Product Description

"Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright" is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled "Portrait of a Tongue" ["Portrat einer Zunge", 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a native speaker of Japanese who learned German as an adult. "Portrait of a Tongue "is a portrait of a German womanreferred to only as Pwho has lived in the United States for many years and whose German has become inflected by English. The text is the first-person narrators declaration of love for P and for her language, a thinking-out-loud about language(s), and a self-reflexive commentary. Chantal Wright offers a critical response and a new approach to the translation process by interweaving Tawadas text and the translators dialogue, creating a side-by-side reading experience that encourages the reader to move seamlessly between the two parts. Chantal Wrights technique models what happens when translators read and responds to calls within Translation Studies for translators to claim visibility, to practice thick translation, and to develop their own creative voices. This experimental translation addresses a readership within the academic disciplines of Translation Studies, Germanic Studies, and related fields.