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“No More Translations”: Uncounting Languages in Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2023

Penny Yeung
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Abstract

Following recent suggestions that multilingual narratives be studied for their narratological features, this essay reads Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2011) as one instance where narratological features are refashioned to allegorize postmonolingual translation. In lieu of relying on narrative perspectival shifts, the novel merges the voices of its animal and human characters. Examining the consequent deconstruction of numerous binaries—animal/human, speech/writing, past/present—the essay tracks the novel's disarticulation of countable languages as they have been imagined in biological, phonocentric, and genealogical terms. The uncounting of languages alongside the novel's rethinking of maternity enables a reading of Memoirs as an antinarrative that counters the linguistic family romance (as articulated by Yasemin Yildiz) encapsulated by the trope of the mother tongue. A narratological reading of Memoirs reveals the structure through which monolingualism is undermined and the emergence of a postmonolingual subject made possible.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 138 , Issue 3 , May 2023 , pp. 639 - 651
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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