Literature – only love ART

Yoko Tawada, Professor Rivka Galchen, Susan Bernofsky

Photo © by Christopher Pelham

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

Jun 9, 2025 | 9 min read

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.

Photo © by Hai Yen Ho

Moonlight Refugee

Jun 17, 2025 | 8 min read

Ever since I was a child, I have always known that the world around me was much larger, that it was not limited to a small market, a moldering temple with a desolate courtyard, a solid church that I had not entered, rows of houses, schools, and a highway. That poor and ragged landscape never limited my imagination. I did not know how I got there, but I always knew that one day I would leave it. I knew I would travel to other vast places, reach the tops of mountains, dive to the bottom of the sea, and talk to people in every corner of the world.

Photo © by Hai Yen Ho

Singapore

Jun 17, 2025 | 11 min read

I don’t know why I came here. Waking at four in the morning, inside this airtight dormitory room with no windows, I can only tell the time from the screen of my phone. Below my bed, the Afghan girl is snoring softly. I imagine her bed, surrounded by piles of stuff hung haphazardly like a rumpled bed curtain. She’s been here for two weeks; the items hanging around the bed are a way for her to assert her attachment, her sovereignty, and to establish herself more firmly than the others, which currently consist of me, a Cambodian girl, and an Indonesian girl.

Moscow: Snow will melt when the sun rises

Jul 12, 2025 | 19 min read

The previous night, the snow fell heavily. The snowflakes fell gently yet fiercely, floating through the night like magical creatures. The cold crashed on me suddenly as soon as I stepped outside, aggressively occupying all the corners in my body, sneaking into every inch of carelessly exposed skin. The cold froze on the skin, piercing my brain, aching with every breath. On cold winter nights like this, the best thing to do is to stay in a cozy room, drink a cup of ginger tea, and talk about everything — except politics, of course. Politics in Russia these days is taboo. Russians avoided the subject like a terminal illness. “War in Ukraine? No, don’t worry, we are fine.” They changed the subject. Except Varf Labec.