Walking Around Pretending to Be Another Person: Susan Bernofsky on Yoko Tawada

(Translator Susan Bernofsky's newest translation is The Tanners by Robert Walser, published by New Directions. Here we discuss The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada, published earlier this year, also by New Directions. An excerpt from The Naked Eye appears in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.)
Scott Esposito: Yoko Tawada is an author that you've translated repeatedly. What for you are the pleasures of translating Tawada, the things that pull you back in to do more of her work?
Susan Bernofsky: Yoko's work is always filled with surprises; she has a way of looking at things that's so idiosyncratic. I love the way she writes characters in confusing situations (an example of a confusing situation might be glancing in the mirror and discovering you're growing scales) and she always somehow manages to convey the delight inherent in being surprised, even when the changes are scary. Characters in her work tend to find everything around them extremely interesting, and reading her makes me feel that way too. It all feels so obvious and simple when you read her, and when you translate her it quickly becomes clear what a precise way she has of saying things and how difficult it is to achieve a tone that conveys wonder without just seeming kitschy or banal.

SE: The Naked Eye is in part about how language filters identity—Tawada wrote parts in Japanese and parts in German, depending on which seemed more appropriate to the particular thing she wanted to express. This is the first book in which she has experimented with two languages at once (though she has previously written books in both languages). As you were translating, did you notice any particular differences between this one and others that were originally written entirely in German?
SB: You know, I didn't, and that surprised me in retrospect when I found out how she'd written the book—she didn't fess up to me until afterward. In a sense, though, she's written so much in German now in between writing books in Japanese (it's about 50-50 as I understand it), that this switching back and forth between languages must be second nature for her now. I suspect it didn't feel nearly as odd to her to be writing a book this way as it seems to us when we hear about it. And I would guess that the Japanese manuscript of the book differs a great deal from the German version. Wish I could read it!
SE: The narrator is obsessed with the films of actress Catherine Deneuve (which are in French, a language she doesn't speak). It seemed to me that in addition to Japanese and German this was another kind of language, that of cinematography, which conditions its own kinds of thoughts. This kind of intertextuality reminded me of the novel Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto, just published in English translation by Esther Allen. Allen says that in this particular novel Prieto writes as a translator, to expose the way in which all meaning is temporary and provisional, dependent upon its immediate context, subject to infinite and unpredictable shifts. Would you say that in The Naked Eye Tawada is after similar goals?
SB: Absolutely. I love how Esther puts that. Yoko's work plays a great deal with the parallels between the way in which being literally foreign in a context defines your culturally inflected understanding of it and the way being foreign in all the figurative senses of that term creates a subjectivity that inflects understanding just as much. In effect, there's no way to escape from the estrangements of subjectivity even within a single language and culture. That's why (or one reason why) Yoko's work is so dominated by fragmented narrative forms, stories filled with gaps—because straightforward linear narration creates the illusion of a continuity she doesn't believe in.

SE: In TWO LINES you wrote that perhaps the greatest challenge of translating this novel was maintaining the slight feeling of alienation in the language, which on the one hand is literary, rich and lyrical, and on the other, possessed of a slight halting quality that seems intended to remind us that the narrator is speaking a language not native to her. How was this challenge different from, say, the challenge of simply rendering lyrical prose?
SB: I was always having to watch my diction and sentence constructions, making sure that my language use didn't get too fancy. The book's narrator is educated and cultured, but she speaks plainly because she's using a new language. In a sense I prefer thinking of the book as having been written in German than in Japanese because we see the narrator being caught up in, subsumed by this European world—and history is written by the victors, she's speaking the language that swallowed her up.
SE: Lastly, in a previous interview, you called the process of translation a writing exercise with maximal constraints. You also said it was like an invitation to dress up as a stranger and try to pull off the disguise. Is this something you enjoy about translation, this very rigorous attempt at mimesis?
SB: What could be more fun than walking around pretending to be another person (in this case: speak in another voice) and convince people to believe you! Nothing makes me happier as a translator than when people talk about the different authors I translate sounding different from one another. Sure, I have my own voice, and inevitably it will come through somewhat in the translations, but what I'm really hoping to accomplish when I translate a book is to write someone else's voice so convincingly that everyone instantly believes it's her or him doing the talking.