“Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan”: The Mother Tongue and Translation in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
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Birgit Neumann
Abstract
The essay offers a close reading of On Earth We’re Briefly Georgeous, the remarkable novel by Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong, showing how the text’s critical engagement with the notion of the mother tongue is used to negotiate subjectivity and community in diasporic contexts. It assesses the importance of the tongue within the broader context of contemporary migrant and transcultural fiction and reveals how the tongue functions as a trope to explore possibilities of self-articulation after the loss of the mother tongue. Further, the essay draws on the concept of translation, exposing both its violent dimensions and its liberating potential within uneven intercultural relationships. Struggling with the unavailability of his mother tongue, Vuong’s central writer-protagonist performs multiple acts of translation between the unequal languages of Vietnamese and English and reconfigures both in terms of their foreignness. These acts of translation materialize in a multilingual poetics that thoroughly unsettles the priority of closed entities and that confronts the organic genealogy inscribed in the “family romance” (Yildiz 2012: 20) of the mother tongue with open, non-identitarian modes of sociality.[1]
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- The Ælfrician Glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barlow 35: A New Edition and Commentary
- An Illustration to Ælfric’s De temporibus anni in Ælfwine’s Prayerbook
- Proverb from Winfrid’s Time and Bede’s Death Song: Some Textual Problems in Two Eighth-Century Poems Revisited
- “Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan”: The Mother Tongue and Translation in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
- Reviews
- David West Brown. 2018. English and Empire: Literary History, Dialect, and the Digital Archive. Studies in English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xvii + 351 pp., numerous figures and tables, £ 85.00.
- Susan Oosthuizen. 2019. The Emergence of the English. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, viii + 148 pp., 7 illustr., $ 19.95.
- Gerald P. Dyson. 2019. Priests and Their Books in Late Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon Studies 34. Woodbridge: Boydell, x + 286 pp., 9 illustr., £ 60.00.
- John D. Niles. 2019. God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, xv + 288 pp., 2 figures, £ 75.00.
- Christopher Michael Berard. 2019. Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England: From Henry II to Edward I. Arthurian Studies 88. Woodbridge: Boydell, viii + 363 pp., £ 60.00.
- Elizabeth Dearnley. 2016. Translators and their Prologues in Medieval England. Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures. Cambridge: Brewer, 300 pp., 22 figures, £ 70.00 (hb)/£ 19.99 (e-book).
- Gottfried Gabriel. 2019. Präzision und Prägnanz: Logische, rhetorische, ästhetische und literarische Erkenntnisformen. Paderborn: Mentis, 255 pp., € 68.00/$ 78.00.
- Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre (eds.). 2018. Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method, and Practice. Heidelberg: Winter, 307 pp., € 40.00.
- Deena Rymhs. 2019. Roads, Mobility, and Violence in Indigenous Literature and Art from North America. Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment. New York: Routledge, 165 pp., £ 120.00.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- The Ælfrician Glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barlow 35: A New Edition and Commentary
- An Illustration to Ælfric’s De temporibus anni in Ælfwine’s Prayerbook
- Proverb from Winfrid’s Time and Bede’s Death Song: Some Textual Problems in Two Eighth-Century Poems Revisited
- “Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan”: The Mother Tongue and Translation in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
- Reviews
- David West Brown. 2018. English and Empire: Literary History, Dialect, and the Digital Archive. Studies in English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xvii + 351 pp., numerous figures and tables, £ 85.00.
- Susan Oosthuizen. 2019. The Emergence of the English. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, viii + 148 pp., 7 illustr., $ 19.95.
- Gerald P. Dyson. 2019. Priests and Their Books in Late Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon Studies 34. Woodbridge: Boydell, x + 286 pp., 9 illustr., £ 60.00.
- John D. Niles. 2019. God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, xv + 288 pp., 2 figures, £ 75.00.
- Christopher Michael Berard. 2019. Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England: From Henry II to Edward I. Arthurian Studies 88. Woodbridge: Boydell, viii + 363 pp., £ 60.00.
- Elizabeth Dearnley. 2016. Translators and their Prologues in Medieval England. Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures. Cambridge: Brewer, 300 pp., 22 figures, £ 70.00 (hb)/£ 19.99 (e-book).
- Gottfried Gabriel. 2019. Präzision und Prägnanz: Logische, rhetorische, ästhetische und literarische Erkenntnisformen. Paderborn: Mentis, 255 pp., € 68.00/$ 78.00.
- Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre (eds.). 2018. Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method, and Practice. Heidelberg: Winter, 307 pp., € 40.00.
- Deena Rymhs. 2019. Roads, Mobility, and Violence in Indigenous Literature and Art from North America. Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment. New York: Routledge, 165 pp., £ 120.00.
