In the essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and published by New Directions in June, Yoko Tawada explores various aspects of life, communication, and art through a lens of linguistic and cultural hybridity. In “Paris: This Language Which Is Not One,” Tawada writes about a poem by Paul Celan in which the German words for dwindling (Neige) and snow (Schnee) appear in adjacent lines, pointing out that Neige means snow in French. “To me, Celan’s poems have a multilingual structure akin to a magic net that even captures Japanese, a language he never knew,” Tawada notes. Write a poem in which you deploy a “magic net” that allows you the freedom to play with associative, expansive thinking, capturing any basic knowledge of words in other languages or dialects or registers. What unexpected connections can be made?
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