Language questions: Translation, modanizumu, and modernist studies in Japan

Abstract

The recent rise of global modernist studies, while in itself exciting, may prove a rather mixed blessing if it fails to be accompanied with an awareness that translation is the 'necessary precondition' of global modernism, a process itself conditioned by the 'uneven politics of language'. From this perspective, this article suggests that delving deeper into the ways modernist studies in Japan originated through the interaction between modernism and translation might give us some useful hints as to how we might confront the factual inequality of languages in the global space in the present. The article in particular focuses on two figures of Japanese modanizumu in interwar Japan, Itō Sei (1905-69) and Sagawa Chika (1911-36), to examine how they negotiated with the anxiety of cultural homelessness through the creative use they made of their own translations of Anglophone modernists such as Joyce and Woolf. Their examples help us envision a practice of translation that resists the dominance of English monolingualism while also breaking through what Walter Benjamin once called 'decayed barriers' of one's own national language.