Translating a Translingual Tongue: Yoko Tawada, Chantal Wright, and the World

The paper examines Chantal Wright's "experimental" English translation of Yoko Tawada's "Porträt einer Zunge" as Portrait of a Tongue in terms of the interplay between translinguality and translationality, especially in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari call "majoritizing" and "minoritizing" impulses in literature, and what David Damrosch calls "hypercanonization" and "countercanonization." The goal is to explore not so much whether Tawada gains or loses in Wright's translation, as whether any gains in translation tend to transmajoritize and so to hypercanonize her or to transminoritize and so to countercanonize her.