Life Writing and Translations: IABA Conference

Report by Jay Prosser (University of Leeds)

IABA reports as a rule now begin with remarks about location. Venues seem to have been chosen to work with the particular conference topic. On the crossroads of East and West, as much Asia as America and yet at same time its own seductive self, Hawai’i was no exception, for this year’s conference on Life Writing and Translation. Second in the mode comes the reporter’s confession. With the accepted papers and therefore simultaneous panels ever increasing, it becomes harder to know what to attend. Determined to see Hawai’i and with my own interests in Chinatown and its Fukkienese origins – and, I must admit, wanting to make the most of superb beach life -- I was conscious of all that I didn't get to hear. And yet I heard enough to find this a stimulating and exciting conference, thoughtfully organized and welcomingly hosted by Craig Howes and his University of Hawai’i colleagues.

Autobiography and translation were most strongly linked during the keynote panels, which this year consisted of different speakers’ ten-minutes each of eminently citable and epigrammatic thoughts. Bella Brodzki paralleled autobiography and translation by suggesting that each involved a transposition of experience, a refashioning of original text. Every autobiographer is a translator, and indeed humans would not have exceeded their biological context if not for translation. Mary Besmeres likewise emphasized that translation underlies every human activity, that translation is ongoing even in the individual. Zhao Baisheng, reminding us that Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men were written in Hawai'i, described these works as exemplifying translation’s aesthetic of juxtaposition -- fiction with nonfiction, biography with the imaginary. Certain moments at the conference staged translation, most notably the opening plenary of Philippe Lejeune in wonderful double act with his translator, retired professor of French at the University of Hawai’i Jean Toyama. Lejeune’s ‘Le moi est-il international’ unveiled the (lack of) rationale in what lives have been translated and, of course, most that haven’t. Beginning characteristically with a confession of his own ignorance and linguistic incapacities, Lejeune led us to a recognition of what can’t be done by the individual which must therefore be conducted by the collective. And every act of translation is of course collective and collaborative.

The collective seemed symptomized by the event. Translation was at work in the exchange of personal histories, the internationalness of speakers and their topics, their geographical affiliations and languages, and their research and teaching across often multiple fields. Israeli poet Azila Talit Reisnberger’s A Life in Translation, a copy to be found on the book display stand until she so kindly gave it to me after I admired it, movingly captured -- in its themes of motherhood and daughterhood, intimacy and solitude, the body and the spirit, and language -- the livedness for many of translation.

Hawai’i was the pivotal presence, the hub for our different spokes. In the keynote panel ‘Cross Cultures, Cross Purposes’ Noelani Arista told the powerful story of colonizer William Buckle, his native Hawai’ian mistress, Loeki, and their child. Questioning simplistic assumptions about what might count as autobiographical narrative, Arista found the ‘small voice’ of Loeki in this genealogy of her child. Noenoe Silva discussed Hawai’i's intellectual ancestors and emphasized the pre-existence of the written tradition before Hawai’i’s annexation. And a group of Hawai’ian artists and performers in their show ‘Pacific People: An Evening of Telling Lives’ gave us a rich sampling of Hawai’ian poetry, storytelling and Hula.

One of the most productive and properly conference moments came as the result of a question Zhao Baisheng asked Sidonie Smith, about where she saw the field of life writing going. In an immediate and typically informed response, Smith mentioned three main areas: digitization; witnessing; and the emergence of different genres. The importance of digitization was evident at the conference in discussions of how new technologies are shaping subjectivity and its representation. In a talk that was at once performative and meditative, touching on Zen and John Cage, Johannes Klabbers considered whether sound is more indexical than the visual and if computers can work to mediate the self. He played us one of his own software-made sound works, commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Services and complete with the bleating of Australian sheep (I’m not sure if they’d need translating for my local, Yorkshire breeds). From the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Linda Rubel and Rose Marie Toscano explored how technology is used to translate and often overwrite in troubling ways the autobiographical narratives of the deaf. Comparing traditional signed forms with new narratives that are written and those (enabled by cochlea implants) spoken, Rubel and Toscano suggested that there was a movement to sign-language autobiographies lost from the more static spoken and written versions. Voicing over and subtitling signed deaf narratives also seemed to detract from their authenticity, the self-‘writing.’ In a panel entitled ‘New Technologies and Genres,’ Paul John Eakin had fun unpacking the new gadgets for tracking the self’s experience. Eakin questioned whether technology leads to greater self-awareness or new selfhood, a ‘New Model Autobiographer 2010.’ He made a distinction between life logging and life writing, data versus memories. Selective, structured and dynamic, autobiography’s ‘truths,’ he suggested, come as much in its mistakes and fictions. On the same panel Tanya Kam read the digitized biographies of those involved in the Virginia Tech shooting. Computer, particularly Internet, facilities are allowing interactive biographies and a citizen’s or involved journalism. Finally Anna Poletti showed a clip from the film Tarnation and left us stunned with a young boy’s fictional performance of the true testimony of a battered woman. A material ‘technology of self’ tied to documentary, home video was here used for translation and performance of another’s story. Poletti asked the important question of how much new technologies are occasioning the production of testimony. Visual technologies were also in evidence with Laura Beard reading the photographs as testimony in the memoirs of a Jewish South American novelistic family album.

Witnessing did continue as a key thread. My fellow panelists, Nancy K. Miller and Brodzki, offered thoughts on what the text or reader misses as telling. Brodzki described how one particular chapter from Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, missing from the English translation, addressed to the reader and encapsulating the theme of irreparable loss, forms an integral part of Oz’s memoir. In the process of recovering but also writing about what she’s missing from her own family history, Miller remarked a trend in what she called the ‘post-personal,’ a move from the individual story to the collective. Rightly, then, we felt the influence of feminism at the conference. Sidonie Smith explained the importance of translation and transnationalism in her global feminisms project, a collection of oral histories of feminist activists across several countries. The model of globalization here is heterogeneous. Leigh Gilmore explored how life writers, particularly women, might deploy sentimentality for political ends. For example Harriet Jacobs entwines coming of age with coming to political consciousness through the figure of herself as ‘the girl.’ Alfred Horning told the narrative of his own journey through life writing, shaped by feminism, translation and internationalization. The title of one keynote panel, ‘Changing the Subject, Subject to Change,’ as Gilmore said during this session, had feminist resonance – the second part the title of Miller’s book on feminist criticism.

Different genres were in evidence in hybrid and new forms, a point echoed by Tom Couser who, in ‘Changing the Subject,’ suggested there had been an explosion of styles and subjects within life writing. Couser underlined how much Smith and her collaborator Julia Watson have expanded our terms for life writing. Following the keynote by Lejeune, Julie Rak and Jeremy Popkin spoke as the editors of Lejeune’s work on diaries and popular culture, soon to be released. Popkin considered the different disciplinary understandings of the diary. If historians have read diaries as fact, Lejeune’s work complicates the diary into a cultural object. Rak suggested that our understanding of Lejeune had got stuck in his 1970s structuralist definitions of the genre of autobiography. She reminded us that in the 1980s and 90s Lejeune's work was a good deal about translation. His new work on the diary shows his interest in the everyday in a manner that bears comparison with the work of Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault. For Rak, Lejeune was not simply a formalist but a historicist whose writings are important for the study of life writing in popular culture.

The conference developed new approaches to life writing. There was analysis of expert writing on life writing, of the life writing elements of New Age self-help discourse. Margaretta Jolly gave us ‘narrative therapy.’ Gillian Whitlock extended her thoughts on posthuman autobiography, suggesting that a critique of the humanist subject exists in life writing and conversely that posthuman theory draws on autobiography -- Jacques Derrida on his cat for example, Haraway in her use of subjectivity.

From the personal to the collective: I want to end with the institutional and an irony. Perhaps the most urgent talk came from Susanna Egan, in her keynote on our collective need to work against the dearth of life writing posts for our graduate students and the underrating of our field’s journals by international research councils. The media and popular culture are currently fascinated by life writing, Egan noted, but engage in ‘soft thinking’ on the subject. We need to shore up this interest with our informed research and talk to new readers of life writing, even facilitate the composition of life writing. Given that life writing is still so marginal in our institutions, it is amazing – testimony to both IABA’s and life writing’s strengths – that this biennial conference goes ahead in spite of receiving no continuous external funding. We can look forward to IABA reconvening, under a different topic, in 2010, organized by Margaretta Jolly, at the University of Sussex. I can promise you that, whoever writes the report on that, they won’t be mentioning the beach life.