Arvi Sepp

Moving texts: The representation of the translator in Yoko Tawada’s and Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s stories

This contribution sets out to investigate the representation of the translator in Yoko Tawada’s Überseezungen and Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, and Brücke vom goldenen Horn. Taking Susan Bassnett’s Constructing Cultures: The Politics of Travellers’ Tales (1993) as a starting point, I will show the similarities and ambiguities between both travelling and translating, which are embedded in spatial practices as the transfer of views and people. These ambiguities can also be found in the postcolonial interpretation of writings on migration or Diaspora. In view of the deconstruction of the paradigm of the self-identity of the individual and the idea of monolingual authenticity, the protagonists in Tawada’s and Özdamar’s texts are represented as translators of heterogeneity.

Keywords: Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, topoi, identity, translator representation

Biography

Arvi Sepp is a Lecturer in German Literature in the Literature Department at the University of Antwerp and Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and German Culture in the Translation Studies Department of the Free University of Brussels (VUB). He holds a PhD in German Literature, an MA in Sociology, and an MA in Literary Theory. He is co-president of the Interuniversity Research Center for Literature in Translation (Free University of Brussels / Ghent University). He is currently co-editing a volume on translation and migration: Bearing Across. Translating Literary Narratives of Migration (with Philippe Humblé).