Language is a Foreign Language
Language is a Foreign Language / Experimental Translation as Device Nancy Seidler, Hopscotch Translation, 2022.
A good, insightful text on translation and it's role, with well described and nice examples.
Language shapes the way we see. Experimental translation shapes the way we see language. The way we see language shapes the way we construct our selves, the landscapes we inhabit.
i's, land/guage/scape, no original, floating, self/other relation, textual instability, entanglement, Yoko Tawada, enstrangement, Wang Wei, Chantal Wright, Chika Sagawa, Eliot Weinberger, Ezra Pound, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Octavio Paz, Outranspo, Sawako Nakayasu, Viktor Shklovsky, Xiaolu Guo, Bakhtin
“Is this ich always the same? Can one always be the same?” Her (Yoko Tawada) questions about language have no resolution, “and that’s exciting”. These questions without answers, this paradoxical positioning between languages, is the enstrangement she lives in a multilingual subjecthood.
“Language,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes, “is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature. Language is mediating in my very being” (15). The language that allows us to say “I, myself,” is entangled within these frameworks. As Yoko Tawada mused, “I” am not the same “I” in another language.