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In this Books Are Magic event, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda reads from her English translation of Yoko Tawada’s essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions, 2025) and discusses Tawada’s defamiliarization of the Japanese and German languages in a conversation with fellow translator Susan Bernofsky.
“That’s the moon—it’s the ghost of the sun wandering the sky at night,” says Daniel Kehlmann. In this video from Louisiana Channel, Kehlmann and fellow writers CAConrad, Georgi Gospodinov, Guadalupe Nettel, Delphine de Vigan, and Yoko Tawada discuss the moon’s mysterious presence and why writers are drawn to it as we watch visuals of the moon captured by NASA paired with Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”
“I believe literature should always start from zero. So, I write stories in both languages on purpose.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Yoko Tawada speaks in German, English, and Japanese about thinking and writing in two different languages and about her novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (New Directions, 2016), translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
“Like two personalities, they didn’t want to be one. They didn't want to tell one story. I couldn’t put them together.” Following the launch of her twenty-third book, The Naked Eye (New Directions, 2009), Yoko Tawada talks about thinking and writing in both German and Japanese. Tawada’s forthcoming novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, is translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky and will be released in November by New Directions.
