In 1933, the German architect Bruno Taut emigrated to Japan in order to flee from the Nazi regime. By that point Taut was already an extremely prolific and noted exponent of architectural modernism and a pioneer of functionalism. He had been invited to Japan by the European-trained Japanese architect Isaburo Ueno and, once there, the businessman Fusaichiro Inoue arranged for Taut to move into a small traditional house in a rural location near Takasaki, in Gumma Prefecture, where Taut was to write several influential treatises on Japanese architecture.

This paper explores the intersection between space and intercultural/interlingual translation by focusing on a book that Taut wrote when residing in Taksaki: Houses and People of Japan (1937). Written in German, the book first appeared in Japan in an English translation by A.J. Sington, with the Tokyo-based Sanseidō publishing company.

Taut’s Houses and People of Japan is remembered for focusing international attention on traditional Japanese domestic architecture. But the book also lends itself to be read as a narrative of Taut’s personal encounters and experiences in Japan. It is significant in this sense that, in his prospectus for the book, Taut described it as ‘fill[ing] a gap in world literature’ and as being designed not ‘exclusively for architects, but rather for every member of the general public who is interested in things cultural’. Indeed, Houses and People of Japan is surprisingly lacking in technical details. Examining Taut’s descriptions of Japanese domestic settings and tracing his sources (notably to the 1886 Japanese Homes and their Surroundings by the American zoologist Edward S. Morse) enables us to piece together an international textual network of writings that represent the acts of entering and inhabiting traditional Japanese houses and experiencing Japanese hospitality (Taut tellingly dedicated his book to his ‘Japanese friends’). Such writings, following Taut, can be understood as a distinctive genre of world literature, in which the treatment of domestic space is used as a foil for questions of intercultural communication and translation (Taut, again, describes his Japanese house as a ‘medium of contemplation’).

My paper will address the following questions. How is hospitality described in Houses and People of Japan, notably through acts of interpretation, translation and failure of translation? How did translation shape the material production and circulation of Taut’s book? How does it portray the relationship between home-making and world-making? How does the progression from estrangement to acculturation enabled by domestic space in Taut map onto the concept of 'domestication’ as understood by translation studies?

Hsieh Pingying’s (Xie Bingying) Autobiography of a Girl Soldier (Nubing Zizhuan 1936) is a key text in modern Chinese autobiographical writing. Existing scholarship focuses on the genre’s enabling power for female writers to articulate new forms of gender relations regarding family, sex, and domesticity and how it contributes gender perspectives to the imagination of nation and modernity. Hsieh’s autobiography is exceptionally international in its circulation and reception, as it experienced translation and reverse translation between Chinese and English languages. This essay focuses on the transnational and translingual aspect of this text as world literature through translation. Adet Lin and Anor Lin (daughters of the Chinese bilingual writer Lin Yutang, who had earlier translated sections of Hsieh into English) translated it as Girl Rebel: The Autobiography of Hsieh Pingying, which was published by America’s John Day Company in 1940. In 1943, London’s George Allen & Unwin published another English translation, Autobiography of a Chinese Girl, by the Chinese writer Tsui Chi, who is author of A Short History of Chinese Civilization (1942). This essay engages with a comparative analysis of these Chinese and English editions. Seeing translator as non-transparent cultural intermediary, it looks at how gender (male and female translators) and location (Britain and the U.S.) intervene in the different choices of specific translation strategies as well as paratextual construct, and how these interventions function as mediation between original textual representation of Chinese female subjectivity and Anglo-American expectations of China and the Chinese. The essay also highlights the specific Anglo-American context of the early 1940s (particularly John Day and George Allen & Unwin as important publishers of writings about China in the U.S. and Britain respectively) and examines how the two English editions translate the relationship between female subjectivity, nation and war (Chinese civil war of the 1920s) into a renewed imagination of transnational connection during the World War.

Taking as my test-case Jamie McKendrick’s The Years, a sequence of fifteen picture-poems of varying length and measure, I’ll re-examine, first, George Steiner’s still powerful postulate that Western culture is the “translation and rewording of previous meaning,” and, then, the model of translation Pascale Casanova adapts for her “world republic of letters.” In The Years, McKendrick uses such rhetorical devices as graphic illustration, allusion, citation, repetition, and imitation in order to gain access to other spatio-temporalities than his own, and to transfer and transmute—partially and topologically—his meaning into the appropriated or inherited meaning and thereby claim for himself citizenship of the “world republic of letters” (as Casanova envisions it). The allusions to and citations from canonical writers of the West—Horace, Catullus, Dante, Petrarca, Shakespeare, or Hardy—in The Years are the sites where such maneuvers take place. In brief, McKendrick’s case enables us to discuss culture as translation, translation as a cultural understanding of cultural understanding, and the world republic of letters as a construct based on such understanding of understanding, a republic of translated letters, whose spatio-temporal boundary is necessarily unstable and ever shifting.

Tim Parks’s short 2010 piece on the ‘dull new global novel’ has provoked some interesting responses. Parks regrets the tendency of some authors to write, as he sees it, for translation and the global market, avoiding the linguistic, cultural and epistemological difficulties of the local, the idiomatic and the recondite. In Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature, Rebecca Walkowitz considers works that acknowledge the place of translation in both literary history and in ongoing literary circulation, reminding us that translation ‘operates differently across languages and literary cultures’. Moreover, the choice is not simply between an emphasis on the local or the global, as Walkowitz argues: ‘Refusing to match language to geography, many contemporary works will seem to occupy more than one place, to be produced in more than one language, or to address multiple audiences at the same time. They build translation into their form.’

This paper will explore how questions of language and space are negotiated in Sarah Bernstein’s novel Study for Obedience (2023), set in an ‘unnamed northern country’. The nameless narrator has come to live in her brother’s house in a country where she cannot speak the language, despite her efforts to learn it and her previous prowess at learning German and Italian. Gradually the country is revealed to be a site of persecution of their ancestors, ‘an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits’. Although the word ’Jewish’ is never mentioned, it is clearly implied by references to their early life, such as saying the bracha over classroom Sabbath ceremonies. But the text is not only an allusion to ongoing anti-Semitism; it can also be read as a study of existential unhousedness: ‘I wanted so badly to live in my life, wanted to meet it head on, wanted above all for something to happen, for this terrible yearning to be quenched’. Similarly, the narrator’s status as ‘incomer, offlander, usurper’ is complicated by her relationship with her brother: the eponymous ‘study for obedience’ can also be seen in the shifting power dynamics between siblings. By avoiding fixed correlations between place, language and identity, Bernstein produces a novel where the local is both present and elusive; the narrator’s resistance to understanding the townspeople compels her attempts to translate their spoken and body language and express it in English.

The novel ends with a measured aspiration towards the global: ‘So much transpired on a scale of time and space that was longer than a lifetime, wider than a country, vaster than the story of the exile of a single people, and bigger still.’ I argue that Study for Obedience belies Tim Parks’ distinction between the global novel and its counterpart: Bernstein create a nexus of spaces and languages that invites personal and allegorical readings, a nexus which is written both for and from translation.