Sawako Nakayasu Eats Sagawa Chika: Translation, Poetry, and (Post)Modernism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the works of modernist poet Sagawa Chika (1911–1936) and her translator Sawako Nakayasu (b.1975), analyzing how they both intersect translation and creation, problematizing issues of gender. Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats color (2011) is a collection mixing English, Japanese, French, and Spanish ‘translations, anti-translations, and originals’, which have as a starting point Sagawa Chika’s poems. I first discuss Sagawa’s work translating writers such as James Joyce, Charles Reznikoff, and others, focusing on the way in which she develops a unique poetic vocabulary through translation, setting her apart within the (male-centered) modernist movement. Next, I analyze the way Nakayasu approaches Sagawa’s texts when rendering them into English, making the translation process visible and positioning some of the results as nijisōsaku (spin-offs), or ‘transcreations’. My analysis of the above-mentioned texts will shed light on translation, self-translation, and anti-translation as methods through which the woman poet-translator explores unique ways of being and writing in the world. Special attention will be paid to translation as anthropophagy from the margins, that is, as a process of consuming and metabolizing central discourses, sometimes beyond recognition.