Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yōko Tawada

Now, when people are always on the move, our language becomes a mixture of all the scenes we’ve passed through on the way.

“When experts decide whether what people speak is independent language or just dialect there’s almost always a political agenda behind it — you see that, don’t you?”

What if the things we saw on the computer screen were just what somebody had cooked up, and the outside world no longer existed? True, whatever we ordered came right on time. But what if there was only one huge factory somewhere across the sea where everything we ordered was manufactured, and the rest of the world had disappeared?

I wanted to go to a place where adjectives have a past tense, and prepositions come at the end of the phrase.

saw fragments of it glittering on her tongue. The homemade language Hiruko spoke was like Monet’s water lilies. The colors, shattered into pieces, were beautiful but painful.