Bilingual writer Yoko Tawada claimed at a symposium that languages can support and interact with each other even though they are different from each other.

Tawada presented alongside Professor Suzuko Knott from Connecticut College and Professor John Kim from The University of California, Riverside. The speakers discussed transnationalism in Tawada’s novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear.  The organizer of this symposium, Antje Pfannkuchen, assistant professor of German, praised Tawada’s work on translating her own novel from Japanese to German. Tawada explained that she would like the audience to listen to the sounds or phonemes of the letters. She believes that all languages exist in the world supporting each other. Even though a lot of audiences may not be able to understand the performance, Tawada still emphasized the importance for audiences to “feel” how other languages function and support each other in the world. Pfannkuchen claimed that it was an enriching experience to explore a contemporary writer who wrote about historical events in the form of fiction.

During the symposium on Monday, Knott analyzed citizenship and national identity in Memoirs of a Polar Bear, which features three generations of polar bears in the Soviet Union and Germany. She considered the polar bears as nomads in different European countries and looked at their relationships with humans in the context of European history. According to Knott, this relationship between animals and humans reflected that humans were confined by different national boundaries set by political movements.

Growing up in a multilingual environment himself, Knott explored the benefits and shortages of multilingualism in Tawada’s novel. He connected himself with the novel and discussed how reading can change people’s perceptions of themselves.

Alex Bates, associate professor of Japanese language and literature, appreciated the way Knott dealt with the theme of citizenship and refugees. He stated that Knott’s interpretation of the use of polar bears as a means to show movement beyond national boundaries in the novel, highlighted the way that countries and people were confined within certain spaces. He also added that both of the talks from Knott and Kim helped him personally in the reading of Tawada’s work.

Some students who attended this symposium found the multilingualism presented in Tawada’s novels interesting but had different thoughts on the scholars’ interpretation on the novel.

“As someone who speaks many languages but grew up monolingual, I don’t know how to navigate those [gaps between languages], even though I’ve been taking German for a long time,” said Corson Ellis ’20. “The differences in connotation can sometimes be hard for me, so I always think it’s interesting to explore [the gaps] because it helps me to think about it more.”

“Tawada is a writer that I am really interested in because she is writing in a very distinct way compar[ed] to other writers, [like] Murakami Haruki,” said Yu Lin ’20. “I think Tawada is holding a mystic view on writing and her translating theory.”

Tawada presented as part of Clark Forum’s semester theme, “Citizen and Refugee, ” on Monday, March 26, and has since also performed alongside Bettina Brandt of Pennsylvania State University in ATS on Wednesday, March 28. The performance took place in English, German and Japanese.