Exophony

(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda)

I found this series of essays about language (and, more specifically, about speaking/writing in a language other than one’s first language) to be really pleasing even though I speak neither Japanese nor German, which are two of the languages that come up most. (Tawada was born in Japan and has lived in Germany since 1980.) Tawada’s style is smart and playful, and while this book was originally published in the early 2000s, it still feels relevant. Tawada argues that when you speak in a language that isn’t your mother tongue, you perceive it and use it differently, and that this can open up literary possibility: writers in this situation can “uncover some latent potential in the language” that might otherwise be untapped. For example, she says: “many similarities between words are invisible to those who reside inside the language,” and these different associations can lead to interesting results.

I really liked the essay about Heinrich von Kleist and the first Japanese translation of his work (which also talks about fiction written in Japanese by that Japanese translator), which includes this: “There is no objectively correct length for a sentence. The length of a sentence is one of its modes of expression.” I also really liked the essay where Tawada talks about teaching a creative writing class and how her goal was to teach her students “how to become more sensitive to language, shifting the way they look at it ever so slightly,” and the specific exercises she used to try to to this. (She talks about having her German-speaking students write about a single Kanji, and about playing tapes in Japanese for them and having them “create a translation,” and about having her students write about the landscape as seen from a train window—all of which sound like very fun writing exercises.)