Translation as Defamiliarization: Translating Tawada Yōko’s Wordplay

Shani Tobias

doi:10.5195/jll.2020.119

Abstract

Keijirō Suga coins the term “translational poetics” to describe the essential similarities between literary translation and creative writing, since both perform a linguistic revolution or transformation. Japanese-German writer, Yoko Tawada, exhibits a literary style that exemplifies this transformative and interactive potential of language, deriving from her self-described existence in the “poetic ravine” or border zone between languages and identities. Many of the characters in her works are also travelers and lack a sense of national identity or most-comfortable language. Tawada forces her readers to question their belief in the naturalness of their native language through a defamiliarizing style that often involves wordplay, such as humorously drawing attention to the literal meaning behind commonly-used idioms and proverbs. This paper focusses on an excerpt from Yoko Tawada’s 2002 work Yōgisha no yakōressha, “To Zagreb”, and its English translation by Margaret Mitsutani, considering how the defamiliarizing effects of Tawada’s wordplay can be conveyed to an English audience. While double meanings and puns are inevitably achieved differently in the two languages, various translation strategies may create similar effects, such as making Japanese and English creatively interact, or exploiting the inherent possibilities of wordplay in English.

Highlights

200 | Japanese Language and Literature nature of translation as interpretation.[7]
11 Formal interpretants are structural and include the editing involved in choosing the particular version of a source text to translate, and creating paratexts for translation; the concept of equivalence adopted by the translator; and the style, which is dependent on the genre or discourse
Chantal Wright, who published an experimental translation into English of a German prose text by Tawada Yōko, states in her introduction that “there is no guarantee that the range of effects I intend and the range of effects the reader finds in the translation will coincide, but I can attempt to create a text in which a plurality of effects are in play.”[19]. Such an approach would encourage source text (ST) and target text (TT) readers to go through similar cognitive processes, such as exploring multiple meanings in response to an ambiguity, novel metaphor, or defamiliarized use of language

Summary

Introduction

200 | Japanese Language and Literature nature of translation as interpretation.[7]. He overturns the commonly-held assumption that translation is about transferring an “invariant” from source to target, maintaining that any and all correspondences between source and target are shaped by the interpretation of the translator at every stage. 8 he says that “because translation performs an interpretation, it can never be literal, only figurative, or more precisely inscriptive of effects that work only in the translating language and culture.”[9]. On many occasions in this work, Tawada uses Japanese idioms and proverbs in defamiliarizing ways to make readers think about the literal meaning behind the figurative expressions they use on a daily basis.

Results

Conclusion