Pas encore de mots-clés.
On the second day of the European Literature Festival in Tokyo in the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, I had the opportunity to listen to some really inspiring talks by authors who rewrite history and translators who manage to build bridges between languages and people.
The first talk I attended today was by two multilingual authors, Yoko Tawada and Helena Janeczek. Both authors have lived outside their place of birth and have written novels and poems in languages other than their mother tongue. During this discussion, the question of language use, borders and identity came up. The most interesting idea that I take away from this talk is that literature contributed largely to the creation of national languages and that today too, literature allows languages to further develop and shape not only our ideas, but also the ways we express them through language.
Yoko Tawada read out from her book The Emissary (2014) and Helena Janeczek read from her book Trieste in Love (2018).
The second talk I attended was with German author Thomas Brussig. Similarly to Helena Janeczek, Brussig uses history as a backdrop for his stories and merges it with fiction. For him, the experience of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 was an inspiration. He uses real events and fiction, which allows the author to focus on specific aspects of that given time and to highlight, enlarge and exaggerate those aspects in order to make the readers more aware of the parallels between today’s issues and those of the past. Brussig read out from his book Wie es leuchtet (2004).
The third talk “Translating Nature and Culture” invited Irish author Sara Baume and Yoko Kato, the Japanese translator of Baume’s novel Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither (2015). The author and the translator discussed the challenges of translating not only the meaning, but also the rhythm of a language. Baume emphasized in the discussion, hat for her the musicality and the rhythm of the words in translation is the most important, and that she advocated for translating her works in a manner that remains rather faithful to the spirit of her writing and not to the letter.
