ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that along the continuum from Village of Stone, a 2005 work in translation, to Xiaolu Guo’s 2017 memoir Once Upon a Time in the East via A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, there is a continual refashioning/rewriting of self. How this rewriting or reversioning of self relates to concepts of translation and self-translation is complex, given Guo’s trajectory as a writer with an acute awareness of both the problematics and performance of translation. A further indication of Guo’s engagement with the theme of self-translation and of what it means to be translated and to live in translation is reflected in the paratextual reference in Once Upon a Time in the East to a quotation from Eva Hoffman’s 1989 memoir Lost in Translation. In a personal communication, Guo referred to the work she had just submitted to the publisher, Once Upon a Time in the East as “a novelistic memoir”.
