Memoirs of a Polar Bear | Yoko Tawada | Granta Magazine

Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Yoko Tawada

Translated by Susan Bernofsky

‘I was perfectly content with my new life until I began to write my autobiography.’

Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada lives in Berlin and is the author of several novels, poems, plays and essays in both Japanese and German. She is the author of the story collections Where Europe Begins and Facing the Bridge, as well as the novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear and The Emissary. Her next novel is forthcoming in the UK as Spontaneous Acts and in the US as Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, in 2024.

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Translated by Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky is the prizewinning translator of works by Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Hesse. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she teaches literary translation at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Her book Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She is currently working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

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