抄録
Today, the bilingual author Yoko Tawada has been widely discussed in various
regions and languages according to her unique writing. Yet, despite expanding
research, there is still a lack of concerning her writing alternates between
Japanese and German, which consist of the comparison of her texts. In
this paper, I will reflect on Tawada’s self-translation as her genuine complex
process of creation.
To enable us to understand Tawada’s writing, the present paper concentrates
on the textual analysis and discusses the different levels of the linguistic
aspects in Tawada’s writing referring to her bilingual work Das nackte Auge
(German) and Tabi wo suru hadaka no me (Japanese): First, the problem of
speechlessness will be examined in the narrative level of the protagonist. Secondly,
the perspective moves to the structural analysis of Tawada’s text which
will be accomplished through comparison not only between Tawada’s texts in
two languages, but also between different editions of her work. These two
parts of the analysis give thorough thought to the relation between speechlessness
and untranslatability which is achieved by this one author’s texts. Hence,
questions and difficulties arise in considering whether the relationship between
the texts should be regarded as the originals in the plural? Or could it
be subsumed as a form of translation?
