Resisting monolingualism in the creative writing classroom: adapting Yoko Tawada’s ‘surface translation’ and ‘microscopic readings’ of script

Abstract

ABSTRACT With an interplay between Japanese, German, and to a lesser extent, English, Yoko Tawada’s oeuvre defies monolingualism. Her Japanese-English poem ‘Hamlet No See’ uses a staple of English literature, Shakespeare’s ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy as a treatment of the 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. By foregrounding homophony, the poem can be understood on various levels with various meanings by listeners depending on their facilities in the languages involved. In her fiction, Tawada plays with the visual forms of letters of the Roman alphabet, defamiliarising the reader from the sense of their arbitrariness. Sound and script come together in phonics-based transcription software used to input Japanese characters using a QWERTY keyboard, and here, Tawada has said, words become ‘changelings that make shapeshifters of the letters on the page’. Through scripts and sounds and what ‘dances’ between them, translingual writing becomes a kaleidoscope of multidimensional meaning and artful, fruitful uncertainty. This study experiments with Tawada’s keyboard changeling concept, adapting it for use by postsecondary creative writing students, providing them with a deceptively simple introductory practice for resisting the longstanding hegemony of anglophone traditions and forms in creative writing education.