Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright

Introduction (II) Translating“ Portrait of a Tongue”

I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity. VLADIMIR NABOKOV, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English” (1955: 512) Vladimir Nabokov’s skyscraping footnotes were born of his desire to do justice to Pushkin’s Onegin in English translation . Previous attempts at recreating the rhymes of the Russian novel-in-verse in English had produced only “grotesque travesties […] teeming with mistranslations,” Nabokov argued (1955: 506), and so, in place of mimicry, and reasoning that it is “impossible to translate Onegin in rhyme” (ibid: 512), the translator took it upon himself to explain: “The original text will not be able to soar and to sing; but it can be very nicely dissected and mounted, and scientifically studied in all its organic details” (ibid:504). The reader of Nabokov’s commentary is helped to understand how the original text functions; the reader of Pushkin’s text in Nabokov’s translation-with-commentary, whether student of Russian literature or monolingual Anglophone, appreciates the INTRODUCTION (II) translating “Portrait of a tongue” PORTRAIT OF A TONGUE 24 glory of the original from a distance and admires the translator’s erudition. The reader’s engagement with Onegin in Nabokov’s translation is thus intellectual/academic in nature rather than a matter of affective response or aesthetic appreciation. Nabokov produces a highly “visible” translation and insists that his approach is prompted by the demands of the text itself. An example of a more ideological approach to visible translation is found in the work of Lawrence Venuti (1995, 1998), who argues that Anglo-American readers should be forcibly exposed to the “other” via foreignizing translation—i.e., a type of translation that, rather than obliterating the fact of its translatedness, highlights its otherness and makes the (monolingual) reader aware of the existence of an inaccessible original. Venuti argues this case from an anti-neoimperialist standpoint: foreignizing translation is an act of resistance to the narrowing of AngloAmerican cultural horizons and its attendant geo-political effects. Venuti’s views echo certain “pre-scientific” writings on translation , notably those of the German Romantics and, in particular, of Schleiermacher ([1813] 2004:49), who advocated that the translator “[leave] the author in peace as much as possible and [move] the reader toward him.” Schleiermacher and Venuti arrive at their mutual destination via very different paths: Schleiermacher’s rationale was that the nineteenth-century German reader and the German language were more than able to embrace and assimilate the foreign; Venuti’s contemporary American or British reader, on the other hand, who is ignorant of and alienated by the foreign, should be forced to confront it. My own approach to translating “Porträt einer Zunge” marries Nabokov and Venuti by practising “thick translation” as expounded by Kwame Anthony Appiah. A thick translation provides an 25 Introduction: Translating “Portrait of a Tongue” “apparatus” or “thicker […] contextualization” ([1993] 2000:422) for the source text, facilitating the reader’s understanding of text and context, but also “extend[ing] the [English-speaking reader’s] imagination” (ibid:427). My translation-and-commentary provides such thick(er) contextualization and, through it, confronts the reader with the original. It does so partly for ideological reasons, but largely because to do otherwise would be to ignore the text’s central preoccupation: language. “Porträt einer Zunge” is a lengthy short prose text that walks the auto-fictional line. The text is a portrait of a German woman, referred to throughout as P, who has lived in the United States for many years. Her portrait is delivered by an unnamed first-person female narrator who speaks German but who is less confident in her English. The text’s publication date (2002), the location of the “story” (Boston) and references to traceable events and identifiable people invite the assumption that Yoko Tawada is drawing on experiences gleaned during her time as a Max Kade Distinguished Visitor at MIT in 1999. The portrait is, variously, a declaration of love by the narrator to P and to P’s language(s), a think-aloud protocol about language in general and about the differences between German and English in particular, and a complex web of associative thinking and intertextual references. Of the text’s host volume Überseezungen, Kraenzle (2007:92) argues that it is travel through language rather than...