Oblique Translations in David Mitchell’s Works

Translation crops up in David Mitchell’s work both as a fictional theme, for instance in Black Swan Green (2006) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), and as a personal practice when Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida translated two non-fiction works by a young Japanese boy with non-verbal autism: The Reason I Jump (2013) and Fall Down Seven Times, Get up Eight (2017). Interestingly, these four books are all related to the genre of autobiography, and three of them focus on Japan. Drawing from an investigation into the specificity of the Japanese tradition of translation and into theories of translation as intertextual and multi-temporal, we will start by exploring the notions of relay and voice in Mitchell’s use of translation. To further investigate the particular nature of the association of translation and autobiography in Mitchell’s work, we will discuss the concept of devolved testimony developed by French historian Emmanuel Bouju and that of the ‘born-translated novel’ by Rebecca Walkowitz. We will finally contend that the notion of “oblique writing”, defined as the practice of rewriting or writing over a lost voice from a lateral perspective, captures the spirit of these works, enabling him to navigate both issues of power play and the delicate relation between intimacy and distance.