Rob Ayling, yer Gonzo Grande Fromage, writes: YOUR FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE
IN 1972,I SAW KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN
jumble all the world's National Anthems into one symphonic piece
In 1992,in Oslo,i saw Yoko Ono's Chess Set.All the pieces were white.
In Austin and Yorkshire,i saw the temporary Nature art of Andy
Goldsworthy
In Bristol,i saw the original street murals of Banksy (NOT"attributed
to"
THE FUTURE IS ALREADY -HEAR?Multiple languages in one world.
Multiple Rashomon viewpoints.POV in cinema(as in life)
And to describe requires a Lewis Carroll Jabberwocky
An ON THE ROAD/CLOCKWORK ORANGE argot/jargon
Mixed metaphors for a multi media world.Already-text poetry,Twitter
poetry.
Already,computer programs writing poetry and making art.
All this was years ago-a bacteria now a plague of ideas and
imagination.
Now we can mic,melt,morph all languages into a New Esperanto
wherein and whereby you can FEEL the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic
or Neruda in his native Spanish.Or Mexican Spanish.Or Argentine
Spanish.
English is a polyglot vampire stealing blood sandwiches.You know what i
mean...
Listen to This Poet Blending German and Japanese
Why you should care
Because this mystical author is writing the future.
After the poetry reading, a gaggle of teenage girls follow Yoko Tawada out of
the room. Oblivious to their presence, she brings me into the author signing
booth, telling me she can talk now, because “no one will come to ask me to sign
anything.” The girls wait patiently until they can approach. “Ma’am,” they say —
and I do not get the sense that these are girls who read a lot of poetry — “we
loooved what you did in there.”
What Tawada did was read her work in three languages: German, Japanese and English. She writes in the first two. And though perhaps one or two people in the audience understood the original, something was still comprehended. She performs, holding up images of Chinese characters to which she refers; she reads part of a poem written on a latex glove that she wears, then turns the glove inside out, where the rest of the poem awaits. Sometimes, Tawada performs her work accompanied by a pianist. She is strange. Her work says things like, “They couldn’t read my face like a text,” and she says things like, “Language is like a co-author — I have something I want to write about, and then I discuss it with language. Sometimes language wants something different.”
The author of short stories, novels and poetry collections, Tawada can be difficult to
come by in English. A few recommendations available in English: the short-story
collection Where Europe Begins, which was translated more than a decade
after it was first published in German, and her novel The Naked
Eye. Both involve stories of migration and distance, of strangers
in strange lands, but they are about as far from Salman Rushdie’s or Jhumpa
Lahiri’s immigrant tales as you can get.
At age 22, Tawada left Tokyo for Germany, to study German literature and to become purposefully lost in a foreign tongue. When she arrived, she was startled by how few people there were on the streets. In Tokyo, on busier turf, her father was a bookseller and she lived in the center of Nakano District — already her life sounds like the plot of a Haruki Murakami novel. She used to make puppets out of the pages of books. She loved Franz Kafka, whom, she says, “predicted reality,” which leads one to wonder what on earth Tawada’s reality is.
In Tawada’s work, people are often alone, confused by those around them and by both the physical shapes and the sounds of words. Though comparisons are difficult, the ones that come to mind are Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and, yes, Murakami. Tawada, who is single, tells me, “I think it’s important for women to be alone if they want to write.” She believes that is necessary to avoid the mind becoming polluted by the wants and words of others. “To find your own language,” she continues, “you must be alone — and by that I mean not language as a language of communication, but language as an art, which has a structure with many hidden meanings.”
What Tawada did was read her work in three languages: German, Japanese and English. She writes in the first two. And though perhaps one or two people in the audience understood the original, something was still comprehended. She performs, holding up images of Chinese characters to which she refers; she reads part of a poem written on a latex glove that she wears, then turns the glove inside out, where the rest of the poem awaits. Sometimes, Tawada performs her work accompanied by a pianist. She is strange. Her work says things like, “They couldn’t read my face like a text,” and she says things like, “Language is like a co-author — I have something I want to write about, and then I discuss it with language. Sometimes language wants something different.”
At age 22, Tawada left Tokyo for Germany, to study German literature and to become purposefully lost in a foreign tongue. When she arrived, she was startled by how few people there were on the streets. In Tokyo, on busier turf, her father was a bookseller and she lived in the center of Nakano District — already her life sounds like the plot of a Haruki Murakami novel. She used to make puppets out of the pages of books. She loved Franz Kafka, whom, she says, “predicted reality,” which leads one to wonder what on earth Tawada’s reality is.
In Tawada’s work, people are often alone, confused by those around them and by both the physical shapes and the sounds of words. Though comparisons are difficult, the ones that come to mind are Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and, yes, Murakami. Tawada, who is single, tells me, “I think it’s important for women to be alone if they want to write.” She believes that is necessary to avoid the mind becoming polluted by the wants and words of others. “To find your own language,” she continues, “you must be alone — and by that I mean not language as a language of communication, but language as an art, which has a structure with many hidden meanings.”
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