Yoko Tawada Is A Genius In Any Language | Defector

"The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world."

"Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960. Despite her native archipelago's strident monolingualism, she has always been surrounded by foreign languages. Her father was a nonfiction translator and he owned a bookstore that primarily sold works in translation. She said in a 2019 interview that her parents made the pointed literary-political choice of studying Russian and German literature during the Cold War."

"When Tawada was 19 years old, she took what would turn out to be a formative trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway to visit Germany. Upon graduating from Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University with a degree in Russian literature three years later, she tried and failed to continue her studies in the Soviet Union, settling alongside the Iron Curtain's western border in Hamburg."

Reading translated fiction offers a distinctive psychedelic experience where readers encounter two stories simultaneously: the author's original narrative and the translator's interpretation filtered through their linguistic world. Yoko Tawada represents a singular contemporary author whose multilingual background profoundly shapes her work. Born in Tokyo in 1960 to parents who studied Russian and German literature during the Cold War, Tawada was exposed to foreign languages through her father's translation work and bookstore. At nineteen, she traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway to Germany, and after graduating from Waseda University with a Russian literature degree, she settled in Hamburg where she has lived for decades. Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, producing nearly two dozen books translated primarily by Margaret Mitsutani and Susan Bernofsky, earning major literary awards and consideration as a potential Nobel Prize contender.

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