Space, (self-)translation and plurilingualism in the works of Tawada Yōko

In the work of Tawada Yōko, we can identify two strategies that are the result of her attitude towards positioning “in the middle”: self-translation and plurilingualism. Through her travels and explorations, her insatiable curiosity for diversity, Tawada engages in a “translational poetics” in which translation works simultaneously as a process of creation. This paper focuses on this parallelism and analyzes how such a positioning “in the middle” can be interpreted as spatial operations, in examples from the author’s German and Japanese production.