Scan barcode
A review by jacob_wren
Where Europe Begins by Yōko Tawada
5.0
Some passages from Where Europe Begins:
If they didn’t manage the operation properly and cut off some necessary part of her, she would not be completely back. If it came to that, I could donate a body part of my own. I could give at least one. Many of the body’s organs come in twos. I have two ears. Two lungs. I think there might even be two of the uterus, but I don’t remember now.
*
When talking to a large company over dinner, one is not so much looking for things to say as walking along a narrow road trying not to touch things one shouldn’t and somehow making one’s way forward.
*
To some extent, one has to forgive them on account of their youth, but I can’t forgive people who use their youth as an excuse to oppress others.
*
Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a foreign language.
Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.
*
But can one understand the language of cells at all? The question brings to mind the image of yet another cell: the booth for simultaneous interpreters. At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in which people stand telling stories: they translate, so actually they are retelling tales that already exist. The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps, it isn’t really a single shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.
*
A theatre, for example, is often a place where the dead can speak. A simple example is found in Hamlet: the dead father comes on stage and tells how he was killed by his brother. That is the decisive moment in this play, without which neither Hamlet nor the audience would have access to the past. They would have to go on believing the story of the murderer, who claimed Hamlet’s father had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Through the dead man’s story we learn a bit of the past that otherwise would have remained obscure. The theatre is the place where knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible. In other places, we almost always hear only the tales of the living. They force their stories on us to justify themselves, and so that they will be able to go on living, like Hamlet’s uncle. The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.
.
If they didn’t manage the operation properly and cut off some necessary part of her, she would not be completely back. If it came to that, I could donate a body part of my own. I could give at least one. Many of the body’s organs come in twos. I have two ears. Two lungs. I think there might even be two of the uterus, but I don’t remember now.
*
When talking to a large company over dinner, one is not so much looking for things to say as walking along a narrow road trying not to touch things one shouldn’t and somehow making one’s way forward.
*
To some extent, one has to forgive them on account of their youth, but I can’t forgive people who use their youth as an excuse to oppress others.
*
Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a foreign language.
Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.
*
But can one understand the language of cells at all? The question brings to mind the image of yet another cell: the booth for simultaneous interpreters. At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in which people stand telling stories: they translate, so actually they are retelling tales that already exist. The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps, it isn’t really a single shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.
*
A theatre, for example, is often a place where the dead can speak. A simple example is found in Hamlet: the dead father comes on stage and tells how he was killed by his brother. That is the decisive moment in this play, without which neither Hamlet nor the audience would have access to the past. They would have to go on believing the story of the murderer, who claimed Hamlet’s father had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Through the dead man’s story we learn a bit of the past that otherwise would have remained obscure. The theatre is the place where knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible. In other places, we almost always hear only the tales of the living. They force their stories on us to justify themselves, and so that they will be able to go on living, like Hamlet’s uncle. The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.
.