Tracy Shi

Tracy Shi

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.
  • Joined: June 9, 2025
  • Articles: 2

For Every Work Has Several Faces: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada about Writing and Translation

Yoko Tawada, Professor Rivka Galchen, Susan BernofskyPhoto © by Christopher Pelham

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.