The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.
The second-best argument is that I can't read Yoko Tawada in the original. Tawada is among the finest and most singular authors working today. Over the past four decades, she has published nearly two-dozen books, the majority of which have been translated into English by Margaret Mitsutani or Susan Bernofsky and published by New Directions. She's won enough major literary awards that experienced Nobel Prize-watchers consider her a near-future contender.
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So while it's possible to constellate Tawada within both the German and Japanese literary scenes, her bilingualism is what truly distinguishes her, especially to an English-reading audience for whom all this work is necesarily going to be read in translation. Tawada has spoken about how the practice of swapping from one language to another allows her to see each language from the outside, and "prevent her from taking things for granted." She insists upon the ecstatic sense of possibility that comes with feeling foreign. Being thrust into an unfamiliar language or country can be scary, but in Tawada's hands, that very disjointedness is a source of profound art, striking beauty, and novel connections invisible to native speakers. "I feel more as though I am between two languages," she told the Paris Review in 2018. "To study that in-between space has given me so much poetry."