Grenzen, Geist und Gestus

the Body as Translation/Translator in Yoko Tawada’s Talisman

Abstract

In the context of contemporary German-language intercultural literature, the work of the Berlin-based Japanese author Yoko Tawada occupies a prominent place. Since the late 1980s, her work has grown steadily in both Japanese and German: it is a bilingual work that moves between the cultures of the West and the Far East. The manifold quality of Tawada's work, however, is irreducible to its raw material - language - reflected also in the variety of genres of which it is made, from prose to poetic text, from dramatic text to poetic and essayistic. Yoko Tawada's Talisman, published in 1996 and still untranslated in Portugal, consists of 16 literary essays. We will focus on two themes with special relevance in this work: translation and the meaning of the body and its representation in Tawada's work. In the corpus of analytical tools, it is important to take into account not only a phenomenological notion of the various themes treated, but also an anthropological notion of Tawada's writing: anthropology, and writing, as a single simultaneous form of translation and rewriting. In short, translation as a constant transposition of a cultural horizon, as the basic anthropological fact(or) of contact between cultures. Parallels will be drawn between the reflections of the philosopher José Gil, in his work Metamorphoses of the Body (1980), and Talisman. Additionally, this article may (as we would like to hope) serve as a starting point and a dialogue with the work of an important contemporary writer who still lacks a translation in Portugal.