Cultural Translations

To live surrounded by, and using, a foreign language, opens up the third place, which seems animportant premise of constructing the subject position that is not caught innocently in onenesswith the mother tongue.As a new language learner, the author is sensitive to the differences of the two languages, Japaneseand German. Japanese constitutes a point of reference, but it is the meeting itself that makesJapanese visible. 21In “From the mother tongue to the mother of tongue” (Från modersmålet till språkmoder)” inTalisman, the narrator ‘I’ is keenly aware of the foreignness of the new language, German, to thedegree that a pencil in Japanese and German, enpitsu and Bleistift, seemed to her two differentcategories. (7) When she comments the outburst of her German colleague at the office, whereshe works, and compares it to general Japanese attitude towards things, it sounds like a reversedOrientalism. German nouns have three genders, masculine, feminine and neutral. As a Japanese,she is enhanced with the sex of things, and a sterile office landscape opens up an almost fantasticscene for her. She establishes a personal relationship with everyday things around her. A typewriteris feminine, which makes her feel a personal tie, when writing on the machine, the foreignlanguage. The typewriter, due to its stable, inviting feminine form, as she sees, and its grammaticalgender, becomes the mother of her new language, giving her a sense of being ‘adopted’ by thelanguageAcquisition of a new language is compared to a child’s learning the mother tongue, wherewords, cut off of semantic connotations and syntactical chains, can fly free in fantasy. (10-11)This is a freedom in language, liberating the language from its everydayness.Not only meeting the new language with the eyes of a marveled child, her method of acquisitionis physical. Vision plays a role, for instance the shape of the consonant ‘s’ on a poster at abuss stop in Hamburg, which seduced the author. (35) But she seems more keenly sensitive toears and hearing. Meeting with the foreign language seems to have bestowed her with a newself-consciousness regarding the act of hearing. The episode of a Tibetan monk is telling. Theauthor heard a monk recite a prayer in a temple in Tibet, which gave her the sensation of hearingmultiple voices in one voice. (22-23) In the monk’s voice, the author believed hearing the voice ofthe dead. She recounts more lengthily the episode in “Others’ timber (Andras klang)” (92-102),where she also tells about own ‘sound-memory’ since the childhood in Japan. Regarding the Tibetanmonk, the author asks, “Why do we not hear several voices in a voice, when they are actuallythere?” (94) She tries herself to simultaneously produce multiple tones. To believe that one’sown voice does not have one clear tone, but contains other voices like that of the dead, showsthat the author’s subjective position is no longer clearly enclosed, but open for multiplicity. Theawareness of manifoldness of one’s own voice figuratively informs the position of subjectivity ofthe author, which cannot be identified by nationality or the mother tongue. This sense of manifoldness,without any clear-cut sense of identity, should be called, in my opinion, the ‘transcultural’positioning of the subjective. Her utterance is not anchored in any homeland but open to8130. All English translations of her text are mine.21 See Sakai and note 21.Noriko Takei-Thunman