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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’ [‘Porträt 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 woman—referred to only as P—who has lived in the United States for many years and whose German has become inflected by English. The text is the first-person narrator’s 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 Tawada’s text and the translator’s dialogue, creating a side-by-side reading experience that encourages the reader to move seamlessly between the two parts.
Chantal Wright’s 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.
Contributor Notes
Chantal Wright is assistant professor of German and Translation at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the USA. She studied at the University of Cambridge and the University of East Anglia in the UK, and previously taught at the University of Alberta and Mount Allison University in Canada. Her research interests focus on the theory and practice of literary translation, stylistics and exophony. In 2012 her translation of Tzveta Sofronieva’s poetry collection A Hand Full of Water, which was funded by a grant from PEN American Center’s translation fund and supported by a residency at the Banff Centre, won the inaugural Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Chantal Wright has translated some of Germany’s best-known children’s authors, including Milena Baisch, Zoran Drvenkar and Cornelia Funke. In 2011 her translation of Andreas Steinhöfel’s The Pasta Detectives was shortlisted for the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in the UK. From 2005 to 2008, Chantal Wright was the editor of Transcript, a European Union-funded, online review of international writing published by Literature Across Frontiers at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales.
