Culture & Psychology

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Losses in Translation
John Haiman
Culture Psychology 2005; 11; 111
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X05050755
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Review Essay

John Haiman
Macalester College, USA

Losses in Translation
Besemeres, Mary, Translating Ones Self: Language and Selfhood in
Cross-cultural Autobiography. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002. 297 pp. ISBN
0820456144 (pbk).
Ever since Freud, psychologists have used literary characters as some
of their most eloquent case histories. In some areas of investigation, the
belletristic literature provides not only by far the most readable, but
still the only accounts that exist, so that we can enjoy their artistic
superiority without any qualms that either we or the author is sacrificing scientific rigor for mere entertainment. This it seems to me is the
case here. The enormously subtle issue that Besemeres discusses is
whether (or to what extent) the self is bound up in the language that
one speaks. Her data include obvious autobiographical classics like
Maria Hoffmans Lost in Translation, Richard Rodriguezs Hunger of
Memory and Maxine Hong Kingstons Woman Warrior, but also
includes some rather unexpected works like Kazuo Ishiguros An Artist
of the Floating World.
Although her citations from each of these works are extensive, they
cannot substitute for the originals, and my impression is that her
discussion is most useful to someone who is already familiar with the
books in question. In addition, there are chapters where Besemeres
concentrates on translation as a purely linguistic rather than a psychological problem. For this reason, my review will largely skip over
chapters that deal with books that I havent read or which deal with
Culture & Psychology Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 11(1): 111116 [DOI: 10.1177/1354067X05050755]

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Culture & Psychology 11(1)

translation as a problem dealing with texts rather than personalities.

(Unfortunately, this means that I will do no more than mentionhere
and nowher treatments of Czesl aw Mil osz and his self-translated
Polish poetry, and of the Hungarian-Australian Andrew Reimers autobiographical Budapest Caf. I will also skip the extremely interesting
chapter on heteroglossia in Kazuo Ishiguros Artist of the Floating World.
(Besemeres discussion here focuses on translationese, whereby the
author manages to convey the effect of speaking and writing in
Japanese, although the work is written entirely in English.)
A standard view, at least within linguistics, is that any human
language is but the outer garb (the container or style) which clothes
ones thoughts (the content). The clothing may be changed, but the
essential integrity of the inner language of the intended message is
absolute and unaffected by the particular language within which it is
expressed. The inner language has often been called mentalese, a
Platonic abstraction that can indeed be modeled in English or in some
other natural language. In fact, it is always so modeled since there is
no independent evidence for anything but particular languages like
English, Turkish, Mandarin, and so on. Mentalese, it is held, is essentially independent of the parochial facts of English or any other
language. The evidence for this claim is actually two hypotheses:
1. the translatability or effability hypothesis: anything that can be said in
one language can be said in any other language;
2. the hypothesis of the existence of universal semantic primitives: a relatively
small store of simple concepts which are identical in every language.
Besemeres, like some eminent linguists, like her authors, and indeed
like every poet who ever lived, takes the opposite view: traduttore
tradittore (the translator is a traitor). This goes for texts and the words
that constitute them. Besemeres is a student of literature, and her
introduction pays duty calls on the usual suspects from cultural
studies: linguists like Saussure and von Humboldt, and literary
scholars like Bakhtin, Derrida, Lacan and Todorov.
How about selves? Here Besemeres invokes the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz, the philosopher Charles Taylor and the social psychologist Kenneth Gergen. But I think it is safe to say that her survey of
the psychological and philosophical literature on the self is relatively
perfunctory (there is no reference to Laings Divided Self ), and she
ignores the historical work of scholars like Elias and Lyons entirely. In
consequence, we are given some scattered observations on the cultural
boundedness of the notion, and some exposition on the Japanese
vocabulary for the inner and outer (private and public) selves, but no
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Haiman Losses in Translation

preliminary definition of the self. The reader is presumably expected

to come supplied with some intuitions on the subject.
Whatever the self may be, it is (at least partly) constituted by ones
natural language (p. 12). The Anglo-French writer Julien Green
considered language much like Sully Prudhomme considered style
(lhomme mme), not as a frill but the thing itself: cest notre substance
mme qui est en cause (p. 11). The 19th-century German polymath
Wilhelm von Humboldt implicitly denied the existence of anything like
mentalese and asserted that you can only get out of one language by
stepping into another (p. 20). A self without a specific language, in this
view, is as much an impossibility as a self without a body, plausible as
this very ancient science fiction may appear. (It first arises in The Golden
Ass by Apuleius, arguably the earliest novel ever written.)
According to this relativity hypothesis, speaking a language is akin
to wearing a disguise like a clumsy and overblown astronaut suit
(Eva Hofmanns words, p. 52) or a distorting mask. The mask imposes
a social role which the speaker may actively dislike, but in any case feels
to be inauthentic. Sometimes, interestingly, it is the native language
itself which is felt to impose an undesired role. Besemeres cites a
unique example: Kyoko Mori, an anglicized native speaker of Japanese,
recorded that when she addressed a male stranger in Japanese, she
heard her tone become high and squeaky, alarmingly taking on the
deferential role of a traditional Japanese woman (p. 21). Conversely,
Chinese women are required to act strong and bossy: Maxine [Hong
Kingston] and her fellow Chinese-American schoolgirls have to force
their voices down to a whisper to become American-feminine. She
complains that she has not dissuaded her mother from shouting into
public telephones (p. 134). Behind the mask, but very different from
it, are the speakers own frustrated intentions, feelings and personality, which correspond not to mentalese but (mostly) to his or her
native language. In fact, correspond may be too weak a term for this
identification. Eva Hoffman wrote that (for example) proper names
within ones language didnt refer to usthey were as surely US as
our eyes and hands (p. 42, fn.). The same sense of inalienable ownership applies to other words within ones native tongue. Hoffman
remembers slipping reluctantly into the Anglo taxonomy of friends/
acquaintances so different from the Polish words they supposedly
translate, przyjacolka/znajoma, with a sense almost of disloyalty not
only to her parents, but also to herself (pp. 2930).
The natural rightness of ones own language is the theme of many
jokes, including that by Nabokov of Pnins perception of good old
Andrej Kronebergs 1844 translation of Gamlet, so superior to the
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Culture & Psychology 11(1)

original Viliama Shekspira (p. 98). We only surmount this feeling when
we learn a second language, and discover that the bond between word
and thing is not indissoluble, that the word indeed is just a label. Eva
Hoffman remembers the experience [of that discovery] as a kind of
spiritual vertigo, a thinness in the blood (p. 48).
To speak a language is to buy into all of its habits and conventions.
Not just individual words like Polish polot (not exactly) panache and
their taxonomies, not just the nimbus of paralanguage (culturally
prescribed indications relating to how you say it, as opposed to what
you say), but its modes of discourse. Besemeres in her chapter on
Mil osz cites a wonderful insight of the poet-translator Robert Bly
concerning a difficulty of translating German into English:
. . . the lack of a [commonly accepted] high-flown vein in English makes
it virtually impossible to translate Rilke without making him sound
pompous. The lack of [such a] vein in English is as evident in Mil oszs translations from Polish as in any from Rilkes German. (p. 79)

Among the language-specific behaviors which shape ones sense of

self are the very different conventions about the representation of the
notion of a self, to begin with. In Chinese, Japanese and many other
languages of Southeast Asia, the most frequently occurring words for
I have originated from other words meaning slave or servant.
Routinely, the speakers role is not so much inhabited as it is referred
to when we say (instead of I) things like the author. We call this
self-reference in English, and it has a marginal status here. Not so
languages like Chinese, where the speaker routinely accomplishes selfreference by a variety of shifting terms like little brother depending
on the relationship to the person addressed. At least comparatively
speaking, Western cultures construe the human individual as an independent separate entity (p. 127). In her chapter on Maxine Hong
Kingstons Woman Warrior, Besemeres notes how relative self-abasement
is not just a purely etymological fact about the pronoun system of
Chinese, but woven into its syntax and written form as well:
The word I is understood rather than voiced. It almost never appears . . .
The very act of writing an I book would seem outrageously immodest. . . .
in letters to her own father she would always write small daughter Jade
Snow when referring to herself and would moreover write the characters
half the size of the regular ideographs. (p. 123)

The vivid and poignant testimonials that Besemeres has insightfully

gathered together come not from social scientists but from bilingual
people who have been there. That is, they speak and write English
now, but they have never forgotten what it is like (different!!) to express
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themselves in their first languagesRussian, Polish, Spanish, Chinese,

Japanese or Hungarian. From a scientific point of view, using native
testimonials is perhaps like making an elephant a professor of
zoology, but it may be that on this kind of subject elephants who do
not pretend to transcend their species are more reliable authorities than
human professors of zoology, who delude themselves that they are
able to transcend theirs. To put this another way, the inner self is a
subject that can be approached only from within.
A cartoon I no longer remember the writer of has a character say I
know how to say, I saw many mushrooms in the forest of my uncle
in perfect French! Her companion responds, But thats not true!, to
which she answers, If you dont know a foreign language very well,
you have to lie a lot. And of course, make a fool of yourself. For the
most part, Besemeres has avoided this, the commonest form of loss in
translation, to focus on the more subtle plight of rare birds like
Nabokov who really are equally fluent, if not equally at home, in both
their native languages and English. And yet Nabokov, one of the principal authors whom she cites, has a beautiful passage on this very
theme in Pnin. The luckless hero whom the omniscient narrator affectionately condescends to as my poor Pnin (p. 88) spends a single
chapter visiting the country home of some friends together with other
migrs who are themselves speakers of Russian. This ugly duckling
(or, if one prefers another ornithological metaphor from another
author, this albatross gauche et laid), the hapless butt of the previous and
following chapters, magically sheds all his clumsiness and abruptly
stands revealed as someone we would happily be ourselves. The
contrast between his totally unself-conscious dignity in Russian and
the diminished self he projects in English is all the more touching for
being unnoted by the narrator. Every child of immigrant parents
catches at least a glimpse of this disparity, whether or not s/he goes on
to become a Richard Rodriguez. Indeed, it is only in her chapter on
Rodriguez that Besemeres gives some recognition to this issue, in
reproducing some of the passages in which Rodriguez writes about his
alienation from his Spanish-speaking self, and his pity for his parents
(pp. 161, et passim).
Besemeres has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking work. Its
greatest value for me is that it raises issues that are of perennial interest
for an understanding of human nature, and she has done so in the only
way that is possible given our current knowledge of the self.

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Culture & Psychology 11(1)

Biography
JOHN HAIMAN is a Professor of Linguistics at Macalester College, and the
author of Talk is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language
(Oxford University Press, 1998), Natural Syntax: Iconicity and Erosion
(Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Hua: A Papuan language of the Eastern
Highlands of New Guinea (Benjamins, 1980), among other books. ADDRESS:
John Haiman, Linguistics Program, Macalester College, St Paul, MN 55105,
USA. [email: haiman@Macalester.edu]

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