Yoko Tawada Research Articles

EVROCENTRIZAM I RECEPCIJA NEMAČKIH PISACA AZIJSKOG POREKLA U SRBIJI

Eurocentrism is a phenomenon in existence for hundreds of years already, yet it has become a subject of criticism only recently, mostly in context of orientalism and postcolonial studies. The aims of this paper are following: 1) to determine if works of German authors with Asian background display elements of eurocentrism; 2) to determine to which extent is Serbia eurocentric in its reception of those works. Based on an overview of literature (in May 2024) and applying the methods of classification, description and analysis, the scope of their reception in Serbia has been determined, as well as the common denominators in text choice. The preliminary results have shown that the reception of the German authors with Asian background is mostly scarce: only few translations and original works are available (four of sixteen authors both in German and in Serbian, two in Serbian, and two in German only) and scholarly papers on their texts are almost non-existеnt. The content of the chosen works is frequently political – autobiographical novels help readers to get familiar with their life stories in context of challenging political circumstances in their countries of origin, maintaining the negative notion of the East and thus contributing to eurocentric point of view. The other group of authors write against eurocentrism, and several of their books are available in Serbia: a fairy tale book by Schami (German), a novel on Dschinghis Khan by Galsan and works by Yoko Tawada (Serbian). Although the preliminary research on the reception of migration literature in Serbia is far from complete, it mirrors both tendencies in German-Asian literature: validation and criticism of eurocentrism. In conclusion, we should read, translate and discuss more of their books, in order to overcome the dark side of eurocentrism, and to contribute to building a global world based on mutual understanding, respect and trust, and not on hegemony.

The Gaze and Metamorphosis：Yoko Tawada’s “<i>Missing Heels.</i>”

Yoko Tawada made her debut in Germany before Japan, but her first work of fiction published in Japan was “<i>Missing Heels</i>.” This novel has been read as a depiction of a person’s encounter with a foreign country. Based on previous studies, this paper examines the anxiety expressed by the protagonist as a foreigner, caught between two communities, old and new, culturally and linguistically, in relation to the violence inherent in the intersection of looking and being looked at. Specifically, we will look at how the gaze of “I” and the gaze of the people of the town are represented as the protagonist come to be placed in a place where the gaze of “seeing” and “being seen” intersect. We will then look at how the violence that the gaze contains, which transforms the object to be seen, works on the protagonist’s body and shakes the protagonist’s identity.

이주자로서 동물 쓰기-다와다 요코의 <눈 속의 에튀드>론

이주자로서 동물 쓰기-다와다 요코의 <눈 속의 에튀드>론

PLOT AND COMPOSITION ORGANIZATION OF THE NOVEL "THE EMISSARY" BY MODERN JAPANESE-GERMAN WRITER YOKO TAWADA

This article examines the narrative structure and arrangement of elements in Yoko Tawada's novel, "The Emissary," authored by a contemporary Japanese-German writer. The novel delves into a dystopian future, albeit with a distinct emphasis on exploring the human experiences within this setting rather than solely dwelling on its dystopian aspects. Through the portrayal of a select group of characters, the novel adeptly captures the essence of humanity amidst the impending apocalypse. Tawada's work serves as a contemplative piece that contemplates the themes of mortality and hope within an uncertain future, skillfully intertwining humor and darkness to create a unique literary experience.

Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture ed. by Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz

Reviewed by: Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture ed. by Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz Ela Gezen Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture. Edited by Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. Pp. 354. Hardcover €99.95. ISBN 978-3110778236. Divided into four riveting parts, this co-edited volume in honor of Leslie A. Adelson centers migration, translation, and temporality as key terms emanating from the main areas for her interventions which are also presented as threads that appear in a variety of thematic, disciplinary, and analytical guises. Scholarly contributions are framed by two literary tributes from Yoko Tawada (“Der Name und die Zeit,” The Name and the Time) and Zafer Şenocak (“Ausreisen und Reißaus nehmen,” To Exit or to Escape) who “stand out for their recurring place in her scholarship from the 1990s to the present” (19). Thanks to English translations provided by co-editor Bettina Brandt, these original literary texts are accessible to a broader readership and can therefore be included in a variety of courses and curricula, while also paying homage to Adelson’s own critical contributions as translator (which Deniz Göktürk also takes up in her contribution). The first section, “Reframing Time and Exile,” “take[s] up writing about exile and refuge in different constellations and literary modes” (14) with contributions by Jamie Trnka, Anna M. Parkinson, and Bala Venkat Mani. The ensuing part, titled “Multilingualism, Translation, Transfer,” reflects on linguistic dimensions of translation and multilingualism, featuring chapters by Ulrike Vedder and Erik Porath, John Namjun Kim, Göktürk, and Yuliya Komska. The third section, “Narratological Itineraries,” illustrates literary close readings in a narratological framework consisting of chapters by Claudia Breger, Katrina L. Nousek, and Paul Michael Lützeler. The fourth and final section, “Communities/Constellations on the Aftermath,” where “different constellations of the aftermath of catastrophe and hope are at stake” (17), comprises chapters by Barbara Mennel, Brett de Bary, Gizem Arslan, and Damani J. Partridge. Apart from thematic and/or methodological intersections within each section, the co-editors illustrate further connections between contributions across these four sections, foregrounding the “presence of ‘migration’” (11) in particular. “Tales that touch are . . . something being explored with the tools of literary and interdisciplinary cultural scholarship” (5), as co-editors Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz underline in their introduction. They further emphasize as commonality across all contributions the disciplinary expansion of German Studies in transnational, multilingual, and intermedial terms in their exploration of touching tales (which is highlighted in the title, in addition to the key terms included in the subtitle). This conceptual tool and mode of inquiry is characterized by its openness in resisting restrictive binaries, categorizations, and essentializations including singular national frameworks, instead shifting the attention to the exploration of the “cultural labor [End Page 338] [texts] . . . perform” (Adelson cited on p. 3). As readers, we are not only given the opportunity to re-engage and re-examine Adelson’s signature concepts including touching tales, future sense, and the riddle of referentiality, but also to discover new “touches,” proximities, and modes of contact this volume engenders: from Chilean writer Carlos Cerda and his exile in the GDR (Trnka) to German-Jewish writer Hans Keilson’s publication history (Parkinson) and Anita Desai’s novel of refuge (Mani); Uljana Wolf’s poetic insights on Bertha Pappenheim (Vedder and Porath); betweenness and lines of literary affiliation in Yoko Tawada (Kim, de Bary); Saša Stanišić’s exploration of fabulation and the significance of intermedial archives (Nousek and Breger); the relationship between theory, the everyday, and artistic practice in Irene von Alberti’s essay film (Mennel); José F.A. Oliver’s intertextual tributes to Rose Ausländer and Paul Celan (Arslan); intertexts in Peter Schneider’s literary engagement with the student movement (Lützeler); translation and multilingualism in Şenocak’s recent Turkish-language novels (Göktürk); multilingual archives in connection to H. A. Rey’s line drawings (Komska); and anthropological (re)considerations of touch to comprehend relatable experiences (Partridge). Not only do we encounter different disciplines ranging from Film Studies, German Studies...

“No More Translations”: Uncounting Languages in Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear

AbstractFollowing recent suggestions that multilingual narratives be studied for their narratological features, this essay reads Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2011) as one instance where narratological features are refashioned to allegorize postmonolingual translation. In lieu of relying on narrative perspectival shifts, the novel merges the voices of its animal and human characters. Examining the consequent deconstruction of numerous binaries—animal/human, speech/writing, past/present—the essay tracks the novel's disarticulation of countable languages as they have been imagined in biological, phonocentric, and genealogical terms. The uncounting of languages alongside the novel's rethinking of maternity enables a reading of Memoirs as an antinarrative that counters the linguistic family romance (as articulated by Yasemin Yildiz) encapsulated by the trope of the mother tongue. A narratological reading of Memoirs reveals the structure through which monolingualism is undermined and the emergence of a postmonolingual subject made possible.

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

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.

Three Streets by Yoko Tawada

Reviewed by: Three Streets by Yoko Tawada Kevin Canfield Yoko Tawada Three Streets Trans. Margaret Mitsutani. New York. New Directions. 2022. 64 pages. IN "MAJAKOWSKIRING," the second story in Yoko Tawada's Three Streets, an unnamed narrator encounters an undead writer. Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, but in contemporary Berlin, on a street that bears his name, the Russian poet—or perhaps his ghost—is having his say on matters great and small. "A moment ago, he'd been talking about lost love and pineapples," the narrator notes, "and now he was going on about 'terrible times' and politics." This might seem like a bizarre cameo appearance, but within the context of this slender, captivating book, it's perfectly reasonable. Tawada, whose novel The Emissary won the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, writes a singular, uncanny brand of fiction. In Three Streets, women, men and human-adjacent beings land in [End Page 60] slow-simmering metaphysical adventures. Her characters face predicaments and puzzles that present the reader with interesting new ways to think about language, inspiration, history, and chance. Each of the book's three stories is set in Berlin, where the author, who was born in Tokyo, now lives. Each takes its title from a street named for a dead artist. Each features a nameless narrator. In "Kollwitz Strasse," our narrator is in an expensive grocery store filled with affluent young families when a "ghost-child" materializes and drags her to the candy aisle. The young specter uses antiquated words and seems unfamiliar with post–World War II products. The narrator, noting that this is plainly "not a child of this age," is reminded of Käthe Kollwitz; the artist's black-and-white prints depicted Germans who, like Kollwitz herself, lost nearly everything during the world wars. Outside, the narrator sees a city with no discernible colors. Has she become a figure in a Kollwitz etching? Like Tawada's other stories, this one doesn't spotlight a single, easy meaning, though it seems clear that she's remarking on complacent twenty-first-century consumerism, the transformative power of art, and the wounds of war. "Pushkin Allee" opens with the narrator disembarking from a subway, only to see that her "body had shrunk to the size of a child's" (like many strange developments in these dreamlike stories, this happens without warning or explanation). She spots a girl on a bike, which evokes vivid recollections of her own childhood. For a moment, it's the 1960s, and a Japanese TV broadcaster is talking about the anniversary of the end of Second World War. This leads to dark musings about secret police and blood-drenched borderlands. In an open field, which she imagines might've once been the site of carnage, people practice yoga. Her walk through the present-day city becomes a reflection on Cold War Berlin, occupying armies, the plight of innocents during periods of deadly strife, and the ways in which nations confront, or flee from, the past's harsh truths. "Majakowskiring" is just as thought-provoking, if even less straightforward than the other two tales. Haunted by the doomed Mayakovsky, the story centers on another discombobulating walk through a Berlin that may have "slipped back in time." She watches an antinuke march, notes that today's clouds "all have human faces," sees that Mayakovsky appears robust—and quite talkative. What follows is an oblique rumination on randomness, political resistance, and language. Apropos of nothing specific, the narrator laments that she rarely hears "words like 'imagination' or 'creativity' anymore." Tawada herself would never say so, but few writers embody these words better than her. "The mystery of what it means to be human"—this phrase, which pops up early in "Kollwitz Strasse," is an apt description of what Tawada aims to explore in these stories. From one moment to the next, her narratives can be mystifying. In time, though, they cohere into engrossing meditations on historical memory and the oft-baffling nature of life in this century. Kevin Canfield New York Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Jenseits von Textbeziehungen. Paul Celan bei Yoko Tawada

This article aims at highlighting the metatextual relationships between the works of Yoko Tawada and Paul Celan. The analysis concentrates on Das Tor des Übersetzers oder Celan liest Japanisch and Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel and is carried out in the light of transtextual practices, starting from theoretical premises related to the act of reading (symptomatic reading – surface reading) and including the dimension of transculturality. The encounter between Tawada and Celan generates a multi-faceted textual space, in which texts from different cultures, having the German language as a common denominator, enter into dialogue with each other.

Child Minds at the End of the World

AbstractThis article focuses on the evocation of children’s experiences in fiction that engages with postapocalyptic scenarios. It examines three contemporary novels from profoundly different geographic contexts—Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna, and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness—that evoke a child’s experience of societal collapse in the wake of a catastrophic event. Diverse meanings come to the fore as these novels outline, through child focalization, the relevance of bodily experience, materiality, and reenchantment vis-à-vis the climate crisis and its uncertainties. This discussion shows how formal choices in climate fiction are instrumental in creating an affective trajectory that complicates adult readers’ perception of our collective future. These close readings stage an encounter between the fields of ecocriticism and childhood studies that speaks to the significance of the figure of the child in the environmental humanities: even in literature by and for adults, the integration of children’s perspectives on the end of the world performs important cultural work by questioning and decentering an understanding of the ecological crisis shaped exclusively by the adult (and adultist) anxieties of parenthood.

Writing Animality in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Yoko Tawada, an author writing in both Japanese and German, is what critics call an exophonic writer, that is, a writer who uses a language other than one’s mother tongue for creative purposes. Writing from a foreign point of view is part of Tawada’s interest in acquiring perceptions of otherness both linguistically and culturally. We might apply Tawada’s exophonic writing when entering animal worlds by creating what Frederike Middelhoff terms ‘literary auto-zoographies’. Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear contains three generations of polar bear narratives: two circus performers and one zoo inhabitant. The text takes a postmodern metafictional approach to problems that arise in speaking for the animal other, a subject under much discussion in Animal Studies scholarship today. My article examines each of the three characters and their corresponding narrative modes. First, the grandmother polar bear writes a first-person autobiography of her life as a performer; in doing so, Tawada combines fiction and nonfiction to deconstruct the bear character’s identity thus resulting in what might be called a more authentic animal autobiography. Second, the article focuses on Tawada’s fascination with translation through the human-animal shared spaces between Tosca (the daughter of the unnamed grandmother polar bear character) and her human trainer. Lastly, the article examines the grandson, Knut, as an example of the current humanimal subject of ecopoetics with an emphasis on Knut as an environmental figure.

Queer Desires and Sugary Kisses: The Sweetness of Interspecies Encounters in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear

ABSTRACT This article explores the prismatic possibilities for interspecies pleasures, bodily fluidity, and intimacies that disrupt speciesist, heterosexist, and repronormative paradigms in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Through the lens of sweetness as an aesthetic, affective, material, and sensory quality, I interrogate modes of human-animal kinship that are predicated on sensorial pleasure, while remaining attuned to the knotty biopolitical entanglements of tenderness, mastery, and commodification underpinning the sweetened human-animal encounter in late capitalism.This paves the way for a literary animality that is as attuned to queertemporalities, cross-species erotics, and speculative futures of multispeciesbecoming, as it is to deep-temporal issues of climate change and extinction.

Sprachabenteuer: Yoko Tawadas exophone Erkundungen des Deutschen

Adventures in Language: Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Explorations of German. Yoko Tawada (1960) is for good reason one of the prime examples for contemporary German exophonic literature. She is a very successful writer in Japanese and in German and provides in her Germanophone writings an ethnography of the German worldview, as Wilhelm von Humboldt famously called languages, or of the German language-mindset. This article focuses on her 2010 poetry volume Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik (‘Adventures of German Grammar’) to demonstrate how exophonia can allow us to develop an acute awareness of the ways in which language structures shape our patterns of thinking. Coming from a very differently organised language, Japanese, Tawada comments in playful ways on the implications of German, and compares it translinguistically with Japanese. Looking at German from an outside position enables her to be very creative and to make Germans discover their language with new eyes. Translingual writing, even though also present in a real mixing of languages in Tawada, appears here as a way to understand how much our ideas are shaped by our linguistic structures, and that there are alternative worldviews. It thus contributes greatly to a relativisation of one’s own perspective and helps to open up to difference and creativity.

Poetische Alterität als Interkulturalität auslösendes Element am Beispiel von Yoko Tawadas Werk Talisman

Im Gegensatz zu der pauschalen Annahme, interkulturelle Literatur sei eine Literatur, die von Schriftstellern betrieben bzw. erzeugt wird, welche einem anderen Sprach-, und somit Kulturraum als die entstammen, erstrebt dieser Beitrag eine klarere Definition. Es wird versucht, festzustellen, was ein literarisches Produkt zu einem interkulturellen Werk macht und welche Aspekte ihm zugrunde liegen. Wenn erst einmal eine solche Definition festgelegt wird, geht der Beitrag zu dem der Alterität über. Indem die Alterität als das Fremde oder das Andere konstatiert wird, wird ihr Bezug auf die Literatur erleuchtet und dadurch gelangt der Beitrag zu einer spezifischeren Alterität, und zwar zum Poetischen in ihr. Darunter versteht dieser Beitrag, dass der literarische Text zwar an sich auch ein Text ist, jedoch einer, der durch seine Andersheit konstituiert wird. Denn er weicht durch Benutzung verschiedener Mittel vom normalen Sprachgebrauch ab. Auf dieser theoretischen Grundlage basiert dann die Analyse des Werkes Talisman der japanischen Autorin Yoko Tawada. Durch eine Mehrzahl an Beispielen werden das interkulturelle Element und die poetische Alterität in diesem Werk herausgearbeitet. Interessant wird hierbei, wie auf die Eigenheiten der deutschen Sprache vom Standpunkt einer Fremden aufmerksam gemacht wird. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt dann dadurch, wie das als interkulturell zu bezeichnende Werk das Eigene beleuchtet und dafür sorgt, dass es besser verstanden wird. Das ermöglicht die Desautomatisierung der Wahrnehmung. Das bis dahin Übliche und Gewöhnliche wird entfremdet, was dazu führt, dass es bewusster wahrgenommen wird. Der Beitrag kommt neben dieser Schlussfolgerung auch zu einer weiteren, dass man durch dieses Verständnis nämlich auch das Andere besser kennenlernt und wahrnimmt.

From “Purpurwort” to Forgiveness: A Tawadian Translation of Celan's “Psalm”

Yoko Tawada's theory of translation positions the translator at a significant distance, both spatially and temporally, from the original text and its context. This essay offers a “Tawadian” translation of Paul Celan's poem “Psalm,” particularly the neologisms in the final stanza, into Chinese characters. In particular, the translation of “Purpurwort” as “yurusu,” a character that consists of the signs for “purple” and “word” but has the meaning of “forgiveness, amnesty, pardon,” brings forth the idea of “forgiveness” that may appear irrelevant to the original text. Drawing from Derrida's interpretation of The Merchant of Venice in “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” this paper relates “impossible translation” to “impossible forgiveness,” arguing that an “irrelevant” translation could shed a new light on the concept of forgiveness, and in doing so offers a dialogical response to Celan's original text.

Tracing the Continual Present: Yoko Tawada and Vilém Flusser1

Contemporary German‐Japanese author Yoko Tawada and Czech‐born, German‐speaking media theorist Vilém Flusser constitute an unlikely pair for analysis. Yet, both have produced multilingual oeuvres resistant to systematization and intensely preoccupied with the medium of writing. In her fiction‐essay “An der Spree” from the 2007 collection Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte, Tawada cites Flusser's essay “Letters of the Alphabet” from his 1987 collection Does Writing have a Future? Recalling Flusser's depiction of the Latin alphabet's imagistic roots, Tawada rediscovers and retraces written signs (letters, logograms, and numerals) in Berlin. This essay argues for two key critical products of Tawada's contact with Flusser. First, Tawada reveals the Eurocentrism in Flusser's theory of writing and Western media theory more generally. Second, Tawada's narrators' acts of writing and reading produce continual presents, which in turn revise Flusser's linear‐teleological understanding of writing and time, and a common conception of our current age as one of simultaneity.

Ten Years After Fukushima

Author(s): Sun, Elizabeth; Tawada, Yoko | Abstract: This is a translation of Yoko Tawada's Zehn Jahre nach Fukushima, an essay on the archive of memory and nuclear power.

Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde by Caroline Rupprecht

Reviewed by: Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde by Caroline Rupprecht Arina Rotaru Caroline Rupprecht. Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde. Peter Lang, 2020. 259 pp. Paper, $63.95. In her latest foray into postwar and contemporary literary productions, comparatist Caroline Rupprecht chooses the contested culinary metaphor of fusion to characterize desirable forms of contact between Germans and racialized others, especially Asian Germans. The author takes issue in particular with representations of Asians as Semitic, orientalized Jews, a conflation she places at the root of contemporary forms of neofascist violence. Through a “call-and-response” metaphor with roots in “African-American slave songs, Indian kirtans and Jewish liturgical services” (6), which she borrows in turn from Tsitsi Jaji’s work, the author foregrounds a dialogic narrative of generations bound to one another within the German-speaking space. In this space, the generations create “new forms of solidarity,” which Rupprecht finds to be an effective mode of engagement with the emerging discipline of Asian-German studies, beyond the postcolonial studies paradigm current in anglophone contexts (14). Rupprecht pairs authors whom she labels “Asian-Germans” with post-war authors who have situated representations of Asian culture in relation to German history. She constructs the book’s chapters as a sequence of would-be intergenerational exchanges around memory, history, and identity between Yoko Tawada and W. G. Sebald, Pham Thi Hoài and Peter Weiss, and Anna Kim and Joseph Beuys. In addition to discussing canonical names, the book also covers authors less known to the wider public—including Pham, a resident of Berlin, and Kim, who grew up in Vienna and now also lives in Berlin—providing welcome additions to any university curriculum. [End Page 129] The book’s theoretical framework is inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, who developed his dialogic theories to counter Stalinist aggression, as well as by Emmanuel Levinas and French sinologist François Jullien, from whom the author borrows the idea of a Daoist-informed “in-between” space to counter violent assimilation of the Other. Rupprecht might have considered responding as well to the problematic ascription of the in-between space to the migrant figure as subsisting in a vacuum. Rupprecht’s use of scale and topography to comment on sites of memory, in particular when focusing on Sebald and Tawada, represents an original contribution. As Rupprecht demonstrates, Sebald uses the Chinese gendered prop analogy to describe the destruction caused by the Holocaust. According to Rupprecht, Tawada’s spaces transcend national identification and engage with subjects that operate outside the human-centered Western philosophical model. Whereas Weiss uses Vietnam as an analogy for German history, Pham tells stories of contemporary Hanoi from the perspective of a male narrator in order to reflect on gender stereotypes and defamiliarize reality through masks. Rupprecht explicitly deconstructs the Eurocentric perspective of postwar German authors against the voices of Asian German writers and their reluctance to “translate” one historical period into another (146). I commend the diversity of the author’s interpretive perspectives: she draws on insights not only from food studies but also from gender and translation studies, memory studies, avant-garde studies, and space studies. The chapters on “discordances,” which bring Beuys and Kim together, highlight several discrepancies in Beuys’s engagement with his National Socialist past and interpret his representation of Eurasia as a substitute for his own fantasies involving expiation of National Socialist guilt. As Rupprecht notes, Eurasia has nothing to do with “Eurasia” as a real space but everything to do with Beuys and Germany. These chapters in particular initiate an important discussion of Beuys’s legacy, which may involve historical whitewashing and instrumentalization of the East–West dialogue. The book is in some respects wanting in its rather marginal references to the avant-garde itself, for instance to the primitiveness of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and the engagement with Fluxus of Beuys and Tawada, the impact of surrealism on Weiss, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s impact on Pham. Rupprecht supplements the book’s fragmented treatment of the avant-garde with additional critical perspectives that resist the embrace of a happy fusion through “new encounters,” drawing [End Page...

Translingual Affairs of World Literature

Abstract This essay explores a number of texts of the exophonic, or non-native literary production, respectively in Italian and German, of translingual authors Jhumpa Lahiri and Yoko Tawada. While the paper looks at how their dominant languages, respectively English and Japanese, continue to play a role in these writers’ non-native production, it focuses on the different approaches the two authors adopt to translingualism and the “linguistic family romance” metaphor, which they equally employ in highly imaginative ways in order to address both their condition of rootlessness and their attitudes to the notion of “mother tongue.” The essay argues that while Lahiri seems to remain a writer that does not contaminate languages (she is a writer in English, a writer in Italian, and a translator of Italian literature into English), Tawada brings German and Japanese together and dwells on the space of contamination between them in her production in German (and Japanese).

Translation as Defamiliarization: Translating Tawada Yōko’s Wordplay

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.