Susan Bernofsky on Yoko Tawada's The Naked Eye

Posted on July 30, 2009 by

The Naked Eye, Yoko Tawada's latest novel to be published in English translation (by Susan Bernofsky for New Directions) is about a young Vietnamese woman set adrift in Paris who takes refuge in the films of Catherine Deneuve.
Tawada, who was born in Japan but has spent most of her adult life in Germany, writes in both Japanese and German?and has won prizes in both languages. Her previous books have been written either in one language or the other, but when she sat down to write The Naked Eye she began first in German, then continued in Japanese, alternating languages as the narrative struck her. Ultimately, she wound up with two complete, separate manuscripts.
I asked Susan Bernofsky about what Tawada's writing is like in German and what's challenging about it to translate:

Yoko's writing in German always seems to be teetering on the brink of I don't know how to say that, and this slight built-in alienation is thematically critical to her work. It's tricky to translate, too: as a writer and translator I've learned to write English as fluidly as possible - after all, that's what good style is all about - but too much fluency/fluidity kills these texts. Of course, if they come out sounding awkward and wooden, that would also be deadly! Yoko's texts in German aren't at all awkward - there's a kind of neutral elegance to her writing that seems not quite to belong to German style but rather somehow exists in the space between languages. She uses less figurative language than most other German-language writers I've worked with. It's as if the utterances have been reduced to their bare essentials, but in a way that is at the same time completely beautiful - what emerges from this approach to language is a sense of sparse, scaled-back expression, which makes you notice and savor each word as if seeing it for the first time. I love the way she makes me think about what it means to express oneself in a language in the first place, and the way she makes me actually see the words themselves.

Bernofsky went on to say, I know Yoko's book was also written partly in Japanese, but it makes most sense to me as a German-language book.
The Naked Eye is newly out from New Directions. You can also read a chapter from it, along with a diverse selection of other new international fiction and poetry in the Center's forthcoming anthology Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.