English Words on Stein in Japanese

Kyong-Mi Park has translated Gertrude Stein into Japanese. In an essay "My Asian Bones Are Ringing" she muses on how the acquisition of any language is an encounter through the bones of the ears with the other. She reminds us, "Words that we call words all belong to others." She continues:

What I discovered through my own personal experience of translating Stein, the mother of modernism, was the spell-like quality of words, that language was in fact a medium — a spiritual medium as well as an intermediary — and that the act of using words is that of being possessed by the words of someone else.

One other someone else that appears in this essay is Theresa Hak Kyung (represented by an excerpt from Dictée).

"My Asian Bones Are Ringing" is found in Four From Japan: Contemporary Poetry and Essays by Women introduced and translated by Sawako Nakayasu.

And so for day 775
26.01.2009