Translation and creation. The boundary may be blurred, but at the same time, there seems to be some irreducible differences, or unsolvable conflicts. The Japanese writer Yoko Tawada’s fascinating 1993 novella “Transplantation of Letters” (originally titled “Gaping Wounds of Alphabets”) deals at some point with such a differend. Tawada (1960-) is a very interesting writer who writes in both Japanese and German, and I will probably write a longer essay on her later. This is just a note toward that future piece.
Let’s take a look at this novella. The narrator is a woman, who stays on an island (which seems to be one of the Canary islands) to translate a story about St. George, the princess, and the dragon. The translation work doesn’t go well and the translator wonders why throughout. She’s also waiting for her friend Georg to arrive but he never comes. Nothing is clearly stated. The whole story proceeds with an atmosphere of ambiguity and absurdity that is often associated, rightly or wrongly, with Kafka.
Apart from the slowly developing story line, the novella is full of insights about the difference between so-called creative writing and translation, as well as the difference between the perception of letters in the European alphabetic languages and the Japanese. It seems that we Japanese, who are accustomed to so-called “kanji kana majiri,” a mixed-character writing of Chinese ideograms and two series of phonetic transcriptions that were invented more than a thousand years ago in Japan. This perception of letters is so natural to Japanese that we tend to notice in the Roman alphabets some peculiarities in their shapes, such as that of the letter O. When scattered around a page, the letter O lOOks like sO many hOles which you cannOt see thrOugh and give yOu the impressiOn of being so many impasses. Threatened by an ineffable anxiety, the translatOr paints the letters’ Openings in black. (Do the same if you can.)
There are places where the narrator expresses her opinion about translation. Her editor, when talking over the telephone, is told that the story she is translating is about St. George, the princess, and the dragon. The editor responds by saying that it must be rewritten to today’s taste, incorporating for example some ideas of feminism. Then the translator says: “I don’t like to solve the problem easily by rewriting like that. That’s why I chose translation as my profession instead of re-writing.” The editor doesn’t like the answer and asks further what then is so interesting about the work of translation. The translator answers, as if by a reflex, in an unnecessarily passionate tone: “Something abruptly comes out.” (41)
At another point her novelist friend tells her to write her own novel instead of just translating. According to the novelist friend a translator is never counted as an artist. To this the reaction in the translator’s mind is that she doesn’t want to write a novel or anything, that she wants to translate and she doesn’t translate because she couldn’t be a novelist. (68) Then there comes this dialogue with the post-office clerk of the island, who asks her a series of questions.
“Is there a book that’s never translated into another language?”
“Well, most of the books in this world are.”
“Is there a book of which only the translation is left, I mean a book from old days?”
“Yes. There are books of which only translations survive and the originals are lost.”
“If only the translations are left, how do you know that these themselves are not the originals?”
“Oh, that’s easy to tell. Translation is, like, itself a language. You can tell because you feel as if some pebbles were falling down on you.”
“You’d better not go to the sea.” (82-83)
I feel here that the narrator/translator is quite rightly pointing out the secret of her craft. Translation leaves you with such a physical, material sensation of unexpectedness. In the process of translation, something abruptly comes out. Some pebbles from an unknown sky will threateningly fall on you. These are the moments when language’s unexpected apparition surprises you and intervenes in your established repertoire of available words and phrases. It is the moment of transformation of the language in which the work is being written. This may also be taking place anywhere that a poet is at work. But in translation, its moment of transformation becomes crudely locatable. To me the beauty of this novella “Transplanting Letters” resides in this disclosure of truth, and seldom have I encountered a literary work that sheds light so accutely on this aspect of translation’s mechanism.
