Language and Emotional Experience: The Voice of Translingual Memoir

This chapter takes as its point of departure a question recently posed by linguist Aneta Pavlenko, but rarely, if ever, asked in either literary studies or the social sciences: ‘what [do] bilinguals’ own narratives contribute to the study of bilingualism?’ (2001b: 321). More specifically, what might bilinguals’ autobiographical writings have to say on the subject of bilingualism and emotion? Polish-born author Eva Hoffman, who emigrated at age 13 with her family from Europe to Canada, writes poignantly of the gap she recalls between her own and her mother’s emotional worlds as immigrants: ‘My mother says I’m becoming “English”. This hurts me, because I know she means I’m becoming cold . . .’ (1989: 146). Hoffman’s words express some of the key concerns of a major contemporary genre of life writing – translingual memoir – which probes the emotional and psychological lives of migrants between languages and cultures. In this chapter, I explore ways in which several striking examples of the genre approach the questions of whether, and how, emotional experience is inflected differently in different languages.