· ]

T   C

(M)Other Tongue; or, Exophony

  

I want to make a modest case for exophony as a term deserving of wider

application and scrutiny. The phenomenon of exophony is familiar
enough, even if the term itself is not. Put simply, it refers to composition
in a nonnative language—which, at first blush, might seem a rather
exotic state of literary matter. However, since appearing in Susan
Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski, and Robert Stockhammer’s 2007 edited
collection, Exophonie: Anderssprachigkeit (in) der Literatur (Exophony:
Otherlanguaged-ness in/of Literature), exophony has become an increas-
ingly widespread and galvanizing concept in literary studies, of obvious
interest to those working on translation but also more generally to those
working on migrant or exile literatures, postcolonial literatures, and
transnational literatures. Beyond these direct applications of the term,
however, I argue that exophony represents not just an exception or spe-
cial case of translation but the paradigm of literary production as such.
To flesh out that thesis, I want to briefly address (and push back on)
three related assumptions one often sees at the scene of translation:
the idea that translations are secondary or subordinate to the composed
literary object (i.e., the original), the idea that exophonic writers repre-
sent a vanishingly small minority, and the idea that self-translation is a
special case, even among exophonic writers. Assumptions regarding
translation as such, then exophony, and finally self-translation: obvi-
ously, these are not the only ones we might think about—and I do
KEITH LESLIE JOHNSON is director of film not treat them in any systematic, sequential way in what follows—but
and media studies at William and Mary, they nonetheless help us begin zeroing in on why translation matters,
where he is senior lecturer of English
integrally, for literary studies as a whole.
and affiliated faculty of Japanese studies.
As a preemptive exercise, maybe we can think about how many
He is the author of Jan Švankmajer: Ani-
mist Cinema (U of Illinois P, 2017); essays
exophonic writers we can name off the top of our heads. Here goes:
on Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, and other Jhumpa Lahiri; Gary Shteyngart and Kazuo Ishiguro, both of
modernist figures; and translations of whom moved to English-speaking countries as children (though
Haruki Murakami and Akira Yoshimura. Ishiguro claims to remember little to no Japanese); Aleksandar
©  The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern
Language Association of America
PMLA . (), doi:./S 

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  (M)Other Tongue; or, Exophony [ P M L A

Hemon; Edwidge Danticat; Tahar Ben Jelloun and determination. In other words, the political dilemma
Assia Djebar (in fact, a great many writers of the of the poem is intimately bound up with a linguistic
Maghreb); Shanxing Wang; Salvador Plascencia; one: it is a question of summoning up the nerve to
Vladimir Nabokov; Milan Kundera; Ágota Kristóf; resist not just mother but the mother tongue as well.
Ha Jin; Joseph Conrad; Joseph Brodsky; Samuel Tawada stages all this not only within the poem itself
Beckett; and Yōko Tawada . . . and this only but also in terms of its relation to Pörtner’s German
scratches the surface. If we allow ourselves to go fur- rendering.
ther back in time, the list quickly grows: Oscar A perpetual embarrassment of translation theory
Wilde, who wrote Salomé in French; William has been the translation’s subordination to the origi-
Beckford, who wrote Vathek in French; Voltaire, nal, a subordination as much ontological as chro-
who wrote essays in English; John Milton, who nological: the translation arrives after the original
wrote poems in Latin and Italian. Even if this list (the way one original may arrive after another) and
reflects my own preferences and limitations as a would not exist without the original. In poems like
reader, one can see where it is going: setting aside “計画 / Der Plan,” Tawada airs this embarrassment,
the huge volume of material composed in various much like Lawrence Venuti, Karen Emmerich, and
court languages, by the time we reach back to the other scholars, while also proposing a kind of solution
Middle Ages, exophony is the rule, not the excep- or workaround: the volume’s mise-en-page exploits,
tion. When we boomerang back to the present, sud- even intensifies, the many differences between
denly we seem to find exophony everywhere. Japanese and German, producing a collection that
We might also consider cases of pseudo- can be read from one direction or the other,
exophony, like those of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, deprioritizing the original work. At the same time,
and James Joyce (to round up some usual modernist these differences are as likely to produce startling
suspects), or what I think of as “exophony-once- harmonies as dissonances. Consider the poem’s
removed,” to refer to writers knowledgeable enough alternate titles: both 計画 and Der Plan carry a tem-
in another language to engage or otherwise collabo- poral sense (e.g., a plan of action, a thing or series of
rate substantively with their translators. Tawada, things to do in future) as well as a spatial one (e.g., a
who later developed into a fully bilingual exophonic visual schema or design). However, Pörtner’s ver-
writer, began her career in this way. Her first publi- sion below perhaps emphasizes the temporal
cation, Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts / あなたのい whereas Tawada’s plays up the spatial:
るところだけ何もない (Only There Where You
Are Is There Nothing; 1987), is a collection of 計画
poems composed in Japanese and presented along-
side German translations prepared by Peter
Pörtner. Because German and Japanese pagination おかあちゃんが、わたしの畳の上に味噌汁を
こぼしてしまった。わたしは、がっかりし
run in opposite directions, the collection invites a
て、来る日も来る日も、ダイズとニボシの染
boustrophedonic reading, ordering the poems first
みついた畳を雑布でぬぐい続けた。おばあ
in one way and then the other, discomfiting the pre- ちゃんのこぼした味噌汁をおかあちゃんが一
sumed hierarchy between original and translation. 生ぬぐい続けたように。
Depending on one’s linguistic preference, the ある日、わたしは、雑布をたたきつけ、湧き
poem “計画 / Der Plan,” for example, occurs either 起こる嘲笑の中を出発した。
at the beginning or end of the collection, either first 一、耳の穴に花束をあふれさせ、燈台
in Japanese and then German translation or vice に向かって歌うこと
versa. An overtly feminist poem, it is at the same 一、蟻たちを呼び集め、正三角形を作
time a “parable of ‘exophony’” (Masumoto 10), ること
framing the speaker’s psychosexual rejection of the 一、ゆで卵を星空に向かって投げること
maternal order as a prerequisite to poetic self- (8/121)1

https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000408 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 · ] Keith Leslie Johnson 

Der Plan Even to the eye, Pörtner takes a number of

Mutter hatte intriguing liberties. Tawada’s two prose paragraphs
auf meinen Teppich are converted into stanzas consisting of seventeen
Suppe verschüttet. enjambed lines, and the final three lines in the
Verärgert wischte ich German version are numbered—cardinality gives
am kommenden Tag way to ordinality, the bulleted list of three items
und den Tagen danach now implies a numerical sequence of actions. Even
mit einem Lappen the typographic quirk of German capitalization pro-
die Bohnenreste und die Reste vom Fisch duces a visual rhythm different from that of kanji
von meinem Teppich. and kana. Tawada’s poem is not just reformatted
Genauso wie Mutter but also localized for the German reader. A slightly
die von der Großmutter verschüttete Suppe
literal rendering of each version will give a starker
ihr ganzes Leben lang
sense of the differences. Here are my English ver-
weggewischt hatte.
Eines Tages sions of Tawada’s Japanese and Pörtner’s German:
warf ich den Lappen weg
und brach mir einen Weg durch das Gelächter Plan
das um mich aufkochte. Mama spilled miso soup all over my tatami. Day after
day, demoralized, I wiped the tatami permeated with
1. Laß den Blumenstrauß im Ohrloch überfließen soybean and dried sardine. Just as mama had her
und singe in Richtung des Leuchturms. whole life wiped up the miso soup that grandma
2. Ruf die Ameisen herbei und laß sie ein spilled.
Dreieck bilden. Then one day, I threw down the rag and set out
3. Wirf ein gekochtes Ei in den Sternenhimmel.
through the mockery that boiled up.
(120/9)
—Let the bouquet overflow the ear hole and sing
toward the lighthouse
—Rally the ants and form an equilateral triangle
Setting aside the fact that a Teppich (“carpet” or —Throw a boiled egg at the starry sky
“rug”) covers a floor while a tatami 畳 is itself the
floor, each term conveys very different spatial infor- The Plan
mation. Whereas Teppich might connote anything Mother had
from an area rug to wall-to-wall carpet, tatami are spilled soup
invariably twice as long as they are wide (roughly on my carpet.
six feet by three feet), so that Japanese rooms are Upset, I wiped up
measured not in square feet or meters but in the the next day
number of tatami they accommodate: that is, tatami and the days after that
are the measure of domestic space. Given this invari- the leftover beans and the leftover fish
able ratio of width to length, we are invited in from my carpet.
Tawada’s Japanese version to visualize the inky Just as mother
text on the page as an image of the soup stain on had wiped up
the tatami. The etymology of 計画 further under- all her life
scores this association, particularly the second char- the soup Grandmother spilled.
acter 画, conveying (among other things) the sense
of the physical brushstrokes of kanji characters. In One day
other words, the Japanese title suggests a strong con- I threw away the rag
nection to written and spoken language not neces- and broke myself a path through the laughter
sarily found in the German. that boiled up around me.

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  (M)Other Tongue; or, Exophony [ P M L A

1. Let the bouquet overflow in the ear hole and sing the original text. Such originals, to vastly simplify
toward the lighthouse. her argument, emerge belatedly as the result of con-
2. Summon here the ants and let them make a triangle. certed efforts by institutional, disciplinary, and
3. Throw a boiled egg into the starry sky. above all market forces with a vested interest in can-
onicity. (Venuti makes a similar argument in The
For Tawada, the differences between her version and Scandals of Translation, in which he discusses the
Pörtner’s represent not infidelities but something like weird division of labor constructed by institutional
what Venuti calls “hermeneutic” encounters (Contra and disciplinary forces in order to promote the liter-
Instrumentalism 2). If the “mother” in question is the ary Ding an Sich—the original—and subsequently
mother tongue, then the first section of the poem is marginalize translation.) The so-called universal
about abandoning one language—and its inter- appeal of works like Gilgamesh often assumes the
minable cleanup duties—to open the possibility of bizarre notion of linguistic equivalence that, to the
another, more defiant and poetic one: the three sur- translator’s embarrassment, “invisibilizes” transla-
realist pronouncements that conclude the poem and tion by presenting it as a negligible presto chango.
presumably comprise its titular “plan.” Pörtner’s To the contrary, Emmerich asserts, there is nothing
translation, which offers up an interpretation of the “modest” about translation: “The entire translation
Japanese version, parallels the revelation of the is a text that didn’t exist before: all the words are
poem’s composition; it is part of the ongoing unfold- added; all the words are different. A translation
ing of the poem. This unfolding, with its concomitant adds a new iteration, in a different language, to the
strangeness, its rejection of conventional beauty, is sum total of texts for a work” (3).
not just an aesthetic phenomenon for Tawada but a I am returned to Walter Benjamin’s sense that,
political one, both in the feminist sense already as Jacques Derrida puts it, “in the translation the
adumbrated (and more or less available on the sur- original becomes larger; it grows rather than repro-
face of the poem) and in the broader sense. Tawada duces itself” (“Des Tours” 191). Exophony, in addi-
has remarked that a primary motivation for her tion to its other virtues, offers us another way to
exophony is to combat the “国粋主義的な” (“ultra- push ever closer (and in this case, more literally)
nationalistic”) notion of “美しい” (“beautiful”) to the putative original while discomfiting the
Japanese language keyed to dangerous ideas of cul- notion of originals. Chantal Wright instead refers
tural purity (Katakoto 37; my trans.). Tawada surely to the exophonic text as a “grey zone” that both
here has in mind Yasunari Kawabata’s 1968 Nobel alienates and is alienated from any notion of an
prize acceptance speech, 美しい日本の私 (“Japan, original, especially one buttressed by ideas of a
the Beautiful and Myself”), with its evocations of “national literature” (“Writing” 27). For Wright,
cherry blossoms, tea ceremonies, and similar pre- Tawada seems most to epitomize the exophonic
modern Japanese iconography. The sort of beauty writer, vacillating between languages with very dif-
Kawabata invokes is for Tawada too easily and too ferent grammars as well as different orthographic
often appropriated and weaponized; to resist purity schemes (kanji and kana versus Latin alphabet)
is to resist (the fantasy of) monolingualism is to and visual formats (vertical, right-to-left versus hor-
embrace exophony. izontal, left-to-right). The issue becomes less about
Exophony pluralizes rather than hierarchizes. It establishing which of Tawada’s novels are Japanese
presents composition and translation on an equal and which are German—either in conception or
footing in a way that closes the ontological gap composition—than about the mutual pressure of
that has been one of translation studies’ embarrass- defamiliarization that each language exerts on the
ments. Emmerich’s Literary Translation and the other. This defamiliarization can appear in style—
Making of Originals, which begins with a consider- for example, in the form of neologisms and other
ation of the Epic of Gilgamesh and concludes with wordplay, grammatical deformations or errors, bro-
the work of Jack Spicer, destabilizes the notion of ken or telegraphic language—and also in content.

https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000408 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 · ] Keith Leslie Johnson 

Whatever the origin of the text (whether it was con- structure . . . an originary ‘alienation’ that institutes
ceived in the language of its composition) and what- every language as a language of the other,” a condi-
ever its destiny, so to speak (the extent to which it tion he calls “the impossible property of a language”
emerges from the “grey zone,” the defamiliarizing (Monolingualism 63). In other words, even in the
but also fruitful overlap between languages), the text monolingual situation, one is always speaking a foreign
emerges straightaway as a product of self-translation. tongue; the multilingual or exophonic situation simply
This defamiliarization takes us finally to the brings this to the fore. All language is, to use an expres-
third assumption, that self-translation is a special sion from Tawada’s most recent novel, “homemade
case, even among exophonic writers. Of the writers language” (Scattered All Over the Earth 7).
listed above, only a few (Nabokov, Beckett, and To the extent that we credit these insights, we are
Lahiri) translated their own work into the “other” forced to concede that at some level exophonic writ-
language. While most exophonic writers are not ers represent not a vanishingly small minority but the
listed on the book jacket as their own translators, entire community of writers, and indeed language
the work, philosophically speaking, is always already users. Exophony represents not an exception or spe-
the product of translation. Miho Matsunaga uses the cial case of translation but the paradigm of literary
expression “Partnertexten” to describe the relation production as such. Put differently, and less polemi-
between Tawada’s German and Japanese texts, cally, if we want to understand literary production—
because exophony makes translation a permanent particularly in a way that preserves its political stakes
feature of the writing process (534). Tawada’s —we could do worse than begin with a phenomenon
translational poetics insistently “point to the rever- like exophony. And at the mention of politics, maybe
beration and figurations of languages” through what I want to emphasize in the end is that exophony,
experimental techniques including “literal and for me, represents less a state of schism or disposses-
interlinear translation, translations featuring certain sion than a precondition for solidarity. And this for
characteristics of computer translation, surface me is, humanly speaking, the task of the translator.
translations, strategic non-translations, and self-
translations within one work, from German works
into Japanese or vice versa” (Brandt 181).
Here the seemingly exceptional case of exophony NOTES
and self-translation suddenly assumes a startling the-
These remarks were originally offered two days after the riots
oretical centrality. Consider Gilles Deleuze and Félix on 6 January 2021.
Guattari’s study of Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature, 1. I give dual page numbers for quotations from “計画 / Der
or Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other. What these Plan”; the first number represents the page if the poem is read
two works have in common, which bears on exoph- according to the perspective of its language, and the second num-
ber represents the page from the perspective of the other language.
ony, translation, and self-translation, is a profound
incredulity toward the notion of a mother tongue.
For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka’s work emerges WORKS CITED
from a kind of productive impasse or force field of
competing languages—German, Czech, Yiddish, Arndt, Susan, et al., editors. Exophonie: Anderssprachig-keit (in)
der Literatur. Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007.
and Hebrew—none of which (on account of the oth- Brandt, Bettina. “The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s
ers) is fully “occupied” or “possessed,” and thus the Translational Poetics.” Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism,
site of his literary enunciation is always minoritarian edited by Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck, Brill,
and subversive, an “absolute deterritorialization” that 2014, pp. 181–94.
makes Kafka “a sort of stranger within his own lan- Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature. Translated by Dana Polan, U of Minnesota P, 1986.
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Parisian pied-noir—finds in the “exceptional situa- Graham. Difference in Translation, edited by Graham,
tion” of Franco-Maghrebian writers “a universal Cornell UP, 1985, pp. 165–207.

https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000408 Published online by Cambridge University Press

  (M)Other Tongue; or, Exophony [ P M L A

———. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Tawada, Yōko. カタコトのうわごと [Katakoto no uwagoto].
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Originals. Bloomsbury, 2017. 何もない [Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai]. Translated
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