For Every Work Has Several Faces: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada about Writing and Translation
by Tracy Shi | June 10, 2025 | Literature
Photo © by Christopher PelhamI had the honor of introducing Yoko Tawada’s seminal lecture “Every Work Has Several Faces: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada about Writing and Translation,” delivered at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts, on March 27, 2025. In this article, I expand on that introduction, exploring how Tawada, a borderless wordsmith, shatters linguistic confines through writing and translation: her language erases frontiers and reconfigures reality, existing not as the ruins of Babel, but as a thriving, pulsating, organic entity.
Born in Tokyo and now residing in Berlin, Tawada is a celebrated writer of fiction, poetry, and a deeply engaged thinker on the nature of language. Writing in both German and Japanese, she is recognized as one of the most distinctive multilingual voices in contemporary literature. Tawada has authored a multitude of distinguished works, including Where Europe Begins, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, The Naked Eye, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All Over the Earth, and Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, among others. Among her many prestigious honors are the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the National Book Award, underscoring her profound international influence.
Tawada’s multilingual and transnational experiences have significantly influenced her literary vision, which is grounded in themes of dislocation, perception, and transformation. Having moved to a foreign land at a relatively young age, she often explores the experiences of characters who are estranged from their native linguistic and cultural roots. Tawada’s writing is both intellectually rich and emotionally resonant. Instead of focusing solely on the confusion or distress linked to the transition and displacement, it diverges from conventional migration narratives, emphasizing a courageous form of freedom and the pure joy of language in an idiosyncratic way: a revelatory gesture that illuminates new vistas for individuals who have traversed and are traveling a similar path.
Themes of linguistic estrangement, imaginative perception, and identity are vividly illustrated in one of Tawada’s most haunting novels, The Naked Eye. The protagonist is an unnamed Vietnamese high school girl who is abducted and taken to West Germany. Following her escape onto a train that accidentally takes her to Paris, her journey commences as she becomes increasingly enchanted by the films of Catherine Deneuve, despite being unable to understand the language. Immersed in cinema that surpasses her linguistic comprehension, she gradually blurs the distinctions between her reality and what she perceives as reality. Tawada’s works present an anti-Babel concept—the notion that linguistic and cultural differences should not, and cannot, be the confinements constraining one’s thoughts. She writes for an understanding that transcends national and cultural boundaries, and considers crystallized facts and known realities as “blind spots,” as she writes: “You know, vision is a split eye, and where bias is born—it isn’t that you have a view through this split eye, rather, vision itself is the bias, and at the point where it is you can’t see anything at all. It no longer bothers me to be blind” (Tawada, The Naked Eye 227). In Tawada’s world, reality is fluid and non-static, while language, through which associations are conveyed, functions as a lens that shapes individuals’ perception of that reality. Yet, language does not define reality or truth itself. Within her universe, there is no need to seek correctness or a definitive answer to questions; the emotional response that emerges from an individual’s experience of reality is the ultimate truth. Her compositional methodology underscores individual emotions and the unrestrained flow of thought in a profoundly humane manner.
Her role as a translator reveals even more about her understanding of language’s materiality and limits. As a translator, Tawada posits that translation encompasses more than mere linguistic substitution; it is a montage, a metamorphosis. As she articulates, every direction of translation is a different processing. Translating from Japanese to German, or vice versa, is not to walk a reversible path. Between every two languages, there are inherent asymmetries—areas of untranslatability that resist parity. This discrepancy is not merely semantic; although the conveyance of meaning, the paralleling of sonic elements, and the correspondence of syntactic structure are fundamentally vital in linguistic translation, Tawada elucidates with diligence that visual similarity must also be considered in the translation process. Before the eye reads or comprehends, it beholds; it encounters the text and language as images—visual symbols of nuances.
This idea is compellingly expressed in her discussion of kanji’s visual weight and aesthetic presence in translating ancient Japanese poetry. The written language in Japanese consists of kana (syllabary) and kanji (Chinese characters). Within a single line of Japanese poetry, kanji appear intermittently, resembling the budding blossoms of plum flowers that sparsely adorn the long bough of a verse. Tawada believes that the kanji units possess greater visual density and weight; they are visual anchors acting as small centers of gravity, pulling the gaze downward. Semantically, they frequently convey a greater informational density than katakana or hiragana. These kanji components, laden with pigment and meaning, operate as tonal accents. But how might one carry this gravity into the German text? In what manner should one address and express that?
To achieve this balance in the German language and restore a visual-semantic resonance, Tawada makes a sophisticated choice. Since all nouns in German are capitalized, she decides to translate the kanji characters into capitalized German nouns when translating classical Japanese poetry, such as poems from the Kokin Wakashū. This approach not only imparts a visual weight to the translated word but also reflects the significance of the original. It is a visual rhyme and a symbolic equivalence. It is noteworthy that many of the Japanese kanji included are, in fact, nouns or variations or noun-roots that are modifiable by the kana that follow them to indicate tense, mood, aspect, or voice. By employing this morphological semblance, Tawada translates not only the content but also the visual importance.
In Tawada’s view, language is both a force and a constraint, capable of liberating and enclosing thought. Every language is initially shaped by those who “made” or “created” it; subsequently, it is gradually reshaped by time, subtly and continuously transforming the thoughts, logic, and perceptions of those who come after. Tawada highlights the perilous nature of language—it can be regarded as a fixed fossilized “mode”—a framework that molds and limits. She warns of this paradox: “Language is an inhibitor,” and we frequently remain oblivious, existing within the blind spot, to the ways in which we are influenced and obscured by it.
Her solution to this constraint is play, specifically, the play of learning and entering new linguistic worlds. Tawada emphasizes the significance of learning new languages. She acknowledges the inherent language learning challenges but does not fear these difficulties. On the contrary, she embraces them wholeheartedly. Each new language represents a new opportunity; as she recollects, it allows her to experience another childhood within that language, to be a child again—a chance to experience and perceive the world anew through the eyes of someone not yet shaped by habituation or structure. It is, in essence, a return to sincerity and unfiltered wonder: a childlike clarity of vision. As Tawada notes, “When I’m just one person, I can’t see being inside my own vision.”
This childlike openness carries over into her views on cultural memory and poetry. Tawada observes that a language or culture’s “ancient part” perpetually resides within an individual, akin to crystallized memory, even in those who have been distanced or removed from that language’s environment. What is continuously renewed in one language, which evolves with the present, tends to diminish; however, an enduring and immutable essence invariably persists. She also sees poetry as a language in itself, one that allows her to step outside her natural linguistic and vocabulary frame and enter another mode of expression, “allowing her to leave her language, and go into another mode of language.” The poetic method of perception and composition is evident both in her fictional and poetic writings.
Tawada also observes that classical Japanese literature is exceptionally attentive to the weather and the seasons. Although she does not emphasize these elements in her writing, she became acutely aware of their significance when translating the Kokin Wakashū. This sensitivity, she suggests, stems not only from a closer relationship between people and nature in the past, but also from the reality that people often “lived inside”—indoors and within their imagination, rather than being entirely immersed in the external world. The profound attention to the seasons and the natural environment is entrenched in a conception of imagined idealism.
This interplay between inner and outer worlds naturally leads to her comparing weather and language. Tawada observes, “You are in a nature that doesn’t align with that of the reality.” She juxtaposes this notion with a quote by Mark Twain, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Perhaps this is precisely the nature of weather: it represents a phenomenon inherently beyond human control. In a similar vein, it mirrors the essence of language itself. It is improper to suggest an agency of one over another, as illustrated by the question of whether we shape language or are shaped by it. Both languages and nature exist as entities that are external and independent of the self, as the outside-of-body. For Tawada, nature remains deeply important. Though one cannot willfully control it, nature anchors the individual in both temporality and reality; it is something in flux—“a fluid, ongoing matter.”
Ultimately, Tawada’s sensuous and playful relationship with language unifies the various strands of her literary vision; her affection for language is palpable in her writings. Each word she writes is not merely a tool for meaning but a “living entity” in its own right, expanding into space and connecting the macro and micro realms within the text. Her perception of language is almost synesthetic, like a child discovering a missing puzzle piece. For example, in Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, she writes, “The word kissing, for example, tastes like dill pickle salad” (Paul Celan …Angel 4), and “The word career comes from the French carrière, which also refers to a quarry. Perhaps that’s why, for some people, a career feels as impenetrable as granite” (35), and earlier in the book, she writes, “Slice is a lovely word; it sounds like something stitched out of silk. A slice of bread. It sounds like warm flesh, a woman’s torso draped in a silky scarf. Not the whole woman, just a thin slice of her” (11). Her use of language and wordplay is pure, expressive, and sincere, capturing the interconnectedness of all dimensions.
Tawada is like a botanist of language, replanting and rerooting words in new contexts, considering the historical significance of etymology and playing with it, animating it in delightful ways. She also allows language to exist in its authentic form, unbound from the constraints of time or rigid definitions that might cause it to stagnate.
In Tawada’s works, language is liberated, and its meanings are unfixed. Nouns, verbs, living beings, and inanimate objects are all respected equally. Language becomes like living water, with each molecule floating and colliding, giving rise to ever-changing vitality.
Tawada, Yoko. The Naked Eye. Translated by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions, 2009. New York.
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. Translated by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions, 2024. New York.
“Every Work Has Several Faces: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada about Writing and Translation.” 27 March 2025, New York.
0 Comments