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- Convenor:
-
Rina Kikuchi
(Shiga University University of Canberra)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Transdisciplinary: Gender Studies
- Location:
- Lokaal 2.21
- Sessions:
- Saturday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Our panel discusses how cross-cultural engagement, translation and poetry production question society and contribute to a more inclusive one, focusing on Chiri Yukie, Tawada Yoko, Takahashi Mutsuo and Kawaguchi Harumi, who deconstruct gender and strive to transcend heteronormativity.
Long Abstract:
Our panel focuses on four poets who deconstruct gender and strive to transcend heteronormativity. Not coincidentally, three of these were translators whose engagements outside Japan helped them probe entrenched notions of gender and identity in their own society. As Luise von Flotow claims, poetry translation is "as activist as any feminist and socially-activist activity" (Translating Women, 2011). Our panel will use these four poets to demonstrate how cross-cultural engagement, translation, and poetic production were central in questioning society and contributing to a more inclusive one.
Our panel consists of four scholars, who are also translators, from four continents . The first presentation looks at Chiri Yukie's translations, showing how she creatively manipulated Ainu oral narratives in her own act of poetic creation, thus giving a new shape to a gendered world. The remaining presentations focus on writers active in the twenty-first century. The second presentation looks at the depictions of lesbian desire in Tawada Yoko's Dead Umbrella and My Wife (2006), pointing out how Tawada's experimental and deconstructive poetics borrow from German literary tradition. The third examines Only Yesterday (2018) by gay poet Takahashi Mutsuo, who writes in veiled ways about contemporary culture with motifs borrowed from ancient Greece. The fourth examines not literal translation but cross-temporal cultural translation, specifically how Kawaguchi Harumi borrows the images of the "witches", the marginalized unwanted figures of old women in a society, to deconstruct gender roles in her award-winning May it Be a Witchforest (2021).
All of these presentations demonstrate the principle expressed by Farquhar and Fitzsimons in "Lost in Translation" (2011) that poetic engagements with the Other can bring willingness to open new paths, thus introducing greater diversity and multiplicity into culture. The panelists will also discuss how their own experiences as translators shape their engagements with these transgressive texts, providing new hermeneutic insights into our cross-cultural work as literary scholars.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -Miho Matsunaga (Waseda University)
Paper short abstract:
The presenter will discuss the experimental transcriptions and wordplays in Tawada’s poem collection "Dead Umbrella and My Wife" (2006) by comparing them with her other works, and analyze the constellation of figures from a gender perspective.
Paper long abstract:
Tawada Yoko's "傘の死体とわたしの妻(Dead Umbrella and My Wife)" (2006) is an enigmatic work. While the story of the two women's encounter, marriage, and attempts at artificial insemination are told in sequence, the tension of the language is extremely high, and the scene with the two women is extremely deformed by leaps, breaks, and unnatural line breaks. Tawada published a number of poems in her early German publications, which can be read in Japanese and German (translated by Peter Pörtner in the beginning). This 2006 book is Tawada's first collection of poems in Japanese.
The title of the book is already unique, and the meaning of the word "umbrella" is not explained in the book. The content clearly deals with same-sex marriage, but it is not clear whether this is legally recognized. Rather, it seems that "my wife" has various ties and that her marriage with "me" was not consummated after all. It is interesting to note that the first person "I" is placed in parentheses at the beginning of the text, and the second person "you" (used for the wife) is rendered as "穴た”. Tawada's word play with kanji has been seen frequently in her other works, but here the use of personal pronouns changes as the relationship between the two changes. In the final section, the relationship between the two figures is dissolved, and they arrive at a place where there is no longer an "I" or "you," but rather an individual, "each one of us is one of us”. The entire collection is full of energy and drama, like a single swell.
It is interesting to compare this change in personal pronouns with Tawada's German poetry collection “Die Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik”. In this collection, the personal pronouns, as grammatically interchangeable symbols, are easily removed from the objects to which they refer, while we can still catch a glimpse of the feelings toward “du” that persist in the poems.
Jeffrey Angles (Western Michigan University)
Paper short abstract:
While examining "Tsui kinō no koto" (Only Yesterday, 2018), the magnum opus of poet Takahashi Mutsuo, this paper draws on the historical turn in Queer Studies to think through the politics of contemporary writers identifying with sexual minorities in physically and temporally distant societies.
Paper long abstract:
In recent decades, scholars have argued that people at different moments have thought very differently about sexuality due to the specific ideas circulating in their societies. While this has led to many welcome developments, recent attention to historical detail hasn’t stopped LGBTQ people from searching for historical models as part of their own liberatory politics. As medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw has noted, the desire to identify with others is a reaction against broken, impartial histories, which until recently, have kept non-heteronormative lives out of view, depriving the LGBTQ community of knowledge that might shape its own ways of being. Recent developments in identity politics, such as Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, and the #MeToo movement, have also emphasized the importance of identifying and allying across perceived boundaries of ethnicity, gender, and culture, but what are the dynamics of identification? Who can identify with whom and why?
This presentation draws upon the so-called “historical turn” in Queer Studies, as well as ideas from Translation Studies, to think about what it means for contemporary figures to write about and identify with physically and temporally distant societies. As a case study, this presentation looks at the work of one of Japan’s most important writers, the openly gay poet Takahashi Mutsuo, who has been writing about homoeroticism in bold, unflinching terms since the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, this presentation will look at his 2018 collection "Tsui kinō no koto" (Only Yesterday), which uses ancient Greece as the central motif to organize 150-plus poems about a wide range of contemporary issues, including the place of homoeroticism in Takahashi's own life and postwar Japanese culture more generally. In exploring this collection’s complex, multi-faceted use of ancient Greek motifs, this presentation will examine the limits, problems, and prospects for queer identification, exploring both the pitfalls and productive possibilities of identifying with people across perceived boundaries of culture and time.
Rina Kikuchi (Shiga University University of Canberra)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the symbolic usage of the “witches” in Kawaguchi Harumi's award-winning book, Yagate majo no mori ni naru (May it Be a Witchforest, 2021), the presenter analyses how poetry can help to verbalize the difficult experiences women face and how it helps to deconstruct a social structure.
Paper long abstract:
Kawaguchi Harumi has been consistently challenging the male-dominated elitist (Japanese) poetry world by publishing BL (Boys Love) poetry anthology (2014), including anime and manga in her poetry, and using a bold BL manga illustration for her 2015 collection, Tiger is Here (the 46th Takami Jun Prize recipient), but Kawaguchi’s latest book, Yagate majo no mori ni naru (May it Be a Witchforest, 2021), which received the Hagiwara Sakutaro Prize in 2022, is more noticeably political and boldly feminist. Kawaguchi recalls that her turning point was being part of the International Poetry Festival in Canberra and being a co-translator and co-editor of a poetry translation project with Anglophone poets in 2017 and 2018. It suggests her engagements outside Japan helped to probe entrenched notions of gender and identity in Japanese society.
The presenter will examine how Kawaguchi gives words to the struggles, anxieties, unfair treatments at school/home/work, vulnerabilities, sexual assaults, and violence that women face in their everyday life but cannot verbalize; how verbalization can help women to share their burdens and feelings, to be able to be more connected, to support each other, and hence to work together to make a fairer and more inclusive society.
Focusing on the women’s body depicted in this 2021 collection, the presenter will analyse how the images of fairy tales such as (evil) witches, women’s beauty and body, and naivety in women are twisted, and how the book proves that women do not need a prince to wake them up for they can awake themselves by their own will. The women’s body has been always seen and consumed as a sexual object and often considered as a “cause” of sexual violence, but the symbolic usage of a sleeping woman in a busy intersection in the poem, “Shindai (a bed)”, for instance, shows that women have the power to demolish the whole structure of such society by awakening themselves. The book suggests women do not need to wait for a prince or a fairly godmother to save them because all women are already witches whose beings are magical enough to deconstruct and renew the world.