Translating one's self

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This study explores ways in which a person’s inner world may differ from one language and culture to another, and how immigrants into a new language are challenged to become different persons. The book’s focus on cross-cultural autobiography allows it to challenge some influential theoretical approaches in literature to the relationship between language and identity, through a close study of contemporary experiences of ‘language migration’. Each of the seven chapters considers the work of a major contemporary bilingual author. Life-writing by ‘migrants into English’ such as Eva Hoffman, Andrew Riemer, Maxine Hong Kingston and Vladimir Nabokov shows that entering a new language involves ‘translating one’s self’, losing part of one’s emotional and conceptual world in the process. This translingual and transcultural experience is an increasingly important feature of the modern world. This book gives full attention to this experience. It provides the first in-depth study of Eva Hoffman’s trailblazing Lost in Translation , and connects cross-cultural memoirs by authors like Richard Rodriguez and Andrew Riemer to the work of translingual writers as distinct as Kazuo Ishiguro and Czeslaw Milosz.