Making senses: Translation and the materiality of written signs in Yoko Tawada

• Published in: Translation studies Vol. 12; no. 3; pp. 338 - 356
• Main Author: Arslan, Gizem
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 02.09.2019; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: intermedial aesthetics; Literary translation; Logograms; Tawada, Yoko; Translation and materiality; Translation studies; Walter Benjamin; Writing systems; Yoko Tawada
• ISSN: 1478-1700; 1751-2921
• DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2019.1600423

Translation studies and literary studies more broadly are increasingly informed by materialities-based approaches, yet remain heavily invested in hermeneutic sense. This essay critiques the recalcitrant metaphorization to which the term translation remains subjected. In its place, it offers readings of those textual elements not considered to be vehicles of meaning: individual written signs read intermedially (as letters, logograms, numbers, images, objects, bodies) and misread paragrammatically, disrupting the referential grammar of a language. These readings do not instrumentalize textual surfaces to reach the depth of meaning, but can address materiality in its own right. This in turn yields modes of reading the illegible in contexts of translation, readings that hinge on the immediacy of contact and encounter with purportedly illegible subjects. This essay thus offers to translation studies some key analytical tools for addressing the medial, material and bodily processes that underpin textual production.