Portrait of a Tongue

Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary.

This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled "Portrait of a Tongue" ["Porträt einer Zunge", 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a native speaker of Japanese who learned German as an adult.

Portrait of a Tongue is a portrait of a German woman—referred to only as P—who has lived in the United States for many years and whose German has become inflected by English.

The text is the first-person narrator's declaration of love for P and for her language, a "thinking-out-loud" about language(s), and a self-reflexive commentary.

Chantal Wright offers a critical response and a new approach to the translation process by interweaving Tawada's text and the translator's dialogue, creating a side-by-side reading experience that encourages the reader to move seamlessly between the two parts.

This experimental translation addresses a readership within the academic disciplines of Translation Studies, Germanic Studies, and related fields.

- This book is published in English.