Tawada Yōko, Jacques Derrida: literature and translation as confusion

Abstract

From the difficulty of deciding how to translate the title of the short story "Misu tenkan'no fushigina aka" (ミス転換の不思議な赤), written by Tawada Yōko, the article seeks to think about the difficulty itself from two different movements. One is an interpretative explanation of the short story, while the other is a discussion involving translation theories in Jacques Derrida, in which the valued idea is that, given the prior existence of confusion as an allocutionary phenomenon of translation, every attempt is not only possible but existing due to the very permanence of the category of the original and, therefore, it becomes necessary not only to read, but to try to translate. What is proposed is to test whether literature and translation, through examples and plot developments in the aforementioned short story, may in fact have some mechanism of thinking about how another communication could arise and make the experience of a literary community (text-translator-reader) appear, as well as what unites community and translation. The event, as a mark of the text and the first reflection to be made from the very idea of the translatological event, begins and ends the argument, so that Tawada Yōko's text is thought of not only a translation challenge, but also as an emulation of what translating translation means and how to be in commonality is also a proposal of community as translation and as confusion.