A Translation of The Self

CHAPTER NINE
A TRANSLATION OF THE SELF:

AN ANALYSIS OF IDENTITY THROUGH
LANGUAGE IN THE LITERATURE
OF MIGRATION
JULIANA DÍAZ BALDOCCHI
To be means to communicate [...] to be

means to be for another, and through the
other for oneself. A person has no internal
sovereign territory, he [sic] is wholly and
always on the boundary; looking inside
himself he [sic] looks into the eyes of
another or with the eyes of another.
—M. Bakhtin1
Bakhtin maintains: "to be means to communicate." He argues that

Copyright © 2011. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. All rights reserved.
communication means to "be for another" which indicates that the limit of
the self is not the I but an I in interrelationship with the other.
Communication is based on these interrelationships, for "[h]umans make
the world in terms of others and the entire existence of the self is oriented
towards others' languages and others' worlds."2 We enter a world of others'
words that becomes part of our own consciousness and culture, and
through dialogue we are constantly acknowledging the other as we
struggle for the recognition of our own self. Migrants, as people who make
the choice or are forced to leave their countries and "seek a place to make
a new beginning, start again and make a better life" find themselves in a
constant negotiation between their roots, home, native tongue, and the
culture and language they must assimilate.3 Migrants are strangers in a
new place; will they find coherence in this new language? If, as Bakhtin
claims, the notion of the self is dialogically constructed through
interrelationships with others, through language in a relation to social and
DeWald, R., & Sobolewski, D. (Eds.). (2011). Bonds and borders : Identity, imagination and transformation in literature.
Cambridge Scholars Publisher.
Created from uses on 2022-02-21 17:23:43.
98 Chapter Nine
cultural forces,4 what happens with those who cannot speak the new
language they encounter? Identity for the migrant is recomposed as it
fluctuates from a past native tongue and culture that is left behind, and a
new language that constructs and defines the new self in a new place.
When discussing migration, it is pertinent to consider Homi Bhabha's use
of the term "cultural translation" in which he refers to the migrant as a
"translated man."5 Translation becomes a matter of survival for migrants in
terms of access to information and to become members of the new society.
Migrants therefore translate themselves because they need to assimilate
and to communicate with others in their new environment. Translation, in
this case, is no longer considered in its textual or linguistic sense; it rather
becomes the need of the migrant or a requirement of the society and
culture into which the migrant has entered. Certain picture books, teenage
novels, and adult novels that deal with migrant children as characters,
demonstrate their quest for identity as a translation of the self.
The condition of being caught between two languages is especially
evident in the migrants' situation where the search for identity in a new
place becomes more complex as it develops through their native tongue
and the language they must learn in order to adapt and exist for the others
around them.
The condition of the migrant is the condition of the translated being. He or

she moves from a source language and culture to a target language and
culture so that translation takes place both in the physical sense of
movement or displacement and in the symbolic sense of the shift from one
way of speaking, writing about and interpreting the world to another.6
In Eva Hoffman's autobiography Lost in Translation (1989), Eva, a Polish

girl whose family emigrates to Canada, expresses the difficulties of
understanding the self within a new world in new words. Trapped within
an unknown language, feeling different and inarticulate when she arrives
in Canada, she is forced to assimilate the English language as she notices
that words no longer evoke the same connection to objects: "But mostly
the problem is that the signifier has become severed from the signified.
The words I learn now don't stand for things in the same unquestioned way
they did in my native tongue."7 As word and thing separate, Polish
becomes a language of her past, Polish words no longer apply to her new
experiences and to the comprehension of herself in this new world.
Within the process of assimilation, Eva experiences a moment of
incomprehension, of silence and absolute vacuity of language. Being
detached from her Polish past and having not yet assimilated her new
state, she feels she has no interior language and no capability of defining
A Translation of the Self 99
herself or the world around her. She asks: "What has happened to me in
this new world? I don't know. I don't see what I've seen, don't comprehend
what's in front of me. I am not filled with language anymore, and I have
only a memory of fullness to anguish me with the knowledge that, in this
dark and empty state, I don't really exist."8
Eva's feeling that she does not exist arises from the fact that she needs
language in order to describe the world around her. Since, as she observes,
"nothing fully exists until it is articulated,"9 she needs language in order to
define herself, to explain herself to herself, and to communicate with
others. Her identity has dissolved within her impossibility to speak:
"Because I'm not heard, I feel I'm not seen. My words often seem to baffle
others. They are inappropriate or forced or just plain incomprehensible…
People look past me as we speak. What do I look like, here? Imperceptible, I
think, impalpable, neutral, faceless."10 Eva cannot communicate and therefore
feels she does not exist. Do we only exist for another? Can we only "be" if
we communicate?
The adaptation process and the assimilation of a new language imply
the re-creation or translation of identity. Eva notices that she is forced to
reinvent her identity every day: "This language is beginning to invent
another me."11 A critical moment of identity translation occurs when Eva
and her sister arrive at their new school. The teacher introduces them to
the class mispronouncing their last name. Eva feels there is a gap between
herself and the new way her name is pronounced. Each person's name
becomes the signifier of a self: "Our Polish names didn't refer to us; they
were surely us as our eyes and hands. These new appellations that we can't
yet pronounce, are not us. They are identification tags, disembodied signs
pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself."12 In this new

world, Eva is forced to detach from her "old self" and acquire a new name
in English; she must adapt her name, receiving a "careless baptism" within
the English language. Her name is translated first and she notices that
gradually her whole self must be translated as well: "A true translation
proceeds by the motions of understanding and sympathy. It happens by
slow increments, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase."13 This idea of
naming is central to Bakhtin's theory of comprehension of the self, for he
states:
All that touches me comes to my consciousness,—beginning with my

name—from the outside world, passing through the mouths of others: with
their intonation, their affective reality and their values. At first I am
conscious of myself only through others, they give me the words, the forms
and the tonality that constitute the first image of myself.14
100 Chapter Nine
Bakhtin not only perceives language as a speech flow from a speaker, but
also recognizes the active role of the "other" as an active recipient.
Although in Eva Hoffman's case, internal processes are prioritized, it is the
"other" that completes the "self." An outsider is necessary in order to form
selfhood not only as an understanding receiver in communication but as an
Other15 who allows definition through opposition. She negotiates between
her Polish history and her host culture as she defines herself through
opposition when she first meets a family from Canada: "They are a
different species from anyone I've met in Poland, and Polish words slip off
them without sticking."16
Eva retells her own story in English because English is the language in
which she has become an adult: "If I am to write about the present, I have
to write in the language of the present, even if it's not the language of the
self."17 Polish has become the language of her past, of the childhood that
she has left behind. She becomes the sum of her languages, searching for a
voice made up of layers in which she can reconcile her splintered self.18 It
is only when all of these voices quiet down that she finds what she is
searching for: the silence from which a true voice can emerge.19 "The
silence that comes out of inarticulateness is the inchoate and desperate
silence of chaos. The silence that comes after words is the fullness from
which the truth of our perceptions can crystallize."20
The immigrant in a new place is forced to be silent when facing the
initial complex stages of second language acquisition. The silence is
created by the separation between a past in a native tongue and a future in
a new language. Julia Kristeva explains that "[i]f I don't exist except in the
language I address to another, I am only present in the moment of that
communication. In relation to this present of my being there is that which

proceeds and that which follows."21 Kristeva situates the self within a
language that is continuously changing. The self, simultaneously changes
and remolds itself at every moment of communication. Yet, what happens
to the immigrant within that "silent period"? Does the migrant exist within
that silent present situated between a language that precedes and a
language that follows?
In the teenage novel The Frozen Waterfall by Gaye Hicyilmaz,22 Selda
is a young girl whose family migrates from Turkey to Switzerland in
search of better opportunities. Her journey is a clear depiction of a search
for the self through the assimilation of the German language. The
preoccupation with the personal growth of the adolescent migrant
character in this novel reflects the way in which notions of selfhood
undergo rapid and radical alterations. Her adaptation process involves a
linguistic transformation or translation from one language to another and a

desire to "exist as she communicates" with others.
The book opens by introducing Selda as a determined girl who speaks
her mind. Yet, as she is getting ready to leave Turkey and go to
Switzerland, her grandmother tells her that in the new country she will not
be making any more smart answers: "She was horribly afraid that her
grandmother might be right. She would not be able to say anything at all in
German, let alone anything clever."23 When Selda gets on the airplane to
go to Switzerland, a stranger helps her put her bag up in the lockers
because she cannot reach them. She says her first words in German "Bitte,
bitte" and celebrates her first step into the new land, the fact of being
understood. As soon as she arrives in Switzerland she is astonished by the
quietness around her. Although she wants to cry out, "Look, it's me! I'm
here, I've come at last!"24 she notices she cannot. She remains quiet.
Selda is taken to school where at first she feels invisible. Other
children pass by her and do not notice her presence. She is taken into the
classroom by a fair-haired teacher, and the first morning of school,
completely immersed in a new language, seems endless; she "listened until
her head ached."25 Sometimes she would think she "actually caught a
word," yet everything was entirely incomprehensible. She found "her eyes
doing twice the work, because her ears were useless now that she could
not understand all that she heard."26 The process of assimilation of a new
language not only requires learning and concentration but brings along
with it a "lack of existence" parallel to the "lack of communication" due to
the fact that messages do not get across to the recipient. When Selda finds
herself using the wrong German words, her identity becomes vague and
blurred: "[I]it was not courage that she lacked […] No. It was words. It
was German words. Without them confusion and doubt hung around Selda
and threatened to cloud her meaning and hide her thoughts […] If only she
had had the words, she could have swept away these mists of doubt."27
Due to the fact that Selda cannot communicate with those around her, she
feels non-existent. Her thoughts cannot be articulated and she feels she
cannot articulate herself, for as Bakhtin explains, individual consciousness
is impossible outside of a relationship with another: "I am conscious of
myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another,
through another, and with the help of another."28
On various occasions, Selda describes her inability to speak as if it
were a physical disability: "It's like being deaf, this not being able to
understand what people say.”29 She feels "dumb and helpless as if she had
been struck down by paralysis."30 She even explains her situation to her
teacher and relates her lack of speech to the dissolving of identity: "It's
102 Chapter Nine
like being struck dumb, suddenly, and not being able to speak or
understand. You stop being a person. It's like being an animal […]."31
However, she finds shelter by writing her thoughts down in her own
language and sending them to her grandmother who cannot even read
them because she is illiterate. However, the act of writing becomes a way
of redefining herself and her feelings through language. Although the
novel is written in the third person, the writing of the self through the
letters is done in the first person. Her deepest feelings become more
plausible as they become words on a written page assuming a recipient or
an addressee: "[D]ay by day and week by week, she had been writing
continuously to her grandmother. It had become a habit. She wrote to the
old woman just as she might have written in a diary."32 She thinks about
rereading the letters and reading the letters aloud to her grandmother if she
should go back to Turkey in the future. In this case the author uses the
diary narrative as a strategy to demonstrate that Selda translates her
thoughts and feelings into writing, for she has not yet been able to translate
herself into the German language. In this case, it is pertinent to mention
the term "cultural translation" because Selda has adapted to the
requirements of her new culture.
As time goes by, Selda begins to develop a voice. She studies hard and
is determined to adapt to the German language. She not only befriends a
Swiss girl named Giselle from her "new" country but also meets a Turkish
boy named Fehrat from her "old" country who wants her to teach him
German. He is the one who makes her aware that she has become a
translator; he points out that she can translate what he would say in
Turkish to Giselle in German and vice-versa. Selda talks to her teacher,
gets books, starts teaching Fehrat, and notes that "watching him learn to
speak German was a bit like watching someone come alive again."33 With
these new words she exists not only for herself or for a page that might not
be read, but for those that surround her. Through Selda's struggle,
Hicylmaz represents the situation of an adolescent character who is caught
between two languages, mirroring the situation of adolescents who are
expected to migrate with their families.
A similar situation is presented in the picture book One Green Apple
by Eve Bunting about Farah, a Pakistani girl who arrives at a school in the
United States where "she listens and nods but doesn't speak."34 The
narration is mainly presented by a third person narrator who tells the
reader about the difficulties of adapting to a new culture: "Farah feels
alone, even when surrounded by her classmates. It's hard being the new
kid in school, especially when you're from another country and you don't
know the language."35 Then the narration shifts and is told from Farah's
point of view: "This is my second day in the new school in the new
country. There are to be no lessons today because we are going
somewhere. Other days will not be like this one. Tomorrow I will go again
to the class where I will learn to speak English."36
The experience of the trip to an orchard allows Farah to find
similarities and differences between her native culture and the one she is
assimilating. She particularly notices that the sound of laughter and the
sound of dogs crunching their food is the same as in her home country.
Nevertheless, she knows that the words to describe these sounds are no
longer the ones she used back home. She is aware of diverse behaviour,
for boys and girls sit together and none of the other girls are wearing a
dupatta as she is. Farah's movement into this new society implies that she
is defining herself in relationship to what she is not.
The process of assimilation that takes place in this picture book is
gradual. In the beginning, Farah feels excluded not only because she is
different but because she cannot communicate: "The students know each
other, but they don't know me and I don't know them. I can't understand
them when they speak, and I can't speak to them."37 This is another
example of being inexistent or invisible due to the lack of verbal
communication. Nevertheless, there is a use of gestures and pointing at
objects (signified) to fill them with new words (signifiers). When all the
boys and girls in the classroom are taken to the orchard, the teacher tells
them to pick one apple. In order to make Farah understand, the teacher
touches the apple, picks it and says "one;" in the illustration the teacher
shows "one" with her finger. Farah thinks to herself: "I nod. I want to say,
'I understand. It's not that I am stupid.' It is just that I am lost in this new
place. But I do not know how to tell her."38 Her lack of verbal
communication makes her feel isolated and non-existent.
It is interesting to note that, since this is a picturebook, images are used
to represent alienation strongly. For instance, Farah picks a green apple
while all of the other children pick red apples. The teacher then tells them
to put the apples inside a machine in order to make apple cider. Some of
the children try to stop Farah from putting in the green apple, just because
it is different. However, the green apple goes into the cider. This situation
is a metaphor for the blending of cultures and for the immersion of
someone who is different into a new culture. In Farah's particular case, the
acquisition of language and meaning is what will allow her to assimilate
fully: "Everyone laughs. I do too. Laughs sound the same as at home. Just
the same. So do sneezes and belches and lots of things. It is the words that
are strange. But soon I will know their words. I will blend with the others
the way my apple blended with the cider."39
104 Chapter Nine
This picture book exemplifies Farah's process of connecting familiar

objects to new words. This process is internal at first: "I say the word
inside myself, where it can't be heard: 'App-ell.'"40 However, at the end of
the book she makes her first step towards translation as she accepts her
arrival and joy to be in a new place by speaking out: "'App-ell,' I say.
Anna, her new classmate, claps. I smile and smile and smile."41 The act of
saying a word is evidence of her integration into this new society. When
the word becomes external and it exists for those around her, Farah smiles
as she receives a response from Anna. By getting hold of the word her
frustration ceases due to the fact that she now feels she exists for another:
"It is my first outside-myself word. There will be more."42
The quest of identity for the migrant implies a physical and linguistic
displacement. As individual consciousness and identity formation is
"inextricably bound up with the acquisition of language" and is within "the
discursive practices of the society which a person inhabits."43 For
migrants, the arrival in a new place implies that, in order to communicate
with others, they must adapt to a new way of interpreting the world.
Caught between the native tongue and a language that they must learn,
migrants wait to become "translated beings." A process of "cultural
translation" takes place, referring to the movement of people from one
place to another and one language to another. The quest for identity in this
new place involves a translation of the self: there is a rupture between a
past self articulated in the native tongue and the building of a new self in a
new language and culture.
Notes
1
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 287.
2
Ivana Marková, "Dialogicality as an Ontology of Humanity," in Rethinking
Communicative Interaction: New interdisciplinary Horizons, ed. Colin Grant
(Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 2003), 33.
3
Madan Sarup, "Home and Identity," in Traveller’s Tales: Narratives of
Displacement, ed. George Robertson et al. (London, New York: Routledge, 1994),
97.
4
Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 96.
5
Harish Trivedi, "Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation" in Translation:
Reflections, Refractions, Transformations, trans. Paul St. Pierre and Rafaella Cikar
(Delhi: Pencraft International, 2005), 253.
6
Michael Cronin, Translation and Identity (London: Routledge, 2006), 45.
7
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (New York: E.P Dutton, 1989), 106.
8
Ibid., 108.
9
Ibid., 29.
10
Ibid., 147.
11
Ibid., 121.
12
Ibid., 105.
13
Ibid., 211.
14
Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, 96.
15
For further reading see: Roderick McGillis, Voices of the Other: Children's
Literature and the Postcolonial Context (New York, London: Garland, 1999) and
George Robertson, et al, eds. Traveller’s Tales: Narratives of Displacement
(London, New York: Routledge, 1994).
16
Hoffman, Lost in Translation, 170.
17
Ibid., 120.
18
Ibid., 275.
19
Ibid., 276.
20
Ibid.
21
Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (London: Boyars,
1977), 34.
22
It is important to note that although the author of the book, Gaye Hicyilmaz is of
Turkish descent, she was born and educated in England, and the novel was
originally written in English.
23
Gaye Hicyilmaz, The Frozen Waterfall (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 4.
24
Ibid., 38.
25
Ibid., 59.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 66.
28
Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, 30.
29
Hicyilmaz, The Frozen Waterfall, 93.
30
Ibid., 66.
31
Ibid., 76.
32
Ibid., 176.
33
Ibid., 182.
34
Eve Bunting, One Green Apple, illus. Ted Lewin (New York: Clarion Books,
2006), 4.
35
Ibid., 5.
36
Ibid., 4.
37
Ibid., 6.
38
Ibid., 12.
39
Ibid., 25.
40
Ibid., 4.
41
Ibid., 30.
42
Ibid., 32.
43
Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic
Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland, 1999), 101.

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CHAPTER NINE

A TRANSLATION OF THE SELF:

JULIANA DÍAZ BALDOCCHI

To be means to communicate [...] to be

Bakhtin maintains: "to be means to communicate." He argues that

The condition of the migrant is the condition of the translated being. He or

In Eva Hoffman's autobiography Lost in Translation (1989), Eva, a Polish

pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself."12 In this new

All that touches me comes to my consciousness,—beginning with my

communication. In relation to this present of my being there is that which

linguistic transformation or translation from one language to another and a

This picture book exemplifies Farah's process of connecting familiar

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