One afternoon in Japan, I went to a small neighborhood rice shop and asked if they had rice that didn’t require rinsing. “We don’t rinse rice,” the owner said, “we sharpen it.” In Japanese, to sharpen rice is an idiom for rinsing rice, a phrase that once referred to rubbing the grains together to polish away the bran. The verb togu (“to sharpen,” “to hone”) still carries that trace of abrasion, long after modern rice no longer needs it. I’d never thought about this etymology before: after years of speaking, reading, and writing in English, the phrase reached me as if for the first time. My unwitting mistranslation made me aware of what I’d forgotten, “to sharpen” sleeping inside “to rinse.” That mistake was accidental, but it taught me something I’ve since tried to do on purpose, in both my poems and my translations: to keep shifting between my native language and my adopted language until they become defamiliarized. While my slip at the rice shop revealed the semantic possibilities of togu, my later translations would explore how choosing the “wrong” word might reveal what the “right” one can’t.
—Yuki Tanaka, Huffing Like a Horse
