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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.
Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator. Her work includes Ryunosuke Akutagawa's KAPPA (New Directions, 2023), Yuko Tsushima's WILDCAT DOME (FSG, 2025), Natsuo Kirino's SWALLOWS (Knopf, 2025) and Yoko Tawada's EXOPHONY (New Directions, 2025) among others. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she now lives in New York City.
Susan Bernofsky is the translator of works by Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Hesse. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she directs the program in literary translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Her book Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her most recent translation is Yoko Tawada’s pandemic novel, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (published in the UK as Spontaneous Acts). She is currently working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton.