Translating the Self: Ariel Dorfman's Bilingual Journey

Doloughan, Fiona

doi:10.1080/14708470208668083

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“…In the English version of his memoir, Dorfman writes of his British school in Chile as “rememorating an old empire that no longer existed” (Dorfman , 113). Seizing on this unusual locution, Fiona J. Doloughan contends that: “The neologism ‘rememorating’ is not simply a (mis)translation of the Spanish “rememorar’ but consciously combines the English notions of commemoration and remembrance in a term freshly coined for the occasion and available to Dorfman because of his bilingualism” (Doloughan , 151). A passage in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin (1957) belies Doloughan's claim of Dorfman's linguistic priority: “In the rememoration of old relationships, later impressions often tend to be dimmer than earlier ones” (Nabokov , 138).…”

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Writing South and North

Kellman

2013

Orbis Litterarum

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Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998) is a translingual memoir, an account of how its author constructed a new identity in and through a new language. Born in Buenos Aires, Dorfman moved to New York when he was two and a half years old. Traumatized by a hospital stay, he rejected his native Spanish entirely in favor of English for the next ten years, until his family relocated to Santiago, Chile. Antipathy toward Yankee imperialism led the young author to vow never again to write in English. The coup against Salvador Allende, for whom Dorfman worked as an adviser, forced him into exile in the United States, where he has learned to make use of what he calls his "linguistic ambidexterity." Heading South, Looking North is the nonfictional Bildungsroman of a man who recognizes that his identity is constructed out of language and who, though desperate to be monolingual, is torn between Spanish and English selves. After completing his book in English, Dorfman, a self-proclaimed "bigamist of language," immediately translated it into Spanish as Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte (1998). Just as Dorfman himself remains suspended between English and Spanish, his text itself, a product of the dialogic imagination that refuses a single linguistic form, exists in the space between the English and Spanish versions. Beginning with the different titles (deseando means "desiring," not "looking"), Dorfman as self-translator takes liberties that he acknowledges the translators of his novels and plays into Italian and Korean would not dare. A different Dorfman is constructed by each rendition of the life. Dorfman's ambilingual attention to two different communities is apparent in the separate ways he handles cultural references in the English and Spanish editions. Examination of the English and Spanish versions of his memoir reveals what he calls "the anxiety, the richness, the madness of being double."

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Writing South and North

Kellman

2013

Orbis Litterarum

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“…In previous articles I have focused on the work of Dorfman (Doloughan, 2002) and Kundera (Doloughan, in press) and have demonstrated the ways in which their textual production is underscored by their capacity to draw on multiple representational resources. In the present context, I shall concentrate on Ben Okri's latest novel, In Arcadia (2002), exploring the effects of the discursive employment of multiple material and representational resources and 'the interpenetration of cultures' (Quayson, 1997: 101).…”

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Writing with an Accent: Components of Style in the Intercultural Narrative

Doloughan

2004

Language and Intercultural Communication

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The paper that follows is part of a larger project aiming to examine the textual production of writers having access to more than one set of representational resources. It is premised on the notion that access to such dual or multiple resource-bases permits the production of texts that are 'marked' in salient and systematic ways.Cet article vise à proposer l'existence d'une littérature «avec accent», c'est-à-dire composée de textes écrits par des auteurs bilingues/biculturels ou multilingues/ multiculturels. Par l'application des catégories narratologiques proposées par Naficy dans son oeuvre sur un cinéma accentué, j'analyse le nouveau roman de Ben Okri dans le but de démontrer à quel point ceci est conforme aux éléments stylistiques d'une littérature dite accentuée.

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Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2002-2003

Wachter¹,

Schultz²

2003

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Translating the Self: Ariel Dorfman's Bilingual Journey

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Writing South and North

Writing South and North

Writing with an Accent: Components of Style in the Intercultural Narrative

Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2002-2003

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