The Japanese German Author on Living Between Languages

Japanese writer Yuko Tawada wrote: “I was born in Japan in the way in which one is thrown into a bag,” wrote Japanese writer Yuko Tawada. “This is why this language has become my external skin. The German language, on the other hand, has swallowed all of it and has been sitting in my stomach since then.”

If these metaphors initially indicate a linguistic hierarchical sequence, Tawada continued to accurately refute the idea in an interview. Her mother tongue is intimate and impossible to float on her skin; On the contrary, the second language is consciously consumed: chewing, tasted, metabolism. She noted that some foreign words resist fully digestion; They fall uncomfortable in the throat or abdomen, imperceptible. Others turn into “meat” and eventually become part of her body.

If these metaphors initially indicate a linguistic hierarchical sequence, Tawada continued to accurately refute the idea in an interview. Her mother tongue is intimate and impossible to float on her skin; On the contrary, the second language is consciously consumed: chewing, tasted, metabolism. She noted that some foreign words resist fully digestion; They fall uncomfortable in the throat or abdomen, imperceptible. Others turn into “meat” and eventually become part of her body.

The dance between the familiar and uncommon was the subject of Tawada’s work. In her imagination, written in Japanese and German, enacted a kind of deliberate separation, and the gradual confrontations between her narrators and the world around them, which force both the reader and personality to see the ordinary again. in “A talisman, “Women offended earrings as a protective amulet. In the movie” The Man with Mops “, a group of Japanese tourists meets with a German fraud, giving up twisting and broadcasting from the technician alike and hitting them.

In the world of Tawada, the wrong reading is not necessarily a failure – it is a generator, a way to show that the relationship between the word and the meaning, between signal and evidence, is always negotiated. In the newly translated articles, exophonyTawada transforms the instability of the meaning into a method of investigation. The book draws its meetings in the language not as a fixed system, but as a variable terrain – where misunderstanding can light, and where the borders between languages are always in a state of flow.

“Perhaps what I really want is not to be a writer in this or that language in particular, but falling into the poetic valley between them,” reflected in exophony. The book is located in this valley. It is an exploration of what lives between languages, in a place where speech and concepts of self are allowed to stutter, beaten, and resist cohesion.

in exophonyTawda, a travel writer for the same language. It does not tell cities, memorials, or food as much as the symbols and agreements – which do not announce this – that determine the perimeter of linguistic affiliation. If traditional travel writing plans are a spatial displacement, Tawada articles are of the type that bow to how to speak (or reject speech), then the language has turned into the location of the individual in the cultural universe.

The largest part of exophony Organized as a loose path, with chapters called the cities – Dakar, Berlin, Los Angeles, Seoul, Vienna – but every place is treated as a location with accurate geographical coordinates of the linguistic linguistic climate.

In Dakar, where Tawada traveled to attend a literary conference in 2002, she faced the phrase “EXPHONIC” for the first time. It does not refer to writing simply in a second language, but the method of consciousness that flourishes outside the jurisdiction of the mother tongue. Hearing this, the term clicks to the Tawada location is not as a poster, but a compass. “The Exoveric is the concept of adventure, full of curiosity,” she wrote. Likewise, this book: Its chapters are exposed, the sediments accumulate, again on themselves like rivers that reconsider their banks.

Tawada-translated prose by Lisa Hoffman Kuroda-reflects and developed, with sudden axes of stories to philosophical. Tawada can move from linguistic theory to the story about an existing translation in Dakar and maintain the lightness of the same touch. Paul Ceylon, the poet in the German language that he admires more, will later narrate the re -jamming of a train.

In Seoul, Tawada notes that the ongoing effects of the colonial Japan are still forming cultural and linguistic exchange – or rather non -exchange. “If Japan has not committed war crimes against Korea – or at least assumed responsibility for them – maybe linguistic exchange will be more likely,” he wrote. That sentence, simple and non -decorated, contains complete morals of speech.

Over and over again, you resist the assumption that the language is a neutral container, and refuses to entertain the basic questions about language and identity. People often ask her about the language you dream of – as if it would open itself “real”. They are bristles. “Implicitly in the question is the assumption that it is impossible for people to really speak two languages,” she wrote. The dream question is not about dreams at all; It is related to classification. Tawada, as expected, refuses to classify.

Likewise, it disintegrates the myths of the original speaker as a referee, and the mother tongue as a kind of cognitive homeland. “Nothing good can come from a pre -defined feeling for society,” warns. “I want to believe that living means creating new societies wherever it happens, using the strength of the language.” What appears in its studied articles is the idea of language as something immigrant, a herd of birds rejects the nest.

However, Tawada is very hidden from falling into the easy romance about linguistic displacement. She moved to Germany in her early twenties after graduating from the University of Waseda to work in a book distributor. It was crossing into another voluntary language – unlike the paths of those who were forced to integrate due to war, colonialism or exile. “People have no right to preach about the wedding of Exophony if they never have to speak in a language and not through them,” reminds us, and carefully put their linguistic dislocation in greater structures of strength.

In Senegal, you are considering the number of book, despite the raising of those who speak Wolof, have long written in French – a legacy of colonial education and literary traditions. But she notes a shift between generations: instead of returning to Wolof on its own, some writers now choose English, and adopt their global arrival not far from rapprochement, but as strategic support in a new linguistic field. “These writers were choosing to confirm their independence not by reaching the past and their roots, but through a jump in a completely different world,” Tauda notes.

While publishers still depend on the English version of Balluo To consolidate their translations, Coetzee stressed the importance of the Spanish version and hinted that it may fully reflect the final form of the novel. Its publishing maneuver is not only disturbed the translation rules, but the deep belief that the text is exactly the same in its supposed “original” language.

This belief is also the most modern Coetze reflections Speak in tonguesA conversation along the book between him and Dimópulos published earlier this year. Like Tawada, it is wondering about the hypothesis that the language is a stable container of thought or identity, while realizing its ability to power, geography and historical weight. In what Coetze describes as his English “non -radical” – a language that stripped of the national term and the national flavor, “divorced from any social cultural home” – there is an echo of the desire of Tawada to write in the separation between two or more languages.

But where Coetzee talks about the language in which it is published pole They also starve … what I think of it as the original nutrients. ”Tawad embraces the shortcomings in the language, its destruction, as sites of poetic possibility. Far from seeking to neutralize the language or bring it back to a pure essence, seeking its layer, to enlarge its deviations. This is not the“ original ”offering, but it is a re -imagination of the science itself. “Not to take things as a Muslim by it.” exophony This idea presents a good dramatic way – that the stranger is not just a geographical state but rather literary ethics: a way to stay in a state of alert of how things are otherwise.

Tawada never offered exophony As an indication, but in his clashes from the story, history and linguistic investigation, it develops a radical theory calmly of literature. Tawada articles such as Tidepools – at first glance, are exposed, but they are filled with an unpredictable life. She realizes that the language carries the history of classes and unconscious loyalties, but it is also always slipping from under the United States.

In writing from the “Poetic Valley” – between nations, textual programs and grammatical systems – Tawada does not seek to reconcile these tensions, but to grow them. Its vision of global literature is not a flattening of the difference in everything that is marketable, but it is a practice to make visual instability that readers are usually trained to ignore. It is a useful separation – one of which depends on the ways we have seen the language, betray us, and sometimes it makes us clear to each other, even for a short period only, or without cost.