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

“Portrait of a Tongue”

I remember an essay I wrote as a seven-year-old schoolgirl. The title of the essay was “My Sister.” It consisted of a list of incorrect words that came out of my sister’s mouth. She was only four years old at the time and would say things like “toothbreast” instead of toothbrush, “mother-in-war” instead of mother-in-law, and “washingmean” instead of washing machine. My sister was a fascinating language machine. “I’m happy I have a little sister”—that was the sentence with which I finished my essay. Who is the painter of this portrait of a tongue? She tells the reader very little about “Portrait of a tongue” by YOKO TAWADA PORTRAIT OF A TONGUE 36 herself, but I assume that she is the same narrator who populates Yoko Tawada’s other autofictions, namely, a Japanese woman who allows her foreign and foreignizing gaze to wander over Western culture and the German language. Below, on the left, you will find the German words the narrator uses to render her sister’s word play. The “incorrect” element is in parentheses. Literal English translations of the correct and incorrect words are on the right: Zahnbürste toothbrush Zahn[brust] tooth[breast] Schwiegermutter in-law mother [Schwierig]mutter difficult mother Waschmaschine washing machine [Waschine] wachine J, an American colleague who teaches Japanese, tells me that this word play is not 37 An Experimental Translation literally translated from the Japanese. There is actually no mention of Japan or of the Japanese language in “Porträt einer Zunge,” and the narrator never identifies herself as Japanese. * * * I assume this is a reference to Henry James’ novel, although in German James’ novel is entitled Portrait of a Young Lady. In Japanese the title is apparently equivalent to James’ original. The lady portrayed in this prose text is P, a German who has been living in the United States for many years. Her situation is an inversion of that of Isabel Archer, an American in Europe. I had always been more of a writer than a painter, even though I wanted to be an artist. I once tried to paint a picture of a woman; it bore the working title “Portrait of a Lady.” PORTRAIT OF A TONGUE 38 Tawada’s novel Das nackte Auge (2004) [The Naked Eye] is divided into thirteen chapters, each of which bears the name of a film starring Catherine Deneuve. The novel tells the story of a young Vietnamese woman living illegally in Paris. Events and situations in the woman’s life come to resemble the plots of Deneuve’s films. * * * I had long since moved away from traditional portrait painting, but didn’t yet know what else one could do when one wanted to capture a face. What did this lady look like? Whom did she resemble? At first I thought of Catherine Deneuve and I borrowed a few of her films from the video shop. I tried to entice the actress off the screen and capture her in the painting. But my brush drowned in the flowing pictures of the film. 39 An Experimental Translation Piroschka is a Hungarian woman’s name and part of the title of a German novel by Hugo Harting entitled Ich denke oft an Piroschka [I Often Think of Piroschka] (1954) that was also adapted for film. Piroschka is the seventeenyear -old girl with whom the narrator of the novel falls in love during a trip to Hungary. The novel concludes with the narrator looking back on this romance in later life and stating: “Sometimes I think it was nothing—the thing with Piroschka. But in fact it was everything. Everything” (1954: 190). Uncertainty like this is a feature of Tawada’s text. How many words do we fail to find in the Her name is Piroschka because, later on, when I asked her what she would like to be called in a novel, she gave me this name. But maybe I hadn’t heard the name properly because I couldn’t find it in my dictionary of names. PORTRAIT OF A TONGUE 40 dictionary (or the spell checker)? These adjectives all begin with the letter “p” in German, as they do in English. They happen to fall within the same “chapter” of the dictionary, but they are, of course, binary opposites. * * * When the narrator states that she began meeting P on a daily basis, does...