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

Introduction (I) Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Texts

I should write down things whose importance isn’t yet obvious. The most important things often occur in isolation, they are peculiar and very small. YOKO TAWADA, “Portrait of a Tongue” In 2003, when I began my doctoral research on Yoko Tawada, there was little published scholarly discussion of her work. Master’s and doctoral theses were the most comprehensive secondary sources at that time,1 an indication of the then emerging status of this Japanese-German writer as a subject of academic enquiry. An English-language anthology of Tawada’s texts, Where Europe Begins (2002a), translated from the German and the Japanese by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, had just been brought out by American publisher New Directions; the only other Tawada title available in English was The Bridegroom Was a Dog, a collection of stories translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.2 Since 2003 Yoko Tawada has become the focus of two edited volumes dedicated solely to her work. Germanists and Japanologists collaborated on the first of these, a book entitled Voices from Everywhere, edited by Douglas Slaymaker INTRODUCTION (I) Yoko tawada’s exophonic texts PORTRAIT OF A TONGUE 2 (2007a). A German-language volume entitled Yoko Tawada: Poetik der Transformation, edited by Christine Ivanovic, became available in 2010. New Directions followed up its 2002 anthology with a collection of Japanese-language stories, Facing the Bridge (2007), translated by Margaret Mitsutani, and the German-language novella The Naked Eye (2009), translated by Susan Bernofsky.3 Yoko Tawada is an example of a type of writer I will label “exophonic .”4 Exophony describes the phenomenon where a writer adopts a literary language other than his or her mother tongue, entirely replacing or complementing his or her native language as a vehicle of literary expression. The adopted language is typically acquired as an adult; exophonic writers are not bilingual in the sense that they grew up speaking two languages, and indeed do not necessarily achieve the type of spoken fluency associated with the term “bilingualism.” Exophony in post-war Germany has generational nuances: its emergence as a phenomenon goes hand in hand with the Wirtschaftswunder or economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s that brought thousands of foreign guest workers to the Federal Republic. From among the ranks of these Gastarbeiter emerged a number of writers, some of whom organized themselves into a collective known as PoLiKunst, which adopted German as its official language of literary expression. Franco Biondi, Carmine (Gino) Chiellino and Rafik Schami were among the writers who belonged to this collective. This first generation of post-war exophonic writers typically came from Italy, Turkey and a variety of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Their preoccupations were socio-political: guest workers in Germany were disenfranchised; Germany’s de facto status as an immigrant country had not yet been acknowledged. Yoko Tawada belongs to a second, entirely distinct generation of exophonic writers whose migrational histories are more 3 Introduction: Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Texts individual and who do not bear the “burdens of representation” (Cheesman 2006:471) with which German-Turkish writers, for example, are confronted.5 Tawada, who was born in Japan in 1960, studied literature at Waseda University in Tokyo and made her first trip to Europe with the Trans-Siberian Railway at the age of nineteen. In 1982 she moved to Hamburg and now lives in Berlin. Her PhD thesis, written in Germany, was published under the title Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur [Toys and Linguistic Magic in European Literature] (2000). A glance at Tawada’s website (yokotawada.de), confirms her as an inveterate traveller who has completed over eight hundred readings across the globe since 1987. She is frequently invited to the United States and has held writer-in-residence positions at MIT, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford and Cornell. Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, but does not selftranslate into German.6 Her German-language publications cover the spectrum of literary genres from the novella to the poem, but the essay that populates her collections Talisman (1996a) and Überseezungen (2002b) is perhaps her most characteristic mode of literary expression. Tawada has been awarded numerous literary prizes in both Japan and Germany, including, in 1996, the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preis. The Chamisso prizes are given annually to writers whose mother tongues or cultural backgrounds are not German; the existence of these prizes reflects the...