Yoko Tawada's literature without a fixed abode: a proposed translation of Schwager in Bordeaux in light of Tawadian exophony

Abstract

Yoko Tawada (1960-) has the foreignness caused by linguistic transit as the central point of her literary project, a process that enables the recognition of boundary zones, from which identities are constructed and questioned. This approach can be seen in the author's second novel, Schwager in Bordeaux (2008), in which Yuna, a young Japanese woman living in Hamburg, decides to travel to Bordeaux to learn French. The narrative is crossed by an amalgam of memories where several secondary characters navigate and contribute on the construction of a text which deals with the linguistic fluidity of a literature without a permanent address, enabled by Tawada's exophonic writing. The novel is composed of several linguistic layers that, when translated into another language, such as Brazilian Portuguese, can multiply its interpretive possibilities. The exophonic aspects of Schwager in Bordeaux highlight the multilingualism inherent to the novel and accentuate itself in its translation process, thus revealing a mechanism that questions the origin myth of the text, as well as the subjective processes related to literary creation arising from the subversion of the anthropological gaze, which is increasingly relevant in the struggle against the conservative discourse that persists in demarcating several border genres.