Yoko Tawada Flashcards
Define exophonic literature.
Literature written in a language which is not your mother tongue.
Place names are often exophonic.
It is important to note that exophonic doesn’t entail second language in the sense that a second language is lesser than a mother tongue. This is why the term acquired language is more appropriate.
Tawada emigrated to Hamburg in 1982 to study Germanistik, where she had previously been studying Russian in Tokyo at the Waseda University. Describe this historical context.
This was a period of the Cold War but also its end, in which liberalisation and the network of continental Europe was re-integrated. As such, it was a period of increasing pluralism, demographic diversification and liberal capitalist success simultaneous with the anti-war movement and fears of global annihilation. Tawada has said this period was ripe in observation for her.
Tawada completed her doctorate in Switzerland in 1998. What’s the significance.
She went to Switzerland to continue studying with her mentor, Sigrid Weigel. Weigel introduced Tawada to academic discourse and shaped her understanding of many key figures in the canon of critical theory.
The term “poetische Ethnologie” appears in Tawada’s dissertation, “Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur”. What does it mean?
It paradigmatically captures the essence of much Tawada’s writing. Through a combination of demotic, everyday language, irony, humour and grotesque, Tawada’s language highlights and distorts moments of apperception. Consequently, the individual’s consciousness anchored in their social environment is problematised by bringing attention to surreal details embedded in the process of sensory perception itself.
Compare Das Bad (1989) and Ein Gast (1991).
A good answer must include the following:
- The experience of immigrant women in foreign environments. Both include young Japanese women who move to Germany to work as a translator (Das Bad) or as a journalist (Ein Gast).
- As immigrants in this space, disjuncture in their sensory interpretation of the German social environments underlies much of the drama. Both protagonists become unreliable, as they admit an object or person was not what they though, such as Xander in Das Bad and the book in Ein Gast.
- Depictions of synthesia, especially in relation to consuming books, is an example of the unfiltered, dislocated sense experiences of immigrant women Tawada depicts.
- Linguistic transgression: language as a means of understanding sense experience is constant flux reflective of the immigrant’s status.
- Body and voice are disassociated in both stories. Xander in Das Bad takes the protagonist’s voice; in Ein Gast, the protagonist hears a voice from a book, even when she’s not reading the book, which later becomes a casette.
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Who is Xander in Das Bad?
He is a partner of the protagonist. He appears, at different times, as a photographer and as a German tutor.
He symbolises the negotiated dialectic of identity. In that the protagonist’s identity is transgressed and her attributes as a women are changed by him to better model the ideal of a German woman, Tawada highlights the significance of power in the construction and protean nature of women and their sexuality.
Discuss the symbolism of the ghost in Das Bad.
I love Das Bad!
The ghost is a half-burnt cross-border commuter and broker between life and death, night and day. After a sole has stolen the protagonist’s voice, the ghost forces the translator to work as her typist and she can only resonate with her voice, becoming a “transparenter Sarg.”
This is an example of exophony being used as a literary conceit. Exophony allows Tawada to introduce a multiplicity of cross-cultural voices into the text.
Tawada is also demonstrating the danger of male erosion of female agency by destruction of their ability to communicate.
Delineate the implications of the concept of “transgression” in Tawada’s work.
“Transgression” in Tawada’s work, especially early work, refers to methods in which her narratives attempt to problematise and highlight the artificiality of experience. This is achieved by the interplay of binaries: gender, foreign and native. As such, the constructed ontology of the individual’s relationship to the social realm is revealed.
The three organising principles of the lecture series are: “transgression, translation, transformation”. Which principle undergirds “Wo Europa anfängt”?
Transgression.
The journey of a Japanese lady into Europe through Russian on the Trans Siberian Express questions the validity of geographical/civilisational identity. It is therefore consistent with Tawada’s other works which incorporate the lecturer’s principle of transgression, because cultural and linguistic constructs in relation to place are scrutinised in the text.
What are the functions of fantasy and realism in Tawada’s early texts?
The story world in Tawada’s texts are descriptively scalable, both in terms of the density/paucity of detail observed by the protagonists and the extent to which they are realist or fantastical from page to page.
This reflects Tawada’s interest in transgression: Fantasy dissolves the demarcation between self and the experienced environment, reflecting the artificiality of social categories impressed on the immigrant and their difficulty in internalising them.
“Wie kann man wissen, wo das Ort des fremden Wasse anfängt, wenn die Grenze selbst aus Wasser besteht”.
From which text is this quote?
Wo Europa Anfängt.
When did Tawada first encounter the term exophony and what is its relation to Paul Celan?
Although much of her earlier work can be described as exophonic, it wasn’t until 2002 in Dakar at a conference being hosted by the Goethe Institute. Exophonic literature is concerned with, as a matter of central importance, the relationship between languages which is made self-conscious by writing in a language which is not native.
In “Das Tor des Übersetzens”, published in Talisman, 1996, Tawada discusses the difficulty of translating Paul Celan. Translating Celan, which entails an experience of exophony in that she must learn Japanese, deepened her understanding of Japanese. This happened because she noticed the overlaps between the ideograms and Celan’s meaning. For example, prior to translating Celan, she did not realise that a gate was a fixed ideogramm in Japanese and that other ideogramms contain features of this ideogramm. For example, hearing, borderland and illumination. All of these words, like gate, evoke boundaries. The exophonic experience of translating Celan therefore redefined Tawada’s relation to her own language.
The three organising principles of the lecture series are: “transgression, translation, transformation”. Define each.
Transgression reflects Tawada’s intention to scrutinise the individual’s relationship to society through poetic narratives. These narratives, in which immigrant women are central, reveal the mental construction of the European social realm. In many of these narratives, the protagonist loses something crucial to their power of expression, such as their tongue (Das Bad) or the abiltity to write (Ein Gast). These symbolise the contraction of self.
Translation refers to a group of essays which concern Tawada’s philosophy on translation. This is too big for one card. Crucially, Tawada utilises Walter Bejamin’s theory of translation to treat translation as itself as an artistic process of creation. Adhering to Benjamin’s two principles of “Sprachmagie” and “Dingsprache”, Tawada’s translation attempt to identify fissures, overlaps and idiosyncracies between languages and explode them for literary purposes.
Transformation is a combination of the two concepts. For Tawada, transformation is a central and universal theme uniting western and eastern literature (Opium für Ovid). Transformation can entail a cross-cultural translation of the body itself (Kafka Kaikoku), or erasure of the distinction between human and animal (Leda in Opium für Ovid; arguably the bears in Etüden im Schnee). Transformation can evince a political resonance in Tawada’s work, as Tawada utilises transformation as a method of celebrating “impure” languages that embodies heterogeneity in its own metapmorphosis.
Explain Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation and relate it to Tawada.
Benjamin conceptualised two principles for a translator which he elevated to the status of an artist.
For Benjamin, the translator should be aware not only of the content of a language but also its form. In doing so, the translator will decipher how language itself structures meaing, dissolving the unilateral logic of cause and effect in the act of speech or writing. In other words, this erases the notion that the intention to convey meaning is crucial for communication; the language is itself inherent with meaning - “Sprachmagie”.
The other principle coined by Benjamin is “Dingsprache”: The need for mimesis in language, the observable fact that language must reflect environment, logically demands that empirical environment has minted language. The translator should demonstrate awareness of how the environment is tacitly imbued in communication.
In all three of the principles organising this lecture series, these two principles can be detected, as Tawada is painstakingly aware of how the idiosyncrasies of language in prefiguring interpretation and the presence of the environment in language. Though, obvs, Benjamin’s Übersetzungstheorie is most relevant for Tawada’s writings on translation.
Give Examples of intertextuality in Opium für Ovid: ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen
The title itself and the content makes explicit to Ovid and his Metamorphoses in which transformation, like in much of Tawada’s work, is the leitmotif of the entire work. Tawada’s characters are adapted from the text.
Opium is a reference to the famous quote that “religion is the opium of the masses”.
Kopfkissen is a reference to the Makura no Soshi by the court lady Sei Shonagon. It’s a sociological, literary text (one of the oldest in Japanese literature) detailing the lives of court women in Japan.
What’s the connection between the figure of the flaneur and Opium für Ovid?
The flaneur is the figure of the meandering, city-bound male prominent in (especially French) 19th c. literature. Such men are connected to the city. Opium für Ovid, in that it also a Kopfkissenbuch, feminizes the concept.
Ariadne (chapter 20) is a good example of this as she feels as if she herself were physically interwoven (pun intended) with the city.
What symbolic value does opium have for Tawada?
Good answer must include the following:
- opium as a source of creative writing for historical writers (think Coleridge and De Quincey).
- The opium wars in China, this allusion marks a more overtly political tenor in Tawada’s work. Simulateneously, her works now deal with more generally and more politically with the experience of being/becoming foreign rather than the singular figure of a Japanese woman in Europe/Germany.
Explain the significance of the letter O in Tawada’s oeuvre.
O has an incredible number of symbolic connotations for Tawada. It is a ring and symbolises interconnections between masculinity and femininity and originals and translations. How so?
O corresponds to the ideologram “kuchi” (which resembles a square in Japanese script). Its foundational meaning is opening the mouth, but in combination with other ideograms, kuchi can also mean wound, entry or exit. As such the letter O embodies in itself many threads of Tawada’s creative concerns, such as problematising the connection between writing, sound and the body as well as its transformations as languages and bodies transgresses conceptual borderlines, linguistic, sociopolitical or otherwise. Because of the word Kuchi’s link to violence (wound 0 kizuguchi), the letter also evokes the presence or dangers of violence inherent in such conflicts.
How does Tawada interpret the Marquise von O by Kleist.
The O in the name the title’s name embodies several meanings for Tawada. It evokes the difficulty of representing violence in that the O symbolic of emptiness but also of the physicality of the body, which is conscious in Japanese as sound and ideogram for O (kuchi) denotes embodied conditions and experiences, such as opening and wound.
Furthermore, the letter O reflects the contradiction of the narrative. When the maquise is raped, she is the victim of male desire. Here, the O evoke is redolent with the connotations of violence against women. However, after the lady is repudiated by her family, she can become an agent in her life, which she then dedicates to finding the father of her child. In this regard, the O is simultaneously evocative of liberation.
How does Tawada interpret the symbolism of Echo as inherited in western literary history?
Echo is a woman without a body and who repeats words spoken to her. For Tawada, this represents the condition of women through history as being relegated to miming the voice of men who are ignorant of woman’s lives, including the biological reality of women’s embodied existence. Moreover, the O in Echo evokes Tawada’s interest in cross-referencing the vowel, both phonetically and in script, to the body and translating bodily experiences and language into Japanese.
What other text is Tawada’s St. George and the Translator in communication with?
Der wunde Punkt im Alphabet by Anne Dudens. The protagonist of the text is translating Duden’s text during the narrative.
Dudens is dedicated to analysing the historical patterns underlying the depictions of Saint George, which Dudens finds inextricable from violence (perhaps against women) being instrumental to the foundation of peace.
What is the significance of the environment in Tawada’s Saint George and the Translator.
The term is not used by the lecturer (I’m not sure if there is an equivalent in German), but the environment is a form of pathetic fallacy, a literary device in which human emotions and experiences and externalised and represented by the environment itself. The emotion symbolised by the environment is the translated’s internalised state of indeterminacy and dislocation, as someone who is adjacent to the text. As such, although she is one of the Canary Islands, she finds she is unable to perceive her environment and the demarcations between land, sea and sky.
What is moral point of Tawada’s Saint George and the Translator?
Using the history of Saint George as an example, as he is ubitiquous, Tawada is highlighting the role of language in perpetuating systems of violence. For the translator, the language is itself bears the dragon’s wounds, allegorising how language itself bears the scars of women’s oppression. The translator experiences this wound in the instance that she feels a cut on her face and when her nipple (an anatomical O) is split as she translates the moment when St. George slays the dragon.
The letter O also plays a prominent role in the story as being the site, metaphorically speaking, of the wound against women the language bears.
Describe the plot of Der nackte Auge.
A young Vietnamese woman is sent as the representative of a school to East-Berlin to attend a conference on “Vietnam as the Victim of American Imperialism” because she speaks good Russian. On the night of her arrival, a West German student of Slavic studies gets her inebriated, traps her in his car and kidnaps her, bringing her to West Germany. The student, Jörg, keeps her trapped in Bochum as he continues with his studies. With the help of a mysterious night train, she travels to Moscow and then to Paris where she survives and is denigrated as an illegal immigrant. She attempts to escape to Vietnam with a fake passport provided by a Vietnamese doctor, which claims she is Japanese and is travelling to Vietnam to marry her husband. This is plan is foiled as border control discovers she is not Japanese. She escapes them and returns to the prostitutes she was living with in Paris. Jörg encounters her again, kidnapping and transporting her back to Bochum.
How is Catherine Deneuve important to the structure and narrative events of Das nackte Auge?
Every chapter is named after Catherine Deneuve and is loosley inspired by the content of the referenced film. The protagonist also attempts to learn French by watching films in which Deneuve appears, and the actress becomes a role model who she imitates. The novel is therefore also a hommage to Catherine Deneuve as well as a meditation on the essentially transgressive experience of an illegal in the west as they attempt to assimilate. Alongside the political issues present in the novel, colonialism and the dissolution of the Eastern block, the text is also a meditation on the question of what role does media play in the constitution of the self’s identity.
Summarise Etüden im Schnee.
Etüden im Schnee is the story of a family of polar bears in Germany, whose story reflects the political history of Europe.
The novel also challenges the notion that animals are ahistorical, unconnected to contemporary political events.
