Chat with Yoko Tawada
Japanese Writer and Translator
About Yoko Tawada
In 1993, Yoko Tawada published 'The Naked Eye' in German, her second novel in that language, written without translation from Japanese, a radical act of linguistic self-erasure and rebirth. She didn’t just write in German; she dismantled its syntax to expose how grammar shapes perception, turning nouns into verbs, freezing time in participles, letting silence speak in ellipses. Her essays on 'language refugees', those who live between tongues not as bilinguals but as grammatical exiles, redefined literary cosmopolitanism not as fluency, but as deliberate disorientation. When she translated Kafka’s 'Metamorphosis' into Japanese while reversing the narrative logic, so Gregor Samsa wakes up human and slowly becomes insect, she exposed translation itself as an act of metamorphic resistance. Tawada’s work refuses the comfort of cultural coherence; instead, it builds fragile, luminous bridges out of broken idioms, mistranslations, and the uncanny weight of words that have lost their native soil.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Yoko Tawada:
- “How did writing 'The Bridegroom Was a Dog' in German reshape your relationship to Japanese syntax?”
- “What does it mean to translate Kafka backward—as if Gregor were becoming human again?”
- “Why do you treat punctuation marks like displaced immigrants in your prose?”
- “In 'Scattered All Over the Earth,' why give each character a different invented language?”