There's always a song to sing, but first a silence must be created for the song to be born in. — Yoko Tawada, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel
The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.
The second-best argument is that I can't read Yoko Tawada in the original. Tawada is among the finest and most singular authors working today. Over the past four decades, she has published nearly two-dozen books, the majority of which have been translated into English by Margaret Mitsutani or Susan Bernofsky and published by New Directions. She's won enough major literary awards that experienced Nobel Prize-watchers consider her a near-future contender.
Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960. Despite her native archipelago's strident monolingualism, she has always been surrounded by foreign languages. Her father was a nonfiction translator and he owned a bookstore that primarily sold works in translation. She said in a 2019 interview that her parents made the pointed literary-political choice of studying Russian and German literature during the Cold War. When Tawada was 19 years old, she took what would turn out to be a formative trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway to visit Germany. Upon graduating from Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University with a degree in Russian literature three years later, she tried and failed to continue her studies in the Soviet Union, settling alongside the Iron Curtain's western border in Hamburg. Tawada quickly learned the language and has lived in Germany ever since.
Tawada writes in both her native Japanese and in German, making her perhaps the world's foremost practitioner of exophonic literature, i.e. writing outside of one's mother tongue. Unlike most notable exophones such as Joseph Conrad, Milan Kundera, and Tawada's beloved Paul Celan, Tawada regularly swaps back and forth between her two languages. She just published the final volume of the 地球に散りばめられて (Scattered All Over The Earth) trilogy in Japanese in 2022, and published Eine Affäre ohne Menschen in German this past October (Bernofsky confirmed in an Instagram DM that she has read the novel and plans to translate it). When writing her widely lauded novel The Naked Eye, Tawada switched languages every few sentences, translating one into the other, onwards through the book until she had rendered the syntactical bones of each language into moldable gelatinous goo with which she could invent new forms.
So while it's possible to constellate Tawada within both the German and Japanese literary scenes, her bilingualism is what truly distinguishes her, especially to an English-reading audience for whom all this work is necessarily going to be read in translation. Tawada has spoken about how the practice of swapping from one language to another allows her to see each language from the outside, and "prevent her from taking things for granted." She insists upon the ecstatic sense of possibility that comes with feeling foreign. Being thrust into an unfamiliar language or country can be scary, but in Tawada's hands, that very disjointedness is a source of profound art, striking beauty, and novel connections invisible to native speakers. "I feel more as though I am between two languages," she told the Paris Review in 2018. "To study that in-between space has given me so much poetry."
Tawada's body of work is full of stories about such in-between spaces, what she calls the "poetic ravine." She is chiefly fascinated with unstable and negotiable boundaries, between the norms of the human and animal worlds (The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear), the old and the young (The Emissary), silence and noise (Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel), or one language and another (everything she's written at least touches on this). Each Tawada novel takes shape as the border at its center comes into focus.
In the first story in Facing the Bridge, Tawada tells a fictionalized version of the real story of Anton Wilhelm Amo, an influential early-18th century philosopher who was abducted from his home in Ghana as a child and brought to Europe, where he rose to prominence. The fictional Amo intuits the nature of a soul, something he's only able to do because of the dislocation he's experienced:
"The human soul is one kind of spirit. Spirits are living beings that cannot be seen and have a will of their own. They cannot describe this will with words, but we know by observation that it exists. Spirits have a purpose that they act toward. When this purpose is achieved, they are at rest." After writing this composition, Amo showed it to Petersen. Although impressed, the tutor couldn’t see why his pupil had suddenly decided to write about such a topic, and asked if he had been reading some philosophical works that might have influenced him. When Amo told him this was something he had thought of himself, Petersen felt the unexpected appearance of words like "soul" and "spirit" in the boy’s writing uncanny. Understood by no one, Amo continued to work on his compositions.
As we read here, borders in Tawada's writing are places that both join together and keep separate; characters often butt up against their impenetrability. Which is to say, Tawada's real genius is for writing about what can't be flung over the poetic ravine. Something "between languages" is necessarily something that defies coherent expression, yet that's exactly what Tawada is writing towards. In both content and form, Tawada seeks the impossible.
Her fictions typically begin with the protagonist experiencing a profound sense of alienation. The first polar bear and only ursine memoirist in Memoirs of a Polar Bear is thrust into unwanted minor literary fame and its attendant strains after writing an autobiography; The Naked Eye's Anh is abducted from East Berlin, ferried across the Iron Curtain into mild imprisonment before winding up in Paris; the best story in Exophony—Tawada's first book-length work of non-fiction, published last summer—is about making her German students write essays about Japanese, the shape of its characters, the prosody of its spoken form, without knowing the content of what is being spoken or written; the tentpole story of Where Europe Begins is about a woman taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Russia and being thrust into a hostile, alien world, a familiar tale to readers of this essay's third paragraph.
Many of Tawada's stories echo her own biography, carrying with them the recurring theme of the gap between ambition and reality. The echoes are rarely that direct—sometimes it's a would-be shipbuilder leaving Japan and winding up in Kiel—yet she is committed to bringing the reader to a place beyond familiarity, the same way she brought herself to such a place 40 years ago. Alienation is the first step one must go through before ecstatic growth.
Tawada writes in Where Europe Begins:
For my grandmother, to travel was to drink foreign water. Different places, different water. There was no need to be afraid of foreign landscapes, but foreign water could be dangerous. [...] When I was a little girl, I never believed there was such a thing as foreign water, for I had always thought of the globe as a sphere of water with all sorts of small and large islands swimming on it. Water had to be the same everywhere. Sometimes in sleep I heard the murmur of the water that flowed beneath the main island of Japan. The border surrounding the island was also made of water that ceaselessly beat against the shore in waves. How can one say where the place of foreign water begins when the border itself is water?
All the more impressive is that for how often her fiction is speculative and occasionally fantastical, it's firmly grounded in the world as it exists. It is a beautiful, simple thing to imagine a world without borders, but it's quite the artistic feat to square that vision with the harshly delineated world we actually live in. The majority of Tawada's fictions are set in Europe, a terrain of perpetual fascination for the contradiction between its self-idealization and the violence sustaining its impossible vision of itself. Little of it is explicitly political, though her allegiances to the many, to the marginalized, to those subject to the whims of empire are clear. Some, though not much, is set in Japan. Tawada's native country is often invoked as a symbol of the paranoid vantages that come with seclusion.
The Bridegroom Was A Dog, hailed as her "masterpiece" by the great Parul Seghal, earned her the Akutagawa Prize (the Japanese equivalent of the Pulitzer) and put her on the map. The 1993 novella is written relatively straightforwardly, though of course only relatively: It begins with the eccentric Mitsuko Kitamura, who more or less appears out of nowhere in the suburbs to run a small school, reading her students a story called The Bridegroom Was A Dog. It goes, "Once upon a time there was a little princess who was still too
young to wipe herself after she went to the lavatory, and the woman assigned to look after her was too lazy to do it for her, so she used to call the princess’s
favorite black dog and say, 'If you lick her bottom clean, one day she’ll be
your bride.'" Shortly afterwards, Mitsuko is visited by a doglike man, and she begins living a strange, sexually fulfilling life with him. The animating force of the novel, which, again, is great and weird and extremely funny, is the suffocating force exerted on Mitsuko by the gossiping local mothers and by Japan's rigid class and social structure.
"Tawada is immune to the seduction of ideal worlds," Reed McConnell writes in the Baffler. The recent Scattered All Over The Earth trilogy, framed as "cheerfully dystopian" climate fiction, is a particularly potent example. The story's protagonist Hiruko is stranded in Denmark, with her native country (referred to only as "the land of sushi") having disappeared in some unspecified environmental catastrophe. Scattered, Suggested in the Stars, and Archipelago of the Sun follow Hiruko and a swelling cast as they seek out more native Japanese speakers and the truth about what happened to the archipelago.
Ostensibly, anyway. The motion of the trilogy is less Hiruko's quest for a specific geographic endpoint than her ensemble's collective linguistic ferment. The members of an ever-growing troupe—a mama's boy linguistics researcher afraid to use his voice, a native Greenlander pretending to be Japanese, a optimistic, genderfluid exchange student in love with the researcher, a pessimist environmental hardliner in love with the indifferent Greenlander—are thrust into varying states of conflict with an antagonistic world by the gaps between their languages. Hiruko speaks Panska, "an artificial language that can be understood throughout Scandinavia" that "just sort of came into being as I said things that people somehow understood," making her simultaneously alienated from and insulated by language.
Most scenes involve the ensemble trying to further their quest, only to get sidetracked by the delightful, clunky circumstances of trying to further the quest in so many languages at once. Instead of, say, getting on an eastbound train, one character will remark on the way a train is like a caterpillar, another will note that the written form of the word caterpillar in their mother tongue looks like a wardrobe toppling over, prompting another to make a point about earthquakes. Needless to say, the exchange does not end with them getting on a train.
In lesser hands, this would be cloyingly circular, but Tawada is a gifted stylist and she writes with such heart that her prose moves as if alive. As Tawada gradually unfurls her theory of translation as a site of formative confusion, the inciting mystery of the trilogy—Will these guys ever find out what happened to Japan?—fades, ceding its place to an even more compelling question: What is that person going to say when they open their mouth? As Hiruko did with Panska, the characters do not so much change their circumstances as describe them so beautifully and suprisingly that they feel genuinely altered. In Tawada's hands, dislocating that pleasant, eternal sense of connection and mystery across different languages—both within the story and across the medium of translation—allows for a greater clarity of transmission.
But even greater clarity always falls short of perfect. It is not actually possible to experience the world as someone else does, even if you speak the same language. This makes any act of writing potentially futile. Maybe there will always be some obscurant layer between people preventing pure communication, maybe it is not actually possible to do anything other than convey the broad abstract shapes of our loneliness, maybe the poetic ravine is a bottomless gulf across which no meaning can pass.
Terrifying, perhaps, but Tawada embraces it. "Every human being needs a great unrequited passion to enrich their life with impossibility," she writes in Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. Tawada's writing is a testament not quite to the power of imagination but rather to its necessity. She applies the maxims of translation—its faithful imprecision, its preference for poetic truths over literal representation, its impossibility—to all human communication as a means of allaying the dreadful possibility of the eternal loneliness of one's own subjectivity. Through that lovingly obscurant lens, something like true connection materializes.
Importantly, this imprecision in communicating one's subjectivity is broadly characteristic of fiction, whether you're reading it in translation or not. The utility of translation is to serve as a filter that allows the reader to see the gap between languages, to feel the wind rushing up from the bottom of the poetic ravine. Translation acknowledges the reader's anxiety, in the process opening up a space for generative misunderstanding.
Every language is a foreign language, and for Tawada this presents not an obstacle but a vast terrain of possibility. There is no such thing as reading Yoko Tawada in the original.
