Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue

Yoko Tawada

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780776621272
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Yoko Tawada's Portraitof a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybridtext, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, andscholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by YokoTawada entitled ' Portrait of a Tongue '[' Porträt einer Zunge ', 2002]. YokoTawada is a native speaker of Japanese who learned German as an adult.

Portrait of a Tongue is a portrait of a German woman—referred to only as P—who has lived in theUnited States for many years and whose German has become inflected by English.The text is the first-person narrator's declaration of love for P and for herlanguage, a 'thinking-out-loud' about language(s), and a self-reflexivecommentary.

Chantal Wright offers a critical response and a new approachto the translation process by interweaving Tawada's text and the translator'sdialogue, creating a side-by-side reading experience that encourages the readerto move seamlessly between the two parts. Chantal Wright's technique modelswhat happens when translators read and responds to calls within TranslationStudies for translators to claim visibility, to practice "thick translation", and to develop their own creative voices. This experimental translationaddresses a readership within the academic disciplines of Translation Studies, Germanic Studies, and related fields.

- This book is published in English.

“Portrait of a Tongue”

by YOKO TAWADA

I remember an essay I wrote as a seven-year-old schoolgirl. The title of the essay was “My Sister.” It consisted of a list of incorrect words that came out of my sister’s mouth. She was only four years old at the time and would say things like “toothbreast” instead of toothbrush, “mother-in-war” instead of mother-in-law, and “washingmean” instead of washing machine. My sister was a fascinating language machine. “I’m happy I have a little sister”— that was the sentence with which I finished my essay.

I had always been more of a writer than a painter, even though I wanted to be an artist. I once tried to paint a picture of a woman; it bore the working title “Portrait of a Lady.”

I had long since moved away from traditional portrait painting, but didn’t yet know what else one could do when one wanted to capture a face.

What did this lady look like? Whom did she resemble? At first I thought of Catherine Deneuve and I borrowed a few of her films from the video shop. I tried to entice the actress off the screen and capture her in the painting. But my brush drowned in the flowing pictures of the film.

Her name is Piroschka because, later on, when I asked her what she would like to be called in a novel, she gave me this name.

But maybe I hadn’t heard the name properly because I couldn’t find it in my dictionary of names.

What am I supposed to do? Maybe I should just say P; P for permanent and provisional, poetic and practical.

When I began meeting P on a daily basis, the resemblance between her and the actress disappeared.

I saw within her face a silken face, a polished face, an illuminated face and many different faces within her face. The more I saw her, the less I was able to say what she really looked like.

* * *

I took a photograph of her standing in front of an Armenian grocer’s. Green lettuce leaves shone in the sunlight, oranges and bananas gleamed, but in the picture P’s face looked completely different from the way she had looked to me.

* * *

I always bought some of the Armenian cracker bread known as ak-mak: a magical name. Through the sound of this name I could see P standing in front of the store much more clearly than in the photo.

* * *

At the time I was spending four months as an artist-in-residence in Massachusetts.

I was happy to be free of Caenis, the faded women’s café in Berlin where I had worked as a waitress five days a week. The women who came to the café were not uninteresting, but their language too often disappointed me. It sounded cold but loud at the same time; bold but without critical edge; cut off from the magical world of material objects; anxiously pompous and possessive.

An old friend of mine worked in Boston as a musician and the other women who worked in the café assumed that I was visiting him. But he wasn’t the reason I had crossed the Atlantic. Our association had come to an end when we had had a serious argument while preparing an installation.

I secretly wished for a new adventure of the senses in the women’s bookshop in Massachusetts whose mysterious website I had seen by chance on the Internet.

It had become impossible for me to fall in love in Berlin. The sentences that sprang into my ears had an immediate cooling effe...