For a reviewer, an apposite comparison is always a big help: If you liked X, then you might like Y. It’s a little lazy, choosing to compare rather than describe, but it’s a nice shorthand that we all understand. The problem is that a few times in every generation, there is a writer that defies comparison. A groundbreaking author out on the edge doing their own thing. These writers often become overused adjectives themselves: Joycean, Kafkaesque, Beckettian. You cannot be compared to your peers if you are playing your own game. Yoko Tawada is one such writer.
Winner of a handful of prestigious awards in Japan and overseas, “Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel” (translated by Susan Bernofsky) is the latest of Tawada’s many works to be rendered into English. The titular Celan was a German-language poet and Holocaust survivor who died in 1970. His work is, according to the translator’s afterword, a “longstanding influence” on Tawada, and so this novella is something of an intellectual love letter.
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, by Yoko Tawada. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. 144 pages, NEW DIRECTIONS PUBLISHING, Fiction.
The protagonist is Patrik, an academic who planned to present a paper on Celan at a conference in Paris but changed his mind. Set during the pandemic, fear of contagion and of human proximity partially explain his hesitation — he refers to himself as “the patient” and the opening chapter is a kaleidoscopic blend of images connecting travel with death — but as always with Tawada, there is much more going on. Her two great themes are identity and language, and both quickly raise their heads here. Patrik refuses to give his nationality on the registration form, not recognizing the relevance of the question, but also because his place of birth near the German and Polish border has changed hands so many times throughout history that any answer he gives is, to him, essentially meaningless. Refusal to answer means he cannot attend. Apparently, to speak of poetry one must first define one’s nationality.
The main action involves a surreal series of conversations between Patrik and Leo-Eric Fu, another Celan expert who appears mysteriously in Patrik’s life.
The afterword states that a lack of familiarity with Celan’s poetry is no obstacle to enjoyment of the book — and that is correct — yet readers may not help but feel out of depth after jumping into the torrent of references, quotes, puns and linguistic games that inform the bulk of the narrative. Again, Tawada fans will be used to this — you are expected to run to keep up, and the effort is always rewarded. Yes, it is difficult, it is nonlinear, it is deliberately confusing. The characters even seem to make meta-textual comments on this fact, such as when “Patrik feels infinitely relieved. He now knows what’s going on. But this breath-pause of relief doesn’t last long.” Me too, Patrik. Me too. You don’t read Tawada to find out what happens next; you read Tawada to lose yourself in the maelstrom of language and ideas. Each time you jump in, you find you can swim a little better, but your feet will never touch the bottom.
This isn’t willful obscurity for its own sake, nor is it intellectual posturing. Tawada is an artist out on the tip of the spear. She isn’t courting a readership, curating her image, coaxing popularity like some; she is pushing her art forward, and we as readers are welcome along for the ride if we can keep up. It’s startling, breathtaking prose, literature at its purest. What to compare it to? Nothing. It is simply Tawadaesque: peerless, unique and incomparable.
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