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ABSTRACT
Translation studies and literary studies more broadly are increasingly informed by materialities-based approaches, yet remain heavily invested in hermeneutic sense. This essay critiques the recalcitrant metaphorization to which the term translation remains subjected. In its place, it offers readings of those textual elements not considered to be vehicles of meaning: individual written signs read intermedially (as letters, logograms, numbers, images, objects, bodies) and misread paragrammatically, disrupting the referential grammar of a language. These readings do not instrumentalize textual surfaces to reach the depth of meaning, but can address materiality in its own right. This in turn yields modes of reading the illegible in contexts of translation, readings that hinge on the immediacy of contact and encounter with purportedly illegible subjects. This essay thus offers to translation studies some key analytical tools for addressing the medial, material and bodily processes that underpin textual production.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Tyler Whitney, Martha Sprigge and Stefania Lucamente for their generous and detailed feedback on earlier versions of this essay. The greatest thanks goes to Leslie A. Adelson. Without her invaluable feedback, support and scholarship, this essay would never have been written.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Gizem Arslan is Lecturer in German at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, USA), publishes primarily on migration studies and translation studies. Her recent publications include contributions to fora on migration studies in German Quarterly and the DDGC Blog, as well as the articles “Yoko Tawada Writes Ernst Jandl” (in Slaymaker, editor, Tawada Yoko: Voices from Everywhere, forthcoming from Lexington Books, 2019) and “Animated Exchange” on Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s translational strategies (The Global South, 2014). She is currently finishing her book project titled Metamorphoses of the Letter: From the Turkish Alphabet Reform to Fukushima.
Notes
1 Except where otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author.
2 For a broad range of essays on the subject, see Saussy Citation2006. For an incisive evaluation of these assimilatory tendencies from a comparative literary perspective, see Melas Citation2007. For critiques of Anglo-American biases in translation, world literature, and publishing, see Lennon Citation2010; Apter Citation2013 and Walkowitz Citation2015.
3 In his 1990 foreword to the English translation of Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900), David Wellbery critiques Anglo-American and German literary scholars alike for their presupposition that hermeneutic sense as they know it remains intact, and argues that “as long as we continue to operate within the hermeneutic paradigm we are paying homage to a form of language processing long since deceased” (Citation1990, xi). The hermeneutic paradigm has proved tenacious nonetheless, no doubt owing to its deep roots in both scholarly contexts. This essay does not intend to disavow meaning or interpretation altogether, but to supplement meaning-based approaches with readings of literary strategies that cannot be addressed with the hermeneutic arsenal alone. New materialisms seek “to counter the figuration of matter as an agent only by virtue of its receptivity to human agency” (Frost Citation2011, 73). Samantha Frost distinguishes new materialisms from Cartesian accounts of matter (matter as essentially inert) and historical materialism (matter as transformed and given agency by humans’ labor and cultural practices). In the readings advanced in this essay, written material is transformed by the agency of a culturally situated reader. Written material here is neither inert as in the Cartesian account nor accorded as much agency as in the new materialist account. Rather, it possesses a protean potentiality realized in transformative acts of the reader and is thus more closely allied to the historical materialist account.
4 Scott correctly observes that translation cannot be reduced to the provision of a source text for an audience that might not otherwise have access to it, but rather to initiate a dialogue, to reveal “the multilingualism already in langage,” to produce vivid performances that add a third dimension to two-dimensional text, and to release the play between sounds and senses (Citation2012, 65, 73). This study too conceives of translation as a performative and productive activity based on associative play and keen attention to the phenomenology of reading as transformative activity. In distinction from Scott’s calligraphic overwritings of texts as translative performance and his emphasis on acoustic phenomena—particularly in poetry—, this study identifies material transformation as a potential that inheres in purportedly monomedial texts. It therefore disagrees with Scott’s assertion that “[p]rinted text alone is inadequate to translation’s text-genetic and cross-lingual impulses” (Citation2012, 70).
5 The term Schriftbildlichkeit [notational iconicity] is of critical significance here. It rejects an understanding of writing as purely representational. Instead, the dimensions of writing as icon, its operative functions (calculation, notation) and object are brought to the fore. The history of writing systems, calculation, oral culture, and book culture also reveal that writing is intermedial: element of sound transcription, numeral, musical notation, and object. See Krämer and Bredekamp Citation2003; Koch and Krämer Citation1997; Krämer Citation2003; Kittler Citation2006.
6 Both David Bellos and Anne E. B. Coldiron rightly point out that not all transformation is translation (Bellos Citation2011, 312; Coldiron Citation2016, 99). This essay also holds that proliferating uses of “translation” often lack conceptual rigor and dilute the term. The relevance and explicatory force of the terms “form” and “transformation” are discussed in the section on Walter Benjamin and form.
7 The German original of the 2008 novel Schwager in Bordeaux [Brother-in-law in Bordeaux] includes logogram-rubrics printed in blue. The same rubrics are printed in the Japanese translation, but in mirror image. Yoko Tawada observes that this manipulation makes the logograms appear “uncanny” [unheimlich] (Tawada, pers. comm., March 2009).
8 Dworkin opposes “misreading” to “modernism’s hermeneutic concern for ‘interpretation’” (Citation2003, xx).
9 The original German title begins with “The Gate of the Translator” and offers “Celan Reads Japanese” as an alternative. Both the visual form of the Sino-Japanese logogram for “gate” and the semantic field associated with the word are important for Tawada’s analysis in this essay.
10 Admittedly, Lennon disagrees with Venuti on a key premise. Venuti was instrumental in moving translation studies from a secondary practice to a primary scholarly discipline. However, Lennon argues that this very move “erased precisely the theoretical advantage of that practice: its deixis with respect to theories of literary theory itself as something other than (or in addition to, or more than) descriptive science.” (Lennon Citation2010, 6)
11 Chantal Wright joins Andrea Krauss in suggesting that Tawada cultivates the “metonymic gap,” which is common in postcolonial texts and involves inserting unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language into a text written in the dominant colonial language, with the aim of resisting interpretation, presenting a marginal language as cosmopolitan, and claiming space for the marginal language. This essay agrees that Tawada engages in a similar form of subtle abrogation, but that her writing typically relies on a potentiality that does not rely on the real presence of unglossed words, instead seeking to make any language alien to itself (Tawada and Wright Citation2013, 13).
12 A radical is “[a]ny of the set of basic Chinese characters which, sometimes in a modified form, constitute semantically or functionally significant elements in the composition of other characters, and are used as a means of ordering and classifying characters in dictionaries” (“Radical, adj. and n.” Citation2016)
13 The purported transparency of written signs recalls two prevalent—though increasingly challenged—biases in humanistic inquiry. First, in literary studies broadly, written signs have been commonly treated as transparent elements of writing that dissolve the moment they are deciphered and give way to the depth of meaning. Second, in translation studies, textual transparency aligns with the criteria of fluency, familiarity, and invisibility that Venuti criticizes. In Schwager, Tawada evokes the theme and motif of transparency—in general and textual transparency more particularly—in order to undermine it.
14 Intermediality of written signs has not yet made its way into existing typologies of intermediality, which address larger semiotic units instead of individual written signs, such as literary, artistic or filmic works or movements (e.g. Fluxus, French New Wave) or media more broadly (e.g. film, photography, music). For a more detailed discussion of the term “potential intermediality” as it applies to written signs, see Gizem Arslan’s book project in progress, Metamorphoses of the Letter: From the Turkish Alphabet Reform to Fukushima. “Potential intermediality” as it relates to written signs is defined here as “possibilities offered in a literary text for its written elements to be read simultaneously as letters, numbers, logograms, and punctuation, even if the text itself appears monomedial.”
15 In her astute analysis, Miho Matsunaga suggests that Tawada’s translational writing involves “reformulation” [Umdichtung] and “transformation” [Transformation]. However, she does not theorize “form” and “transformation” further (Matsunaga Citation2002, 541).
16 This is closely related to Walter Benjamin’s emphasis on translatability as structural possibility irrespective of whether a text gets translated or not. Samuel Weber insists on the importance of the suffix -ability in his readings of Benjamin, noting that “the processes that these nominalized verbs [translatability, criticizability, etc.] designate are all traditionally considered to be ancillary, secondary, supplementary. To therefore define these processes as quasi-transcendental, structuring possibilities is to shift the emphasis from the ostensibly self-contained work to a relational dynamic that is precisely not self-identical but perpetually in the process of alteration, transformation, becoming-other” (Citation2008, 59).
17 For a critique of proliferating uses of translation in general and a discussion of translation as intercultural communication, see Dizdar Citation2008, esp. 89–90. For critiques of the overuse of the term translation, see Bachmann-Medick Citation2008; Bachmann-Medick Citation2012; Duarte Citation2011.
18 One example Tawada gives is the logogram 聞 [hear], composed of the radicals for “gate” and for “ear” and resembling the picture of an ear pressed against a gate: “Folgt man dem Zeichen, so bedeutet Hören, wie ein Ohr an der Schwelle zu stehen” (Tawada Citation1996b, 128) (“According to this sign, to hear means to stand on the threshold like an ear”, Tawada Citation2013).
19 In the case of the translation essay, these central aspects are messianism and the concept of pure language.
20 Many thanks to Leslie A. Adelson of Cornell University for pointing out Tawada’s insistence on the role of the reader despite and in response to Benjamin’s exclusion of it from his translation essay. On Tawada and reading in this regard, see also Adelson Citation2011.
21 This approach to surface reading, or “reading with the grain,” in Timothy Bewes’s words, can be and has been reproached for its lack of vigilance in the face of texts’ latent content. Bewes readily admits that “it would be more accurate to posit a reading simultaneously with and against the grain,” where thinking arises from “an ‘encounter,’ which forces us to think by its unrecognizability, by its sensory immediacy” (Bewes Citation2010, 25, 14). Bewes’s otherwise trenchant essay reveals its own shortcomings in its textual analyses that insufficiently account for imperialism, colonialism and the performance of race in texts by T.E. Lawrence and Eugene O’Neill. This essay therefore argues for surface reading as a supplementary practice.
22 “Jeder Versuch, den Unterschied zwischen zwei Kulturen zu beschreiben, mißlang mir. Der Unterschied wurde direkt auf meine Haut aufgetragen wie eine fremde Schrift, die ich zwar spüren, aber nicht lesen konnte. Jeder fremde Klang, jeder fremde Blick und jeder fremde Geschmack wirkten unangenehm auf den Körper, so lange, bis der Körper sich veränderte. Die O-Laute zum Beispiel drängten sich zu tief in meine Ohren und die R-Laute kratzten in meinem Hals.” (Tawada Citation1996a, 42) (“Every attempt I made to describe the difference between two cultures failed: this difference was painted on my skin like a foreign script which I could feel but not read. Every foreign sound, every foreign glance, every foreign taste struck my body as disagreeable until my body changed. The Ö sounds, for example, stabbed too deeply into my ears and the R sounds scratched my throat”, Tawada Citation2016.)
23 In the instance cited here, Adelson is referring to the literature of Turkish-German migration, particularly but not exclusively the work of Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Yoko Tawada’s literary production shares common themes, literary strategies, and sensibilities with the literature of Turkish migration, but cannot be counted as part of it. In fact, Adelson indicates elsewhere that Tawada’s output relates “to global phenomena rather than migration debates in Germany in any narrow sense” (Citation2011, 159).
24 In his incisive analysis of Tawada’s ironic play with the personal pronoun “I” and, by extension, first-person writing and the social figure of ethnicity, John Namjun Kim observes a translational moment in which the “I” is inscribed onto a textual surface, turning semantic sense into phenomenal sense (Citation2010, esp. 346).