Surface Translations: Meaning and Difference in Yoko Tawada’s German Prose

Translation as a play of surfaces, as hyperattentiveness to form and literality, lies at the heart of Japanese writer Yoko Tawada’s aesthetic probing of German culture. Tawada, who lives in Germany and writes in both German and Japanese, often uses fictional Japanese narrators to filter the German cultural manifestations they encounter through a pseudo-Japanese perspective back into a strange kind of German, thereby revealing the artificiality of the ways they perceive both German and Japanese culture in her texts. She presents intercultural encounters as translation problems with infinite potential solutions, because she does not regard translation as a means of replicating an original meaning (for example, “Tawada Yōko Does Not Exist”). Rather, she sees it as a way to bring language to life and to call cultural conventions into question. Her translation of the surfaces of language – that is, her focus on letters, sounds, discrepancies between words and images, and on other aspects of linguistic form – ultimately makes both German and Japanese enigmatic, animated, and multivalent. Her approach to translation reworks ideas about the relationship between source and translated language and links her writing to current debates about the cultural dimensions of translation, such as the role of the translator in mediating between cultures. Surface translation as presented in her fiction, essays, and interviews questions the concept of a source, or native, language and, by extension, the distinction between native and foreign culture. The translator plays a central role in this process by attending to the sensual play of aesthetic forms on the body. Tawada’s translating figures gain both strength and pain by focussing on the ways meaning attaches to and detaches from form.

Critics praise Tawada for her creative exploration of language, culture, and (mis)communication. They focus on how her works show heterogeneous identities and new subject positions (Breger; Fischer; Kraenzle; Schestokat) and how she presents being foreign as a process that transforms perceptions and the body (Arens; Ervedosa; Laudenberg; Matsunaga; Weigel). Others address the ways in which she emphasizes the strangeness of language (Esselborn; Ette; Grond; Kloepfer and Matsunaga; Krauß; Mitsutani; Weigel) or how she emphasizes exophony or stepping outside of the mother tongue (Ivanovic; Slaymaker; Suga; Tachibana). Several analyses of Tawada’s work have demonstrated the different ways it criticizes dualistic and Eurocentric thinking about cultural difference (Albrecht; Breger; Fischer; Kersting; Kraenzle; Mejcher-Neef; Wägenbaur; Weigel; Yildiz). Claudia Breger, for instance, refers to postcolonial and feminist theories to show how the pseudo-Japanese perspective of Tawada’s protagonists deconstructs European concepts of Japan and of Europe. Her figures experiment with the ways language affects power relationships and perceptions of the body. Their different poses, according to Breger, subvert the dominance of West over East and male over female (“Meine Herren” 47). Sabine Fischer argues that Tawada expresses the loss of identity in the situation of being foreign as an inability to comprehend meaning. Fischer contends that the foreigner is forced to perceive differently by incorporating the foreign language (79). Andrea Krauß focusses on the decentring effects of Tawada’s childlike narrators, whose misreading of cultural and linguistic conventions produces a multiplicity of perspectives that challenge binary models of cultural difference. Christina Kraenzle centres on travel as a spatial metaphor for the journeys that the “translated self” takes through language in Tawada’s Überseezungen. Although the protagonists in the volume’s different tales cross over geographical boundaries with relative ease, their movement across linguistic borders transforms them physically, for instance, in the exertion they make in speaking a new language and in the ways they view their bodies and identities through the perspective of the new language (6–7). While these studies address the physical and alienating aspects of translation, none of them investigates in detail how translating surface phenomena empowers the translator.

This article builds on the scholarship above by concentrating specifically on the process of hyperliteral or surface translation in Tawada’s writing and on how the translator uses this process as a means of avoiding both assimilation and marginalization, but a means that is never complete. The result renders the “native...