Susan Bernofsky on Yoko Tawada and Paul Celan

Harshaneeyam

Susan Bernofsky is an American translator of German-language literature and author. She is best known for bringing the Swiss writer Robert Walser to the attention of the English-speaking world translating many of his books and writing his biography. She has also translated several books by Jenny Erpenbeck and Yoko Tawada. Her prizes for translation include the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. In 2017 she won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her translation of Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada.

In this episode, she spoke about her views on translations, the author Yoko Tawada and her translation of Tawada's novel 'Spontaneous Acts' released in July 2024.

'Spontaneous Acts' written by Tawada in Berlin during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, pays homage to Paul Celan, a longstanding influence on her work. Arguably the most important German-language poet of the post-World War II era, Celan is known for the diamond-hard density of his lyrical lines, estranging words from their inherited meanings, and thereby opening up new avenues of association and interpretation.

You can read Yoko Tawada's article on Paul Celan's Poems written in 2013, via the link in the show notes.

https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/celan-reads-japanese/

To buy the book 'Spontaneous Acts' - a link is provided in the show notes.

https://tinyurl.com/susanyoko

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