Anne Carson once wrote that Paul Celan is ‘a poet who uses language as if he were always translating.’ His elliptical, compressed poetry has been a longstanding influence on Yoko Tawada, another writer who seems to exist between languages. Born in Toyko in 1960, Tawada moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, eventually settling in Berlin. She has written some ten books in Japanese – both fiction and poetry – and five in German. A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation, Tawada has absorbed a kind of anti-language from Celan, a deeply affecting, sui generis diction unmoored from nationality or obvious tradition. As the poet and critic Ryan Ruby has written, ‘More than simply international, [Tawada’s] writing is translingual; she leaves the borders between languages open and allows them to cross-pollinate.’ She shares with Celan the desire to render inbetweenness legible, and to give form to emergent or unspeakable sensation.
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