Games and Disasters
A Multilingual Reading on Behalf of Practiced Transculturality
By Paul Busch
On April 25th, CAPAS hosted an event with Yoko Tawada, held in the auditorium of the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS). Yoko Tawada, a Japanese-German writer and international scholar whose work is characterised by its multicultural and poetological morphology, attracted significant interest not only among students and staff of Japanese Studies beholden to the semantic context. It furthermore proved to be highly appealing to those who wish to experience transculturality in a more comprehensive manner than ordinarily assumed.
A large number of participants attended the performance as well as the discussion of Tawada’s poetry by exploring their background with regard to apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic imaginaries. Through a remarkable amount of skilfully implemented humour, para-verbal presence, and multilingual virtuosity, Tawada effortlessly managed to captivate the audience: what made her poetry so convincing was not only the empathic and observational sensitivity poured in her vocal engagement with Japanese modernity and the peculiarity of German quotidian matters. To the same extent, she availed herself of a remarkable variety of onomatopoeia, bestowing her performance with a unique degree of tenderness that could not be expressed with fragmented vocabulary alone.
The roughly one-hour reading was complemented by a panel discussion with Tawada, Marcus Quent (CAPAS-Fellow 2023-2024, Berlin University of Arts), and the German sinologist Barbara Mittler (Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University). The three of them passionately did justice to the impact emanating from the recital and managed to include the audience by addressing various transcultural and apocalyptic topoi such as Fukushima as starting points for a further reaching transdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue. As one person in the audience maintained accurately, it is the multilingual character of Tawada’s writing that enables us to juxtapose it with and reflect it through the necessity of performatively synthesising existential divergences in light of disastrous incidents.
THICK (太) A time will come when dawn will melt into dusk Warmth will mean the same as cold Walk slowly and the station will feel nearer A single cracker will fill our stomachs And at the moment one wants to stop writing, a poem appears on the page
Aus dem Japanischen: Jeffrey Angles
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960. She came to Hamburg in 1982 where she studied German language and literature and obtained her doctorate in Zurich. She has lived in Berlin since 2006. Her first book was published in 1987. She writes in German and Japanese and has received numerous literary prizes, including the Akutagawa Prize (Japan), the National Book Award (USA) and the Kleist-Preis (Germany).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Busch is employed as a research assistant to the Managing Director of CAPAS. Being a MA student of Philosophy at Heidelberg University, he takes a particular interest in Classical German Philosophy, as well as its contemporary impact regarding transcultural configurations.