I 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.
JoinedJune 9, 2025
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Tracy Chenxi Shi is a mixed-media and textiles artist, a painter, a translator, and a poet. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Writing Poetry and Literary Translation at Columbia University. She previously earned a BFA in Textiles and Theory and History of Art and Design from Rhode Island School of Design.
She can be found on Instagram at @oleracea_no.0.




