Discovering/uncovering: Yoko Tawada’s Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik

Reading Yōko Tawada’s works is a fascinating and challenging experience. Be it poetry, prose, or theater (as she is versatile with genres), in Japanese or in German, the reader faces a constant process of being challenged. In every text, one is forced to stop and think about the statement that has just been read, to go back and read it once again, sometimes with an amazed look, sometimes for the fun of beautifully and cleverly crafted language plays. Tawada’s works are a constant play between her Japanese mother tongue and German, the language of the country she lives in. An amusing dimension which is understood only by going back to the time learning our native speech, or for some of us, every time we learn or just brush up on a foreign language for whatever purpose, be it for pleasure or work. The aim of this contribution is to investigate this use of languages and the meanings behind the words, focusing on one of the most interesting works of Tawada, from the point of view of language experimentalism, Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik, a short but semantically dense collection of poems in German (but not strictly, as we will see shortly), published in 2010.