(M)Other Tongue; or, Exophony

Abstract

KEITH LESLIE JOHNSON is director of film and media studies at William and Mary, where he is senior lecturer of English and affiliated faculty of Japanese studies. He is the author of Jan Švankmajer: Animist Cinema (U of Illinois P, 2017); essays on Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, and other modernist figures; and translations of Haruki Murakami and Akira Yoshimura. 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 increasingly 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 special 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 represent 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: obviously, these are not the only ones we might think about—and I do not treat them in any systematic, sequential way in what follows—but they nonetheless help us begin zeroing in on why translation matters, integrally, for literary studies as a whole. As a preemptive exercise, maybe we can think about how many exophonic writers we can name off the top of our heads. Here goes: Jhumpa Lahiri; Gary Shteyngart and Kazuo Ishiguro, both of whom moved to English-speaking countries as children (though Ishiguro claims to remember little to no Japanese); Aleksandar