open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/44399

Die Körperlichkeit der Sprache in einigen Gedichten von Yoko Tawada

The Physicallity of Language in some of Yoko Tawada’s Poems

ドイツ語

2010-11-15

Research Faculty of Media and Communication, Hokkaido University

Media and Communication Studies

59

95-101

As writers are migrating from one country to another learning a new language, being influenced by the new culture, a new branch of literary criticism has evolved that takes this into consideration: Intercultural Literary Criticism. Transformation as well as intercultural space have become keywords in this new development. Differences are made between cultures of identity (mostly Christianity influenced Western countries) and cultures of transformation (mostly Buddhist influenced Asian countries). Yoko Tawada has migrated between these two cultures and has become a well known writer in Germany now. She has written several narrations, novels and some poems. Some of her poems seem to coincide by their contents with her lectures on poetry. She personifies abstract language items and lets them interact with fictional bodies, where language as personifications leave their impact of these bodies. In "Schwarze Tasten" drums and a blind alphabet create a threatening atmosphere. Interculturally positioned Tawada wrote this poem in Japanese and had it translated into German. "Ein Gedicht für ein Buch" exists only in German and shows the life of a word as a person. The human voice, or better: not using one's voice seems to be a good alternative to get along with the intercultural positioning. "Das Restaurant mit den Vogelnamen" refers to the voice of a foreign language learner as well as birds as beings of transformation. Whereas the earliest of the three poems shows an atmosphere of fear and dread, in the second one the lyrical self retreats to not using its voice, whereas the third poems is full of dialogues. This seems to mirror the author's own development of dealing with the German language.

紀要論文

Version of Record

1882-5303