Both Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over The Earth (tr. Margaret Mitsutani) and Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance (tr. Ros Schwartz) deal with the idea that language and identity are interconnected and able to create, transform, and mould each other in response to life experiences. Each writer reflects on experiences of forced displacement, either personal or fictional, and through these works they explore what it means to lose one’s native language and be forced to rebuild one’s self around, and through, an entirely new one.

Hiruko, one of Tawada’s characters, has created a whole new language after being displaced and realising she might be the last speaker of her native tongue left in the world. This language, Panska (a language that borrows from, and can be understood by any other Scandinavian language) reflects her situation as an immigrant who might be forced to move country again and again at any point. In this way, Panska is a representation of her in-betweenness, the impossibility of belonging to one place now that her native country has disappeared. Progressively as well as mutually, Hiruko and Panska shape and represent each other. 

As Tawada, through Hiruko, proves that language can change and adapt to better fit a new environment or way of life, so Gansel reflects on the openness and adaptability of language by drawing a parallel between translation and transhumance (the journey shepherds and their flocks make every year from winter pastures to summer pastures). In spite of national borders - language can move and transform, getting constantly enriched by what it meets along the way. In this spirit, the translator has the duty of opening up her own language to make space for something new. From Translation as Transhumance: "it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other. That was probably my most essential lesson in translation."

Part of The Translation Table, our reading group where all the attention is pointed at translation, with the translator and their work under the spotlight. It is a space where we think together about what it means for a book to be translated, to move from one language to another, from the hands of its author, to a reader far away by means of a translator. We do so by bringing together our favourite translated literature and literature about translation, pairing them to highlight the process, the effect, the consequences and the wonders of “this little art” called translation.