Reviewed by Jacob Rowland
In the early months of 2020, images began to circle of a world suddenly cleared out: deserted trains in London, Times Square lit up with no one around, dolphins moving silently through the blue canals in Venice. What went missing was not only the noise and conviviality of our public spaces. The silences were missing too: intermission at the opera, recess at school, the natural pauses in a conversation not conveyed over video, the parting of two friends who knew the next time they would see one another.
Yoko Tawada’s pandemic novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, published in 2024 by New Directions (simultaneously published in the UK by Dialogue Books under the title Spontaneous Acts), inhabits that time absent even of familiar absences. This reality is not a far-off memory (the novel was first published in German in the fall of 2020), yet experiences of the time have only reluctantly made their way into fiction. In the years since life resumed its normal rhythms, the conditions of life under lockdown have entered a quarantine in our collective memory. Reading now about the pandemic feels like reading about the distant past. Tawada’s novel, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, reconjures a world that may already seem far removed in many readers’ minds.
The novel follows Patrik, a struggling scholar of the poet Paul Celan, living in Berlin in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown in the summer of 2020. Patrick, like everyone else at the time, is caught in a feeling of timelessness: “The winter will not come in which humankind will have the leisure to process this bizarre summer and come to terms with it. Spring won’t come because winter isn’t coming” (13).
The details of Patrik’s life seem to float in quantum superposition. Perhaps he has a girlfriend—maybe not, he can’t remember. He works as a research assistant at the fictional Institute for World Literature, though he’s not sure whether he has quit his job, or whether he was even hired in the first place. The reader cannot even be certain as to the protagonist’s real name. In Patrik’s inner monologue, which oscillates continually between first and third person, he often calls himself “the patient.” Other figures drop in and out of the narrative: a younger brother who has been radicalized by the far-right, a useless therapist, and an American opera singer who lives in the same neighborhood, whom Patrik watches on DVDs from his apartment, and with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love.
He is preparing to attend an international Paul Celan conference in Paris, the city where the Romanian-born, German-speaking poet lived and worked for most of his career, until its abrupt end in 1970, when, at the age of 49, he was found drowned in the Seine. Patrik’s preparations for the conference are only an act. For reasons he cannot quite articulate, he has already given up on attending.
Things change when Patrik meets Leo-Eric Fu, a “trans-Tibetan”-looking man (in a phrase Patrik borrows from Celan) who seems to know a suspicious amount about Patrik. Leo-Eric is also a reader of Paul Celan, and the two can hold a thrilling conversation, quoting from the poet’s works as if speaking a second language. Patrik is surprised to find Leo-Eric knows things about Celan that others don’t. In the nineteen-sixties, Leo-Eric’s grandfather practiced acupuncture in Paris; as an educated man who read Chinese, French, Hebrew, and German, he moved in the same circles as Celan. He too had been a careful reader of Celan’s poems, just like Patrik and Leo-Eric, but to him, they evoked concepts familiar from traditional Chinese medicine. “The Meridian,” an idea at the center of Celan’s poetics, also happens, as Leo-Eric explains to Patrik, to be the most common translation of jingmai, a term for the lines that, according to Chinese medicine, crisscross the human body, connecting the different organs and forming the basis of acupuncture.
Language is at the center of the book. It could almost be said that the action of the novel follows linguistic acts, rather than happenings in the real world. Patrik’s internal monologue is steeped in Celan-words, particularly those from his 1968 book Fadensonnen (Threadsuns). Celan’s later poetry attempted to piece apart the German language, partly an effort to filter out the pollution left over from Nazi-era speech. It draws its language from botanical, geological, technical, and biblical registers. The whole genetic history of the German language combines with borrowings from numerous foreign tongues. In Celan’s poems, as read by Tawada’s characters, individual letters dislodge from words to form new strands of meaning. A single compound word (Tiefimschnee, meaning “deepinsnow”) in Celan’s poem “Keine Sandkunst mehr” (“No More Sand Art”) gets its letters scrubbed off like an artifact being worn down on all sides, until it is just a tiny lexical kernel: Tiefimschnee becomes Iefimnee becomes I-i-e. Tawada tells us that iie happens to be the Japanese word for “no” (114).
Suffusing Patrik’s mind day and night, the poet’s idiosyncratic vocabulary floats over the whole of the novel. Much of it is likely familiar to a literate German audience, but perhaps less so in translation. For instance, when Patrik meditates on his discomfort with the word “shovel,” one is meant to recall the line, “We shovel a grave in the air,” from the famous poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”). When Patrik replaces the word “popularist” with “poplarist,” the reference is to the Celan poem “Ich hörte sagen” (“I Heard It Said”). In general, however, if the reader is unfamiliar with the poems referenced in the novel, she is not missing out on all that much. The splendor of the book is in Tawada’s own experiments with the German language. For this reason, the book places unusual demands on its English translator. But readers of Susan Bernofsky’s English translation can look forward to an equally entertaining performance with a grace and playfulness on par with the author’s.
Patrik’s world of meanings is richly varied, often bordering on oversaturated. Numerology, anagrammatic wordplay, and other modes of symbolic thinking common in mystical thought carry him through the business of everyday living. Instead of bread for breakfast, Patrik eats the word “bread.” Then his thoughts turn to the word “slice,” and his pleasure grows. Some words are tastier than others. In certain ways, Patrik’s hyperactive interpretive ability nourishes and enlivens him. It also means he faces danger at every turn: after all, the word “bread” rhymes with the word “dead,” a dangerous thing to ignore. The similarities between English and German often ease the burden on the translator. The rhyme “bread” and “dead” is the same in German (Brot and tot), so the translator can carry the same resonance into English without a lot of effort.
Tawada often slips into fantastical passages structured around the shape of words: “He draped the word neck around his neck like a scarf. For a glove, he tugged the four letters of the word hand over his fingers. Shirt and pants have five letters each, as does the brain he wore as a hat. Hat, hair, and hand all begin with h” (112). In passages like this, the English, because of its closeness to German, is able to keep most of the lexical resonance of the original (though not all of it: the German words for “neck,” “hand,” “shirt,” “pants,” and “brain” are all four-letter words beginning with h).
Bernofsky makes up for the inevitable losses with new resonances that she brings to the English. In a passage where Patrik meditates on illness, she puns: “Health insurance thinks (if insurance can be said to think) that an illness like tuberculosis is outdated and fit for public consumption only—if at all—on the opera stage.” (53) The play on “tuberculosis” and “consumption” only works in English.
Bernofsky’s translation enters Tawada’s wild, associative style. Consider my literal translation of the German text in this discussion of Celan’s poem “Denk dir” (“Think to Yourself” or “Imagine”), a political poem “but with the letters of the alphabet as the main characters”: “The letter d in Denk [“think”] and dir [“to yourself”] reminds us that no action can be intransitive. Simply thinking without an object doesn’t work. Consider the verb sterben [“to die”]. Do I die my death, or do I die intransitively?” (82).
Now compare Bernofsky’s much shorter translation: “The letter d in denk and dir is also the first letter of the verb to die” (75). Though Bernofsky condenses this passage significantly, she is actually hewing closer to the texture of the original than a literal translation would. Patrik’s paranoid mind, if he had been thinking in English instead of German, could not have avoided hopscotching straight from the letter d to the word die. Following the whims of the English language, Bernofsky indulged playfully in Tawada’s “slantwise process of association” (Bernofsky, “Afterword,” 136) as she recreated an English-speaking Patrik.
Tawada, a contemporary Japanese writer who has lived in Germany for her entire career, writes German as a foreign language (her book of essays Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue was published in 2025 by New Directions, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda). Her writing alternates between her native Japanese and her adoptive German. “Reading the alphabet,” she writes in a 1998 course of lectures at the University of Tübingen, “is an art.” In the novel, letters and words have an innate intelligence. They think on their own. Sometimes their schemes become dangerous. When Tawada describes Patrik shaving his head because “[t]he words that had settled in his hair were too much for him” (22), one cannot help thinking of virus particles, letters forming strands of RNA, floating invisibly in the air. Patrik’s world of multiplied meanings is uncomfortably familiar. During a pandemic, in a world sequestered behind screens, in which illness and health become politicized categories, it becomes hard to avoid being caught in rogue chains of significance which seem to float all around.
In the end, Patrik’s wish is to be free from this neurosis: “Eventually, he wanted to stop counting, to free himself from the cage of countable letters and go dancing every night. He wanted to excel at lightness and learn to say: Oh, it really doesn’t matter if there are only three letters, that’s just how it is!” (113).
It is Leo-Eric who will help him achieve this. His friendship offers a way out of the abyss of timelessness into which Patrik has fallen. In their conversations, Patrik’s thoughts take on a greater emotional urgency—both those about Celan’s poetry and those about life. He receives a sense of purpose again. He decides he will attend the Celan conference, bringing the fruits of his conversations with Leo-Eric. In a hallucinatory episode near the end of the book, Leo-Eric sprouts wings, transforming into the bird-airplane that will carry Patrik to Paris. For his part, Patrik knows how this will end. Earlier, perhaps the same day, he read in the newspaper about a plane that crashed en route from Berlin to Paris. Among those on board was a young scholar on the way to deliver a talk at a Paul Celan conference. This prophetic vision is the first time Patrik has been able to form any conception of the future.
For the whole of the novel leading up to this point, past and present have mingled in a formless in-between space. First and third person have intruded one upon the other, seemingly at random. Patrik complains, earlier in the novel, about the obligation to conjugate all the verbs that form his life with the first-person singular ending “-e”: “ich habe, denke, esse, liebe, wasche, kaufe (I have, think, eat, love, wash, buy)” (16). When he dissociates into “the patient,” he gets to conjugate his verbs with a “-t” instead”: “er hat, denkt, isst, etc.” At the end of the novel, his life is reconjugated. He is handed the future tense. The letters that form his first- and third-person selves—e and t—are transformed into the document that marks his future, and sets him free: “This is a copy of your e-ticket for Paris” (131).
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel is an adventure in friendship in a fractured world. Tawada’s hyperactive symbolic games recall a time when the whole world seemed to flee from reality: the furious atmosphere of conspiracy theories, dogwhistles, and unknown illnesses. But Tawada’s writing has an emotional generosity that sets the novel apart from other works of fiction that deal with the crises of the contemporary world. Leo-Eric, the titular Trans-Tibetan angel, breaks into the novel like sunlight through clouds. The book is about the power of friendship, literature, and language to rescue us from dark times. Susan Bernofsky, who is credited not only as “translator,” but also as “contributor,” delivers an English version which is just as frantic, playful, and human as the original.
Bernofsky’s other translations of Tawada’s books include Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Naked Eye, and Where Europe Begins, all available from New Directions.
Tawada, Yoko. Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, 2024.
Jacob Rowland is a writer, translator, and teacher. He holds a BA in Comparative Literature and German from Oberlin College.
Works Cited
Yoko Tawada. Spontaneous Acts, Dialogue Books, 2024, translated by Susan Bernofsky.
—. Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel, Konkurs Buchverlag, 2020.
—. Verwandlungen: Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen, Konkurs Buchverlag, 1998.