5 - Ishiguro and Translation

Summary

This chapter highlights translation as both formally and thematically at the very core of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing – as its origin, strategy, and target. Its first part considers the ways in which the author’s engagement with the two cultures at the heart of his own experience helped shape a translational realism and a poetics of originary translatedness that are central to his style and that comment implicitly on their own constructedness as well as on our narrative and critical assumptions. The chapter then turns to a focus on Ishiguro’s self-consciously ‘translated’ narrative voices training us in navigating their liminalities, thus prompting reflection, on various levels, on the limits of knowing. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Ishiguro’s poetics of translation – or more precisely the liminalities of its subtly self-reflexive translational realism and voice – draws attention to itself as such, thereby extending the novels’ concerns to an ethics of reading that also models an ethics for reading world literature.