and Cambridge, with its development closely related to imperialism and colonialism. Applied to literature, the conceptions of translation challenge this universality. V . 2 . Theory, Interpretation, and Translation Literary theories have provided educators with crucial perspectives for teaching literature. In the twentieth century, New Criticism, emerging around the 1920s and continuing into the 1970s, was the dominant literary criticism in which many instructors today were trained, as Kameen writes. At the risk of over-simplifying, New Criticism focuses upon the text itself rather than the author or reader. New Critics suggest that the close reading of the text helps readers examine its complexity and expose the unity of the text by analyzing, for example, figures of speech, point of view, diction, irony, and imagery. Focusing on the intrinsic elements of literature—on literature as a valid form of knowledge and a language unto itself—instead of as a referent to external experience, implications, doctrines—New Criticism evaluates literature in terms related directly to the work itself as literary object. For this reason, it has worked best when applied to the 207 study of poems; longer works such as novels or plays lend themselves less easily to the detailed examination of linguistic and symbolic elements that comprise critical analysis (Eagleton, 1996). New Criticism has influenced many teachers in their literature classrooms. Classrooms practicing this approach have taught students to pay attention to words—to listen to their resonances and feel the images evoked thereby, to consider their echoes and interactions within the text. New Criticism forbids the easy retreat to societal and biographical assumptions, requiring instead close reading of text as artifact. Yet this very strength of New Criticism is also its limitation. Though the New Critics maintain that the unity of a text derives not from its author's intention but from its structure, Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker (1997) point out that this "self-contained unity, nevertheless, has subterranean connections with its author, because it represents a complex verbal enactment (a 'verbal icon') corresponding to the author's intuitions about the world" (p. 157). More importantly, the close reading of New Criticism has been criticized as it judges "literary 'greatness' and 'centrality' by bringing a focused attentiveness to bear on poems or pieces of prose isolated from their cultural and historical contexts" (Eagleton, 1996, p. 37). Literature, these critics argue, cannot be removed or isolated from the world of its past, present, and future. Contemporary literary theories developed after and incorporating elements of New Criticism help us examine these and other significant points pertaining to literature and pedagogy. In particular, in the 1960s, theoretical perspectives emerged, shifting the focus from text-oriented to reader-oriented, which is significant for this study. Led by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology, for example, focused on the phenomenal reality of objects as they appeared to consciousness, a contribution which was to develop into 208 reader-response theory. The reader-response critics suggest that it is the reader who makes the text live and constructs its meaning; the "meaning of the text is never self-formulated; the reader must act upon the textual material in order to produce meaning" (Selden, Widdowson, & Brooker, 1997, p. 50). Similarly, Maxine Greene (1994) writes that "the meaning of the work is emergent, an event associated with the activation of experience" (p. 211); "reader activity is necessary if meaning is to happen," (p. 213) she states, emphasizing the crucial role the reader plays. In his pivotal philosophical treatise Truth andMethod, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989) argues that literature "does not exist as the dead remnant of an alienated being, left over for a later time as simultaneous with its experiential reality" (p. 161) but that literature "brings its hidden history into every age" (p. 161). He suggests that the meaning of a literary work depends upon the historical situation of a reader-interpreter, but "this process is unfinished and perhaps never can be finished" (p. 161). Maxine Greene (1994) agrees; "meaning always seems to transcend whatever the words say or express; there is continually a move beyond" (p. 213). Readers are translators who endeavour to seek meaning through the historical, social, and cultural context of a language of others. In the classroom, Louise Rosenblatt "has been constructing a place in the English curriculum for the reader in the act of reading," (Willinsky, 1991, p. 114) reminding us of "the intrinsic value found in the immediate experience of those quiet moments with the page" and trying to "keep to the fore the salutary role that literature can play in a democratic education" (ibid.). Rosenblatt (1978) suggests that reader and text (the author is not included) are the essential elements in the experience. She explores reading from the transactional view developed by Dewey and Bentley; "a 'known'," she says, "assumes a 'knower;' a 'knowing' is the transaction between a 209 particular individual and a particular environment" (p. 17). This knowing is the process of translation. In addition, she suggests that language is "a socially generated and socially generative phenomenon" (p. 20) as well as an individual one: Language is at once basically social and intensely individual. In other words, the transactional view of human life applies here with all its force, and the transactional view of the reading act is simply an exemplification, with highly rarified complications, of the basic transactional character of all human activity, and especially linguistic activity, (p. 20) Translation brings the "intensely individual" into the "social" by shifting a space, enabling students to observe such transformation. It also allows for readers' varying degree of translation, whether linguistic, cultural, or even generational. Rosenblatt (1978) discusses two types of reading—efferent and aesthetic. Efferent reading refers to what the reader "will carry away from the reading. . . . the reader's attention primarily on what will remain as the residue after the reading—the information to be required, the logical solution to a problem, the action to be carried out" (p. 24). In aesthetic reading, on the other hand, "the reader's primary concern is with what happens during the actual reading event" (p. 24)—a translating stage. She suggests that "the reader's attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text" (p. 25, emphasis original). Willinsky (1991) argues that "her aesthetic/efferent distinction works most effectively, as a viable distinction, in a pedagogical setting" (p. 122). When literature classrooms address not only efferent reading but also aesthetic reading, they provide students with the opportunity "to engage in the more personal experience" which is an experience "that might be profitably shared, refined, cultivated, examined in the context of the classroom" (ibid.). Aesthetic reading offers students an opportunity to focus upon language both for itself and for its transformative power. This engagement with the text 210 brings the reader to the process of construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction at the heart of literary experience. Susan Sontag (1966) in Against Interpretation claims that the "task of interpretation is virtually one of translation" (p. 5): "The interpreter says, Look, don't you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?" (ibid). Her statement suggests that "interpretation" in this sense is metaphoric and vertical: "To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of'meanings'" (p. 7). Her word "impoverish" echoes Barthes. Sontag does not, however, deny the act of interpretation, but criticizes the way it is understood: . . . interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling, (p. 7) For her, "interpretation" has become reactionary. She contends that the critics must "recover" their senses, "learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more" (p. 14). In the post-secondary classroom, students sometimes engage in this type of interpretation, analyzing themes and symbols which Amy Tan (1999) calls "classroom literary investigation" (p. 587). Tan writes about the issue of interpretation in the classroom. Her books are often chosen in order for students to understand "multicultural" perspectives, in her case, Chinese culture. Readers' attempts to understand the meanings of her texts, however, puzzle her: "The truth is, if there are symbols in my work they exist largely by accident or through someone else's interpretive design" (p. 588). She writes that students and reviewers "enlightened" her by their interpretation of what her text means. For example, one student wrote a letter to Tan, asking whether the student's analysis of Tan's use of 211 the number four in The Joy Luck Club is correct: According to the letter, "my use of the number four was a symbol for the four stages of psychological development, which corresponded in uncanny ways to four types of Buddhist philosophy I had never heard of before" (p. 587). Tan's experience echoes Sontag's writing about Kafka who "has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters," (Sontag, 1966, p. 8) reading Kafka as social allegory, psychoanalytic allegory, and religious allegory. Sontag suggests that interpretation "is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius . . . . It doesn't matter whether artists intend, or don't intend, for their works to be interpreted" (ibid. pp. 8-9). The danger of this type of interpretation is suggested by Tan who fears that she is regarded as an expert on China and Chinese culture, and a representative of immigrant experience. So I am alarmed when reviewers and educators assume that my very personal, specific, and fictional stories are meant to be representative down to the nth detail not just of Chinese Americans but, sometimes, of all Asian culture, (p. 588) This type of interpretation separates students' lives from the text. The text is there to portray the other world, which students get to know, but such a world is not theirs—the frame stays the same. They miss the opportunity of translating—taking a different world into part of their own. Tan is concerned and uneasy about how her books are treated in the classrooms: Over the years my editor has received hundreds of permission requests from publishers of college textbooks and multicultural anthologies, all of them wishing to reprint my work for "educational purposes" (p. 589) One of these anthologies wants to include an excerpt from The Joy Luck Club. At the end, the textbook asks students about a particular scene of the book in which a non-Chinese boy brings a bottle of wine to his Chinese girlfriend's house for dinner. The question is asked: "If you are invited to a Chinese family's house for dinner, should 212 you bring a bottle of wine?" (p. 589). Such irrelevancies, such attempts to capture a "universal Chinese experience" through one story, make Tan wonder whether writers today "must talk about their intention" (p. 590). Both Sontag and Tan address an important issue in teaching/learning literature. Interpretation must not simply dig a deep hole and seek the meaning of words. Interpretation has to derive from Rosenblatt's aesthetic and efferent reading, and efferent reading is enriched by today's classrooms where students can bring perspectives developed in different frames. The ideas of translation are thus crucial for bridging different frames to create new ones. Sontag, by equating interpretation with translation, does not see the potentiality of translation which can transcend interpretation. Interpretation, or aesthetic reading, is limited to students' preexisting knowledge and understanding of the world. Translation, by its attempt to bring other languages and cultures into a new or non-framed space to be shared, offers students opportunities to open their minds to more than what they have known or experienced. Reading is a hermeneutic act of translation. If students can "translate" the text, they have created a new "vessel," Benjamin's term, in which fragments of the text's world and their world can make a whole. The advantage of the classroom is that students can work together and share their personal reading experiences with other students. Not just telling others what one understands but also communicating with others and exploring the meanings and concepts the text delivers enable students to enrich their reading. Personal reading experiences need not be exclusive or superficial. The classroom can provide students with opportunities to listen to the other students' interpretations or translations—sometimes more literary, sometimes more metaphoric—and together they can deepen their understanding of a world created by texts and readers. They, at the same time, can reflect upon how their 213 historical, geographical, social, cultural, and political environments have shaped their understanding of language. This is what I would like to call translation. V . 3 . Intertextuality as Translation Intertextuality is "a crucial element in the attempt to understand literature and culture," (Allen, 2000, p. 7) and is connected to the horizontal expansion of signification suggested by translation. The crux of intertextuality is, Graham Allen (2000) writes, that the "act of reading.. .plunges us into a network of textual relations," and that to "interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations," (p. 1) an action which is "initially employed by poststructuralist theorists and critics in their attempt to disrupt notions of stable meaning and objective interpretation" (p. 3). New Criticism takes as its focus the text; Rosenblatt explores not only the text but the reader's relationship with that text. For both, language is at the heart. Language, as translation theorists would argue, is not a fixed system of signs and corresponding meanings but a fluid interaction between them, socially constructed by its use and infinitely transforming. Although the term intertextuality was introduced by Kristeva whose work was influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism in the late 1960s, this relationship between texts originated in Saussurian structuralism. Saussure challenged the idea that language reflects a pre-existing reality, and considered instead the systematic features of language, arguing that "'subjects' are produced by linguistic structures which are 'always already' in place" (Selden, Widdowson, & Brooker, 1997, p. 152). Bakhtinian critics reject the structuralist's notion of a sign system, insisting that language has to be considered in a social context: "every word that is launched into social space implies a dialogue and therefore a contested interpretation" (ibid.). 214 Language cannot be separated from social living; "it is always contaminated, interleaved, opaquely coloured by layers of semantic deposits resulting from the endless processes of human struggle and interaction," (ibid) reflecting perspectives of society and human relationships. Kristeva's work combines Bakhtinian and Saussurian theories of language and literature. Mary Orr (2003) even suggests that Kristeva's essay is "primarily a 'translation' ofBakhtin as informed transposition"; "Source- and target-text traverse a space that is mediated by a translator-interpreter of two languages, and expert in two frames of reference in linguistics" (p. 25). Kristeva (1986) locates the word within the space of texts, saying that there are three dimensions of textual space or coordinates of dialogue—writing subject, addressee, and exterior text. The word's status is defined horizontally and vertically: Horizontal axis (subject-addressee) and vertical axis (text-context) coincide, bringing to light an important fact: each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read. In Bakhtin's work, these two axes, which he calls dialogue and ambivalence, are not clearly distinguished. Yet, what appears as a lack of rigour is in fact an insight first introduced into literary theory by Bakhtin: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read at least double, (p. 37) This passage reminds us of one of the conceptions of translation—a space of doubling (Metonymy)—in which a metaphoric vertical space and a metonymic horizontal space interrelate. Intertextuality denotes the transposition of one or several sign-systems into another; i f "one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an intertextuality), one then understands that its 'place' of enunciation and its denoted 'object' are never single, complete and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated" (p. 111). Here, a 215 metonymic horizontal space emerges—translations of translations of translations, as Octavio Paz (1992, p. 154) puts it. Mary Orr (2003) suggests that intertextuality can be seen as a translingual connection, and yet very few readers see "translation itself as an intertextual generator" (p. 156): However hidden, a translator is a human agent, the embodiment of the interim passage of text, whether from older to modern form of the same language or from one language to another. Without persons, languages and texts remain dead. 'Dead" or living languages can ever be resuscitated and rearticulated through retranslation, for rewording instills new life, (ibid.) In the classroom, students can be translators, generating intertextuality and giving texts new life. In this way, translation not only seeks what the author of the text intends but also how readers, helped by text, can make sense of their lives. Roland Barthes' 1968 essay "The Death of the Author," makes this point. He employs intertextuality to question the role of the author in the production of meaning: It "is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality.. .to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'" (1977, p. 143). Words have potentially multiple meanings as the "text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture... .the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original" (p. 146). He suggests how important the student's role is in the multicultural classroom, by arguing that we must pay attention to the reader: A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted, (p. 148) 216 For Barthes, the meaning of a text is constructed not by the author's own consciousness often sought by interpretation, but by intertextuality, its place within linguistic-cultural systems, embraced by translation. The dictionary "confirms only the relentless deferment of meaning: not only do we find for every signifier several signifieds . . . but each of the signifieds becomes yet another signifier which can be traced in the dictionary with its own array of signifieds" (Selden, Widdowson, & Brooker, 1997, p. 151). In a sense, students do not need to seek an author's intended meaning, but together can construct meaning that helps them create an inclusive living space. They can do so by sharing interpretation and constructing translation. Rosenblatt (1978) explains this point: The reading of a text is an event occurring at a particular time in a particular environment at a particular moment in the life history of the reader. The transaction will involve not only the past experience but also the present state and present interests or preoccupations of the reader. This suggests the possibility that printed marks on a page may even become different linguistic symbols by virtue of transactions with different readers, (p. 20) Students' experiences shape their interpretations of the world, and their languages help them construct it. But we have to consider what Orr (2003) reminds us: To "ignore the references in culture, the 'ungrammaticalities' or traces that disrupt smooth reading or translation of words, is to ignore the ways in which text retranslates itself over time" (p. 158). Students must learn to accept such disruption and take it as an opportunity to expand their horizons: As with all language use and cultural expression, borrowing and remaking in new contexts prevent ossification and obsolescence, on the one hand, and enable rediscovery of previously concealed elements, on the other. It is the prospect and challenge that the untranslatable will find expression that keeps language and its translations in all forms constantly exercising and circulating. (Orr, 2003, pp. 158-159) Studying literature provides students with a valuable learning environment where they 217 can share and learn from other students' translations—their social constructions of the world through language. V.4. A Post-colonial approach A post-colonial approach to literature, particularly in its focus on the colonial power of language, bridges separately framed worlds to create a new space through translation. Literature provides readers with resources for the construction of identity, a process which has been variously theorized by approaches such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and post-colonial studies. Al l promote the notion that the self or individual is not given by birth, but is historically and socially constructed. As I have discussed in the previous chapter, a post-colonial approach to translation and literature challenges "the way the West has conceived its identity and articulated it in a canon of artistic works," and the "result has been the breaking open of a narrowly conceived Western cultural canon, retrieving the besieged cultures of'marginal' groups and peoples" (Eagleton, 1996, p. 204). Post-colonial theorists situate literature as a political and cultural phenomenon, used to promote nationalism. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989) suggest that literature "was made as central to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to its political formation," which in turn used as "a template for the denial of the value of the 'peripheral,' the 'marginal,' the 'uncanonized'" (p. 3). They argue that education "establishes the locally English or British as normative through critical claims to 'universality' of the values embodied in English literary texts, and it represents the colonised to themselves as inherently inferior beings—'wild', 'barbaous', 'uncivilised'" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1995, p. 426). Education, and literary education, in particular, has been "a major theme and site of contestation in 218 post-colonial literatures" (ibid.). Literary education is thus crucial, offering "one of the most potentially fruitful routes to a dis/mantling of that old author/ity" (p. 427). The post-colonial approach to literature has helped readers reinterpret/translate texts, deconstructing a vertical signifying space to construct a horizontal one in which the meaning of language is sought and contested. From Shakespeare's Tempest to Conrad's Heart of Darkness many canonical texts have been reread and reinterpreted. Willinsky (1998) introduces "the pedagogical device of a post-colonial supplement designed to create a little space in the curriculum for thinking about the implications of five centuries of a global imperialism" (p. 63): A post-colonial supplement in Canadian schools would seek to connect lessons about the country's recurring constitutional crisis with the global phenomenon of self- definition and self-determination that is often caught within concepts and units of a nationalism that are the direct product of the European imperial project, especially in its late nineteenth century guise, (p. 65) When taught in schools, literary works which include a colonial legacy and construct the Other accordingly need to be re-read and re-explored. A post-colonial approach to literature and translation brings into secondary- and post-secondary classrooms of numerous nationalities, races, and ethnic groups the opportunity to address issues of racism, sexual harassment, and multiculturalism. Willinsky (1991) writes that "it seems irresponsible to suggest that literature . . . is about the individual reader's transaction with the book, just as it has become impossible to do a close reading of it that ignores the global response to it (p. 192): When we isolate literature from the world, allowing only for brief background of the author and the times to introduce the work, students have little chance of understanding how books work and how readers made something of real importance out of them, (p. 195). Bringing the ideas of translation to literature classes is useful, as they operate to transfer 219 meaning between two different worlds, worlds shaped by different histories, peoples, and their norms, and values, dismantling frames for better understanding of the different cultural experiences of others. V.5. Translation in the Classroom V .5 .1 . Translation in the Classroom: The Role of the Texts While interpretation may be bounded by students' frames, translation can shatter such frames and encourage not only students to go beyond their own framed world but also teachers to do so, perceiving a new world. Literature is a catalyst for "translation." In his experience of teaching literature to high school students in Nigeria, Charles Larson (1995) writes about the challenge of teaching, created by learning across languages, and about his learning through "translation." When studying Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, his students read the part where characters "get frustrated when they were kissed (or more likely, when they weren't kissed)" (p. 63). One student asked Larson a question: 'Excuse me, sir, what does it mean "to kiss"?' - a question which he was not expecting: That was a much more difficult question to answer than the usual ones relating to the plot or the characters of the novel—a real shock when it was brought to my attention that I had a rather naive boy in my class. So I brushed the question off until it was repeated a number of times and I slowly began to realize that all of my students had no real idea of what it meant to kiss. (p. 62) Later Larson learned that "Africans, traditionally at least, do not kiss; to learn that what I thought was 'natural' in one society is not natural at all, but learned, that is, cultural" (p. 63). He wonders how they are able to grasp the feeling of frustration that the characters had, if they were never kissed. His students also could not understand "what page after page of description of the countryside had to do with the plot of the novel," because 220 "descriptive passages were virtually nonexistent in African fiction" (p. 63). He realizes that the attitudes toward nature and environment vary among different cultures. Larson questions the notion of "universality" in literature: " i f someone does not react to something in our literature the same way that we do, then he is to be considered inferior?" (ibid.). This universal experience, he argues, is the construction of Western tradition: When we read a piece of non-Western literature we realize that the interpretation we make of it may be widely different from what the artist intended, and contrarily, that we should not expect people who are not of our own culture and heritage to respond in the same way that we do to our own literature, (p. 65) This is a meaningful learning opportunity for both students and instructors. Instead of answering the query of what "kiss" means or of when people kiss in the West, and instead of describing scenery according to the Western concept of "countryside," students and instructors can discuss cultural differences and how African students might act or feel in a similar circumstance to the one portrayed in the text. In North American classrooms, too, "universality" may have silenced the voices of students who struggle with an unfamiliar framework. They are silenced because they feel they are unable to fit in the frame established by Western society. If this "universality" is deconstructed, students may be able to find a "contact zone" between the text and their own lives. In Larson's case, students do not know what a kiss is but may be able to connect to the feeling of "the frustration of the characters." In this way, literature helps students perceive a space in which difference can enrich rather than divide their lives. Larson discusses the point that literature can help us realize how the meaning of a word is constructed socially and culturally. Here, together with students, Larson moves from interpretation to translation: 221 The purpose of any piece of literature, no matter what culture it was produced in, is to show us something we were previously unaware of. Just as literature is a bridge connecting a life lived with a life not lived, so, too, all literature that is effective is a voyage into a previously untraveled world, (ibid.) Translation is about connecting "a life lived with a life not lived." A world portrayed in literature sometimes seems far from lived experience and alien, yet it can be a part of how we live. At the same time, it helps native English speaking (NES) students perceive a space in which difference enriches and supplements, creating a whole rather than dividing. Translation thus helps students acquire ways to perceive the world from multiple angles. Consider my own experience. More than ten years ago, I took first-year literature courses at a community college, partly because I enjoyed studying literature, and partly because I wanted to improve my writing skills. One of these courses was entitled "Studies in Prose Fiction"; content was chosen to represent a wide range of fictional types and conventions, and a variety of authors and nationalities, including British, Canadian, European, American and Latin American writers. The course description read: The emphasis throughout the course will be, first of all, on careful reading and attention to detail as the foundation of a sound critical approach to literature; and, secondly, on developing, organizing, and expressing ideas and observations in coherent written form. Accordingly, a considerable amount of class time is spent making specific observations about the story being studied and discussing these observations with other members of the class, often in small groups. In addition, the major course assignments will be written essays, which will be graded for both content and presentation. This course description and course objectives were similar to other courses I took, though the focus varied. For example, the primary objective of the Canadian Literature course was "to refine the skills of reading and writing on literature with critical understanding, sensitivity, and insight" and students were directed to work both 222 "individually and collectively to achieve these goals." These course outlines ask students to read attentively, critically, and receptively, to be sensitive to language and to acquire a recognition and understanding of "the differences between denotation and connotation"; of "literary concepts such as metaphor, irony, symbol, allusion, allegory, and personification"; of "elements in prose fiction, such as the nature of character . . . narrative structure, including various points of view, the use of setting" (Canadian Literature course). For most of the courses, I wrote exploratory questions, topics and thesis statements which were later developed into essays. Literature courses are demanding as they require a large amount of time for reading, thinking, and writing. In the "Studies in Prose Fiction" course, I generally enjoyed reading and thinking about literary works, but at the same time struggled to keep up with the reading, preparing assignments, and writing essays while also studying for other courses. Half way through the course, I read William Trevor's Beyond the Pale, through which I first became aware of the process that I now call translation. It is a story about four friends—a couple and a single man and a woman—in their early fifties, "the prime of life," (Trevor, 1981, p. 77) who go on a retreat to Glencorn Lodge in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The story is narrated by Dorothy, the single woman of the group. She describes the setting and their routine. She reports they have come to the Lodge in Ireland for fourteen years. They spend hours playing bridge and enjoying a comfortable, idyllic retreat which they share with well-mannered guests and caretakers. They feel great security in the routine and predictable nature of their holiday: "Nothing had changed at Glencorn Lodge, all was well with its Irish World" (p. 78). This peaceful romantic world is disturbed, however, and everything changes to turmoil, when one of the guests drowns himself after talking to one of the 223 four friends, Cynthia, who has come on the retreat with her husband. Cynthia meets the stranger when she is at Glencorn Lodge alone while the other three have gone for a walk. When she learns about the man's suicide, Cynthia goes into shock and frantically starts to tell the story of this stranger: "her talk was literally almost crazy" (p. 99). He had come to Glencorn Lodge to trace his memory; as a boy he had ridden "dilapidated" bicycles "through the streets of Belfast" to Co. Antrim (p. 94) with a girl, and they once stayed at the place where Glencorn Lodge was later built. They "had ridden away from poverty and unhappiness" and "later fell in love" (ibid.). They "went their different ways" (p. 99); the boy became a dockyard clerk, and the girl went to London to work in a betting shop. The girl who "had laughed on the seashore, whom he had loved" later began to make terrorist bombs, and since then "her violence" had haunted his memory (p. 101). In the end, she died as the perpetrator of a suicide bombing. Their story overlaps with Irish history. Cynthia, the hearer of the story, "has read endlessly" and "is extremely knowledgeable about all matters relating to Irish history" (p. 85). She is angry, saying to her husband and friends who try to stop her from obsessing about the man's death: "You none of you care. You sit there not caring that two people are dead" (p. 99). Her framed world is cracked by encountering the stranger who neither belongs to nor is accepted in her world. This is a contact zone where she can translate how she has lived/not lived, including her tolerating her husband's affair with the narrator, Dorothy: "That woman . . . is my husband's mistress, a fact I am supposed to be unaware o f (p. 107). Speaking of the dead man and his childhood friend, she continues: Yet I stupidly thought, you see, that the tragedy of two children could at least be understood. He didn't discover where her cruelty had come from because perhaps you never can: evil breeds evil in a mysterious way. That's the story the red-haired stranger passed on to me, the story you huddle away from, (ibid.) Although the stranger's story has sunk deep into the water in which he drowned 224 himself, his story, a story beyond the pale, encourages Cynthia to break her old frame and to perceive a space that encompasses his life and hers—a space of translation. The four friends will eventually make their journey home, yet Cynthia asks "is the truth about ourselves at least a beginning? Will we wonder in the end about the hell that frightens us?" (pp. 108-109) Nobody can answer: Cynthia "stumbled off, leaving a silence behind her" (p. 109). Dorothy cannot understand her: "How awful a rigmarole hung about us as the last of the tea things were gathered up—the earls who'd fled, the famine and the people planted. The children were there too, grown up into murdering riff-raff' (p. 109). Dorothy cannot see a world outside of her frame, because she only has the language to talk about her world. Everything else has to be dismissed as beyond the pale. She interprets, but cannot translate. Dorothy speaks a language that Toni Morrison (1993) describes as one of "the policing languages of mastery," (p. 16) languages that are privileged, and "cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas" (p. 17). My knowledge of wealthy British people was very slight; their world was alien to me. My knowledge of Irish history was also limited, though I had read books, watched the news and movies; it seemed the history of "the other" to me. Thus, when I first read the story, it was "other people's story," and I did not see any connection with my life. I looked up "beyond the pale" in an English-Japanese dictionary; it is defined as meaning behavior or actions that are not acceptable. I interpreted the title as referring to Cynthia's behavior triggered by the incident. Later, in the class, however, the instructor drew a circle on the board and talked about it. He suggested that Glencorn Lodge symbolizes the lives of the people who stay there; it is a false paradise, a facade, a place of evasions that belie the truth and reality. I was looking at the circle, thinking about the 225 story, and suddenly felt that the story was not just about snobbish and shallow wealthy English people and poor Irish people, but about us, about the world. The circle is a frame constructed in society, designed to ignore, deny, and discriminate against others who do not belong to the frame. Within a framed world, nothing "could be further away from all the violence," (Trevor, 1981, p. 80) and a person who does not belong to the frame is considered "not at all the kind of person one usually sees," (p. 81) a person who does the "kind of things one doesn't do," (ibid.) who should be "placed out of view," (p. 91) because "that life should continue as normally as possible was essential" (pp. 93-94). People dismiss outsiders that are "beyond the pale." Now when I think about this reading experience, I realize that my interpretation at that point developed into a translation, enabling me to connect the story of untraveled Northern Ireland with my lived world—Japan and Canada, past and present. People in Glencorn Lodge became the people surrounding me. The story started to speak to me, helping me to create a "vessel" in which fragments of the story's world and my world came together in a whole. I could read the phrase "beyond the pale" not vertically as my dictionary explained it but horizontally, translating the story into my life in Japan and Canada. Later I learned that Trevor was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1928, and resides in England: "Trevor navigates with great skill among the tensions and conflicts brought on by decaying class structures and by ancient national and cultural grievances between the English and Irish" (Birkerts, 1996, p. 585). Perhaps he is a translator of different frames of history and culture. I may not fully understand what Irish people have undergone, but his story has led me to appreciate the value of translation, enabling me to make sense of the world. 226 V.5.2. Translation in the Classroom: The Role of the Student M y experiences in Canadian literature classrooms have helped me not only "translate" literary works into lived experiences but also provided me with insight about how to approach literature in the classroom. The methods of instruction in my old Japanese literature courses were based on lectures, but here in Canada methods were based on small group discussions about plot, characterization, setting, theme, symbols, and irony; on oral presentations; and on peer editing. Willingness to listen to other students and translate their ideas are important components of those types of tasks. In 1996,1 conducted ethnographic research in first-year English literature courses in which about thirty-five percent of the students were E L L students. This experience offered me insights into the role of translation in the classroom. M y data derived from triangulation—a multiple qualitative research method—observing classrooms, taking field notes, interviewing students and instructors, collecting and analyzing students' writings, video- and audio-taping classroom activities and discussions, and conducting questionnaires. The study illustrated how classroom tasks embraced social, cultural, and academic values and norms, such as individualism, collaboration, equality, and a post-structural approach to literary interpretation and classroom practice. I observed three kinds of classroom tasks—input (e.g., lecture, reading), interactive (e.g., discussions, peer-editing), and output/evaluative (e.g., essay writing, editing) tasks. In particular, what I learned from interactive tasks provides me with new ways of considering the role of translation in these tasks. The success of small-group discussions, I observed, depended on how NES students perceived E L L students. If they can engage together in "translation," they can develop insightful discussions. But if NES students only state their own opinions and do 227 not take E L L students' opinions seriously, collaboration cannot work; both NES and E L L students feel that they are wasting their time. In my study (Nishizawa, 1997), one NES student describes his frustration in the interview: The small-group discussion works only when participants in the group prepare ideas and seriously want to discuss their ideas. I found a lot of them did not prepare enough, or the level of English comprehension of [ELL students] was too low. It's wasting time. (p. 159) Perhaps students are not prepared. Or perhaps this student's presumption that E L L students' comprehension of English is too low to discuss literary work hinders him from listening to E L L students' accented English. His interpretation of E L L students keeps him within his frame; he misses out on an opportunity to see the world beyond his frame. When this happens, E L L students tend to retreat: Sometimes I think differently from others, because my culture is different. So I write differently. They [NES students] think I'm different. But I feel they are different, (p. 169) I don't feel I belong here. They don't accept me. I don't feel I'm understood. I feel I'm a strange person, (ibid.) Different frames are isolated from each other. Consider one E L L student's observation of NES students' participation: When it's a small-group discussion, they [NES students] don't listen to each other. They're just talking about their writing, like how difficult it was to find a theme. They seem to believe "my essay is the best," you know. Then they joked about other things. I don't want to talk, because it's not useful. That's why I like lecture better. At least I can learn something, (p. 159) He remains quiet, not because he has no ideas, but because he does not appreciate the small-group discussions. In this Asian student's mind, there is a stereotypical NES student's attitude towards discussions—they do not listen to each other but only express their own opinions and ideas. Effective collaborative work requires individual commitment to the process. In both cases, the students are unable to move beyond their 228 preexisting knowledge and understanding about the Other. Thus there is no space for translation, no common sense of interpretation as a form of shared translation. They may respect an individual's right to silence but do not seem to appreciate the meaningfulness of exchanging ideas. Individualism is often considered a North American cultural value, compared to Asian collectivism. Scholars of intercultural communication typically suggest that individualistic societies and the literature they produce emphasize the individual's initiative and achievement and promote self-realization; collectivistic cultures and their literature, in contrast, emphasize belonging to groups and require that individuals fit into these groups (Gudykunst & Kim, 1997). Ron and Suzanne Wong Scollon (2002) point out that North American ideologies of discourse, what they call Utilitarianism, derive from the Enlightenment concept that the "human was to isolate each person as a completely independent, rational, autonomous entity who moves about through society according to society's laws" (pp. 112-113); this perspective has resulted in promoting a particular communication style. They write that individuality and creativity embrace two elements; "not only may one be free from the restrictions of social discourse, one must continually show oneself to be free by producing original phrasings and statements" (p. 122). Citing Obelkevich (1987), they also suggest that these values are reflected not just in speaking but also in writing, and emerge from a reaction to "a culture in which intertextuality was rampant; in which the notion of plagiarism (and the word itself) did not yet exist; in which there was no author's copyright, no property in ideas and no footnotes" (ibid.). 4 7 Translation theorists would argue, however, that individuals are the 4 7 Alastair Pennycook in his "Borrowing Others' Words: Text, Ownership, Memory and Plagiarism," writes about E L L students' language learning and questions the notion of ownership of text and learning. He argues that language learning is "to some extent a process of borrowing others' 229 product of translation; it is hard to trace the original. Individualism has been so valued in the West that both educators and students have overlooked the fact that their thoughts and ideas are the products of intertextuality and translation. If small group discussions occur with the intent of group members to share their fragmented selves, collaboration benefits students. In my research, one E L L student explains different group dynamics which sometimes discourage her from participating, and sometimes encourage her to participate: I was scared [of small-group discussions]. It's a very good learning method, but it's really hard for me. The words just don't come out. I need to take time to think what I should say. But they [NES students] don't wait for me. Most of the time, I just give up. I think it really depends on the group members. When I feel comfortable and accepted, I can speak well. And we [ELL and NES students] try to explain what I mean and what they mean. I like this discussion, (p. 160) If NES students wait and listen to what E L L students try to say, communication gaps can be minimized, as E L L students feel accepted and encouraged to speak. Students can even use these gaps to learn about different experiences and perceptions, as described by one of the NES students whose group discussed marriage: I thought it was fascinating. It's so different, you know. I think I learned a lot about Asian culture from them. And, remember? When we talked about color. I didn't know that the Chinese wear red wedding dresses, because it's the lucky colour. I thought it's bizarre. Or marriage, women's role. Yeah, it's different and interesting. I like to talk with them [ELL students], (ibid.) This is where translation begins. The word "wedding dress" or "marriage" evokes different images and meanings—socially constructed—to students from different cultures. When they can talk about their own interpretations and share these with other students, a metaphoric vertical signification shifts, moving towards the signifying chain and into a horizontal metonymic space. This is what collaborative work offers, the words," and that educators need to be flexible when drawing "boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable textual borrowings" (1996, p. 238). 230 possibility of creating a shared space. However, this discussion has to be developed further. Otherwise, students find "fascinating" differences between cultures, see the borderline, and go back to their own frames. Like tasting sushi or celebrating Chinese New Year, finding difference is not in itself translation. Instructors must encourage students to reflect upon what these "interesting" differences might do to someone's perspectives and values; how these differences affect their understanding of others. Because E L L students, consciously or unconsciously, have undergone the process of translation, they are aware that "when one switches from one language to another it is not just the form that changes but also the content" (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 1997, p. 3). NES students, on the other hand, may not be aware of such challenges. Once they have experienced this process of translation, they become attentive listeners and willing participants for creating a shared space with E L L students. Consider the following interviews with NES students: It's just a matter of time, you know. They need more time for everything . . . no, I don't think it's a problem. I can understand them . . . uh . . . I try not to use idiom when I talk to them. Just like when I talk to my dad . . . my dad is Yugoslavian . . . yeah, my mom is Canadian. He came to Canada when he was twenty something. I use words that he can understand. If I use words which are not commonly used, he doesn't understand. If you're not a native speaker, it's natural. But, we can communicate. (Nishizawa, 1997, p. 160) I think they (ELL students) are nice kids, they don't talk much though. I like my class . . . my dad is Hungarian and my mum is German...yeah I was born in Germany and went to Singapore between 1984 and 1989.1 speak German and English at home. My dad is really smart; he speaks Hungarian, German, Russian, and French. Yeah, I can read German pretty well, but I can't write, (ibid., p. 161) It takes time [to figure out what they are saying]. But I have time. I was a peer counselor when I was in high school. I helped ESL students learn how to speak, read, and write in English. I know their problems and feelings. The ESL students in this class are okay. Of course there are lots of grammatical problems, but I understand what they meant in their essays, (ibid.) Whether their family members are "translated" individuals, or their experience of 2 3 1 interacting with E L L students has helped them perceive a world beyond the frame constructed through "standard," "universal" English—translation begins. Although they point out only linguistic challenges that E L L individuals have, at least such awareness has made them listen to others and try to achieve mutual understanding, whatever the difficulties they might encounter. Their translation cannot be developed without E L L students' participation, and their awareness encourages E L L students to participate. One such E L L student became actively involved in discussions: Now I can participate in small-group discussions. It's interesting to discuss ideas with other students. I learned how to argue with other students. I have a little bit of confidence now. (ibid.) Her confidence that she can "argue with other students" does not come from her linguistic ability to communicate ideas but from finding a place in a group where students equally exchange ideas—a place where they become translators. They can do so by interpreting literature and translating other students' interpretations. English that carries different histories and memories is used and translated, expanding meaning. Because of its cultural diversity, today's classroom provides students with a valuable opportunity to learn what it means to translate. Connecting individual interpretations with those of others and thereby developing translation is challenging but possible. V.6. Literary Texts and Translation What kinds of literature can promote translation? Are there any particular literary texts that help students engage in translation more than others? What can notions of translation bring to the study of literature? In this section, I will examine and interpret first, anthologies and second, individual literary works, attempting to demonstrate how ideas of translation operate (both the misuse and the potential) and how bringing 232 conceptions of translation into the classroom helps students perceive the world through eyes beyond their own. I will analyze texts in detail because hermeneutic conceptions of translation address the meaning of language as sociocultural and ideological production, and paying attention to language helps me examine how frames are created and seek how ideas of translation may open up a space beyond frames. 1 will illustrate how not only contemporary works but also canonical literature offer linguistic and cultural spaces for students to explore difference and connection among people. In what follows, an irony often prevails. The works that seem most intended to expand students' perspectives are sometimes those which instead reinforce stereotypes; the works that seem most canonical and colonial—the chestnuts of British literature—are sometimes those which open up the richest possibilities for connecting among cultures. V.6.1. Current Literary Anthologies Many current anthologies of short stories aim to introduce broader perspectives to students, who, these anthologies argue, do not "see the world from another person's point of view," and suffer from "a failure of imagination" (Kennedy, 1991, p. xi). In particular, reflecting a society of people from diverse cultural backgrounds, recent anthologies include not just canonical works of literature but also world literature; sometimes even translated works of literature can be found in these textbooks. In the Norton Introduction to Fiction, Jerome Beaty (1996) writes that texts "have potential for meaning, implication, response, and result; but the reader must activate them, give them life, and turn them from quiet print into a lively interplay of ideas and feelings" (p. xi). Students' imaginations enable them to perceive the larger world: The "process of reading involves not just the consciousness of the self but an awareness of the 233 other—what is beyond the self (ibid.). In The LongwoodIntroduction to Fiction, Sven Birkerts (1996) writes of the importance of assembling "a true diversity of readings—a diversity that not only recognizes the reality of a multicultural society but also the inevitable emergence of internationalism" (p. xv): "Students clearly need a context, a way of understanding the major historical developments that underlie the changing complexion of world literature" (p. xvi). Internationalism characterizes the selection of short stories. This textbook includes world literature translated into English: "Important new literatures are springing up in African, Asian, and Latin American countries; formerly isolated traditions are being reinvigorated and changed by the impact of global modernism" (p. 1). Birkerts acknowledges the role of the translator; "this profusion of literature would not have nearly so great an effect were it not for the work of translators" (ibid.). By including world literature, these textbooks try to move beyond "the choice of a ruling clique of old white males," and "the traditional literary canon" (Birkerts, 1996, p. xv). Ironically, however, in the case of Japanese literature, these anthologies include canonical Japanese literature written by male writers, typically Kawabata Yasunari and Tanizaki Junichiro. As I suggested in Chapter Three, Japanese literature has been known to the West mainly through these writers whose translated works appear to be the only available choices for editors of these anthologies. Both writers' texts in the anthologies seem to be chosen based on "the aesthetic stance," Karatani's term I discussed in Chapter Three, reflecting the Western readers' expectation of what Japanese culture should be. In particular, Tanizaki's "Tattoo" in The Longwood Introduction to Fiction depicts a time when samurai existed: "Tattoo exhibitions were frequently arranged where the participants, fingering the tattoo marks on each other's bodies, would 234 praise the original design of one and criticize the shortcomings of another" (Tanizaki, 1996, p. 281). A young "tattooer of outstanding talent" seems to be obsessed by the "strange pleasure" of observing that "the pricking of his needles caused the flesh to swell and the crimson blood to flow," and his patients were "unable to endure the agony" (ibid). He receives a visit from a young geisha whose "perfectly shaped toes, the iridescent nails, the rounded heel, the skin, as lustrous as if it had been washed for ages by the limpid waters of some mountain brook—all combined to make a foot of absolute perfection designed to stir the heart of a man and to trample upon his soul" (p. 282). He finds in her a mutual fascination with cruelty, and tattoos an "enormous spider" on the girl's back, expressing "the essence of his whole life" (p. 284). The girl's "heart is now free from all fear," and he becomes her "first victim" (p. 285). The story ends: "Without a word, she inclined her head and unfastened her dress. The rays of the morning sun fell on the young girl's back and its golden gleam seemed to set fire to the spider" (p. 286). Images conveyed by the text match those of traditionally enigmatic Japanese culture—tattoos, a young fragile geisha, kimono. The anthologist writes that Tanizaki's early works such as this "reveal an obsession with themes of cruelty and sexual power," and that "Tattoo" suggests "how the modernist influences of the West interacted with Eastern traditions" (p. 280), implying intertextuality within Tanizaki's works. Yet I have difficulty finding interaction between West and East in "Tattoo"; rather the text reinforces an image of Japanese as Other. Here is a story chosen for its internationalism but ultimately hindered by an exoticism which emphasizes difference as an end in itself. Including such works of world literature in anthologies is problematic, and reflects the limited availability of English translations and perhaps the editors' views on other cultures. Instructors must 235 carefUlly choose world literature, not to reinforce alienation or frames of otherness, but to promote issues which transcend cultural boundaries. V.6.2. Self-Translation: Framer and Framed Yet through imagination, literature offers students an opportunity to examine how their identity is shaped through the frame of their upbringing, and how this self-construction process generates difference. As I discussed in Chapter Two, self is a product of translation and it is always changing. Yet self is often regarded as fixed in a particular frame, based on ethnicity, gender, or class, which operates much as one's own language does, framing experience and expressions. I will analyze two short stories—Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party" and Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls"—both frequently anthologized in texts used in Canadian literature classrooms—to illustrate how literature can help students reflect upon this construction of self and other. Through these two stories, students can observe and analyze how upbringing—parents, siblings, community, schooling—shape identity and perceptions of the other. Both stories suggest how powerful environment can be in constructing self and understanding other people, thus helping students translate the stories into their own identity-construction process. If they become aware of how they are framed and who the framers are, they may find ways to transform themselves. Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party" (published in 1921) portrays a series of one-day events revolving around a girl from an upper-class family, Laura. This story is also in The Longwood Introduction to Fiction, in the same section as Tanizaki's "Tattoo," a section entitled "The Modern Age." Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls" (published in 1968) is included in The Norton Introduction to Fiction, in a section 236 entitled "Literary Kind as Context: Initiation Stories." This is the story of a girl whose father is a fox farmer, raising silver foxes and selling their pelts to fur traders. Because the girls in these two stories are young and have not yet fully acquired the norms and values they are expected to embrace within their frames, they attempt to live beyond their frames. Eventually, however, they yield to or are made to accept roles given by their framers, including parents and siblings. Although the frame in "The Garden Party" is centered on class, and "Boys and Girls" focuses on gender roles, both stories portray how self-construction, particularly for a girl, is influenced by societal constructs. The two girls' attempts to avoid being framed end in vain; the stories show students how class distinction or gender roles—one's upbringing—shapes one's identity and world view. Both Laura in "The Garden Party" and the girl (symbolically with no name) in "Boys and Girls" sense the expectations derived from the frame into which they were born, and feel pressured and unsettled. They feel admiration for the men's world, but men do not take girls seriously. Laura's family is planning an extravagant garden party, and Laura's world appears "ideal," (Mansfield , 1996, p. 304) filled with beautiful flowers, pleasant music, and the sound of happy laughter. As workers come to put up the marquee, Laura senses a different world out there; when she meets the workmen, she feels that they "looked impressive" (p. 305). The girl in "Boys and Girls" feels resistant to her given role as a female. She is raised on a fox farm in which the traditional division of labour is rigid: A man works the land to make a living, while the woman works in the home, raising the family. The girl's father organizes and controls the fox farm, and she admires him: His work place is "tidy and ingenious," and he is "tirelessly inventive" (Munro, p. 467). She loves to help with his work. But she hates her mother's work in the 237 house, which is "endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing," whereas the work out of the house done by her father is "ritualistically important" (p. 468). The girl feels her mother as an "enemy," trying to trap her in the "hot dark kitchen" (ibid.). She fantasizes an escape, telling herself a story at night, a story in which she is a brave heroine, rescuing people from danger. Rebelling against the constraints of female roles in the house, the girl begins to discover the same limitations in society; the inferiority of the female role is reinforced by people outside her home. Henry, who works for her father, sees her with his "derisive" eyes and takes a "swipe" at her (p. 465). The salesman says: "I thought it was only a girl" (p. 468). Despite her resistance, she is unable entirely to escape from her femininity. When she realizes that her little brother's physical strength is becoming greater, she feels intimidated. She sees herself in the fate of the foxes on the farm for whom death is inevitable: Al l their "pure hostility" showing in their "golden eyes" cannot save them" (p. 469). Her rebellion cannot save her from her fate either: It seemed that in the minds of the people around me there was a steady undercurrent of thought, not to be deflected, on this one subject. The word girl had formerly seems to me innocent and unburdened, like the world child; now it appeared that it was no such a thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become, (p. 470) She seems to have no choice but to accept what she has been made to become. Readers/students can see, through the girl's eyes, how a framed world defines the meaning of a word—"girl" in this instance—and shapes the norms and values of the girl, limiting her translation and identity- construction. In "The Garden Party," Laura's experience of the death of a poor neighbour illustrates how her framed world perceives class and divides people. When she learns that Mr. Scott, whose residence is located at "the very bottom" of the slope, lying a 238 "broad road" between them (p. 310), has been killed in a terrible accident, she sympathizes with his family. She wants to cancel the planned-for party but is dismissed by her sister, Josie: '"Don't be so absurd. Of course we can't do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don't be so extravagant'" (p. 310). Laura's mother also insists that Laura use "common sense," (p. 311) that they have learned of Mr. Scott's death "only by accident" (p. 311). Laura is supposed to agree with her mother, yet she feels "it was all wrong" (ibid). Eventually, however, she follows her mother's orders, and the party is held. At the party, Laura begins to forget about Mr. Scott, as people praise Laura's appearance in a hat: There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon. Never had she imagined she could look like that. Is mother right? She thought. And now she hoped her mother was right. . . . Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper, (p. 312) This is the only defense she can take against her anxiety. But it is also the reality of her life. She is being shaped as people of her class perceive her. Similarly, the girl in "Boys and Girls" gradually recognizes that she cannot identify entirely with the roles her father plays. She gains this insight when the old horse, Mack, is shot. Mack has become a part of the family, which makes her determined to witness his death. After seeing him killed, however, she is disillusioned by her father's work. By killing foxes and horses, the father works only for death. She does not like the role of women, but neither does she like the role of men in her family. She begins to see her father's work differently: "I felt a little ashamed, and there was a new wariness, a sense of holding-off, in my attitude to my father and his work" (p. 473). This feeling triggers her desire to save another horse, Flora, who, like Mack, is also destined to be 239 shot. She frees Flora: "Instead of shutting the gate, I opened it as wide as I could. I did not make any decision to do this, it was just what I did. Flora never slowed down; she galloped straight past me" (ibid.). The girl might have seen herself in Flora, as her "gate" too is being shut. She is hoping to make a run with Flora to seek her own identity. But just as Flora is shot by her father, her future is determined: [The father] would know that I was not entirely on his side. I was on Flora's side, and that made me no use to anybody, not even to her. Just the same, I did not regret it; when she came running at me and I held the gate open, that was the only thing I could do. (p. 474). Unfortunately, "the only thing she could do" cannot save her from who she is made to become; she goes up to her fancily-decorated bedroom, "spreading the bed with old lace curtains, and fixing [herself] a dressing-table with come leftovers of cretonne for a skirt" (ibid.). The story she tells herself at night has also changed; she is now rescued by a boy. She has been framed. The two young women's reluctance to accept frames created either by class or gender is ultimately overcome by the framers, as is suggested by the end of the stories. In "The Garden Party," Laura comes home and tries to explain to her brother about what she has experienced through seeing Mr. Scott's dead body, lying in bed: "It was simply marvelous. But Laurie—" She stopped, she looked at her brother. "Isn't life," she stammered, "isn't life—" But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood. "ten't it, darling?" said Laurie, (p. 315) Her brother, as a framer, knows what Laura should become, and what he "understood" is not what Laura endeavours to articulate about "life." Her brother's response, "Isn't it, darling" sounds patronizing, treating Laura's struggle as his little sister's trivial sentiment. His power consumes Laura's attempt to understand "life" in the world beyond her frame. Laura is trying to translate "life" into a horizontal space in which both Mr. Scott and Laura can share their lives. But her brother's "life" signifies meaning that only 240 people of his class appreciate. Laura's translation cannot be completed, as framers interfere with its process. The ending of "Boys and Girls" suggests a similar consequence. After the girl frees the horse, her father and his man shoot "old Flora" and "cut her up in fifty pieces," (p. 476) which Laura's younger brother proudly reports. The brother also tells the father that the girl opened the gate for Flora: "Never mind," my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humour, the words which absolved and dismissed me for good. "She's only a girl," he said. I didn't protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true. (p. 475) Like Laura, the girl has been framed by the framers—her father, brother, mother, school, and community—by whom her gender role is determined. The girl's struggle to deconstruct the meaning of the word "girl" is futile. "Gir l" is signified vertically in her family's frame, and translation is not allowed. The stories reveal how powerful framers can be, and how a frame can shape norms, values, and beliefs. We can only imagine whether or not these two young women's awareness of other worlds remains and awakens when they grow up. In a sense, "The Garden Party" and "Boys and Girls" are two more stories about people whose behaviour is "beyond the pale." The nature of the particular pale (defined by Oxford as "an enclosed or delimited area")—the attitudes, values, assumptions, beliefs—is revealed; then, that pale confronts something which exists beyond it, something unfamiliar, uncomfortable, unknown, which makes people feel insecure. Perhaps Laura is young and thus has not yet been completely shaped by her class's frame. Her awakening is the point at which she can begin to translate other people's lives into hers, stepping beyond the pale. She takes the steps of Steiner's "hermeneutic motion." She visits Mr. Scott's house because there is something to be understood, 241 perceiving the working-class family and the dead man, which leads her to see life and death in an enlarged way. Her translation has begun, but is disrupted by her ffamers before reaching the final stage of translation. The meaning of the word "life" will likely be vertically defined appropriate to her class frame. The girl in "Boys and Girls" struggles to translate her circumstances, by freeing the horse or decorating her bedroom, but there again her translation process is terminated by her framers who believe in their conception of her gender role as the only acceptable one. The girl surrenders, accepting that she is "only a girl." Students have their own frames—the basis by which they make sense of themselves—and difference emerges because of those frames. Of course, frames are not just about culture, but many other elements in one's environment, such as social class and gender as portrayed in these stories. These stories can help students reflect upon how their identities are constructed, and what has framed them as who they are today. Translation requires them further to understand the process by which difference is constructed. Encountering people who live in a different framed world is a familiar occurrence in their lives, and these stories mirror that act of translation and lead students to the possibility of new understanding, growth and change. According to the textbooks, Mansfield who was born in 1888 in New Zealand into a middle-class family, traveled to London when she was fifteen to become a musician but eventually became a writer through contacting the leading writers of the time, including D. H . Lawrence. She spent her last years in France, dying of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four. Alice Munro was born in 1931 and grew up on a farm in Canada: "Much of her fiction grows out of her childhood memories of rural family life" (Beaty, 1996, p. 799). She has published many short stories and novels. As these authors 242 have translated their lives into literature, so students can translate their stories into their lives. Not only literature but fdm too deals with translation. Trinh Minh-Ha (1992) talks about translation pertaining to her film-making, saying that translation "implies questions of language, power and meaning" (p. 133): In the politics of constructing identity and meaning, language as translation and/or film as translation is necessarily a process whereby the self loses its fixed boundaries—a disturbing yet potentially empowering practice of difference, (ibid.) Translating stories has potential to help students "lose" their "fixed boundaries" and become aware of how difference is constructed, and an instructor must facilitate this experience. In this way, literature functions as a "contact zone," and students learn not just about themselves but others through translation. When students feel connected to a literary work, their interpretation begins. But they must move from interpretation to translation, through which they can consider issues of class, gender, race, or culture beyond their preexisting understanding, beyond their frames. They can see that "Boys and Girls" is about roles of men and women. They may think that the father is wrong to treat his daughter as "only a girl." Or they may feel proud that their parents treat girls and boys equally. Translation means more than that. If they find somebody who feels that a woman should be the keeper of a house and raise a family, instead of dismissing this idea as wrong or different, students need to see where this different idea comes from and why it might have developed. Together they can explore difference and reconstruct the word "girl." Literature offers such opportunity for translation. 243 V.6.3. Much Ado About Noticing Translation begins, as Steiner suggests, when a translator feels that there is something to convey; the translator can notice what needs to be explored. Without noticing difference, there will be no translation necessary, as things are fine, and people are comfortable in their world. No author is more canonical than Shakespeare; yet no author better lends himself to the application of conceptions of translation to his work. Shakespeare has taught us what should be noticed, enabling us to engage in translation to see the world outside our frame. "We keep returning to Shakespeare because we need him; no one else gives us so much of the world most of us take to be fact," Harold Bloom writes (1998, p. 17): The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement; aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind's reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us. (Bloom, 1998, pp. xvii-xviii) What Shakespeare "invents" are "ways of representing human changes, alterations not only caused by flaws and by decay but effected by the will as well, and by the will's temporal vulnerabilities" (p. 2). The Japanese love Shakespeare; various translators have translated his plays, and actors have performed them, and some directors have translated his plays into the form of a Japanese traditional performing art, Kabuki, and a film, Ran. Translation has played an essential part in the Japanese appreciation of the Bard's plays written hundreds of years ago. Bloom does not forget to point out that not everybody considers Shakespeare preeminent: When our education has faltered, and Shakespeare is battered and truncated by our fashionable ideologues, the ideologues themselves are caricatures of Shakespearean energies. Their supposed "politics" reflect the passions of his characters, and insofar as they themselves possess any social energies, their secret sense of the societal is oddly Shakespearean. (Bloom, 1998, p. 13) Play like The Tempest, for example, have been criticized as colonial, but then students 244 need to read colonial texts. Post-colonial translation theory encourages students to examine colonialism and analyze it from different frames—outside of the pale—instead of excluding it from the classroom; such a text helps students to perceive colonialism, and how the dominant discourse has constructed it, reflecting upon their past, present, and future. Once they are able to break their frames, when translation begins to operate, they can transform negative energy to positive. Much Ado About Nothing suggests the indeterminacy of story and language, helping students to translate the world of the play into their lives. Bloom writes that Much Ado About Nothing "is not one of Shakespeare's comic masterworks" but "it continues to manifest extraordinary vitality in performance" (p. 192). With its "vitality," this play has the potential to create a translating space. Interestingly, Shakespeare himself was a great translator; the play is a product of intertextuality or translation. Critics have traced similar plots in other literary works: The Hero-Claudio-Don John plot, with its lady's maid, caught with her lover, being mistaken for the lady herself, has been traced back to a Greek source of about the year 400. The sixteenth-century Italian collector of tales, Bandello, used the plot in Story XXII of his Novelle (1554), as did Ariosto somewhat earlier in Book V of his Orlando Furioso, and as did Spenser in Book II, Canto 4, of The Faerie Queene (1590). (Stevenson, 1989, p. xxi) Furthermore, Shakespeare is a significant contributor to the modern English dictionary. His language is fundamental to the English-speaking world together with his ideas and spirit. Remember Octavio Paz's words: The world is presented to us "as a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translation of translation of translation" (Paz, 1992, p. 154). Much Ado About Nothing is often found in college and university bookstores on the shelves for first-year literature courses. The focus of the play in the classroom is usually the two couples, Beatrice and Benedick, and Hero and Claudio. Bloom's analysis 245 (1998) is centered around them; Bernard Shaw (1898/1989) wrote a critique entitled "Shakespeare's Merry Gentlemen." I studied this play in Canada in a college course consisting of a wide range of stories on the theme of marriage, from Chaucer to current ones including gay and lesbian couples. I read the play, compared it with Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue," discussed both in class, analyzed the language, and wrote an argumentative essay. For the major essay assignment, the instructor asked students to write "a well-planned essay in which you agree or disagree with the following statement about Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing"'': The "two planned weddings at the end of the play are in the best interests of the four characters concerned." I thought about the two couples in the play, evaluated their relationships, and wrote an essay. Bloom (1998) writes that "there is just a hint that like most Shakespeare marriages, the union of Beatrice and Benedick may not be a bower of bliss. . . . Two of the most intelligent and energetic of Shakespeare's nihilists, neither of them likely to be outraged or defeated, will take their chances together" (p. 201). Relationships and marriages may be an interest of young adult students, and students may bridge easily the world of the play and the world of their own relationships and thoughts about marriage. But the play can offer insightful views about more than marriage. In fact, the traditional classroom focus on the marriages of characters who share like class and values can be an obstruction. It can keep us from seeing the play's more interesting observations about difference, as it manifests itself in distinctly framed worlds. In my translation, this play is about noticing, noticing people of different class and gender, and the ambiguous and deceiving nature of language. Characters of the play talk, listen/not listen to each other, and often deliver wrong information to others, either intentionally or unintentionally. They enact a power dynamic. They interpret information 246 based on their preexisting knowledge or understanding of other people. The popular study guide, Cole's Notes (1967), suggests that "the power of report, usually false report, 'that only wounds by hearsay' (III i 23), to alter the course of human life for good or for evil" (p. 20) is the theme of the play, then lists the scenes in which "action is taken on something heard—true or false" (ibid.). These scenes show "how much in the play depends on falsehood, told or designed to be overheard—both in the serious and the comic plot, and how much upon words overheard by chance" (p. 21). Students can find this theme throughout the play, but how they translate the characters' "reports" is important. The characters receive information by overhearing. For example, when Antonio tells his brother Leonato false information that his man overheard Don Pedro telling Claudio that he was in love with Hero, Leonato wants to know if the source is reliable, and believes his brother's assurances. Leonato. Hath the fellow any wit that told you this? Antonio. A good sharp fellow. I will send for him, and question him yourself. (I. hi. 15-17.) The "good sharp fellow" has no intention of telling a lie, but nevertheless makes a false report. This is how gossip circulates. Some characters take advantage of that part of human nature and use it, for example, to make two people believe they are in love. Beatrice and Benedick fall for the ruse. For characters of a lower class, on the other hand, overhearing leads to the revelation of an evil plan; the Watch overhears a conversation when Borachio tells Conrade how easily Claudio believed that Hero is not loyal to him: Conrade. And thought they Margaret was Hero? Borachio. Two of them did, the Prince and Claudio; but the devil my master knew she was Margaret; and partly by his oaths, which first possessed them, partly by the dark night, which did deceive them, .. (III. iii . 153-157) 247 Don John's oaths possess Claudio, making Claudio unable to notice deception. Darkness and masks symbolize such deception, implying that darkness and masks are in people's minds, clouding their judgment. By noticing how language can deceive people, and how seemingly factual, plausible information can be false, students can see how people today are still tricked by language, for example, easily manipulated by media. Characters of a lower class are able to notice facts, while characters of the upper class depend on words. At the masked ball, for example, Ursula notices Antonio behind a mask, while Beatrice appears not to notice Benedick in a mask: Ursula. I know you well enough. You are Signior Antonio. Antonio. At a word, I am not. Ursula. I know you by the waggling of your head. Antonio. To tell you true, I counterfeit him. Ursula. You could never do him so ill-well unless you were the very man. Here's his dry hand up and down. You are he, you are he! Antonio. At a word, I am not. (II. i. 111-119) Ursula seems to know that words do not capture meaning. She is not tricked by language, but trusts her observation—she notices. Beatrice and Benedick, in contrast, depend on words and take them seriously. Here is Beatrice talking with Benedick, without knowing who he is. Beatrice. Will you not tell me who told you so? Benedick. No, you shall pardon me. Beatrice. Nor will you not tell me who you are? Benedick.~Not now. Beatrice. That I was disdainful, and that I had my good wit out the "Hundred Merry Tales." Well, this was Signior Benedick that said so. Benedick. What's he? Beatrice. I am sure you know him well enough. Benedick. Not I, believe me. Beatrice. Did he never make you laugh? Benedick.! pray you, what is he? (II. i. 124-135) Or has she noticed who he is? "I am sure you know him well enough" might mean that 248 she has. Then she uses this opportunity to insult Benedick. This is again a matter of noticing. Also, Leonato fails to note important information, when Dogberry and Verges come to tell Leonato that Don John had Conrade and Borachio make Claudio believe Hero's infidelity. Partly because Leonato was preoccupied with the wedding, partly because informants are lower-class people who speak an inarticulate language, Leonato does not listen to them. If he had, the consequent unhappy incidents would have been prevented. Although the servants seem nothing to upper-class people, they need them to discover the truth; lower-class people, by delivering accurate information, are the saviours in the play. They live in different frames but they complement each other and create a balanced world. Students can notice that if they rely on language too much, they might fall for the frame in which language operates in a particular way. In the play, people believe false information because the informants are their equals. They do not listen to somebody who is considered to be lower than them; social inferiors, like the Watch, are considered to be of little consequence. Yet they are the ones who deliver accurate information. One believes language is speaking the truth if it comes from an authority; or, one does not believe or even listen to language if it comes from somebody who is "nothing." In Shakespeare's time nothing (no thing) and noting were pronounced similarly (Cole's Notes, p. 62). Nothing puns with noting. Consider the following malapropism between Don Pedro and his musician Balthasar: Balthasar. Note this before my notes:/ There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting. Don Pedoro. Why, these are very crotchets that he speaks!/ Note notes, forsooth, and nothing! [II. iii . 54-58] Perhaps not noticing such "nothing" is something that hinders people from translating the Other, and a world outside of their frame. Bloom (1998) writes that "the authentic 249 Shakespearean litany chants variations upon the word 'nothing,' and the uncanniness of nihilism haunts almost every play, even the great, relatively unmixed comedies," (pp. 13-14) as in Much Ado About Nothing: As a playwright, Shakespeare seems too wise to believe anything, and while he seems to know not less than everything, he is careful to keep that knowing several steps short of transcendence, (p. 14) The play tells us that this nothing can become anything, if one notices it; students can learn how to notice something which may appear normal, ordinary, or nothing. In this way, they can translate nothing into something meaningful, which may be why Shakespeare's dramas are so universally well received. Donald Stauffer (1989) says of Much Ado About Nothing that the Bard is a believer in experience: Copybook maxims, admirable as they may be, are ineffective. The only school is experience, and axioms are proved upon the pulses. Believing this, Shakespeare finds the drama a most excellent moral instrument, since in the drama characters reach conclusions by putting their various conflicting beliefs into action. Their passions and philosophies are forced to work out practicable solutions, in conflict with a larger world and with unsympathetic alien forces or personalities, (p. 151) Through the play, imaginary experience can be translated into people's lives. Richard Olivier, theatre director, is such a translator, exploring personal transformation through Shakespeare's plays. I attended his 2001 University of British Columbia talk about translating Shakespeare into the business world; Henry V, for example, is used to help business people manage social, interpersonal, and work relationships. In an interview with Joseph Roberts (2001), Olivier describes how he translates the play: Henry F"uses a very martial theme to explore how you can gather groups of diverse people together under a common goal and get them to potentially sacrifice for a common vision of the future" (Roberts, 2001, p. 6). He sees Henry Fas a genuinely inspired leader, rather than a superficially charismatic leader, such as Hitler or 250 the Roman Emperors. Henry V has eight thousand people under his command, while the French forces consist of forty thousand people. His victory seems impossible: In Act I Henry comes up with his vision of the future and has to build consensus among a hugely diverse group of people about whether and how they can move forward to try and fulfill this vision. In Act II he has to deal with some old friends who aren't necessarily in it for honour and with the traitors who would stand against him and actively seek to sabotage the vision he's attempting to fulfill. . . . In Act IV he ends up surrounded by the 40,000 troops and goes through his long dark night of the soul where he has to go inside and re-examine his own motives. He asks if he is doing the right thing and if he's the right person to do it. Those are very brave and very important questions for a leader to face in a crisis, (ibid) Olivier considers that Henry V provides new leaders with a vision of successful leadership, which is required in the world today, a world becoming colonized by large corporations that "are attempting to convert people" into this "commercial, material world" (p. 7): "If they don't feel they have a voice, they're going to pushed back and their kids are going to be seduced with the new religion of Coca-Cola" (ibid.). People need maturity, he suggests. Consider Henry V s famous speech before the battle of Agincourt: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in English, now a-bed, Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. (IV. i i i . 60-67). He defeats the French and wins the hand of Princess Catherine of France. Olivier considers that Henry V s success derived from knowing his strengths and weaknesses. Bloom (1998), in contrast, writes of Henry V as a symbol of colonial power: The common soldiers fighting with their monarch are not going to become gentlemen, let alone nobles, and "the ending of the world" is a rather grand evocation for an imperialist land grab that did not long survive Henry V s death, 251 as Shakespeare's audience knew too well. (p. 320) After all he is the very king of England and may be a brutal hypocrite so that in "Henry's vision, the growing inner self requires an expanding kingdom, and France is the designated realm for growth" (p. 324). Reminded, however, that we live in a world where a few powerful people make decisions, and that such decisions can endanger countless people's lives, we must realize that the human desire for power and economic gain has engendered a never-ending predicament for humanity. Olivier's work with Henry V, along with other leaders in Shakespeare's plays such as Caesar and Hamlet, offers ways to confront this predicament. We can regard Olivier's work as another form of translation, one across temporal frames. He demonstrates how relevant a four-hundred-year old play of Shakespeare is to the world today, how effectively it translates our time, our place, our concerns, and moves us beyond our comfortably-framed world to a space of inter-historicity. V.6.4. The Flow of the River: Heart of Darkness Overhearing others' conversations causes much ado in Shakespeare's play, suggesting the lack of true communication between individuals and the deceptive nature of language. Overhearing conversation also plays a role in Joseph ConradHeart of Darkness (1899/1995), conveying significant information to the protagonist, Marlow. In his view, "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze," (p. 18) a statement which resonates with post-structuralists' views of translation in which the meaning of words expands horizontally, and nothing is definite. Conrad lived in a world of translation, as he moved from one language to another, from one culture to another. Although he is 252 "generally regarded as one of the greatest writers of fiction in English," (Hampson, 1995, p. i) English was his third language. Conrad (1857-1924) was born in Polish Ukraine. He accompanied his parents into exile in northern Russia, was left an orphan at eleven and raised by his uncle. Before he was seventeen, he embarked for Marseilles, as an apprentice seaman serving French merchant vessels. In 1878 he joined a British ship where he served for the next sixteen years, becoming a British subject in 1886. He started to learn English when he was twenty, and published a first novel in 1895. Edward Said (1993) considers Conrad different from other colonial writers, because "for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self-conscious about what he did" (p. 23), and Conrad had "an extraordinarily persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality" (p. 24). Despite negative criticisms of its imperialistic view of Africa, Heart of Darkness, through Marlow's journey, can offer students an enriching opportunity to examine the history of colonialism and the construction of the Other. For Marlow, Africa, as the Other, was initially a place on a map: When "I was a little chap I had a passion for maps.... At the time there were many blank spaces on the earth" (p. 21). These blank spaces become filled with colours, as Africa is colonized by Europeans: There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and on the East Coast, a purple patch to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. . . . I was going into yellow. Dead in the centre, (p. 25) Red symbolizes pride, as the red countries are colonies of the British Empire. On the map, there is a river, "a mighty big river . . . resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost 253 in the depths of the land" (p. 22). A coloured map is two-dimensional knowledge of Africa within the frame of colonial power, which may be similar to what students know about the Other through education—maps and books made within a particular frame. On a map, neither Marlow nor students can see individuals who live with their families and friends; the map is only paper knowledge, which is unable to see real life and categorizes the Other systematically. But when Marlow is on a journey "into yellow," he has an opportunity to translate people and their lives into his world; students, too, begin to learn actual life in a space on the map, coloured yellow. The River takes him to the other side of borderlines to an unknown world. This is when Marlow senses that "instead of going to the centre of a continent, [he was] about to set off for the centre of the earth" (p. 29). Marlow's journey transforms his two-dimensional knowledge into a three-dimensional quest for the depths of the human mind. His encounter with the Other forces him to translate self and Other into his world; he struggles to make sense of himself, his work, and Kurtz. In this process of translation, he may realize the impossibility of translation through conquest and colonization, and find the darkness and horror of humanity in the pursuit of power. His narrative helps students to explore how the "civilized" have constructed the Other and divided the world, and to see that they live in a world where the darkness of human desire still haunts them, looming large. His journey is a translation, an entering into a space beyond his frame, trying to make sense of human existence and his own, which is in turn the students' journey. Heart of Darkness is considered to be a masterpiece of canonical literature in the twentieth-century, and has been a popular text for first-year literature students. The previously mentioned Norton Introduction to Fiction (1996), for example, includes this novella in the section entitled "Form as Context: the Short Story and the Novel" along 254 with classics such as Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," and Ernest Hemingway's " A Very Short Story." Beaty, editor of this anthology, introduces Conrad's work as influenced by naturalism, portraying "people and their actions as largely determined by their biological natures" (p. 501): "For Conrad, natural man or man in nature was corrupt; all values were artificial, like rules of a game, but it was man's necessity, role, and glory to make and live by such rules, no matter that they were inevitably fictions" (ibid). Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989) describe the background of this work deriving from Europeans' encounters with African culture in the 1880s and 1890s: "Europeans were forced to realize that their culture was only one amongst a plurality of ways of conceiving of reality and organizing its representations in art and social practice" (p. 156). Yet Europeans did not appreciate African culture as equal; rather, they regarded it as primitive art, "a 'stage' in the development towards civilized art" (p. 158): This ethnographic view was accompanied by a more radical, fearful, and complex vision in which 'primitive' art was seen as expressive of the 'other side' of the European, civilized psyche, the 'dark' side of man. This is the fear which is expressed in such works as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and which is summed up in Yeats's comment after seeing Jarry's Ubu Roi. 'After us, the Savage God.' (ibid.) Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin argue that "discovery" of Africa is crucial for "the self discovery of the twentieth-century European world in its self-contradiction, self-doubt, and self-destruction, for the European journey out of the light of Reason into the Heart of Darkness" (p. 160). Students can explore this history of constructing the Other through Conrad's work. Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in the midst of this emergence of a "contact zone" which is reflected in his treatment of Africa. Because of this, Chinua Achebe (1988/1996) criticizes this story: "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the 255 other world', the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality" (cited in Brooker & Widdowson, 1996, p. 262). Achebe refuses to "translate" Conrad's work, because he says it offers only racism.4 8 He points to the role of language, finding particular meaning in Conrad's word choice, "adjectival insistence" borrowed from F. R. Leavis: "When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery, much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity" (Achebe, 1996, p. 263). When language is translated into different frames, meaning shifts, and impact shifts, creating different images which offer an important lesson for students. But Achebe's main argument is about the portrayal of people—Europeans versus Africans. He cites passages where Africa and Africans are described as "prehistoric," "monstrous," or "ugly." He also compares the portrayals of two women, Kurtz's Intended and his assumed mistress: "The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two women is conveyed in too many direct and subtle ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the most significant difference is the one implied in the author's bestowal of human expression to the one and the withholding of it from the other" (ibid. p. 265). At least two responses are possible to a text like Heart of Darkness. One is Achebe's: A refusal to translate (or teach) the text. The second is to place the text on a reading list precisely because it makes possible the very discussion and analysis of conflicting framed worlds that a hermeneutic classroom demands. 4 8 This racism seems to be common in European literature at this time. Onuki Torn (2001), a Japanese scholar, observes that discrimination against Africans and Asians was often present in European literature in the nineteenth century. As one example, he points out the way that Jules Verne, in his Around the World in Eighty Days, describes the Japanese when a protagonist, Passepartout, arrives in a Japanese port, Yokohama: "The Frenchman felt himself as much alone among them as if he had dropped down in the midst of Hottentots" (Verne, 1906, p. 176). 256 Continuing his discussion about Conrad's language, Achebe points out that in only two occasions in the book, Conrad confers speech "even English speech, on the savage," and Achebe discusses the "famous announcement: 'Mistah Kurtz—he dead'" as some of Conrad's "best assaults" (p. 265): In the case of the cannibals the incomprehensible grunts that had thus far served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad's purpose of letting the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts. Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the dumb brutes against the sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear, unambiguous evidence issuing out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter, (ibid.) We are told that when he made this pronouncement "the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the door way, and said [it] in a tone of scathing contempt" (p. 112). It is not his language, but the colonizers'. Yet, his accent and inaccuracy of grammar are translated into signs of inferiority, which E L L students can understand in their everyday lives. Marlow might have sensed that the boy's scathing contempt derives from being forced to speak "english" under his master. Achebe argues that this use of language which is "technically erroneous in the context is almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the writer to downgrade the discussion" to the level of the Other. He writes that in 1857—the year Conrad was born—the "first Anglican missionaries were arriving among [his] own people in Nigeria," (p. 267) and in 1890 when Conrad sailed down the Congo, his "own father was still a babe in arms" (p. 268): I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question, (p. 268) Achebe's rejection of Conrad's language is similar to the post-colonial writers who write only in their native language but not English. However, I do not feel that Marlow is completely unaware of his "racism." As a map "reaP'izes people and their 257 land, Marlow senses what space he is about to enter: "I don't know why—a queer feeling came to me that I was an impostor" (p. 29). I also do not think that today's students perceive Africa and Africans as portrayed in the story; they know better. They know Marlow makes racist remarks about Africans. At the same time, though, students can learn how history has been told through an imperialist world-view, constructing the Other and placing the Empire's English uppermost. Edward Said (1993) writes that Heart of Darkness works effectively because "its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist" (p. 24): Conrad's realization is that if, like narrative, imperialism has monopolized the entire system of representation—which in the case of Heart of Darkness allowed it to speak for Africans as well as Kurtz and the other adventures, including Marlow and his audience—your self-consciousness as an outsider can allow you actively to comprehend how the machine works, given that you and it are fundamentally not in perfect synchrony or correspondence. Never the wholly incorporated and fully acculturated Englishman, Conrad therefore preserved an ironic distance in each of his works, (p. 25) Said argues that as "a creature of his time," Conrad could not "conclude that imperialism had to end so that 'natives' could lead lives free from European domination," and could not "grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them" (p. 30). But what Conrad can show us is that "all human activity depends on controlling a radically unstable reality to which words approximate only by will or convention" (p. 29). Said contends that Conrad's work is relevant and significant for students today, as it illustrates imperialism, "its contingency," and "records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste," (p. 26) which continues today, with an "appalling tribalism and fracturing societies, separating peoples, promoting greed, bloody conflict and uninteresting assertions of minor ethnic or group particularity" (p. 20). Education must address this issue, Said argues: We are all taught to venerate our nations and admire our traditions: we are 258 taught to pursue their interests with toughness and in disregard for other societies.... Little time is spent not so much in "learning about other cultures"—the phrase has an inane vagueness to it—but in studying the map of interactions, the actual and often productive traffic occurring on a day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute basis among states, societies, groups, identities, (p. 20) Literature like Heart of Darkness can provide students with an imperial experience that they are unable to capture otherwise. By translating Marlow's world, they can see the hearts of darkness in their own world. The river in Heart of Darkness seems to have significance for translation, as it is the only passage to connect different worlds. Marlow's map is brought to life by the river, which connects the "white men" with people who are "black and naked, [moving] about like ants" (Conrad, 1995, p. 32). Upriver—"fascinating—deadly—like a snake" (p. 25)—slowly leads the white men to "the centre of the earth," (p. 29) beckoning "a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart" (p. 58): Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, and impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances, (p. 59) Marlow feels "bewitched and cut off for ever from everything" he has known, cast into "another existence" (ibid.), into a place where "no man was safe from trouble" (p. 66). This is the beginning of his translation; his fear of facing the unknown is shared by all human beings who first encounter the other. Nevertheless, he begins to smell the earth, feel the lives of people, and their humanity, which enables him partially to come to know such humanity. Unfortunately, however, his translation is not completed. Recall Steiner's four stages of translation. As a sailor, Marlow is always interested in 259 "something there to be understood" (Steiner, 1998, p. 312); he enters with "aggression," and appropriates the context—Africa—by colonial language. Still, he never reaches the final stage of "restitution"—to restore balance. He cannot complete Benjamin's vessel through fragments of himself and Africa. As he goes up the river, Marlow senses connection, translating people in the "river-side bushes": But what made the idea of attack inconceivable to me was the nature of the noise—of the cries we had heard. They had not the fierce character boding of immediate hostile intention. Unexpected, wild, and violent as they had been, they had given me an irresistible impression of sorrow. The glimpse of the steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained grief. The danger, if any, I expounded, was from our proximity to a great human passion let loose. Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence—but more generally takes the form of apathy. . . (Conrad, 1995, p. 73) Marlow may find a space between two worlds; through the "impression of sorrow," he perhaps feels a void in what he and other white men have tried to achieve. He says he likes "what is in the work,—a chance to find yourself: "Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means" (p. 52). Now he is given an opportunity to translate himself to see what is under the river. He might realize that as Said (2003) writes: Every "domain is linked, and that nothing that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence" (p. 2). Marlow expresses such a sense of connectedness about his helmsman's death: Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account then a grain of sand in a black Sahara . . . . I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. (Conrad, 1995, pp. 84-85) The "intimate profundity" of the helmsmen's look makes Marlow sense a third space. With this realization, Marlow can observe of Kurtz that "he was hollow at the core" (p. 260 95): The "wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion" (ibid.). The "fantastic invasion" of white men is not fantastic after all, only revealing the "horror" in themselves. Marlow understands better "the meaning of [Kurtz's] stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness" (p. 113). Marlow and Kurtz see a world which contains "all the hearts that beat." Ironically, they can find it only through invasion and violence. The return downriver pushes them back to "civilization": "The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time" (p. 109). Retreating into the securely framed world does not save Marlow and Kurtz from the horror, which haunts Marlow when he returns to the Thames: The offing was barred by a black band of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness, (pp. 123-124) Marlow's journey into "the centre of the earth" has made him realize the darkness is within him, his world, and the world of civilization, the real heart of darkness. Said (1993) writes that with Conrad "we are in a world being made and unmade more or less all the time" (p. 29): What appears stable and secure . . . is only slightly more secure than the white men in the jungle, and requires the same continuous (but precarious) triumph over an all-pervading darkness, which by the end of the tale is shown to be the same in London and in Africa, (ibid.) Said (2003) writes about the history in which the "civilized" desire to conquer the Other and gain economically justify power and violence: Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise of oriental 261 studies and the takeover of North Africa, and goes on in similar undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and during the entire 20 t h century, in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Afghanistan. Then think of the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, through the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, of insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of "natives." Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics, (p. xxii) When film director Francis Coppola directed Apocalypse Now in 1979, inspired by Heart of Darkness, his portrayal of Vietnam evoked the horrors of war. Coppola's "translation" of Heart of Darkness makes us realize that the same river that Marlow traveled is still flowing towards the land of the "natives," as again we witness the madness and horror of human nature proliferating in Iraq, triggered by imperialist desires, replacing "a devastated Third world dictatorship" in a war fought "on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control and scarce resources" (Said, 2003, p. xix). The world has not changed, it seems. Yet, the river continues to flow and will never stay the same,49 reminding educators how crucial it is for students to understand the construction of difference and to develop broader and deeper perspectives to appreciate the connection, the river, between us and the Other. The river has always been there, even before civilization, offering an opportunity to explore unknown places and meet others of different cultures. What makes the river fall into darkness is people, their desire to rule, possess, and gain; The flow of the river was an inspiration even before the words of the "Philosopher, David's son, who was king in Jerusalem" appeared in Ecclesiastes: "Every river flows into the sea, but the sea is not yet full. The water returns to where the rivers began, and starts all over again. Everything leads to weariness—a weariness too great for words. Our eyes can never see enough to be satisfied; our ears can never hear enough. What has happened before will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing new in the whole world" (1. 7-9). Consider also the river in the first paragraph oiHojoki (Ten Foot Square Hut), written by Kamono Chomei (11557-1216). He was born in to a family of Shinto priests in Kyoto, Japan, and became a poet at the imperial court. He later became a Buddhist monk and lived in an isolated hut, as a hermit, where he wrote this essay in 1212: "Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same, while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone, never staying for a moment. Even so is man and his habitation" (trans, by Sadler, 1972, p. 1). 262 the river simply carries those who are obsessed with power. Yet it offers us possibility, creating an in-between world. Willinsky (1998a) writes that a "literary education intent on imagining a world that has moved well beyond the age of empire world" is possible (p. 222): But this call for a postcolonial education is not about proscribing or policing any given piece of literature or form of literary criticism. What is needed is a return to our ideas about the value of literature, ideas that after the centuries of literature's engagement with imperialism, are bound to bear something of a legacy devoted to civilizing the savage, to bringing sophistication of feeling and thought to the primitive. A student's literary education needs to include this historical role of literature as an educational tool that supported, and at times stood against, the expansion of empire, (p. 223) Conrad's Heart of Darkness takes students to a space of possibility in which they can rise "above both the savagery and the hollowness within" (p. 222). V . 6 . 5 . Post-colonial Literature: Blurring Borderlines Literary works such as Heart of Darkness help students to recognize how colonial power has worked and how its adverse effects still touch their lives. Colonial power historically has been exercised in different forms—exploiting resources and labour, expanding settlement, plundering land and language, violating sovereignty—often through the means of military force. Students can recognize that these forms are still operating in the world. Literature can also help students realize that their frames operate their norms, values, and beliefs, which can be deconstructed and transformed. This is when students engage in translating a nation, self, culture, and the other, from different angles. The conceptions of translation reflected in literature show them the indeterminacy of language, and ambiguous boundaries of nations and races. Students can see that self is not fixed and is perhaps transformable if they are willing to cross the imaginary and projected borderlines that others have already crossed and 263 recrossed in this mobile age. Post-colonial translation and its approach to literature help students to identify this process; even when students read canonical works reflecting colonialism, the texts can be read from a post-colonial perspective. Post-colonial writers have provided readers with experiences of people on the periphery, depicting the effects of colonial power and their resistance to it. These characters' views and relationships help to dismantle the frames and vertically-signified meanings of language. Sometimes they rewrite history and canonical works of literature, and demonstrate the impossibility of binary opposition—centre/margin, civilized/primitive, good/evil, white/black. Students may find a space in-between, a third space, or a Metonymic space, where they have to seek fragments of Benjamin's vessel from different viewpoints of characters beyond their frames—translation in operation. Rewriting a story shows the myriad possible stories behind it, suggesting the interconnectedness of perspectives and lives. Words may shift views; actions may change lives. Students can see how perspective alters translation. One's identity is translated differently by the norms and values of people within a particular frame. Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 rewrites Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, showing the possibility of different translations of characters' lives in the novel. Because Jane Eyre, an orphan, speaks her voice and achieves a life, Jane Eyre used to be considered "a key text in the analysis of earlier women's writing, of how a woman's 'voice' and psyche are articulated both in the conscious and the repressed discourses of the fiction" (Brooker & Widdowson, 1996, p. 107). However, other critics, such as Gayatri Spivak (1985), consider the achievement of Jane Eyre from an Anglo-American feminist perspective. Spivak argues that the novel has produced a narrative of "the 'worlding' of 264 what is now called 'the Third World"'(p. 243): To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation, fosters the emergence of'the Third World' as a signifier that allows us to forget that 'worlding,' even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline, (ibid.) When a signifier is defined and becomes a norm of pedagogy, it is difficult to find another translation beyond existing frames and boundaries. Jean Rhys challenges such narrowly defined meanings of language; she was "outraged by the caricature of the Creole she found in the murky background; faceless, voiceless and sacrificed to the success story of the famous English heroine" (Ashworth, 1968, p. xiii). Rhys, of European descent, but born and raised in the Caribbean, creates a story for Bertha, who is Rochester's first wife and portrayed in Jane Eyre as the Other—a person of color, insane and thus confined to a forbidden room, resulting in her setting the house on fire and leading to her own death. Because Bertha does not tell her own story in Jane Eyre, readers can see her only through other people's views, as if they were reading a colonial textbook that justifies the colonizers' position and reinforces stereotypes. Rhys gives Bertha a voice to tell her own story, so that students can translate her experience from another angle. Spivak (1985) acknowledges that Rhys "keeps Bertha's humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact," (p. 249) though she criticizes Rhys' novel which "rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native" (p. 253). Andrea Ashworth (1968) writes that "Rhys rescues the disposable, barking-mad woman from the 'cardboard world' of the attic in Thornfield Hall. The Englishman's Creole wife is lifted off all-fours and thrust into the literary limelight as the thinking, feeling, talking, heroine at the heart of a vividly realized Caribbean world" (p. ix). In any case Wide Sargasso Sea 265 has been read in English literature classrooms and has helped students become aware that their perceptions change depending upon who is telling whose story, and that, like Bertha's, when one's relation to the world shifts, one's identity can also shift. In this way, students can recognize the unstable nature of binary opposition, just as Bertha strays into a space between black/white and colonizer/colonized. This ambiguity is an important concept in translation. Bertha is a woman who is lost in translation. Even though she has lived her life on the border, she cannot find a space on the border. Her place exists only in her dreams, which lead her to death: "Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do" (pp. 155-156). Bertha gets lost between the colonizer and the colonized. Her original name is Antoinette, but her English husband, Rochester, forces her to change it; he has tried to frame her by his colonial ideology: "Don't laugh like that, Bertha" "My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?" "Because it is a name I'm particularly fond of, I think of you as Bertha" (p. 111) Rochester appears to be a colonizer, exploiting Antoinette's riches by marrying her, and attempting to own her in order to maintain his framed world. Yet, Antoinette is resistant: "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name" (p. 121). Rochester, like Antoinette, is lost because of his inability to translate himself to the Caribbean—the land of the colonized: "It was not a safe game to play—in this place, Desire, Hatred, Life, Death came very close in the darkness. Better not to know how close. Better not to think, never for a moment. Not close. The same . . ." (p. 79). Students can recognize the importance of their names; the names identify who they are. But students, like Antoinette, are often obliged to change their names to ones that are easy for native-English speakers to pronounce. In this way, they 266 feel connected to the frame constructed by "standard" English. The ambivalence of Antoinette's identity becomes evident after the Emancipation Act in the British West Indies in 1833. Her family wealth has been earned by slavery, which has made her belong to the colonizer. But when the slaves are freed, her identity is translated from "white" to "non-white" by the people who used to serve her. "Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger," (p. 21) Antoinette's childhood black friend Tia asserts. Antoinette's world has shifted, and she is lost. There is no place for her to dwell. She feels that Tia "was all that was left of [her] life as it had been": We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be liker her. . . . When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. I was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass, (p. 38) Even though they have once shared the same space, Antoinette's and Tia's worlds are divided by imperialism and seem never to be united. The only thing that they can share is the history which separates them into colonizer/colonized. But, at the same time, as individuals, Tia feels conflicted about hurting her friend. Their tears convey the possibility that they might transcend the boundary that has separated them for centuries, but frames are dominant: Tia has to throw a stone at Antoinette's face, expressing hatred against the frame that has trapped her race in slavery. For her part, Antoinette has to accept the hurt, repenting of the frame that made her race masters. But they are not completely different, as Antoinette sees herself in Tia. Antoinette realizes that she has become colonized by the power her husband has imposed on her. Spivak (1985) suggests that there are "many images of mirroring in the t ex t . . . . Rhys makes Antoinette see her self as her Other," (p. 250) suggesting that the borderline between 267 self and other is uncertain and becoming one. Antoinette/Bertha, however, is able neither to embrace her self and otherness as one, nor to find a space between, and thus has to move into another world—death. She senses her death in the sky: "It was red and all my life in it" (Rhys, 1968, p. 155). A candle light leads her "along the dark passage" (ibid., p. 156). Let the conflagration begin. Students can observe through the story that as society changes, social values change. The divisions of power are ever shifting. Any sense of belonging is in fact unstable and uncertain. Students may also think about what is valuable enough to be preserved, such as friendships that can last, if they move beyond the given frames and divisions between self and other. Translation is the embrace of self and other, a space in which new self emerges. The novel, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, depicts the possibility of such emergence in people who transcend their frames and share their humanity—a place that Antoinette was unable to find. The conceptions of translation are richly reflected in this novel, helping students to consider the frame within which their norms and prejudices are shaped, and to foresee potential in dismantling the frame in their culturally diverse society. The novel portrays people who are destined to live on the border world creating a third space in which they can find self through translating others, despite constant pressure from the power of frames. In this novel, nations are not translated as equal to race, but deconstructed through the lives of the characters. The novel challenges the vertically-signified meaning of nations and portrays the inseparable nature of self and other; self is constantly being translated while interrelating with the lives of others. Intertextuality plays an important role in this novel, as many literary works are interwoven, suggesting how literature can help reexamine the process of one's life and 268 help make sense of it. The title itself deconstructs the meaning of language. The "English patient" is not English. He is labeled as English, because he has been severely burnt, and nobody can identify "his black body" (Ondaatje, 1993, p. 3). His identity is revealed later: he is a "Hungarian named Almasy, who worked for the Germans during the war," and in "the 1930s he had been one of the great desert explorers. He knew every water hole and had helped map the Sand Sea. He knew all about the desert. He knew all about dialects" (p. 163). The novel poses the question of whether being English or Hungarian makes a difference. Derrida might say that there is nothing for English or Hungarian to represent. "Leave him alone. He's my patient," (p. 166) his nurse Hana says. Nationality divides people into allies and enemies. But because nobody recognizes his nationality or skin colour, the English patient has become a frame-less person on the border world. What has come to matter is his story through which three others' lives interact. He is a frame-less person and patient, who as a catalyst allows others to be frame-less. In a shared space, they are given an opportunity to translate the language of the others into their own. In the novel, four individuals are stranded and come to share their lives in a deserted Italian villa towards the end of World War II. The Villa San Girolamo—previously a nunnery, half ruined by bombing—becomes a third space in which they share stories, as they try to make sense of who they are. Not only the English patient but all the others are products of translation, living on the periphery—the border world—between different languages and cultures. Hana, a twenty-year old nurse, is French-Canadian. Sherry Simon (1999) explains Hana's location: A "French-speaking political community," Quebec in Canada, "long 269 considered itself to be a territory colonized by the power of English," and "can be said to participate fully in the contradictions and tensions of contemporary post-coloniality" (p. 59). Hana has retreated from the centre of the war and from her occupation to be a nurse in the army, seemingly as a result of the death of her father and baby. Hana is determined to stay away from the centre: "But she felt safe here, half adult and half child. Coming out of what had happened to her during the war, she drew her own few rules to herself. She would not be ordered again or carry out duties for the greater good" (Ondaatje, 1993, p. 14). Such determination, however, places her in isolation: "I wanted to go home and there was no one at home. And I was sick of Europe" (p. 85). She is home-less, nowhere to belong to. When she meets the English patient, however, Hana feels a connection: There was "something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult" (p. 52). Hana senses that the English patient dwells in a space different from "framed adults" who have lost their ability to perceive the other without prejudice. Caravaggio, who is Hana's father's friend, a thief—"brilliant in deceit against the rich" (p. 40)—and spy, is Italian-Canadian. Hana writes about him: "7 have always loved him.... He is in a time of darkness, has no confidence. For some reason I am caredfor by this friend of my father" (p. 61, italics original). Hana explains to the patient: "He was a thief. He believed in 'the movement of things.' Some thieves are collectors, like some of the explorers you scorn . . . . But Caravaggio was not like that. He was too curious and generous to be a successful thief. Half the things he stole never came home" (p. 169). Hana's words suggest that he is outside of the frame, not completely controlled by imperialism, as he is unable to act like colonizers who steal from and exploit the Other. The fourth protagonist is a young Sikh sapper, Kip, who has 270 been trained in England in bomb disposal techniques, and who has been dismantling unexploded bombs. Kip admires an English man, Lord Suffolk, who has taught him skills and treated him as an equal, but has died in a bomb blast. The English patient feels a bond with Kip: "Kip and I are both international bastards—born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives" (p. 177). Through these protagonists, students can learn what it means to be off-centre, dwellers on the periphery, and how a frame-less state enables people to interrelate genuinely. The centre exists in relation to the periphery, determining frames, and students can observe that the binary oppositions created by imperialism hinder people from maintaining close relationships and mutual understanding. The English patient knows how harmful a frame can be. He fell in love with a married English woman, Katharine, but their irreconcilable differences resulted in her tragic death. Another relationship ends when Kip has to leave Hana, with whom he has fallen in love. The frame constructed through imperialism, discriminating against people of colour, divides the lives of Kip and Hana. Kip's resentment and anger against the British Empire make it impossible for him to stay. His return to India is a form of resistance and departure from the frame of imperialism, the imperialism that his brother has fought against his whole life. Four people in the villa are translating each other, and as they do so, they reconstruct themselves anew. This new self is again translated by others—a chain of signification suggested by the conceptions of translation—providing them with new knowledge and understanding of the world and people, and creating a new meaning in life. Caravaggio, for example, has known Hana since she was a child. He realizes that 271 Hana has been transformed: He "loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, when she was the product of her parents," (p. 222) testifying to her departure from her old frame. Hana has become the product of translation: "He could hardly believe his pleasure at her translation" (ibid.): Years before, he had tried to imagine her as an adult but had invented someone with qualities moulded out of her community. Not this wonderful stranger he could love more deeply because she was made up of nothing he had provided, (p. 223) Caravaggio expected her to become a woman framed by her community; instead, she becomes a "wonderful stranger" reconstructed by translation. And, as he "watches Hana," (p. 39) he perhaps translates his discovery of "her translation" into his life. Hana watches him, too: "In his graying stubble-beard, in his dark jacket, she sees the Italian finally in him. She notices this more and more" (p. 40). She realizes that he moves from the centre towards the periphery—a more comfortable space for him to be himself. Her translation enables her to translate Caravaggio's transformation. The novel reveals how imperialism destroys the lives of individuals and how nation/race translation constrains people from trusting and understanding each other. The patient was an explorer of the desert, making maps, which means helping colonizers extend their domination. He traveled with "a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations" (p. 16). When he was in the desert, his "only connection with the world of cities was Herodotus, his guidebook, ancient and modern, of supposed lies" (p. 246). Since ancient times, caravans have traveled through the desert; merchandise and cultures are exchanged as well as stories. It has been a contact zone. The centre is only possible when periphery is constructed; division is easily drawn when different nations, races, religions, and languages are recognized. In a place like the desert, it all 272 becomes blurry. The desert shifts its form and shape, thus making it impossible to draw borderlines. The desert shapes the English patient as "nationless" (p. 138): I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states . . . . The desert could not be claimed or owned . . . . It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We felt the harbours of oasis. The places water came to and touched. . . . I didn't want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert, (pp. 138-139) His emotional response to imperialism is shared by the others in the villa. Yet, maintaining a nation-less and name-less state is difficult, as all are harmed by imperialism and thus are fully aware that its power swallows them easily; they are vulnerable. Such vulnerability—helplessness—makes Kip point a rifle at the "English" patient, when he learns about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Kip's anger is about imperialism, resulting in targeting his collective enemy—white Europeans—represented by the "English" patient. Kip "is a man from Asia who has in these last years of war assumed English fathers, following their codes like a dutiful son," (p. 217) but his brother has warned Kip that "the English are now hanging Sikhs who are fighting for independence" (p. 218). When atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he sees "the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies at it meets them, the shadow of humans suddenly in the air. This tremor of Western wisdom" (p. 284): M y brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. The contract makers. The map drawers. Never trust Europeans, he said . . . . What have I been doing these last few years? Cutting away, defusing, limbs of evil. For what? For this to happen? (p. 285) Even though "the Sikhs have been brutalized by the Japanese in Malaya," (p. 217) his brother ignores that, perhaps because "Japan is a part of Asia" (ibid.). His world becomes divided again between East/West, colonizer/colonized, white people/people of 273 colour: A l l those speeches of civilization from kings and queens and presidents . . . such voices of abstract order. Smell it. Listen to the radio and smell the celebration in it. In my country, when a father breaks justice in two, you kill the father . . . . American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English, (pp. 285-276) Even though both Caravaggio and Hana try to stop him, saying "he is not an Englishman," and that of "all people he is probably on your side," (p. 286) Kip cannot stop pointing the rifle at the patient. The English patient himself, however, accepts Kim's rage: "He nods to the sapper. Do it, he says quietly" (p. 285). Caravaggio, too, understands Kim: "He knows the young soldier is right. They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation" (p. 287). Kip feels that "all the winds of the world have been sucked into Asia" and gazes at the photograph of his family: "His name is Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is doing here" (p. 287). He finds who he is, rediscovers his homeland, independent India, and returns to it, "traveling against the direction of the invasion" (p. 290). The English patient dies, and Hana and Caravaggio depart from the villa, but a third space they shared will remain, a space that has helped them find a new self. Caravaggio thinks about Kim: "He could walk away, never see him again, and he would never forget him. Years from now on a Toronto street Caravaggio will get out of a taxi and hold the door open for an East Indian who is about to get into it, and he will think of Kip then" (p. 208). About fourteen years later, Kip is a doctor and has a wife and two children: "At this table all of their hands are brown. They move with ease in their customs and habits" (p. 301). He thinks of Hana; he has not seen her since his departure from the villa, yet he can see her face, and "reactions to people around her" (ibid.). Kip 274 has kept fragments of Hana who has touched his life. The narrator tells us that Hana "is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild love leaves out luck, always taking risks . . . . People fall in love with her" (ibid.): And so Hana moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles, (pp. 301-302) Kip sees his daughter overlapping with Hana; Hana's and Kip's fragments are also part of his daughter's. Kip and Hana are not able to maintain their shared space. The English patient's wish to "erase the family name" and "erase nations" perhaps stayed in his mind to be achieved by the generation of Kip's daughter. Hana's and Kip's "regret" is not wasted. Fragments of people's lives are all part of his daughter's "vessel," striving for completion. Kip is there to help her. Michael Ondaatje was born in 1943 in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) but moved to England with his mother when he was ten. In 1962, he moved to Canada, attended university first in Quebec, then in Toronto and in Ontario. He has taught English at university. He perhaps transformed stories of his parents' generations into the novel, and also "translated" his experience, moving across cultures and languages to become the people in the Italian villa in The English Patient. He perhaps found a third space which he could now call home. Even though the British Empire no longer exists, students today dwell in a world still bound by the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, hindering them from erasing nations, from eliminating discriminations against people of colour, and from deconstructing language that divides and reinforces difference. Nations, lured by power, still invade each other physically and economically. Against such a gloomy view of life, 275 The English Patient offers possibility, showing students how a third space can be created, and provides students and educators with the hope that their continuing efforts to dismantle frames and barriers will someday be realized. The novel shows how the self is created through translating other people's lives, as they occupy the same space in this world. Regardless of their nationality, race, gender, or class, or whether they love or hate each other, they co-exist and influence each other. David Smith (1999) writes that there "is a place where Self and Other cannot be identified separately because the moment one is identified, so too in that very instant is the other named or brought forward. The game of trying to separate them is one, not just of futility, but worse, of utter violence, because they are always everywhere co-emergent, with a denial of one being a denial of the other" (p. 19). Perhaps that is what Benjamin considers translation—seeking to construct a fragmented vessel. Self and Other are not on other sides of the border, but each a part of the whole where Metonymy—a space of doubling between self/not-self, other/not-other—can be found. V.7. Future: Translation as Lived Experience The conceptions of translation reflected in literature help students perceive norms and values beyond their frames and find a space where they can make sense of the world. Whatever their path might lead students to become, they live lives with other people in society, all of whom are connected through narratives. Literature tells stories that help students to reflect both upon their own stories and upon the stories of others and to construct stories which offer them the role of active participants to change their present and nature. Such journeys need to be shared, as they live their lives. Literature helps them do so, by sharing stories, introducing individuals and places they might 276 never been, providing an opportunity to reach people in different frames beyond time and space. They must realize that what prevents them from sharing a world is power that historically has divided the world, erasing individual values and beliefs and framing people based on nation, religion, and ethnicity. Individual characters in literature show students how to translate the shadow of such power into their own world. Maxine Greene (1994) writes that when "imaginative works enable us to see metaphorically and allow us to deal imaginatively with what goes on under the heading of 'reality,' we see the texture of our experience; we discover the text-like character of our lives. And it is then that meaning has an opportunity to emerge" (p. 217). Greene (1994) suggests that literary experiences "do move readers to reach for their own modes of sense-making by articulating how it has been for them" (p. 217). As students read literature and translate it into their own narratives, literature becomes "a harbinger of the possible" (p. 218). The literature classroom consists of multiple translators who can create a venue for students to learn history, question what they have learned and believed, share experiences, negotiate differences, and create a space where they are all "foreigners."50 Willinsky (1991) writes that "literature is not simply about the world, nor does it construct a secondary world that we may slip into on that bus ride home from work; literature is of the world and as such counts like other acts of writing" (p. 195). Rosenblatt is right. Paper and ink become alive when readers open the first page. Their search for transcending an "inexorably divided world" (Willinsky, 1998b, p. 20) begins. Whether it is through Marlow, Antoinette, or Kip, literature tells students a story of how humanity can be crushed by the darkness of human nature, pursuing power Kristeva, J. (1991) Strangers to ourselves. 277 to dominate and control. The characters might have been prejudiced one way or another because of their social circumstances. Nevertheless, their struggles with power help them explore a potential space created between opposing frames, a third space which can turn "the Other into a self (Spivak, 1985, p. 253) through translating imperialism into their lives. David Smith (1999) in his discussion of Gadamer writes that "prejudice (pre-judgement) is not a swear word, but rather a sign that we can only make sense of the world from within a particular 'horizon' which provides the starting point for our thoughts and actions" (p. 33). This horizon is a frame that shapes one's norms, values, and beliefs, forming knowledge and understanding of the world, which is "the starting point": Understanding between persons is possible only to the degree that people can initiate a conversation between themselves and bring about a "fusion" of their different horizons into a new understanding which they then hold in common, (ibid.) This fusion—a third space—is achieved through translation. Literature has offered students powerful messages, and the conceptions of translation help them perceive their roles for the future. Educators hope that students are eventually led to understand, what Said (2003) writes: Humanism "is only, and I would go as far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history" (p. 4). With the help of conceptions of translation, decades after my first exposure to the formal study of literature, I now find literature a guide through the "inexorably divided world" to locate where I came from, where I am, and where I would like to be heading. Literature opens up a space for me to dwell and work with others, re/searching myself and hoping to help others realize how literature can help us craft ourselves. 278 Chapter Six Implications I lost my talk The talk you took away. When I was a little girl At Shubenacadie school. You snatched it away: I speak like you I think like you I create like you The scrambled ballad, about my word. Two ways I talk Both ways I say, Your way is more powerful. So gently I offer my hand and ask, Let me find my talk So I can teach you about me. (Rita Joe, 2004, p.353) VI. 1. Hermeneutic Conceptions of Translation and Educational Agendas This study has attempted to explore hermeneutic conceptions of translation which consider language as a component of thought and meaning, reflecting the norms and values of a particular culture. I have argued that these conceptions of translation may help us rethink curriculum and pedagogical practices in post-secondary education, re- or de-constructing "knowledge" that has been shaped by the English language and an Anglo-American perspective. I have applied hermeneutic conceptions of translation to textbooks of college preparatory E L L courses and first-year English literature courses. As a result of this examination, several issues have emerged: that language is more than simply a tool for delivering a message; that the meaning of language is historically and ideologically constructed; and, that language, in particular English, has contributed to forming knowledge and reinforcing perspectives about 279 national identities. Traditional conceptions of translation have entrenched boundaries rather than encouraging the sharing of an open and creative space in which language expands rather than limits, and people equally articulate their lives and experiences. The concluding chapter will now explore how hermeneutic reconceptualizations of translation can inform current educational agendas and curricula issues. V L 1 . 1 . Ambiguities of Language Hermeneutic conceptions of translation perceive language as "interpretation, constitutive of thought and meaning, where meanings shape reality and are inscribed according to changing cultural and social situations" (Venuti, 2000, p. 6). They are concerned with how language constructs reality instead of how reality is defined by language. As post-structural and deconstructionist approaches to translation suggest, reality and knowledge are productions of certain discourses, and there may be no definite meaning represented behind language. Or as the conception of metonymy suggests, the relationship between signifier and signified is not vertical but horizontal, through which cultural values and beliefs can be negotiated. In schools, however, the meaning of language may often be treated as singular, manifest, and definite, excluding "other translations" of students from non-English speaking cultures. Once I took an intercultural communication course at a community college. We discussed how much we could reveal ourselves to others—parents, siblings, friends, teachers, strangers, and so on—in terms of breadth, depth, variance, and time. We interviewed each other and were reminded that people build up relationships differently in ways which, the course textbook suggested, tended to be cultural. But I also noticed that in order to speak with others, terms of reference had to be consistent. When my interview partner asked me how comfortable I was talking about my religion, I felt a little confused and did not know how to 280 answer. One of the Japanese students in the class later said that the Japanese in general do not adhere to only one religion. The class ended. I did not say anything, partly because there was not enough time, and partly because I was thinking about a friend in my high school who had claimed in an ethics class that her religion was the most valuable aspect of her life. As I left my intercultural comminucation class, I felt an unexplained frustration. I could not discuss religion in a way both I and my Caucasian partner could understand. But now hermeneutic conceptions of translation help me re-examine this class and analyze my thoughts. Students have different "translations" of a word such as "religion," based on their experience. For non-native English speaking students, "translating" religion means translating a "translation," since the Japanese translation of "religion" may not carry the same meaning as the English word "religion" means to North Americans. Nor perhaps does it mean the same to older generations as to younger generations. Culture is fluid and shifting. The meaning of the word, then, becomes ambiguous. If students can share how they understand language and further explore its ambiguity, they may realize that language defines a space that allows language to perform, and this space can be expanded as language is used by different people. Searching for such a space—sharing what they understand of the term 'religion' and what it means to them—may help students acquire new knowledge and understanding of others. It also helps them perceive themselves from different angles through the language of others. If the classroom provides students with opportunities to examine the language of the topics they are presented within the textbooks they read, they can think more independently about the expertise represented by teachers or textbooks. With an invitation to deconstruct their prior knowledge, they can develop skills to identify and question main issues. In this process, students of diverse backgrounds can bring different fragments of norms and values—whether contested or shared—and create new knowledge. 281 VL1.2. Cultural Imperialism in Translation Hermeneutic conceptions of translation therefore indicate that we need to re-examine language critically, since common conceptions of English translation of other cultures may have created arbitrary boundaries, asymmetrical power relations and national identities, perceiving cultures and identities as though they were static. Such common conceptions of translation tend to view language as instrumental, privileging the communication of objective information, "excluding altogether any question of function beyond communication," (Venuti, 2000, p. 6) disregarding the power relationship that underlies the language of communication which places people in different frames. Rethinking language, hermeneutic conceptions of translation suggest, helps educators and students re- and de-construct the meaning of language and open up a space in which other cultures and difference are discussed and explored equally. This argument is not only an issue for translation: It is closely related to important educational concerns in today's classrooms. In North America, responding to an increasingly diverse student population, multicultural education has been a significant educational agenda. In Canada, for example, multiculturalism was introduced by the Canadian government as a national policy in 1971, and "the educational system was targeted as the site from where multicultural ideas, views, and principles could be diffused among young Canadians" (Rezai-Rashti, 1995, p. 3). Goli Rezai-Rashti (1995) writes that multicultural education in the 1970s and 1980s "favored programs such as Heritage Language Programs and enhanced English as a Second Language programs" (p. 4): They stressed the need to have anglophone teachers and students become more sensitive to minority students so that equality of educational opportunity could be attained by everyone regardless of race, gender, religion, or ethnicity. They also called for reforms in school curricula and celebrated cultural diversity through mainly government-sponsored events, in order to break the ethnocentric bias of the educational system and of Canadian society at large, (ibid.) 282 Multicultural education has attempted to dismantle the stereotyping frames in which we place each other, helping students perceive worlds outside of their own frames. Even with this intent, however, Rezai-Rashti (1995) suggests that multicultural education has not been able to achieve its goals; rather, it has been criticised for being concerned more with social control than real social change. Ng, Staton, and Scane (1995) write that multicultural education in Canada may even have reinforced segregation more than integration of minority groups: In the past, the multicultural education has tended to focus narrowly on the celebration of visible "ethnic" and "cultural" differences, with the implicit goal of promoting cross-cultural understanding and tolerance. It did not examine how these differences are produced historically and ideologically or their social and economic consequences for minority groups, (p. xiii) Perhaps because multicultural education was initiated by government policy rather than emerging within schools and being developed by educators, cultural differences were not viewed historically and have been analyzed superficially, not politically. Without examining how differences have been constructed, we see cultural differences only by skin color, lifestyle, religion, language, and other elements that are easy to identify. Rezai-Rashti (1995) points out that "a universally acceptable definition of what multiculturalism is," and "a conceptualization of what constitutes multicultural education" have been hard to formulate (p.4). Missing a clear definition, educators have responded inconsistently and without clear direction. As a result, instead of dismantling frames, multicultural education may have reinforced and reframed stereotyped minority cultures from a basically Anglo-American perspective. We can see here a parallel between conceptions of education and conceptions of translation. Traditional (colonial) North American education as well as multicultural education in its celebratory focus might be seen as functioning in the same way as traditionally colonial conceptions of translation. Both perceive other cultures from the standpoint of their own frame 283 and attempt to adapt the other to themselves. Criticisms of multicultural education are thus linked to a post-colonial approach to translation. Post-colonial translation contests against an Anglo-American centered translation of non-Western cultures which have been marginalized as different, perhaps even inferior. In other words, multiculturalism may have led us to a "bad translation" or a "colonial translation" of non-Western cultures, stereotyping them and not seeing them as shifting and developing. Hermeneutic theories of translation tend to treat culture as fluid and continually in a process of shifting and creating anew, and critically examine commonly accepted translations of'nation equals race' and of'fixed (stereotypical) cultural identity.' They perceive, instead, intercultural relationships as fusing, evolving, and creating hybridity. Similarly, the scholars who criticize multicultural education have attempted to move beyond the simple celebration of different cultures and have developed critical pedagogy—anti-racist pedagogy. Their attempt is to examine how differences have been constructed historically and ideologically. Rezai-Rashti (1995) and many others (e.g., Apple, 1982; Freire, 1985; Giroux, 1983) argue for anti-racist education which has "emerged from the struggles of racial minorities against imperial, colonial, and neo-colonial experiences" and "concentrates on examining the histories and the practices that prejudice supports" (p. 6): Anti-racist education argues that the persistence of stereotypes and prejudices must be met with a comprehensive analysis of their origins by way of questioning existing social and political structures. While the supporters of multiculturalism look at culture as if it were a static institution, anti-racist educators see it as dynamic institution influenced by elements of social class and gender, (p. 7) In an anti-racist classroom, as students from diverse cultural backgrounds interact and learn about each other, their learning may change their understanding of others as well as of their own identity. Ali Rattansi (1992) suggests that multiculturalism and anti-racism have become "a binary opposition" based on "different understandings of racism," (p. 24) and 284 argues that in multiculturalism, intolerance "is conceptualized basically as a matter of attitudes, and is said to be constituted by prejudice" (p. 25): The basic educational assumption is the sympathetic teaching of'other cultures' in order to dispel ignorance which is seen to be at the root of prejudice and intolerance. The overall social and political project is the creation of a harmonious, democratic cultural pluralism, a healthy cultural diversity, (ibid.) As he points out, simply presenting fragmented bits of information about other cultures faraway and elsewhere in the world has had little impact upon reducing prejudice or instilling genuine sympathy and understanding of difference. Rattansi (1992), however, is also concerned about antiracists who, like multiculturalists, "have often failed to confront the limitations of a rationalist approach to education" (p. 33): Like the multiculturalist project of reducing prejudice by teaching about other cultures, the antiracist project of providing superior explanations for unemployment, housing shortages, and so forth, has so far, and for similar reasons, produced only patchy evidence of success, (ibid.) Neither multiculturalists nor anti-racists, if they keep themselves in the frame created by their own norms and values, are able to dismantle barriers between frames. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation offer educators and students a space in between frames in which they may be able to redefine the meaning of language that enables them to speak equally. Rattansi also suggests that "multicultural and antiracist critiques ignore the actual literary and pedagogic devices involved in the construction of subject positions for the child/reader in school texts" (p. 35): They neglect how texts construct meanings as opposed to what they supposedly mean. As a consequence, the complexity of the processes by which texts which form part of particular school disciplines—history or geography, etc.—have effects on the 'subjects' of schools, the students, is also neglected. Too often, all the protagonists make simplistic assumptions about the ease with which subjectivities are produced by racist or antiracist texts, (ibid.) Though Rattansi's argument addresses school children, it also applies to post-secondary 285 students. Educators may have overlooked how the language of texts constructs different meanings for students of different sociocultural backgrounds in favour of teaching content—what they want the text to mean. As I have argued in Chapters Four and Five, how to "translate" the language of textbooks has a strong impact upon students' learning and influences the production of knowledge. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation as well as Rattansi's argument remind us of the importance of how language is constructed historically and ideologically. And English in particular has produced a kind of knowledge within the frame of Western perspectives about self and other, power relations, and national identities, as if it were universal truth. Considering how English has been utilized and has defined/divided the world, may thus be the key and the starting point for transforming curriculum and educational practices. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation suggest that the meaning of language is not neutral or pure, but constructed socially. In particular, post-structural and post-colonial approaches to translation argue this point, focusing upon the hierarchies and exclusions in socially-constructed language use, which have been reflected in textbooks as though it were a world view. Reflecting upon this English construction of the world, Cameron McCarthy (1995) argues for what he calls a "critical multiculturalism," involving a rethinking and reforming of curriculum and pedagogical practices. He writes that the fundamental stance of multicultural education's approach to ethnic difference is that of cultural relativism: "Within this framework, all social and ethnic groups are presumed to have a formal parity with each other. The matter of ethnic identity is understood in terms of individual choice and preference—the language of the shopping mall" (p. 25). In this position, reciprocity and consensus are emphasized, and thus it does not "provide adequate theories or solutions to the problem of racial inequality in schooling" (p. 35); multiculturalists "simply failed to provide a 286 systematic critique of the ideology of 'Westernness' that is ascendant in curriculum and pedagogical practices in education" (p. 36). This ideology of Westernness is reflected in English and may have separated non-Western cultures and peoples, placing them outside of the frame. McCarthy discusses three elements of a new approach to multicultural education: first, it "must begin with a more systematic critique of the construction of school knowledge and privileging of Eurocentrism and Westernness" in the curriculum; second, it "must not only insist on the cultural diversity of school knowledge but must insist on its inherent relationality"; and, third, it must reconceptualise "the race category within a multicultural paradigm. Current multicultural formulations tend to define racial identities in very static or essentialist terms" (pp. 37-38). Leslie Roman (1993) also discusses the relativism that McCarthy suggests. Education tends to be based on the assumption that society is neutral and all people are equal; this "attempts to deny [teachers'] pedagogical responsibility to engage students in critical evaluation of their own and others' claims to belong to particular oppressed or privileged groups and, therefore, to know and represent their realities" (Roman, 1993, p. 82). This relativism, Roman (1993) writes, "erroneously treats all knowledge claims as equally reliable guides to describing and representing the social world," and thus "it denies their interestedness and unequal effects" (p. 82): When educators assert or protect relativistic claims in the classroom, what emerges is an implicit endorsement, if not advocacy, of the existing social inequalities, or, worse yet, of emergent practices that appropriate the experiences and discourses of the oppressed in order to deny their struggles for emancipation and equality, (ibid.) Roman suggests, as "the provisional alternative to both relativism and essentialism in classroom pedagogy" to "achieve a socially transformative practice of critical realism," "speaking with rather than for, the interests of oppressed groups who are engaged in critically 287 evaluating and transforming existing social relations—whether or not members of such groups are physically present in the classroom" (pp. 82-83): In contrast to the dominant meaning of speaking for, which implies that one group's voice can replace and stand for another's, I introduce the concept of speaking with to convey the possibility for tendential and shifting alliances between speakers from different, unequally located groups. Speaking with refers to the contradictions of voices engaged in dialogue with one another without suggesting that they are reducible to the same voice or epistemic standpoint, (p. 82) She writes that the "politics of speaking with others permits white educators or other members of dominant groups to struggle with what it means to make choices about one's political allegiances rather than to use one's privileged location as an excuse for paralysis, guilt, and shame" (p. 84). English may have spoken for people, not with others, making students passive recipients of knowledge. Examining language may instead enable students to speak with others. Speaking with others requires a space where students have the language to share their experience and thoughts equally, and hermeneutic conceptions of translation suggest that achieving such a space and language is possible. For example, Pratt's contact zone or Bhabha's third space suggests that when students of different sociocultural backgrounds meet, they experience the process of displacement and transformation within and across cultures. As a result, different cultures are continually shifting and in a process of hybridity. If the classroom is "one significant context in which struggles for hegemony amidst unequal power relations take place," (Roman, 1993, p. 83) both teachers and students have to "translate" each others' realities and critically analyze them, whether or not they are based on a dominant discourse within the frame of Anglo-American perspectives. This process of translation "aims to treat as its legitimate texts for collective deconstruction all claims to know and represent reality made in the classroom, including those of the teacher, those manifest in 288 the formal and hidden curriculum, and those implicit in classroom social relations" (Roman, ibid). Students and teachers are first at the contact zone trying to learn about and understand difference, which is the beginning. Speaking/or others might mean that they are "translating" others within their own language, which may be imperialistic—the aggression stage according to Steiner. But if they continue critically examining and sharing their knowledge, new understanding about others may open up, which leads them to the third stage, incorporation. This is still incomplete as Steiner suggests that appropriation of language might occur. Their efforts eventually lead them to reach the final stage, restitution, in which power relations are contested and reciprocity is gained. Speaking with means the process of "translation" is developed to the final restitution stage in which balance is restored in the in-between framed worlds. This is a third space where new language begins to perform and new knowledge and understanding emerge. This is also a border world in which the post-colonial translators may dwell; in the border world or third space, language performs in a metonymic space and transforms hegemonic representations of the non-Western world. Students may be able to see themselves and others through different perceptions, as if looking at David Abram's clay bowl resting on the table from a new angle. The challenge of language enables them to find a space of ambiguity and uncertainty, where they can see the signifying chain of language. If multicultural education has not been successful, as the scholars above suggest, it is because it does not generally examine how cultural differences and minority ethnic identity have been described, identified, and stereotyped through an English language constructed through Anglo-American perspectives. English has historically and ideologically produced difference, which has become the "knowledge" of the West. Critical multiculturalism—what others call anti-racism—must thus rethink what hermeneutic theories of translation suggest about language. 289 VI.2. Hermeneutic Conceptions of Translation Enacted in the Classroom This study has shown how translated texts in English, particularly those translated from Japanese, have typically constructed and reinforced stereotypes of people and cultures. Such stereotypes or cultural images not only influence the knowledge of Anglo-American people, but also affect the perception of non-English speaking people, such as the Japanese, about themselves. They tend to accept how they are perceived and placed by the Anglo-American world when it comes to conceptions of self and other, power relations, and national identities. This study also has examined some textbooks used for E L L students, and argued that those textbooks may deliver imperialistic world views that place E L L students on the periphery. Because textbooks aim to help students integrate into a new social environment, they may focus upon helping students master Standard English and thus reinforce the norms and values within the Anglo-American framework. The consequences of these common conceptions of translation for students in the classroom are obvious and negative, increasing students' feelings of inferiority and alienation. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation applied to the classroom offer a more positive learning environment for everybody. Jamake Highwater (2002), a Native American writer, writes about the experience of learning through a textbook written from an Anglo-American worldview. He writes that we "are born into a cultural preconception that we call reality and that we never question" (p. 5): We essentially know the world in terms of that cultural package or preconception, and we are so unaware of it that the most liberal of us go through life with a kind of ethnocentricity that automatically rules out all other ways of seeing the world, (ibid.) Because English was a language of colonial power and was used to locate the centre and the periphery, West and East, and divide the world between the colonizer and the colonized, its legacy still "rules out all other ways of seeing the world." Highwater demonstrates how English is used to build the framed world which excludes those who dwell in languages other 290 than English. For example, Flighwater was very disappointed with English when his English teacher said that a bird of special significance for his people—meksikatsi— which in his language "means 'pink-colored feet'," (p- 4) is translated into English as a duck. I could not understand it. First of all, the bird didn't look like "duck," and when it made a noise it didn't sound like "duck," and I was even more contused when I found out that the meaning of the verb "to duck" came from the bird and not vice versa, (ibid.) He also writes that he grew up in a culture that considers human beings as a part of nature, and feels perplexed that people call this nature wilderness. Rather, he sees wilderness in New York City, as "being fairly wild and pretty much out of hand" to him. Wilderness for him means "something wild that needs to be harnessed" (ibid.), and these different perceptions reveal how English defines the meaning of a word within its frame: Nature is some sort of foe, some sort of adversary, in the dominant culture's mentality. We are not part of nature in this society; we are created above it, outside of it, and feel that we must dominate and change it before we can be comfortable and safe within it. (ibid.) In multicultural education, his culture might have been described equally narrowly by an English language that defines the meaning of words. Even though meksikatsi is not duck, and his people do not dwell in "wilderness," the significance of the bird or nature to him is diminished into something trivial and uncivilized in English, resulting in a demeaning of the self. Highwater's experience clearly suggests why shifting from one language to another significantly affects one's perceptions of the world, self, and other, and thus needs to be taken into consideration in the classroom where students of different cultures and languages occupy a space through English; otherwise, ethnic minorities' experiences will never properly be shared. If his experience of language is shared in the classroom, students can understand how the meaning of language is constructed and may be able to find a metonymic space where a word signifies horizontal relations. And sharing their understanding may lead them to approach 2 9 1 "pure language" where fragments can become a whole. Where is wilderness? This is a great journey of learning about others. In the classroom, there may be many Highwaters pondering over the discrepancy between dictionary definitions and their understanding of the world. Reexamining how English has been used to divide the world and people of different cultures, and exploring how English may be used to create a space to integrate minority perspectives are both crucial for transforming educational practice. Adams and Marchesani (1997) write that "mainstream students, in whatever area they may experience dominance," tend to think of "difference" as "belonging to the cultural 'other'" (p. 263). They are "oblivious to their own role as culture-bearers and deny or downplay the experiences of students who are socially subordinate or targeted" (ibid.). Adams and Marchesani (1997) argue that increasing students' awareness is crucial, enabling them to shift their attitudes toward "greater receptivity, sensitivity, and openness to 'the other'" (ibid.). Educators must challenge students to analyze critically the English language through which the privileged world has been constructed. As I have discussed earlier, hermeneutic conceptions of translation offer an approach that helps E L L students reflect upon their border crossing experiences, learn about how they are perceived and placed in society, and eventually feel that they are equal participants in, as well as contributors to, the classroom and society. Translation evokes interaction, which helps dismantle the frame between cultures and create a new space—in between the frames. This approach may help educators reform curriculum and pedagogical practices in the direction of critical multiculturalism—McCarthy's term—by exploring how the meaning of language is produced and performed historically and ideologically. It allows educators and students to transcend their own frames moving into a space where the meanings of language are negotiated, created, and shared. Roxana Ng (1995) considers the language of the classroom from a teacher's 292 viewpoint, describing how sexism and racism operate not only among students but also between professors and students; both groups are influenced by the sociocultural environment outside the university. Roman's "speaking with others" requires language that speaks the experiences of students as well as teachers. Ng writes that "we each interpret words differently, based largely on the nature of our own previous experiences in life," and thus "the same structured learning experience leads to different 'ownership' of knowledge of individuals" (p. 107). Her experience in approaching anti-racism has led her to recognize difficulties in a dialogical education, including dialogues and negotiation: for example, "moving beyond 'class discussion' towards the development of meaningful theory"; "breaking students' ingrained dependence on teachers for the 'right' answer"; and "creating a democratic classroom where dominant student personalities do not exclude the voices of the more reticent" (p. 111). Ng, like Roman, aims to create a space beyond the existing frame, enabling students and teachers to search for collective knowledge, reflecting both privileged and discriminated voices. She suggests that collective efforts can alter existing power dynamics in the classroom, and continuous dialogue can provide language that can be shared, just as Benjamin's fragmented vessel requires fragments to complete a whole. If educators themselves have experienced moving from one frame to another, they may have encountered a third space in which language speaks with others. But a feeling of resistance may stay forever. A university professor and writer, Marjorie Agosin (2003), identifies herself as "a Jewish writer who writes in Spanish and lives in America," and for her, switching languages seems impossible: What does it mean to live in two languages, to exist on the border, not knowing when to cross from the realm of the mother tongue to the realm of the acquired language? Living through two languages is a marvellous thing, say the guardians of order, not memory. I only lived in one because the other did not adjust to my feelings or my skin. One language insisted on forgetting, the other on memory . . . . I lost familiar objects 293 and sounds in order to learn English, and realized that I existed outside of time. For me, life between two cultures was no life at all. (pp. 322-323) Writing in Spanish defines her past, her "essence, the fragile, divine core of [her] being" (p. 324). She does not want to translate herself. However, as she has been a faculty member of a university in the United States since 1972, she must have found ways to communicate with students and share the difficulties of translating herself from one language to another. Whether they chose to or had to leave their homeland, many immigrants and international students may share the resistance as well as the challenge that Agosin expresses in her writing. I can imagine that the English that Ng or Agosin speaks is not one which has "divided the world" and marginalized the other, but one whose vitality "lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers" (Morrison, 2002, p. 20). Hermeneutic conceptions of translation reveal how differences among peoples and cultures have been created by the frame of English, such as Highwater's struggle to grasp what it means to learn English, and how the meaning of language can be contested and expanded through different perceptions of the world. To the North American classroom, E L L students can bring educational potentiality, the opportunity to learn about and deconstruct the dominance of English and its imperialistic ideology, but they have been considered disadvantaged, and mastering Standard English has been viewed as an essential condition for achieving goals and success in life. I do not argue that mastering English is unimportant, but educators may have put too much emphasis on saving E L L students from failure; I suggest that the world has been perceived and gauged primarily through a lens of English, resulting in disregarding, even eliminating, other perceptions that exist in different languages. Unintentionally, educators encourage students to be assimilated into the world of English where they are simultaneously defined as peripheral. Native English speaking students, too, 294 may have acquired the particular views that English maintains, and perceive fellow E L L students as different. Yanabu (1998) calls this a "cultural lens" or "cultural glasses" which are associated with the value judgements of superior or inferior, beautiful or ugly, logical or emotional, and so on, illustrated by Highwater's wilderness example. Cultural glasses are acquired through education in every culture. Yanabu suggests that such cultural glasses tend to carry value judgements: for example, "blue eyes" bring to Japanese people a feeling of inferiority to and envy of Western culture and the white race. Perhaps educators and students should make an effort to take their glasses off—whatever the value judgements they deliver—and seek what is outside of the lens. Educators must consider how other languages and their perceptions, instead of separating from each other, enrich the classroom which has become a small globe consisting of students from diverse backgrounds. The challenge that educators and students face is a great learning opportunity about difference. Toni Morrison (1993) addresses this issue: The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction of the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building, and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life. (p. 19) Taking the time to understand other views and other narratives in the classroom may enable students to appreciate and embrace difference. Language does not represent a monolithic view but allows multiple interpretations, which can be negotiated in the classroom. Nowhere can these multiple interpretations be more effectively explored than in the study of literature. As I demonstrated in Chapter Five, literature can be read through a lens informed by hermeneutic conceptions of translation, a lens which provides students with rich 295 opportunities to explore how norms and values are shaped by frames and how differences operate within and outside of frames. Through characters' lives, students are able to perceive how their sense of self shifts and emerges when interacting with others. Hermeneutic conceptions of translation invite readers to bring to the text a self open to be shaped by their encounter with language and story. VI.3. Research Implications This study is primarily conceptual, exploring theories underlying translation and their implications for a critical multicultural education. The empirical application of hermeneutic conceptions of translation to pedagogical practices is beyond the scope of this research but points to the need for a curriculum which helps educators and students understand the educational experience of teaching and learning across languages and cultures, suggesting a shared space in which integration of self and other emerges. Mary Louise Pratt offers an example of such a curriculum in her course "Cultures, Ideas, Values," which "centered on the Americas and the multiple cultural histories (including European ones) that have intersected" in the United States. This course attracted many students, and Pratt recalls it was her most exciting and hardest teaching experience: We were struck . . . . at how anomalous the formal lecture became in a contact zone. . . . The lecturer's traditional (imagined) task—unifying the world in the class's eyes by means of a monologue that rings equally coherent, revealing, and true for all, forging an ad hoc community, homogeneous with respect to one's own words—this task became not only impossible but anomalous and unimaginable. Instead, one had to work in the knowledge that whatever one said was going to be systematically received in radically heterogeneous ways that we were neither able nor entitled to prescribe, (p. 183) In this contact zone, students experienced "hearing their culture discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them," saw "their roots traced back to legacies of both glory and shame," and had to face "the ignorance and incomprehension, and occasionally the hostility, of others" 296 (pp. 183-184). Through these experiences, Pratt's students came to appreciate "the joys of the contact zone": "The sufferings and revelations were, at different moments to be sure, experienced by every student. No one was excluded, and no one was safe" (p. 184). As issues were discussed, this contact zone might have evolved into Bhabha's third space. Pratt points out that virtually "every student was having the experience of seeing the world described with him or her in it" (ibid.). Here, they could speak with not for others "[a]long with rage, incomprehension, mutual understanding, and new wisdom" (ibid). Pratt describes this as the joys of the contact zone, but I would like to think that students have created a third space where newness emerges. Because this space does not belong to any frames, "[n]o one was excluded, and no one was safe" (ibid.), and thus everyone is involved. Her approach to teaching reflects hermeneutic conceptions of translation and can be applied to any classroom and subject in different degrees. Paying particular attention to how English has been used to define ideas, histories, and attitudes toward others may help educators create a shared space where each individual can speak with others. In educational research, qualitative empirical studies involving ethnographic research, case studies, and action research are common and help us appreciate the value of an interpretive approach to research, as knowledge is constructed through the dialogue of researchers and participants. But textual analysis, as this study illustrates, also offers valuable means to examine pedagogical practices; in particular, exploring how language is used to define the world makes us realize how dependent we are on the language of textbooks and academics, if we do not engage in critical analysis. Classroom research into how language is used to talk about self and other among students and/or between teachers and students will provide rich support to my current study. How the educational possibilities suggested by hermeneutic conceptions of translation 297 can be achieved in the classroom requires further research. Examining how textbooks can be approached differently, how the meaning of language can be negotiated and re-constructed , and how a new space beyond the frames can be created in the classroom will provide a better understanding of the application of hermeneutic theories of translation. Such future research can explore how teachers and students may reduce barriers to understanding difference and analyze how students perceive self and other through a process of transforming their identity and becoming hybrid—a whole consisting of the fragments of themselves and others. VI.4. Towards Globalization Translation theories are an educational issue. While translation deals with linguistic and cultural differences, educational agendas and curricula issues focus upon students' cultural and linguistic diversity in the classroom. Cope and Kalantzis (2002), for example, write about their project—Multiliteracies—that addresses "two important arguments [they] might have with the emerging cultural, institutional, and global order" (p. 5). These arguments are related to, first, "the increasing multiplicity and integration of significant modes of meaning-making"; and second, "the realities of increasing local diversity and global connectedness" (pp. 5-6). They suggest that language has been "conceived as a stable system based on rules such as mastering sound-letter correspondence," which is "based on the assumption that we can actually discern and describe correct usage"; and that such "a view of language must characteristically translate into a more or less authoritarian kind of pedagogy" (p. 5). Multiliteracies, by contrast, views language as unstable, and promotes a pedagogy in which "language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes" (p. 5): Dealing with linguistic differences and cultural differences has now become central to 298 the pragmatics of our working, civic, and private lives. Effective citizenship and productive work now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries . . . . When the proximity of cultural and linguistic diversity is one of the key facts of our time, the very nature of language learning has changed, (p.6) Since translation theories rest on particular assumptions about language use, language use in educational contexts can be explored through theories of translation: "We are living through a period of intense social and cultural change which is pervasive and universal in its global, national and local effects, and which involves the breakdown and redrawing of boundaries and relationships of all sorts" (Fairclough, 2000, p. 163). Fairclough (2000) argues that these fundamental changes are changes in language in which difference and identity are at the centre. He suggests that intertextuality and hybridity are key concepts for exploring new pedagogy. These are also crucial ideas in hermeneutic conceptions of translation. But pitfalls exist; the natural human tendency towards simplistic solutions, "diversity lesson plans" or "hybridity handbook," must be resisted. Because understanding others and difference has become a burning issue in education, educators have explored ways in which they can attend to this issue more effectively. But they must be aware of the danger created by "colonial translation" of the other, which Roman calls "speaking for" or appropriation of the identity of the other. Chris Johnson (2004) reports that some scholars are interested in developing a test to quantify people's "ability to negotiate the multicultural maze" (p. Bl)—cultural quotient (CQ)—that might help people understand cultural differences and bring success to international businesses. Although Johnson does not report what a CQ test is like, he includes several examples of what people should not do when they deal with other cultures, for example, regarding others as devious because they do not make direct eye contact. One example is about a Japanese woman: Do not think "your joke was funny because she covered 299 her mouth laughing" (p. B4). Johnson quotes a professor of international management who says that for some Japanese women, "nervous laughter could mean 'I'm afraid' not 'I'm happy'" (p. B4). I always thought that Japanese women covered their mouths laughing only because to do so is considered to be polite, and I cannot help thinking the CQ test might lead to testing knowledge of stereotypes—the translation of other cultures through Western perspectives. Translation of different cultures constructed by different languages has become a crucial issue for education. Knowing different cultural norms may help people succeed in business communication, and perhaps that is why the College where I work includes intercultural skills, such as working well with people from diverse sociocultural backgrounds and respecting individual differences, among other employability skills that instructors should include in their curriculum. Skills can be acquired by training, but memorizing how people of different cultures are likely to behave is nothing close to embracing difference and reaching other people's hearts. Educators are responsible for not heading in a direction that minimizes the view of cultural difference as something static and measurable. Otherwise, their efforts to help students acquire intercultural communication skills may result in the same limitations for which multicultural education has been criticized. In the classroom, in particular in this internet age, language tends to be regarded as a tool to transmit information, and communication is reduced to delivering information. Students exchange messages through e-mails and cellular phones in which language is broken into codes. This is the instrumental assumption about language use, on which some translation theories rest, and on which machine translation for students studying foreign languages is offered on the internet. There is a great concern for education that language not be reduced to a kind of skill that people can acquire through training. Ursula Le Guin (2004) writes about this point, saying 300 that "human communication cannot be reduced to information" (p. 187): The medium in which the message is embedded is immensely complex, infinitely more than a code: it is a language, a function of a society, a culture, in which the language, a speaker and the hearer are all embedded, (ibid.) She suggests that human communication is "intersubjective": "Intersubjectivity involves a great deal more than the machine-mediated type of stimulus-response currently called 'interactive'" (p. 188). Intersubjectivity is mutual, and through communication people reach out to each other, "unite themselves and give each other parts of themselves" (p. 189). This is what David Smith (1999) calls bringing about a "fusion" of different horizons into a new understanding, like Benjamin's fragmented vessel. Adrienne Rich (2001) is concerned about the "corruptions of language employed to manage our perceptions" and criticizes the "self-congratulatory self-promotion of capitalism as a global, transnational order," (p. 147) writing that where "capitalism invokes freedom, it means the freedom of capital" (p. 148). She argues that language is being devalued, observing that the "flattening of images, results in a massive inarticulation, even among the educated" (p. 149): Language itself collapses into shallowness. Everything indeed tends toward becoming a thing until people can speak only in terms of the thing, the inert and always obsolescent commodity, (ibid.) Language risks being reduced to a tool, and educational goals a means to acquire skills so that everyone "equally participates in the economy" in the name of globalization (Miyoshi, 1988, p. 248): "Profit and production are now the universal goals, and nothing is ignored in the striving to maximize personal and private gains" (p. 254). Miyoshi (1998) argues that the transnational corporate structure continues to exploit and colonize people, and that "transnational corporatism [TNC] is a process of decomposing of the state; and along with it, of economicization of culture" (p. 259): 3 0 1 Arts and architecture are absorbed into business; music theatre, and film into entertainment and/or entertainment cum speculation. History and geography, in fact all "differences," are treated seriously by economic leaders only as a part of tourism, often packaged in museums, restaurants, and theme parks. Thus, all cultural productions are susceptible to TNC appropriation as profitable commodities, (ibid). Reflecting this world of TNC, Miyoshi is concerned that various issues in education, in particular in university, have begun to be addressed in "bald quantitative terms—with no reference whatever to substantial intellectual or pedagogic matters" (p. 261). Miyoshi writes that many university courses are cancelled, simply because they do not attract a prescribed number of students, and are replaced by courses which are more closely linked to employment. Discussions about globalization are generally focused on the economic and political; however, we must also consider cultural globalization involving the "changing relationships between languages, and the increasingly important role that a few major international languages—and most obviously English—are taking on at the expense of the great majority of languages" (Fairclough, 2000, p. 165). Fairclough (2000) points out that because of considerable cultural and linguistic diversity which has brought boundary shifts, globalization needs to be seen not only between societies but also within societies. In order to address cultural globalization, it is surely more important than ever, as this study suggests, to examine language critically, instead of treating it as a tool to receive information and acquire skills. Such an approach helps students re-construct knowledge and understand self and other and thus reduces barriers and even creates a new space in which the meaning of language expands to articulate the lived experience of all students. Globalization can be integrated into education; Burbules and Torres (2000) suggest that "positive features associated with [globalization] practices and dynamics" can be applied to education (p. 17): Two features that might be termed "positive" are the globalization of democracy or, 302 at least, a peculiar form of liberal democracy (more a democracy of method than a democracy of content); and the prevalence and expansions of a belief in "human rights" and the growth of organizations attempting to monitor and protect them, (ibid.) They write that the teaching and learning of multiple languages may help students appreciate difference in the world: "The European experience with youth who are proficient in several languages finds that such skills facilitate interpersonal, academic, and social communication, expand intellectual horizons, and encourage appreciation and tolerance for different cultures" (p. 21). The global context requires and creates new challenges to education, departing from development of the individual and focusing more on the community beyond "the family, the region, or the nation" (p. 22): As a result, educational aims that have more to do with flexibility and adaptability (for instance, in responding to rapidly changing work demands and opportunities), with learning how to coexist with others in diverse (and hence often conflict-riven) public spaces, and with helping to form and support a sense of identity that can remain viable within multiple contexts of affiliation, all emerge as new imperatives, (p. 22) If the world was a village of a thousand people, Intercultural Competence (Lustig & Koester, 2003) cites, there would be 607 Asians, 132 Africans, 120 Europeans, 79 North Americans, 57 South Americans, and 5 Australians and Oceanians. Yet this village might likely be controlled by perhaps ten to fifteen percent of people and their language, English. It is time to consider who else lives in the village, and learn about each other. David Smith (1999) suggests that describing the everyday world and reflecting on the power relations of people helps students recognize their relationships to other people, things, and events, enabling them to see that "the world is an interpreted world, not just a received world in the brute sense of that term," and "as an interpreted world, it can be interpreted differently," which means the relationships can be different (p. 117): I can find myself in the world in a different way than I presently do when I assume my ability to name and organize the world in a way that is truer to my experience of it. 303 Such a task identifies the creative heart of a truly critical language pedagogy. It assumes an alliance between the critical spirit and the creative spirit, and in so doing points a way through the burden of dogmatic discourse, (ibid.) Edward Said (2004) argues that returning to philology is crucial for revitalising the humanities: a true philological reading "involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us" (p. 59). He writes that words "are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are, instead, an integral formative part of the reality itself (ibid). Hermeneutic conceptions of translation help us examine language critically to re/produce new meanings and realize that "the way we use words is tied to much deeper issues about social structure, power relations, technology, capital interests and so on" (Smith, 1999, p. 118). Exploring language in depth may hold a key to the education of the future. 304 Epilogue Strolling the busy streets of downtown Vancouver, I see many faces and hear many voices. People are young and old, tall and short, of different skin colours, speaking different languages. This is ordinary; everybody blends into the scenery, including myself. In fact, forty-six percent of the Vancouver population aged fifteen and over was born outside of Canada (Ramsey, 2003), and nearly "four in ten people in Greater Vancouver are members of visible minority groups" according to the latest census (Reevely, 2003, p. A l ) . 5 1 The classroom reflects this culturally rich and diverse society—a space occupied by students whose cultural and linguistic experiences vary. When I was a newcomer to this cosmopolitan city more than a decade ago, I did not feel the same way I feel now about self and other. Then I felt I was different, out of sync, because I am Asian and spoke broken, accented English. I was anxious about not knowing what to expect from people and the society of which I was becoming a member. I was self-conscious about my difference and tried hard to minimize it, in hopes of being accepted. I observed Canadians who were native-English speaking, tried to imitate their behaviour and acquire their norms and values. My efforts to transform myself were sometimes liberating and sometimes constraining, partly because I had to consider how other people perceived me. I realized that people had certain expectations of me as a Japanese woman and judged me accordingly, hindering my efforts to become less visible. Hugging friends was a small yet symbolic example. I met friends who hugged me as a greeting, and at first I believed that was the way people greeted each other in Canada. Although I felt awkward because I was not accustomed to doing this in Japan, I hugged friends when we met or said goodbye. Later, The census defines a visible minority as a person, "other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian 305 however, I was told by another Canadian friend that it felt strange to be hugged by an Asian woman, because in her mind, hugging was not an Asian thing to do. Undergoing numerous experiences like this, I began to reevaluate my approaches to my new environment. I wanted to belong to the Canadian society, but at times such a goal seemed impossible to achieve. Alienation and belonging were common topics among my fellow international and immigrant students; we all struggled to cross borderlines and dwell in a newly framed world. I talked about this tension with Pat, a fellow graduate student at UBC, in a classroom where we had been asked to exchange our writing about self. What Pat said to me deconstructed my thinking about my location. She had traveled and taught in many different places in the world—Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—and considered all the places she lived home, commenting that she did not have or need a particular place called home. She was home-less in her homeland, wherever it might be. Her thoughts relieved me of my struggle. I realized that I did not need to belong or to make myself into somebody else, and that my current self was no longer the same self who had grown up in the country where an invisible borderline was hidden deep under the ocean. I became a hybrid person, who had emerged through embracing self and other within me in a foreign homeland, Canada. Pat helped me make sense of who I was becoming and of what a Metonymic, doubling space is like—a space created through translation. I unexpectedly found another example of such a space when I went to a Vancouver Cantata Singers' concert, which focused on contemporary music. One piece, Shattered Islands, was composed by one of the choir members, Bruce Sled. Born in 1975, he is a graduate of the University of British Columbia. This young musician's composition was inspired by the Japanese haiku poets, Matsuo Basho and Yosa Buson. The program notes read: in race or non-white in colour" (Reevely, 2003, p. AL) . 306 I was drawn to these poems because of their strong imagery and their simplicity. These qualities invite the listener to visualize these scenes and feel that they are part of them. I have tried to further suggest these imagined experiences through music. I believe the listener will be able to imagine ripples and waves, the stretching and bending of bamboo shoots, the distant flight of herons vanishing into the heavens, and a river overflowing its banks. (Our Times, 2003, p. 3) Sled's work was possible because of translation. Translated haiku inspired him to translate further into a world of music—a chain of translation. The world he created was an in-between space of Japanese and English, haiku and music, East and West, Sled's self and Other; Shattered Islands consists of fragments of all—Benjamin's vessel. As I was listening to the music, I could hear the flow of water and imagine the scenery of Japan created by music. I felt I was in a third space. I feel a sense of hope for the younger generation of people like Sled. Perhaps embracing difference has come naturally to him because of the way he lives and because of his educational environment where he has shared a culturally and linguistically diverse space with others. Educators' efforts to help students appreciate other cultures have perhaps provided him with an opportunity to read haiku in translation and to take that experience into a part of his world. He has demonstrated possibilities that exist not only for himself but also for other students similarly shaped by diversity. We live in a world where people are divided by race, nation, religion, and culture, and where Katz's "horror" still haunts us. It can feel impossible to erase historically-constructed prejudice and discrimination. But educators' constant endeavours to transform education, promote inclusiveness and empower students who feel marginalized, can help students build a new world based on learning from past human experiences. In the midst of struggle to dismantle barriers and frames, we can witness that the world is shifting. Just as Sled did, students can acquire ways to "translate" the other into a part of themselves through an 307 educated imagination. Perhaps, someday, sharing a translated third space will be natural for all students, and will encourage bridges on which the three girls—Melanie, Janet, and Sumiko—and many others like them—can linger in each other's company as equals. 308 REFERENCES Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. New York: Vintage. Achebe, C. (1996). 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