Stranded in Denmark, a refugee named Hiruko searches for fellow-survivors, torn between longing for her mother tongue and the desire to fashion a new one. Tawada’s latest novel, “Scattered All Over the Earth” (New Directions), imagines a world in which Japan has disappeared. “Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.” Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. But their creator-a novelist, a poet, and a playwright-has chosen her estrangement. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |