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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the poetics of hybridity and transnational imaginaries in work by Itō Hiromi dealing with the question of language and crossing borders while living abroad. This paper is concerned with the implications of bilingual editions and translation as an affective, embodied engagement.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1990s, the Japanese literary landscape has gradually transformed as plurilingual authors incorporated different languages into their texts in Japanese in the original and/or in their translated versions. Some of the strategies to incorporate foreign elements into a text in Japanese are mixing languages, glossing, translating, and playing with the different writing systems in Japanese. The act of translation seems to be embedded into the very Japanese orthography—with its three notational systems, for example—which presupposes certain hybridity. Itō Hiromi’s (b.1955) work stands out for its representation of mothering and embodiment, but this paper is concerned with her depictions of “mother tongues” and “linguistic mothers,” as articulated by Tawada Yōko when discussing her experience of learning a foreign language. This paper explores the poetics of hybridity and transnational imaginaries at play in Itō’s writings while paying special attention to bilingual editions of her work and translation as an affective, embodied engagement.

This paper introduces Nihongo (1993), a series of poems that deal with the poet’s experience of being an outsider while crossing borders by living abroad. Here, Itō writes in a way that deconstructs language to the point of altering it; as if it had been translated from a different language, as if it had transformed from a mother tongue into a linguistic mother. I also introduce other poems, such as “The Maltreatment of Meaning” (1991; trans. 2005) and “Nashite Mounen” (1993; trans. 2005) that deal with the very question of language, and the three poems included in the collection of poetry, Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan, edited by Rina Kikuchi and Jen Crawford (2017), in which the texts of the Japanese poems are printed vertically, next to their English translations by Jeffrey Angles. How do we read bilingual editions? Is the translation often lacking as it is measured against the original? To reflect upon bilingual versus monolingual publications, I draw on Catherine Malabou’s concept of “plasticity,” defined as the giving, receiving, or even explosion of form in relation to translation, and consider my own affective, embodied engagement with Itō’s work as a reader, scholar, and translator.