Exophony
Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
An electrifying new side of the National Book Award Winner Yoko Tawada: her first book of essays in English
I am trying to learn, with my tongue, sounds that are unfamiliar to me. A foreign-sounding word learned out of curiosity is not “imitation” per se. All of these things I learn leave traces that slowly grow to coexist with my accent. And that balancing act goes on changing indefinitely.
How perfect that Yoko Tawada’s first essay in English dives deep into her lifelong fascination with the possibilities opened up by cross-hybridizing languages.
Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reaches beyond any mere dichotomy. The term “exophonic,” which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: “I was already familiar with similar terms, 'immigrant literature,’ or ‘creole literature,’ but ‘exophonic’ had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one’s mother tongue.”
Tawada revels in explorations of cross-cultural and intra-language possibilities (and along the way deals several nice sharp raps to the primacy of English). The accent here, as in her fiction, is the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Never entertaining a received thought, Tawada seeks the still-to-be-discovered truths, as well as what might possibly be invented entirely whole cloth. Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada’s world, and delivers more of her signature erudite wit—at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Tawada (The Emissary) explores the fertile ground of intermingled languages in this scintillating essay collection. In each of the entries, which are informed by cities the author has visited (Beijing, Boston, Dakar, etc.), Tawada critiques the concept of exophonic literature, or work written in a language that's foreign to the author. Weaving in her personal background as a native Japanese speaker who took up German in high school and immigrated to Germany at 20 but continues to write in Japanese, she challenges the subtle cultural imperialism embedded in notions of a mother tongue or the language one dreams in. In "Los Angeles: The Poetic Ravine Between Languages," she notes how even though Thomas Mann continued to write in German while living in California, he absorbed the language of his adopted home into his work. Elsewhere, she emphasizes how literal "mistranslations" can actually be generative and expand the possibilities of language: "The Chinese word for TV is diàn shì jī (literally, ‘electronic vision desk')". Playful and erudite, these essays offer valuable insights into Tawada's own writing and her readings of classic world literature. This leaves readers with a lot to ponder.
