 Hello and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and I'm joined by Alison Marken-Powell who translates Japanese literature and works with the Penn Translation Committee. She and I are co-organizers of Translating the Future, the conference you are attending. Back in May for week two of the conference, we were joined from Beirut by the brilliant Lena Moonser. The horrifying news of massive explosions in that city just a few hours ago have shaken us and the whole world to the core. It appears that Lena herself is physically unharmed. She, her family, and community and the whole city of Beirut are in our hearts. We will check with friends in Lebanon on what actions we can take to best be of assistance. Yes Lena, we hope you and your loved ones are safe and our thoughts and prayers go out to Beirutis and those who have family and friends there. And thank you all for joining us here for this 13th installment of our weekly program. Today's conversation, Lightning in a Bottle, is a case study, snout to tale, if you like, of the publication of an astonishing author, Yoko Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Germany. Her award-winning books are written in Japanese and in German. Yoko Tawada joins us today along with two of her translators, Margaret Mitsutani and Susan Bernofsky, publisher Barbara Epler and editor Jeffrey Yang of New Directions which publishes Tawada's books and novelist Rivka Gulchin who has written about Tawada's work. You can learn more about all of today's illustrious speakers by reading their full bios on the Center for the Humanities site. We are particularly grateful to Middlebury Language Schools for generously sponsoring today's conversation and we are thrilled to have Dean Stephen Snyder, himself an eminent translator of modern Japanese literature as our moderator. In her marvelous book This Little Art, the translator and essayist Kate Briggs, who will be joining us in September for the final week of Translating the Future, sums up the crucial importance of the complex collaborative process that we'll be discussing today. We need translations urgently, Briggs writes. It is through translation that we are able to reach the literatures written in the languages that we can't read from the places where we don't or can't live, offering us the chance of understanding as well as the necessary and instructive experience of failing to understand, of being confused and challenged. We receive these books newly made by the hands of translators and publishers and editors and the small contacts that those hands make between translator and writer, reader and translator, language and language, culture and culture, experience and experiences are, as Edith Grossman puts it, as vital to our continual reading and writing, to the vitality of our languages, our cultures and our experiences as the books themselves. Today's conversation will show just how many people are involved in the publication of a work of translation at various stages on its way into the hands of readers, from the translator to the publisher and editor to the critic. All these pieces falling into a place are as extraordinary as lightning in a bottle and the process whereby that happens is, as you'll see, every bit as exhilarating and vital as Cape Briggs says. Given the number of participants in today's program, we've allowed ourselves an extra 15 minutes just this once. The conversation will last until 2.30 p.m. Eastern time and we'll address questions from the audience until 2.45 Eastern time. Please email your questions for Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitzutani, Susan Bernofsky, Barbara Epler, Jeffrey Yang, Rivka Gulchin and Stephen Snyder to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you know it in your email that you would like us to read your name. Translating the future will continue in its current form through September. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several large-scale events will happen. We'll be here every Tuesday until the week's hour-long conversation. Please join us next Tuesday at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time for Building Translations and Communities for Translation with Paige and Nia Morris who'll be joining us from Solis Zero Start Time, Shuichi Saraswat, Allison Mark and Powell, and Marcia Lynx Qualey. And do keep checking the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's Translation Committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. If you know anyone who is unable to join us for the live stream today, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Yoko and the gang, we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude, as ever, to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Penn America, and the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound who make this live stream possible. And today we particularly like to thank the Middlebury Language Schools for their generous support for today's events. And now we turn this over to Steve Snyder. Hello. I am enormously honored to be able to facilitate today's event and want to start by thanking the Penn America Center and the Center for Humanities for sponsoring Translating Future, which has been extraordinary from its beginning and looks to be to the end of the program. I also want to personally thank Allison and Esther for conceiving this of this event and asking me to be involved. They told me that I could plug the Middlebury Language Schools very briefly as a co-sponsor of today's event. So I'll just say that normally we would be teaching our summer languages in full immersion, face-to-face language pledge-based form in Vermont. But in this extraordinary summer, for the first time in 115 years, we have over a thousand students studying 12 languages remotely from around the world. And it seems to be going very well indeed despite the challenges. I'll just add that for those of you who are budding translators or would-be translators and want to gain additional language and culture proficiency that will allow you to become the translators of the future, the Middlebury Language Schools are an excellent option. I'm delighted and honored to be serving as moderator for the panel today and it promises to be a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse at the processes that take a literary text out of its original linguistic and cultural contexts and make it accessible in a new language to a new literary market and readership. Ultimately, we'll be looking at some of the forces at work in determining how a text gets selected for translation. In this case, of the Japanese fiction or poetry published every year, thousands of titles hone down to one, how a translator is chosen, how the text is edited, marketed and produced as a physical object and ultimately sold and read in the new literary sphere. And therefore in a larger sense, we're really looking at how a canon of national literature is formed in translation. The format today, as Alison and Esther said, is one that we hope will be a visual representation of that process to some extent. We'll begin with a small number of people on camera and begin adding people to show the complexity of the process. I think we all realize that while the original writer and the translator play key roles, there are many other actors who take part in what I sometimes call a translation discourse. Lots of voices, not cacophonous voices, but organized voices who all have a say to some extent in how a text gets moved from one cultural context into another. These include editors, literary agents, publishers, marketing directors, jacket designers, critics and readers themselves. And I'm sure I've left out a number of other people who are involved. Hopefully today we will be hearing from some of these voices and discussing the process in detail. But the most important voice in this process is of course that of the original author. And today we have with us an extraordinary writer who probably has more sensitivity to and knowledge of the process we're talking about than almost anyone I could imagine. Tawada Yoko has been writing in German and Japanese since the inception of her career. She exists in what she sometimes calls an exophonic universe where language is always foreign, always being translated. And today we're going to begin talking with her about how the text that she creates relates to this translation process. I can't imagine anybody who has more to say on the subject or more has thought more deeply about it. So if you could join us, Tawada-san, we will begin our discussion. Welcome. Hi. It's a huge pleasure and honor to meet you and to be with you on camera today. And as I just said, I think that in many ways you're better positioned to begin this discussion than any writer I can imagine. I wonder if you could just talk for a moment about your almost unique position as a major writer in two literary traditions simultaneously affects your conception of the act of translation, both your self-translation and to some extent the translations that others do of your work. Yeah. To me, to be an exophonic writer means that means when I write I may be free from the idea of how the Japanese language should be or how German should be. Because I'm outside of the language. So for me, the Japanese language is not only the one language that people write today in Japan, but also maybe languages that are produced in the language class abroad. Maybe wrong sentences also. They are all possibilities to use for poets. And I remember that when I used to live in Japan, I was interested in writing style of Oe-kenzaburo or Goto-meshi on people who didn't like them. They criticized and said that their writing is like bad translation. That means you can see the influence from outside in the text. It's transparent. It's transparent and foreign language that you can see always behind the sentences something foreign. And that's exactly what I love. I want to write like bad translation. And when I finish my text, for example, in German, I write my one text, but I don't have the feeling that that's a final form of this text, but it's not closed. From the text itself, I hear, I feel the wish of the text, want to be reborn in another language or as a voice of the text. It said, translate me, translate me. And this voice goes all over the world to many translators. And it's just that the original is just a temporary form of the text. And it is just the beginning of the text. And it must go ahead in other forms on that translation. That's the fascinating concept that works are said to be translated, that they need to be translated. Do you have a sense when you write which version, your German version or your Japanese version, is the original or are they both originals? Mostly one of them. Most of my texts exist only in German or in Japanese. And sometimes I translate, it's so complicated, you know, the naked eye that is a Japanese translation of that novel. There are two originals. Because I wrote in two languages at the same time. And the emissary is just really Japanese text. The German version is not translated by me, but by Peter Potner. And the memoir of a polar bear is, I don't know why I wrote it at first in Japanese. It was my mistake. So I wrote it again in German. And yeah, the mistake is original. The other one is a translation. Very quickly, we're going to bring in your translators from Japanese and German. But I wonder if you could talk for a moment about the role you play in shaping their translations before we get their version of that story. Do you select your translators? Do you work with them closely since you have so many linguistic skills yourself? Or do you, what is the relationship that you have to translators since you are a translator yourself? I never chose a translator, but they found me. I must be, yeah, be visible so that they can find me. And to me, it is important that they translate, they choose and translate one story if the translator has a feeling they want to tell the story in their own language. They must have a connection, a very personal connection to the text. And yeah. Yeah, I think that's the most important thing for a translator to love what you're translating and that makes it possible. I was rereading Ken Toshi, the emissary for today's discussion, and I was struck how again and again you return to the nature of Japanese language itself and particularly in the context of this kind of budding rebirth of Edo society in the cutoff country. And you talk about shapes of characters and you talk about the derivation of words. And as a translator, those are some of the very most difficult things to translate because they rely on an understanding of a language that by definition the reader doesn't understand, the foreign reader doesn't understand. So I'm wondering whether you focused on that as a kind of impediment to the translation process or what drew you to that kind of self-referentially language? When I wrote the emissary, I didn't think about the translation. It's not my intention or I didn't want that Margaret's son suffers also. So I said very free and with word play in Japanese. It's no intention and I was very surprised to see how good it was translated. But I think the poet loves the things that it's difficult to express and also I know the translator loves untranslatable text. I don't know why but they love it and I know it. And maybe in the process of very difficult translating, you can feel the resistance of the word and it is the resistance of the language and what it's not intention of the writer, but it's a moment that you can really understand what the language is. So the resistance is a positive thing. It's fascinating. It may be then time soon to bring in Margaret and Susan, but I want to ask maybe one more related question and that is several of your recent works talk about a Japan that's cut off from the rest of the world. A world where Japanese, for instance in the emissary, you talk about the fact that foreign fiction no longer is allowed in the country and Japanese fiction no longer flows out. Your career has by definition been a transnational career. You've lived in a kind of liminal space from the very beginning. I'm curious what that new thematizing, I know that some of it's rooted in the 311 disaster, but what that current theme of breaking the breakdown of globalization, the breakdown of free movement between countries and free movement of texts and ideas and people means to you in your writing in recent years. The emissary, I wrote it after the Fukushima disaster, so I felt the people in Japan it's like they wanted to return to the Edo period of the isolation. Why? I thought it's a very typical Japanese feeling after big tragedy or catastrophe go back and close their identity and less contact with outside. It's very Japanese way to handle with catastrophe, I thought. But then now we have the corona and that kind of national isolation and the national borders, it comes back and I never thought that this also in Europe, you know, there are suddenly many borders that did not exist before. So maybe, yeah, of course, we are the big topic of the world literature is now the globalization and no border and international and so on, but maybe our future is we must think about this isolation in the future. It's a frightening prospect, but obviously one where your fiction is catching, reality is catching up with your fiction at some point. Thank you so much. What an honor to be able to talk for a few minutes with you and now I would like to bring in Susan Bernofsky and Margaret Mitsutani, your translators from German and Japanese respectively, and expand the conversation because obviously their function, their role in this translation discourse is an enormously important one and without them we wouldn't have these texts that you've created. So I'd love to talk for a minute with the two of you about your relationship with Tawada-san's texts. Could I ask both of you maybe to speak just briefly about how you first began translating the work of Tawada-Yoko? Which one of us should go first? Why don't you go ahead? Okay, okay. Well, let's see, back in the 90s, I'm late, sort of maybe 90s, 97 or so, I had just translated a novel by Oiken Saburo and published from Kodansha International, which is a subsidy of the publishing house Kodansha in a big publisher in Japan. And the editor for the Oe book said that he had heard about this story, the Inu-mukou-iri, which ended up being translated as the Bridegroom as a dog. And he said, there's some hot shot from Columbia University who wants to translate it, but I want you to translate it because people who are excellent academics aren't always good translators. So, and I had already read it and I really, really liked it. So I said, oh, sure, fine. And then I've got the, this is the book, of course, it's out of print because the company doesn't exist anymore. And I picked two other stories to go with it. And the other one was the Godheart Railway. And so that was my, so when I started translating that, I had never met Tawada-san. And I think we met when one of her plays was put on in a small theater near the Yogoku, near where the Sumo Train tournaments are. Yeah. And we, I think we met at the performance. And I remember when I ordered tickets, there was a number to call and I called it and the man who answered the phone told me about the tickets and he said, oh, by the way, I'm Yoko's father. So personal connections matter. Yeah. Tawada-san, you were already living in Germany. And so this was the occasion that you met when you came for this, for the production of this play. Did it matter to you who the translator was or how she was selected? A hotshot from Columbia is another option. Were you, did the press give you, I know who the editor is, I, who the market is referring to, did the press give you an option about translators? No, no, I have no idea. I didn't know that there are options. Did Stephen Shaw, the legendary editor at the National? Yeah. Yeah. Well, he was prescient in wanting to publish this work, obviously. It was brilliant. Susan, could you tell us a little about how you first came to be translating Tawada-san's work? Sure. So we're going to go even a little further back in time now. I first read Yoko Tawada's work when I was living in Germany in Stuttgart in 1992. I went into my favorite bookstore in Stuttgart Niedlich. Yes, Yoko Salafi because she knows it. An excellent little bookshop that's just crammed full of stuff. Like you open the door and something is going to fall on you. And when I was in there, I picked up this, I found this in my house this morning, this beautiful 30th anniversary volume of the Austrian magazine Manus Kripte. And it was very attractive. It has a little, you can lift up the girl, the little baby skirt. And there's a list of the authors a little sort of risque rhyme here written in old German script. Anyway, I picked up this attractive magazine volume and was reading through it on a visit to Berlin. And I looked this morning at my copy and I saw that the, in the table of contents, there's one big check mark that I made next to the Yoko Tawada story. So I read this magazine and when I reached the story, which now exists in English with the title canned foreign, I read the story, I thought, what is this? Oh my God, I was completely blown away by this short little essayistic story that was so strange and inventive. And it was just a couple pages long. And it just, I immediately thought I need to translate this. I was already a, I was always, you know, I must have been 25 then we were, we were all young then. Yeah. And so I translated the story and I sent my translation to the magazine to Yoko care of the magazine and they forwarded it to her and I said, so I'm Susan, I translated your story. I love it. May I have your permission to transcend it to an American magazine to get it published. And I immediately got back a response from her saying, excellent, please do send your translation to a magazine. And here's another story. Do you want to translate that one too? I think she was taking on blind faith that the translation was okay. That's, that's how it started for me. Fascinating. Tawada-san, do you, do you look at your translations into English? Do you check them or do you intervene? I'm always curious. I actually had a research project that started years ago where I asked many, many translators and authors what their relationship is like and the degree to which the writer feels responsibility for or is involved in the translation process. So I'd love to know what you think of the process. And then I'd love to hear from Margaret and from Susan about what they think of your role in the translation. No, I don't, I don't check because I need much time to read English. If I would do it, I don't have time to write. So I don't check but after it published, I had many occasions to read it in the United States, in the seminar and in readings. And so I see the people are very happy about the text. I feel it. And so I can, this is the best way of checking it. I was, wow, I can't say if something is good or not. But in the reaction of the audience, I can see that how wonderful the translation is. And when I read the translation many times in the United States, it comes to me like, this is original. I wanted this English version. For that, I wrote it in German so that Susan can translate it into English. Fascinating. I would add that a national book award in translated literature is also a pretty good validation of the quality of what you're doing. So, Margaret and Susan, how do you, do you ask a lot of questions of Tawada-san when you're working? Do you discuss the work as it goes along? I think I did the very first book that I just held up. I think I called Yoko and you're in Germany. Yeah, yeah, a few times. I was very nervous about, you know, filling up. But recently, I didn't ask anything about the emissary. But there's a lot in the, well, when something is translated, it inevitably changes. Things change in translation. And, oh, one thing I remember, once I was translating a story of Yoko that takes place in Vietnam and people are, a woman is riding the train in Vietnam and she suddenly thinks to herself, if, um, uh, to translate that into English, if the ears of bread, if I cut off the ears of bread, which is the crusts of bread, they're called ears in Japanese. And I thought, oh, what am I going to do with this? But I thought rice has ears. Corn has ears and we talked about ears of wheat. So probably rice has, so I changed it to rice. If I, if I cut off your ears of rice with my ears, it came out something like that. So, I mean, and especially with something like the emissary where there's so much word play, you, you know, you can't just translate the words, it's not going to work. So, so things change. But I think Yoko knows the inevitability of change and translation. So I don't worry about it too much. Probably better than any writer you could imagine, exactly. And particularly if you know his word play. So it's a wonderful thing to have a writer who's, who's conscious of, but also understanding of the process of translation. Susan, how about you? Do you work closely with, with Sawada-san when you're working? I think I do send questions, but often if I send a question, it's because something in the German was ambiguous and you had to make a decision one way or the other. You know, sometimes, you know, in every language, we take advantage of ambiguities and translators are always at the sort of crossroad where it can mean this or that. But in the English, it's going to have to mean one or the other. And I'll ask her that kind of thing. But in general, I would say you can tell with the text that the writing, they're, they're like, the text are like open poured. It's like the texts are already written in such a way that the translation is going to enter into the pores. And there's, it's like those gaps for translation written into the text. Like I remember the, one of the early stories of hers, I translated the title story of the collection, Where Europe Begins. Oh, here's the beautiful German edition. It's a beautiful travel story. Look at that. This is a Claudia Gerke publishing house, beautiful small press in Germany that makes gorgeous books. But the story ends with this sort of alphabet soup where the, you know, it's sort of surreal. All these elements in this fairy tale-ish story come back together and the first letters of each of the objects spell out a word and, you know, in English, the words are spelled differently than in German. So, you know, I was in the position of writing, you know, writing a new one. And it was obvious that that was going to have to happen. And I wound up right introducing words into the story that I thought were tangentially related to what was happening, you know, and I remember sending Yoko the words that I wanted to introduce into her story and say, I had to do this as a Soke and she's like, well, yeah, of course. And then that was, from that moment on, I understood that, I understood that from her point of view, also this was really a collaborative venture and I love having that sense of permission to continue the play, which also brings with it responsibility because if, you know, if you're adding things into the text, are the things you're adding serving the text? Are they carrying the story further? Are they part of it in a productive way? And so in a way that's hard, having more permission can be more difficult sometimes, but it's fun. Fascinating. So this is the primary dyad as I see it between the author and the translator, but I'd love to bring more voices in because once you all have produced your texts and that is already a conversation and in the case of Tawada-san's work, it's a conversation between languages, even in the production of the original text, but other people come into the discussion. And so I know that all of us realize the role that editors play, even though they're completely unsung, editors play an absolutely crucial role in helping a text be selected, for instance, out of the thousands of possibilities. And they have their own agendas and their own reasons. Publishers have a list that they want to create and shape and certain writers fit in and others don't. And particularly in translated fiction, you have, in some cases, dozens of works in existence by a writer that need to be curated into a form in the target language. So I'd love to now bring in Barbara and Jeffrey, Barbara Epler and Jeffrey Yang, to discuss how new directions came to begin publishing Tawada-san's work. And we've been looking at beautiful covers, for instance, and maybe give us some insight into things beyond the editing of the text, but also things like how a jacket designer is selected and what, to what degree is the author or the translator involved in that process? Or how are titles created? Because titles often deform from one language to the other. So if we could bring in our next two speakers, it would be wonderful to introduce them. Barbara, you want to start? What was the question? The question is, how did you two first encounter Tawada-san's work and how did new directions make the decision once Kodansha International moved on and ultimately folded? How did new directions become a primary English language publisher? No, thank you. No, it's so great to be here. Okay, so I guess I'll start because Barbara doesn't want to. No, it's interesting to see the pipeline that's being created with this program. And we're really grateful for that and to see everyone here. But so I, so picking up for kind of where Margaret and Susan were speaking about finding Tawada's work, I first read Brigham was a dog, that book that Margaret had brought up in a graduate course with Keith Vincent, who was teaching at the time at NYU. And it was a class on Japanese literature, masculinity, and a lot of queer theory involved. And it was all kind of an amazing class because a lot of the work I didn't know. And so he, we read one of her stories, we read Soseki and some Oyi and, and, but the Tawada story was fabulous. And when I started to work at new directions, the parent, I was talking to Barbara about Tawada's work. And she said, oh, I know that book. I wanted to publish that book. So she could talk more about that. But so we were kind of, she was kind of already on the radar at new directions. And so she kind of encouraged me to look into more of her work. And so looking to see, around that time too, I'd also found some of Tawada's stories translated by Susan. And I think it was conjunctions or a couple, a couple journals, I think that's, that's how it was. And, and so we kind of, I kind of just chased the trail and, and, and, you know, I, we ended up publishing Where Europe Begins, which is this book that Susan translated with Yumi, Yumi Selden translated a couple of the Japanese stories. And then with Margaret, I worked on this book with her called Facing the Bridge, which is three kind of novella-length stories. And yeah, that's kind of, and then we continued on, I worked with Susan on the naked eye, and then Barbara was working on some of her books later on too. And yeah, so Barbara, I mean, she could. I don't know how it happened, but I read Margaret's translation, The Bride Room was a Dog, when it seemed like American rights were being offered by Podensha Japan before. I don't know how that worked, but anyhow, I read it and I loved it, but I'd recently dragged our wonderful publisher at the time, or managing director, Griselda. And Griselda was this really wonderful person, but she was kind of a proper lady. And I'd already dragged her into Kono Taiko, or Taiko Kono. We had a big drama about that, because I thought it was really great. And J.L. was still, James Lachlan, our publisher, owner was still alive, and they both agreed that it was beautiful literature, but they both disliked the S&M content. And so, but we got into a fight with Griselda and me, and I said, but you've agreed, it's good literature. And if we can publish Sperm and Shitt Mishima, we can publish Timie up Kono Taiko. Upon which Griselda got good hand, and was like, all right, but get out of my office. So I left, and I didn't bother her for a few days. But then, after that, I brought her bridegroom as a dog, and you always had to get your boss to agree. And she liked it. Also saw that Yoko was a wonderful writer, but she didn't like something, very much, she didn't like something. And they were kind of nearly the same time. And I said, well, is it the inner species thing? And she was like, no, it was the kneedexes. Remember the teacher? Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. She didn't like that at all. Anyhow. But so I really liked Yoko's writing already. And I thought she would be a great public summoner publish for us. And then, actually, I met you, Yoko, when you lived in Hamburg, in the little fairy tale house on the river. Yeah, that was like 2001. Oh, yeah. And we talked about Leonora Carrington, and Victor Palavin. I guess a long time ago. But anyhow, and then, and then Jeffrey really was the one who got the show on the road, though, and organized Susan and organized Yumi and put together the first. And this is a really wonderful story, just to be a total publisher. And so I'd like him to, I'd like you to talk more about what that took, because there was all sorts of people, like the remarkable Claudia Gurca, who I've never met, but I love her publishing, the way she publishes. And then a lot of different Japanese publishers, it seemed like at the time, more than just Podantia then. But anyhow, I wanted to just say something about something like this, like CUNY, or the support we get from Columbia or Princeton, and the support we get from Penn and the Gert Institute and the Japan Foundation. So Yoko-san can come and visit us, and we can have events. New directions is really small. We couldn't afford that. And we do a lot of literature. And also the booksellers and writers like Rivka, who's going to talk soon, I hope. And I don't know if there's so many people who support somebody like Yoko Tawada. And it takes sometimes a long time to build them up. And it was really, really, really gratifying to see with every book her audience grow. And like with the polar bears kind of got it bigger. But then to win the National Book Award, that was the first National Book Award they had for translation since the 1970s. Right, yeah. That was a big thing. It was really great. And I just think there's all these people who help us. And there's some authors who really blaze out like Roberto Bellagno or W. G. Zabald, and their first book makes them famous. But other really great writers like Yoko-san, Lazlo Krasnoharke, Clarice St. Lisvector, Jenny Erpenback, it's over decades. And all those translators are working. We're all trying hard. And we have so much support. So I just wanted to thank everybody, including the host of this event and the translation network of Penn and the Heim Awards, and Esther and Allison. It's a trip. And it's such a good heart. So anyway, that's what I want to say. But Jeffrey, you've got to go back on. I mean, I could talk more about how the books that we originally published kind of were put together. And Susan and Mark could talk about that too. But I don't know what your timing is. We have a few more minutes, and then we're going to bring in Rivka. But it would be great to hear a little bit about how you put together a particular volume, how you picked the stories. Obviously, in many cases, they're not published together in a Japanese volume or a German volume. They're things that you craft in your in new directions. And then even if you can talk about the physical books, who does the covers and how you have that conversation, it fascinates, I think, all of us who end up reading them or buying them bookshops. Right. Okay, I'll say a couple things about each of these two books, which is the first two books that we brought out. Susan and Margaret both worked on these. And they kind of match in ways, because they're stories. And thematically, they match. And they both start with like, this one starts with a little frontispiece of an ear. And the other one started with an eye with some eyes. So Susan basically kind of had an idea of what to include in where Europe begins. And she sent us a number of stories and enlisted Yumi, who she, Yumi Selden, who she was friends with. And to translate a couple, a few of the stories as well. And so once we got kind of a number of these translations, I looked at it, Barbara looked at it, I think a couple other editors were all kind of like looking at this work. And then we kind of just chose what we thought would work really well and like a first or in this book of stories. And so yeah, I don't know if Susan wants to add to anything to that. But I think she was kind of had an idea of the arc, right? I've been I've been trying to assemble a volume of Tawada stories to present to publishers. And I had translated about 100 pages worth of stories and sent it to, you know, very small publishers, because, you know, I was nobody. And I don't think it would have I would have dreamed of approaching the great new directions, which I had been in awe of, you know, as the great publisher of modernist literature, I'm sure I didn't dare submit. I don't even remember what publishers I submitted to, but I already had sort of a small book proposal that I had sent around and gotten rejected everywhere. So I was sort of dejected and was so thrilling to get contacted by Jeffrey out of the blue saying, hey, we're interested in Yoko Tawada. Do you have any more translations? It's like, as a matter of fact, here. And it was very exciting to work with with Yumi Seldin, because it was, you know, collaborative. We read each, you know, we were, you know, dear friends, and we read each other's work and had a lot of conversations about every sentence and every word. And it was, you know, I was looking at the German translations of the same stories that she was translating from Japanese into English. So we were sort of triangulating among all that. It was a really, it was a very joyful process. Conversation is wonderful. Do you detect any difference between the translations out of German and out of Japanese in the final English texts, or are they just all recognizable as as Tawada Yoko? Yeah, well, I mean, I don't read those languages. And so I'm just working with the English text. And I mean, I don't know if I'm making this up, but I don't know if the sentences, maybe at the time I was feeling in Japanese, maybe Tawada will disagree with me, but they seem to be a little, a little longer to me, like just the way that the clauses work. But other than that, to me, thematically, and content-wise at all, is Tawada, you know, and so I think it fits together. I mean, she's doing things in the language that are fun and very kind of focused. Her stories come out of so much of this, this, this, the beauty of a language or wrestling with language and translation. I mean, in both of these books, like in Where Your It Begins, like with the story that Susan and mentioned canned foreign, and there's this other story called Storytellers Without Souls. And then in this other book, St. George and the Dragon, and they're all so focused on or they come out of translation. My translation plays a big part of these stories. But they're also very fun. It was St. George and the Translator. The Translator, sorry. Yeah, the original, which was originally titled Wound in the Alphabet, correct? Wound in the Alphabet. Yeah, right. I mean, and I mean, maybe I, can I just read like two lines of what Margaret had put, because I mean, it'd be nice just to hear like a little bit of, because she mentioned this thing about rice and ears. So this is the part that she mentioned in the story. Oh, yeah, that's it. Which is in front of Chongtian Bridge. And she's so Margaret says or translates, if you cut off ears of rice and throw them away, would you get an earache? And why shouldn't bread have ears too? People say dizzy spells are caused by a breakdown in the balancing mechanism deep within the inner ear. The Japanese are prejudiced against foreign rice. So why don't they complain about foreign bread? So there's this really wonderful way of like kind of the narrative being carried along in this way that's just seems to come right out of the story and the writing and so and the translations, of course, is what for us is what makes it possible. And with reference to foreign rice, there was quite a while ago, but the rice crop in Japan, it was just kind of a disaster for the rice crop. And they were importing rice from Thailand, which I mean, it's a different kind of rice. But there were awful stories about kids who were being bullied, being called Thai rice. So I wasn't thinking about that when I wrote that sentence, but it sure did have to be true. Those are the best choices that converge into this. External meaningful coincidences of translation. Now we'd like to complete our grid, so to speak, and bring in Riftagalchen, who is a critic who has written about most astutely about Japanese women writers in her book, Little Labors, but who is, I think will stand in for us as the reader and observer of this process that you all have created and the person who then gets to decide what the value is of this translation discourse. So Riftagalchen, if you'd be willing to join us, hi. And I wonder if you could just talk for a moment about how, same question again, how did you first encounter Tawada-san's work and what role does it play in sort of your thinking about the literary imagination? Yeah, first I wanted to say that it's sort of especially exciting for me to be in this Zoom room with these people because you know, reading, I've never come across great books obviously by sort of googling on the search. It's always been extremely personal. And for me, works and translation have always been the most important to me. I actually tracked that back to a childhood in Norman Oklahoma and it just sort of always felt so important and so alive actually took me years to take the English language seriously. I just had this feeling that everything important was somewhere else and coming in from somewhere. So I already had that predisposition, but I really think I would have been very lost without actually a lot of the people who are here today. I remember after I published my first novel, I had suddenly I was like, had this tiny little sliver where I could pitch something to a magazine or to review. I had like a little bit of power over which books were talked about. And you know, literally it was Esther Allen who introduced me to the writer Cesar Ira and Barbara and Jeff and I think Michael Barron sent me to Wada's work from New Directions. I think because they already had a sense of my sensibility because I'd written about Ira and I had also from Susan worked with Susan when I wrote about Robert Walzer. And so these are exactly the people that I'm so grateful to for bringing these writers who are so important to me in that I don't really stumble, I don't stumble into randomly. They're not necessarily popping up on lists, maybe they are now but they weren't when I first came to their work. And I was thinking about what Jeffrey said about coming across to Wada's work just on the syllabus and how important that is in terms of like building ways for people to encounter work they don't already know. So really all the people in this room, Margaret included, although I didn't have a personal relationship with her, have been absolutely essential to just bringing work to my attention. I'm so grateful for it. Thank you. And could you talk a little bit about your perception of the current state of Japanese women writers in particular since you've written about that? It seems to be an extent, and I'd love to have Tawada-san's take on this as well, but it's an extraordinary moment for Japanese women writers. While fiction and translation in general still seems to struggle, there are a number of writers who are very, very visible in the international publishing scene who receive prizes, and we could also talk about prizes as another aspect of this, and who are regularly published by some large presses. And I'm just wondering, is this, you in fact, I think play a role in helping that to happen Rivka, but I'm just curious why you think this might be a phenomenon at the moment? Well, I sort of feel like I would much rather hear actually from Allison about this, who I feel like, and from you about this, who I feel like would have a lot more inside. I feel like I'm really kind of the reader on the ground who's not particularly great at being zoomed out. But I do often wonder about, you know, chance and funny little doorways that get opened even, although it's so different. I feel like the massive bestseller that Haruki Markami was, whether you love him, whether you don't love him, however you feel about him, it just kind of like left a lot of light all around him and left a kind of whole halo of interest around him. Whether that's like a great method to bring attention to people or not is another question, but it's certainly something like I observe as a reader. I certainly couldn't agree more with that. I think that it's absolutely the case and a lot of the works I've translated have been the result of publishers and editors and agents saying who's the next Murakami Haruki. And so I think that has been a definite updraft for this particular field for a long time. But interestingly, the beneficiaries are in many cases women writers, and there's just been a very interesting dialogue between Kawakami Miyeko and Murakami about his the nature of his works and attitudes toward women. But, Tawada-san, I wonder if you could tell us in the current moment how you feel about being joined by so many interesting writers, both Kawakami Hiromi and Kawakami Miyeko and Ogawa Yoko and a variety of other people whose work now has become visible in the wake of yours. Do you feel kinship with each other, or is it a kind of growing sisterhood, or is it just a phenomenon that we are observing from the outside? It's a good question. But there is something like women writing in Japan, and in this context you can see maybe something in each of texts that you can maybe you could not see if you read only one woman writer. I like this context, and I don't believe that women always write in a different way than men. I don't believe that. But still, it is not nonsense to thinking about women writing and what we can discover if you read not only one Japanese writer, but a series of women writers. I think that's absolutely fascinating, and I think that in fact that's what we're all realizing is that this group together creates a kind of momentum of its own. I'd love to hear what Jeffrey and Barbara have to say about that in terms of publishing. Are you conscious of this, or is each writer's career something individual and distinct, or do you think of that kind of group phenomenon when you're trying to develop a list? It's an odd thing, because I always think if you're really doing translated fiction, it takes a while. You've got to choose someone, then you've got to have them translated, and then you have to edit it, and then the production cycle, and you have a galley six months before. So if somebody becomes like the big thing, like Latin American fiction, like in the early 80s, or whenever 100 years of solitude came out, then everybody seems to be copycating, and I feel like the trains are leaving the station, and we're not on them. It's not part of our thinking. Our thinking is just more like I don't know if it's thinking. It's like honeybees or something, and there's a lot of flowers, and we kind of try them out on each other. I mean, I don't think we think that way, Jeffrey. I mean, and there's a lot of us, you know, there's five or six people here who read, and then we all argue or discuss. We discuss. So I think it's helpful when there's any more women or any more people of color. I think that's all only a win-win for everybody, and more people from areas that are not very well published in America. So that's all true, but we don't really think that way. I don't think. I mean, we do say to each other, wow, a writer from Indonesia, what have we read since 30 years from Indonesia? Maybe we're really ignorant, but, and so that kind of gives us an extra point in our thinking, like this is a voice or an area we've never heard from in a really long time, and it's a voice that's really interesting, but it has to be that the voice is really interesting. Otherwise, it should be, you know, there's, we don't do well with books if they're not really great. That's the problem with translation. Good books which are good enough in their own languages won't work with us anyway. I mean, they may work with other publishers. I don't know. They have to be really great, I think, to work in translation for a little list like ours. And just the time it takes, and I mean, just so much of the community is involved in the making of the book. I mean, to go back a little bit to your question, I mean, I think so much also is of that kind of period of when say Japanese literature or Arabic literature, something seems to be coming into English more. It's very much dependent on the translators. I mean, these were, we're getting samples or we're getting, you know, submissions in, and I think, yeah, and then that is connected to other things, even political issues, you know, with how a literature suddenly, you know, maybe gets more funding or, you know, I'm sure it all kind of feeds into how we're seeing certain things come in as well. But I don't, I agree with Barbara. It's never been like, oh, this person is huge from this country. Maybe we should look into, you know, it's always been more about, I mean, the beginning of New Directions has always been about world literature, you know, not just American writers, but publishing from translation. And that's since, you know, 1936. And so that's, that's kind of just in the way we approached it. Maybe this thing sometimes where just because you do have a success, like say, with Zabel, then you're on the, you're suddenly like, German translators are thinking more about you and German publishers are sending you things. And that happens or like with César, Ira, and Belaño, then every Spanish language publisher and translator just kind of, you know, you're on their radar too. So it's like a circle. In some ways, this speaks to the extraordinary position of New Directions, the ability to attract writers like that because of the list you've created and your reputation as kind of a foundational publishing house for modern literature. And it may not work the same. Many publishing houses, when they're publishing literature and translation work from prizes and sales in foreign countries, in the original country. So books that are prize winners, octagall prize winners, I suspect that was the original case for the bribing was a dog being published, but Margaret could speak to that. But also I had the experience of books that even if they didn't win a prize were extraordinary best sellers, then publishers, commercial publishers are interested in them. Does New Directions function that way? Or do you work simply from the quality of the text? Prizes are interesting. But there are a lot of them. We just do like 35 books a year. So and some of them are those poets that we've published for years. So it's not like we have 35 slots. And then it's like, and then there's people you want to keep publishing like Yoko-san, you know. And so, no, I mean, I mean, we don't have, we had our first best seller with this strange Japanese book called The Guest Cat. A little book by a person we already published as a poet, Takashi Haraiti. And I didn't even know he wrote novels. And I didn't ever think that. I mean, it's an essayistic, odd thing that goes in geometry and stuff. I mean, Zelkova trees. And it's not just about pussycats. Anyhow. So, no, we wouldn't know. I mean, that's, it did. The two things don't really track for us. Understood. So we have reached the end of our normal time period. And we saved 15 minutes for some Q&A. And we have questions from that have been emailed to us. And so I thought I would pose the first one. And it's actually probably for you, Margaret. And this is a listener who's wondering about translation of names in the emissary. And the decision to leave Mumei as a Japanese name that you do, I think at one point, interpolate and explain that it means no name. But throughout, whereas other names are translated, and there is kind of a convention even going back to Soseki of giving literal translations of names that mean something in Japanese. So I'm just curious how you made that decision. Well, Mumei, I thought to call him no name. With Japanese names, they're written in Chinese characters that have meanings. So you can always translate a Japanese name. But I generally don't. I mean, I don't know. I mean, Mumei is Mumei. And I thought, there's a scene where Yoshiro tells the, you know, the baby has just been born. And his father is there. And the great grandfather says, you know, I've named Mumei a name that means no name. How about that? Or something like that. But I didn't translate Yoshiro. I can't think of any other names that I translated. I don't think there's a tradition of, well, Madame Chrysanthemum. That's definitely a translation of the name. But Madame Butterfly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, Madame Chrysanthemum and Madame Butterfly are like cousins, you know. Madame Chrysanthemum was Pierre Loutise. Well, in Japanese, it's Okiku-san. But, you know, Cho-Cho Fujin is Madame Butterfly. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. But generally, names are not translated. I don't think. I don't know what this questioner is thinking of. But when you translated the name as in Madame Chrysanthemum, it sounds kind of quaint or exotic and kind of turns me off. The next question is actually for Tawada-san. And it's referring back to the notion, and you can confirm or deny it, that you write some of your books simultaneously or more or less simultaneously in German and Japanese, like the polar bear or the naked eye. And the question really has to do with whether there's a prior text and a subsequent text and whether one of them goes back to my question to some extent about the original. Is there a way in which either the Japanese or the German precedes the other and then does that affect the way Susan and Margaret would translate it? And I don't understand the question itself. Before, yes. But what's the question? The question, I guess, is there a prior text? Is the Japanese or the German in any given case, in fact, the first text and you create the other one from it? Or is there a way in which you translate simultaneously? I mean, the case of the naked eye, it was only once and simultaneously was no good idea. Really, at the same time, you cannot really write at the same time. If you use both of hands and write... Besides a different... Yes, but you cannot... That means I wrote from five sentences in Japanese, translated it into German, continued writing in German, five sentences, translated it back into Japanese, and so that, I mean, that was the case, the naked eye. But it was not a good idea because after that you have two texts and you read through the text and you must change so many things because the text is not just a collection of sentences, but it is a river. So you must change it. You must change the original translation, German version. Understand, you must change the German version. This process has no end. I think it was good for the book because the character, there is such a sense of disorientation and she feels like estranged from her own language and making and I think somehow your suffering made the book more interesting. Sorry. I don't want to suffer, just translate it. Margaret suffer, right. But what about opium for all of it? In that case, I wrote it in German. In German and then translated it into Japanese. Japanese is very difficult to understand that people, my Japanese reader, don't like the book. Well, it went out of print, I guess, but that young guy, Sua-san, the really tall guy, do you remember? You gave him a copy of that book and he was just thrilled. So not everybody disliked it, but I thought another thing, all the characters come from Greek myth and they're not so familiar to Japanese readers, but now that you're famous, it's come back in print and paperback. Also, Gauta Tetsudo, I think, didn't she write that as a sort of travel essay in German and then the Japanese version turned into something completely different, which I ended up translating through English. A very, very interesting travel of history. Also, not the translation, but the transformation, because I wrote the essay in German and from that same story, but not the same story. Yeah, in Japanese. Can I ask a question that goes back to, and maybe this is a question for Jeffrey and Barbara, but it goes back to my obsession with book jackets and I absolutely love the jacket for the emissary. I think it's brilliant and I think the entire construction is wonderful and I'm just wondering. I'll say just personally, I've had some very interesting and strange experiences dealing with jacket designs and in a couple of cases, I'll have to say that I vetoed things that were proposed just and didn't even have that power and still managed to scream enough to make that happen, but this is a brilliant design and I'm curious if you could just talk for a minute about how you came to it and how Tauata Sensei was involved or if you were, whose voices are heard when that project is going on. We have a really great art director. I also love the way you can see it all the way through the board. Anyhow, Eric Rieselbach and he's done an interesting thing of reaching out to various designers and kind of asking them who their favorite authors are and getting them on board and this is by John Gall who previously worked on a Tennessee Williams book I remember and he did this recently, a very beautiful collage for selected poems of Thomas Burton going back to an older. Anyhow, so there's kind of a whole group of designers who use this. The early books are by a wonderful designer named Seminar Megit and she was really part of the reviving of the Endi thing and then this one is actually by an artist that Susan Bernofsky had bought a piece by and I think this cover just makes it and sometimes when the art is so great, her name is Lalissa Cartwright, when the art's really great, we just asked Eric to add the type, you know, because Eric's also a book designer. He loves the interiors particularly like he loves the settings. So it's different. Oh, there's the art. He's retrieved her. Oh, there's a white polar bear. Oh, what a nice polar bear. Yeah, that's Alyssa Cartwright. So she was a young, is, you know, a young artist who loves polar bears and I recommended her to New Directions on the basis of her love of polar bears and then she did the first sketch she provided was this amazing, amazingly beautiful cover. We really wanted it to be, because we had actually a very nice, much more commercial cover originally, but it involved a typewriter and a bear kind of coming out like a piece of white paper. And it was just a very good design, technically, but not in the feel of the bear with its pen and that Yoko and Susan are bringing into the world as a handwriting there. These are the conversations I love to see where the translator gets involved in something that's not really your business, but is your business all the time. And the author often too. And sometimes Eric wants to kill us. But before Eric, we were really responsible ourselves for at least their initial ideas of the cover. Like these two are by a photographer, Gerg Ludwig, and that I had found that seemed to connect to the books and everyone seemed to like them. And then Seminar, Megan, the designer was, you know, designing the cover. But yeah, so it's kind of a range, right? But lately it's like how Barbara has been described it. The designers are really amazing. They bring a lot to us. So are editors. It's so true. It's so true. Without editors. I'll ask you, was C-Lion literally C-Lion in the polar bear book? Was that all? Yes. Ze Luva, right? The publisher. Yes. He had the name C-Lion. And it was presented as it was his name. But in German, the difference between what's a name and what's not a name is more fluid than in English. You know, in in German, you can say the C-Lion. And that also is a way of naming too. So, you know, you have to decide in English is it going to be presented just as a name or a name as in in German, it can be a name and a noun at the same time. Yeah. Well, I see that Allison and Esther have joined. Fascinating discussion. It's so interesting to see how these extraordinary works that Tawadasan creates in Japanese and in German move through the hands of Margaret and Susan and into the publishing companies that do this amazing work of putting in the hands of readers and that Rivka then has something to write about and something to help us in the circle promote to wider audiences of readers. This is an enormous pleasure and honor. And I will turn it back to Allison and Esther for a conclusion. Thank you, Steve. You did such a marvelous job moderating and just, you know, it was so many so many ripples and so many so many different effects that were being demonstrated visually and and thematically it was fascinating. And I do also want to, I'm not sure if we gave enough credit to booksellers. I want to give a shout out to them because they are so important in and they're also need all of our support right now. So, but I we thank you all so much for being here. I believe we are spanning four different countries here. We have many different time zones that we're covering and I also want to make it clear that Margaret Mitsutani is awake in the middle of the night in Tokyo. Actually it's, hang on a minute, it's 346. Early or late, depending on how you want to do it. You should wake up time. Yes. Once again, we'd also like to thank our partners, HowlRound and America, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Marnese Eagle Theater Center with special gratitude to Middlebury Language Schools, which sponsored today's conversation. Esther, did you want to close us out? Thank you so much, everybody. It was a wonderful conversation and you're all such dear friends and so beloved. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks a lot. You're going to bed.