There are no tricks in translation: wordplay and similarity in the writings of Tawada Yōko

Abstract Tawada Yōko publishes in both Japanese and German: while much scholarship on Tawada has examined difference in her work by focusing on topics such as migration, foreignness, and exophonic authorship (writing in a language other than one’s first language), the present essay considers her writing as an exploration of similarities. I examine similarities at three scales: word-to-word, text-to-text, and oeuvre-to-oeuvre. One of the salient formal traits of Tawada’s work is its incorporation of wordplay based on coincidental resemblances between words in unrelated languages (e.g., German and Japanese). Tawada’s work on wordplay adapts Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the interpretation – or translation, in his occasional metaphor – of dreams and thus embraces a capacious understanding of translation. But – here is the intertextual comparison – when Tawada translates her own work, as when she rewrites her novel Yuki no renshūsei in German as Etüden im Schnee, sometimes a wordplay that is central to one version is omitted in the other, with important consequences for interpretation. Finally, Tawada’s polyglot oeuvre, taken in the aggregate, is characterized as a strategic continuation of a tradition of polyglot authorship – a claim that is, I argue, further underscored by themes in Tawada’s recent fictions.