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YOko Tawada, born in 1960, is a Japanese writer who came to Germany at the age of nineteen and learned German as her second language. She writes nonfiction, plays, and poetry in both languages, German and Japanese. Her play Sancho Pansa (2000), written in German, includes snippets of Japanese and even of Spanish- the latter are three longer quotations from Cervantes's novel Don Quixote of la Mancha. This paper proposes to examine this multilingual, postmodern play and to position it in our contemporary discussion of quixotism. Since the seventeenth century, adaptations of Don Quixote have contributed to an exchange of sentiments and ideas-not only in Spain, but also transculturally. This paper places Tawada's play in a line of reflections that starts with Jorge Luis Borges's narrative "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" (1939) and leads to Franz Kafka's and Walter Benjamin's texts about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Parallel to this meta-literary line that focuses on issues of reception and intertextuality, Tawada's play adds a new chapter to the history of female quixotism.
At first reading, Tawada's play seems to belong to the theater of the absurd, since Sancho Panza is not riding a donkey, but he IS a donkey. Likewise, Don Quixote is not riding a horse, but he IS a horse. In addition, both main protagonists are women: a female Sancho and a female Don Quixote. In other words, they are able to see the world through gendered-as well as animals-centered-eyes. As Roxane Riegler states about Tawada's literary work, it shows us the blind spots in our Western culture, and it does so by bringing out the "Zerlegbarkeit erstarrter Identitätszuschreibungen" ["demountibility of solidified ascriptions of identity"] (358). This judgment is certainly also correct for Tawada's play Sancho Pansa and accounts for the large number of its performances in Europe, the United States, and Asia (see Shimada 61-62).
The text is an adaptation of Cervantes's famous novel repositioned within in the context of the late twentieth century as is indicated by several references to crucial environmental problems and political events and their aftermaths, such as the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Regarding Tawada's re-gendering of the quixotic trope, Tawada's Don Quixote gives a reason for the fact that he is now a woman:...