Translating Self, Performing Migrancy

The notion of diasporic self-fashioning and its relationship to translation will be explored in this chapter through case studies of two twentieth-century émigrés to the US, Bernard Guilbert Guerney (1894–1979) and Rose Quong (1879–1972), for whom literary translation, as well as the packaging and curating of translations, played a central role in the refashioning of their identities in the context of diaspora. Their stories of diasporic self-fashioning, however, trouble simplistic notions of source and target texts and cultures, i.e., that their self-fashioning was driven by a desire either to reject or preserve a previous linguistic and cultural identity. If one can isolate an “origin” in their life stories, it is their early awareness of the discursive constructedness of identity, an awareness born of their status as minorities in their “home” countries—a Jew in the Russian Empire, in Bernard Guerney's case, and a Chinese woman in Australia, in Quong's—an awareness fostered in various ways by their parents. As Charlotte Lissovoy describes the Guerney's childhood home, before the family emigrated to the US: “Ol’ga Grigortevna [Guerney's mother], tutored in French and German, introduced her children to Russian and world literature and was Guerney's teacher until the family joined Abram Tosipovich in 1909. The home continued to be filled with reading and lively literary discussions encouraged by Ol’ga Grigorfevna, who imported journals and books into the Russian speaking home” (Lissovoy 1980, 3–4). Guerney's and Quong's importation of Russian and Chinese literary works into twentieth-century America, therefore, represents a complex, multi-layered performance of diasporic self-fashioning that challenges what James Clifford refers to as “the empowering paradox of diaspora,” namely, “that dwelling here assumes solidarity and connection there,” because for Guerney and Quong, “there is not necessarily a singular place or an exclusivist nation” (Clifford 1997, 269). Indeed, their decentered originary identities generated rather different but similarly paradoxical modes of self-fashioning. Guerney would play with identity through elaborate literary mascarades while Quong would perform traditional “Chinese” culture, a performance that allowed her to build a life as a modern career woman. For both, a crucial aspect of those performances was translation—through which Guerney offered US readers an alternative view of Russian culture and Quong served up a romanticized vision of China through which she expressed—and, one could argue—embodied a progressive feminist agenda.