Poets & Writers Theater

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.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a Netflix film adaptation of the acclaimed 1929 novel of the same name by German author Erich Maria Remarque. Directed by Edward Berger, the German-language film stars Felix Kammerer, Daniel Brühl, Aaron Hilmer, and Albrecht Schuch.

“The place was so deathly still and deserted that you might have thought the time long after midnight.” In this 2001 reading at the 92nd Street Y, the late W. G. Sebald reads from his novel Austerlitz (Random House, 2001), translated from the German by Anthea Bell, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In this Columbia University School of the Arts conversation moderated by Susan Bernofsky and Rivka Galchen, Yoko Tawada speaks about the process of working in between Japanese and Germanic languages, and answers audience questions about her writing and translation processes. “I really enjoy translating. Translating is very slow reading,” says Tawada.

“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.