Japanese author Yoko Tawada’s novella Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, energetically translated from German by Susan Bernofsky, unravels through an absurdist blend of first- and third-person narration. The book follows Patrik, an infirm young Berlin-based Celan scholar who was born in Germany to immigrants from Ukraine.  We are told early on that Patrik (also referred to as “the patient”), “often feels confined in a first-person prison” and “sometimes refers to himself as the patient in his interior monologues.”

There is a near-constant oscillation between a close-third point of view and an omniscient perspective, often within the same paragraph, which allows Patrik to both be himself and not himself, to inhabit an identity and perform it. But narrative is secondary to Patrik’s inner world. Rather, this book revolves largely around character and experience. We are treated to meditations on subjects ranging from populism, warfare, nationalism, and migration to memory, multilingualism, and the twentieth-century Jewish poet Paul Celan, all filtered through Patrik’s eccentric consciousness and moving at furious velocity.

At the start of the book, Patrik is scheduled to attend a conference in Paris on Celan, a poet who played a seminal role in German-language poetry, though he never lived in Germany. When the organizers ask for Patrik’s nationality in order to determine who will cover the cost of his flight, he claims to withdraw out of protest against this “emphasis on national origins.” Germany is a country long resistant to jus soli-based citizenship, and the book doesn’t make a clear statement of Patrik’s nationality. But it is clear that he longs for the confidence of the unmarked citizen who simply belongs to the nation in which he lives:

Patrik doesn’t know any Ukrainian music, or even a single Ukrainian word. When Patrik used to ask his parents about Ukraine, they would respond evasively: What does this country have to do with you, you’re from Frankfurt. His parents found it alienating that migration was such a frequent topic at Patrik’s school. The parents’ opinions rubbed off on their son [ . . . ] He didn’t want to be seen as a person from the East.

Celan was a Romanian French Holocaust survivor who wrote globally acclaimed poetry in German, and Patrik is an early-career—or former—literary scholar toiling in obscurity in twenty-first-century Berlin. But Celan and Patrik share a contested nationality, their study of German literature, and their work in academia. Consumed by the question of nonbelonging, near the middle of the book Patrik is overjoyed to realize that “Czernowitz, the birthplace of Paul Celan, is now a Ukrainian city. He’s Celan’s countryman! Finally some good news. He applauds with joy, even though there isn’t any stage.” The fact that he doesn’t already know this, despite being engaged enough with Celan to attend a conference about him, suggests just how cut off from his Ukrainian heritage Patrik is.

In contrast to Patrik’s fraught relationship to nationhood and belonging, his younger brother embraces German nativist populism with gusto, even claiming to have made bombs “to set fire to the Temple of the Others.” Yet, when Patrik attempts to phone the police to report this threat, he is met with complacent xenophobia: “An officer answered the phone with a coffee-break voice. I told him a radicalized group was planning an arson attack at a mosque or synagogue. The officer’s bass-baritone voice replied without emotion: ‘I don’t doubt it.’ This answer was meant literally.”

Tawada makes use of perspectival shifts, discontinuity, and an implied unreliable narrator who often expresses doubt about the veracity of statements made and posits alternate plot lines. Examples include: “The patient is not yet Patrik. . . . A minor time lag between the patient and Patrik shouldn’t bother anyone”; “So how about letting this Patrik play a man who has already recovered?”; and “There’s a gap in his memory cinema.”  

The protagonist’s sense of fragility is one he has experienced since youth. As a child, Patrik “felt happy in the company of things, and it never occurred to him to seek mastery over them. These objects were alive, while living children were too unpredictable for him, too dangerous.” The tension between belonging and not, between clarity and ambiguity, thrums through this book, while a tender Hammershøi light illuminates the inner world of this disturbed academic, and the tone is one of warm, interested acceptance.

Figures external to Patrik, like the book’s presiding spirits Celan and Leo-Eric Fu, serve to tell us more about his character. The latter is an apparently omnipotent “trans-Tibetan angel” who appears to Patrik in a Berlin café:

The man standing in front of Patrik looks very Trans-Tibetan. This is the first time Patrik has ever used this Celan word, which he’s been warming beneath his feathers for a long time now without knowing what group of people or languages would hatch from it.

The idea of the trans-Tibetan figure and Celan’s prefix of trans- (meaning “across,” “beyond,” or “on the other side of”) speaks to Tawada’s interest in the immigrant’s ineluctable precarity around national borders and identity. Leo-Eric’s appearance echoes Patrik’s old dream of studying in a place under pressure from a more dominating society: we are told he “dreamed of going to school in another country, in Tibet for example, or in the Basque Country,” both places struggling to assert an identity in the face of totalitarian forces. Why was this his dream? “The language there, he thought, would be completely different, and he wanted to learn it.”

Such a thirst for alterity indicates a latent sense of transnationalism, contradicted by resurgent notions of blood-based “Biodeutsch” nationality in Patrik’s immediate surroundings in contemporary Germany: “The more often he reiterates that he’s German, the more uncertain he becomes. No one asks him where his parents are from. But the police have started to record parental countries of origin on a blacklist. A person being German no longer suffices . . .” Yet the narrator also expresses Patrik’s displeasure at the foregrounding of transnational identity, at being invariably marked as “other.” This echoes Celan’s protest at critics who, he felt, granted him licenses as a “foreign” poet that they wouldn’t permit a “‘real’ German writer”—“[Celan] didn’t want to be marginalized in these faux-liberal terms,” Patrik notes.

Amid the tensions of language, Patrik, like Celan, locates silence as a source of power. In a multilingual milieu, silence could be pictured as a universal expression. But in Patrik’s description, even silence is culturally coded: “During the therapy session, I mostly maintained a hard silence, pressing my lips together and wishing I had a great big beard to hide my intentions in. I started saying beard silence instead of hard silence. The beard is a sort of burqa concealing a proud masculine silence. By remaining silent, you obliterate your conversation partner. That’s why Celan writes of a blind silence.” One sees here the nuance with which Patrik reflects on shades of meaning contained in everyday words, as he toys, persistently and self-consciously, with language. His choice of metaphor also displays his perspicacity, framing the very different attitudes of some Germans toward refugees from Ukraine versus from countries where Islam is the dominant religion. Similarly, his awareness of gender bias is crisply iterated in an indictment of how his university employer had “besmirched Ingeborg Bachmann [and] trivialized Nelly Sachs”—two female German-language poets of the same brilliance as Celan but never celebrated by academics to the same degree.

Patrik’s perspective is mirrored in Bernofsky’s translation, with its perfectly balanced tone of dry humor and tenderness. This comes through in the decision to offer the monosyllabic four-letter words Patrik is so obsessed with in both English and German: “Count the letters, count the nuts! Not just almonds, count the peanuts and walnuts, too! You can’t crack them, just count them. I’ve counted and recounted them all. Eye, beard, tooth, brain, heart, throat, hand: Auge, Bart, Zahn, Hirn, Herz, Hals, Hand. I offer you this medley of nuts without articles or possessive pronouns, just four letters each.”

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel begins with Patrik at a literal crosswalk, wishing for a set of dice to dictate his next move, and ends with a suggestion that forces the reader to rethink everything that has come before. Patrik’s frequent self-identification as “the patient” drops away as the novella draws to a close. His putting aside of this distancing term feels like an embrace of his identity. Ultimately, whether the story is a fever song or an afterlife dream feels irrelevant. It is Patrik’s performance of his story that makes this brilliant book unique.

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions, 2024).

Sold in the UK as Spontaneous Acts (Dialogue Books, 2024).

© 2024 by Sylee Gore. All rights reserved.