EXOPHONY

A polyglot’s travelogue, steeped in the joys and peculiarities of exploring a foreign language.

This book, named after a term used to describe “the phenomenon of existing outside of one’s mother tongue,” gathers a series of short observations about languages, borders, and semantics collected over the course of the author’s frequent academic travels. Tawada (Suggested in the Stars, 2024, etc.), who writes in both Japanese and German, is a perfect guide for this peculiar journey, as she embodies the exophonic experience and can showcase firsthand how existing outside one’s native language can reveal hidden wordplay and energy that a native speaker might otherwise overlook. Each vignette follows roughly the same format: Tawada travels abroad to a literary event and encounters a linguistic hiccup that unfurls into a tangent of intellectual rumination. In one, she reflects on being asked what language she dreams in, a question she feels unfairly suggests that one language is more “real” than the other. While in Seoul, she considers the idea of “foreign literature” and how that concept transforms under political turmoil, “particularly here in Korea, where Japan had forced the Korean people into an exophonic condition against their will.” Many segments discuss “loan words,” terms adopted into vernacular as near-homonyms of their foreign source, such as the Japanese “koppu” (cup) and “basu” (bus). Tawada frequently drifts into details that only fellow language-savants will fully appreciate: She parses out compound words, marvels at the individual meanings of their segments, and then overlays their German and Japanese translations. These digressions may exhaust those readers looking for a more cogent point to these flights of fancy, but Tawada explains that these curious observations can lead to something profound. “Play,” she explains, “can temporarily free us from the habit of seeing words solely as tools for conveying meaning, allowing us to come in contact with the language itself.”

A playful journey toward the space between languages.