ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, a surge in translation studies and the ongoing elaboration of translation theory have vibrantly reshaped scholarship in more traditional areas of literature, language, and culture. Destabilizing the hierarchized distinction between “original” and “translation” has proven an apt means for dismantling power relations inherent in Eurocentric notions of modernity, bringing rich new vistas into view. Studies of translation have greatly added to the complexity and rigor with which critical work on the nation, nationalism, colonialism, and racism may be conducted. For an emerging global studies, they have also enabled more nuanced conceptualizations of diasporic and creolized subjectivities and texts. Yet often enough, a new valorization of translation and celebration of lin-
guistic hybridity in North American literary studies has been accompanied by a puzzling relapse into reliance on the same notions of linguistic borders and territorialized language and cultural unities that have been made obsolete by recent translation studies. A sophisticated argument for the teaching of world literature in translation unhesitatingly asserts, for example, that a text translated from another language can serve as a “window on the world,” and that such texts deserve close reading because “world literature is constituted differently in different cultures,” and “much can be learned from close attention to the working of a given cultural system” (Damrosch 2003: 26). The lapse, here, back into the commonsensical assumption of isomorphism among text, language, culture, and geography offers surprising evidence of the continued resilience of Roman Jakobson’s notion of “translation proper,” a privileging of “inter-lingual” translation subjected to extended critique in Naoki Sakai’s formidable study, Translation and Subjectivity (Sakai 1997). Jakobson’s awarding of recognition, from among the three classes of intralingual, inter-semiotic,
and inter-lingual translation (“the interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language”), to inter-lingual translation alone as “translation proper” assumes the existence of distinguishable borders between one language and “some other language” (Jakobson 1971: 261). Yet, as Sakai argues, such comparison of “two” languages cannot take place without the process of translation itself, which precedes, rather than follows, our being able to distinguish between them. Like the movement of a pencil tracing a line, or border, on a page of paper, translation is precisely the movement of creating the border, and must not be confused with the static (and arbitrary) representation of difference that is its after-effect. Only under the specific schema of translation whose historical emergence was co-terminous with that of modern nationalism, Sakai notes, do we “displace translation with the representation of translation.” This displacement “also enables the representation of ethnic or national subjects” – for by erasing the process of translation and the presence of “the translator who is always in-between,” the representation of translation is made to “discriminatorily posit one language unity against another (and one ‘cultural’ unity against another)” (Sakai 1997: 15). Its continued haunting by the notion of “translation proper” offers striking
evidence that what is at stake in contemporary translation studies is far more than the extension of a linguistic metaphor, as some would describe it. That the elaboration of the generative possibilities of translation can easily falter, retracing subjective and territorial boundaries naturalized through modernity’s violence, only attests to the durability of the modern representation of translation as it has been implicated in maintaining the division into geopolitical units of the modern (colonial and post-colonial) world. As Sakai and Solomon have asserted, translation should be understood as a “subjective technology,” which “actually produces differentially coded subjects, typically national ones” (Sakai and Solomon 2006: 27). Translation’s close association with the subjective technology of the national, moreover, may explain why the study of translation and gender has tended to become elided, or underrepresented, in translation studies, as we shall discuss below. In the following pages I will examine some of these issues in the reception of the highly acclaimed, “boundary-crossing” writer of German and Japanese texts, Tawada Yôko (b. 1960). By reading Tawada’s work in relation to a little noticed linking of translation and gender in Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim (2000), I suggest how Tawada’s texts themselves may offer alternative perspectives.
