The Art of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s “Exophony”

Exophony is the practice of writing in a language that is not one’s mother tongue. It’s not as rare as it might seem. Among the lengthy list of exophonic authors that Wikipedia provides are many recognizable names, including Chinua Achebe, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Don Mee Choi, Joseph Conrad, Kazuo Ishiguro, Agota Kristof, Vladimir Nabokov, and Tom Stoppard, to pick a few. The Japanese writer Yoko Tawada has been linked to two languages—her mother tongue Japanese and her adopted language German. Tawada grew up living in both countries and has chosen to live in Germany essentially all her adult life. (After a long spell in Hamburg, she currently lives in Berlin.) In fact, her first book was a collection of poems published in Germany in 1987 in both Japanese and German. She has both a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in contemporary German literature, and has written more than a dozen novels, several books of short stories, and several collections of essays, plays, and poetry. Her…

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