An English translation by Professor Susan Bernofsky of Yoko Tawada’s German novel, Paul Celan And The Trans-Tibetan Angel, will be published by New Directions in July 2024.
The absurdist novel centers around a literary researcher, Patrik, in the wake of present-day, post-lockdown Berlin. Despite all of his favorite locales, such as the opera, reopening, Patrik––who refers to himself as “the patient”––has stumbled into a certain malaise. He can barely get out of bed or leave the house and decides, impulsively, to shave his head.
As Tawada’s dream-like narrative continues, Patrik is tasked with writing a paper for a conference, taking place in Paris, on the Romanian poet Paul Celan’s collection Threadsuns. When filling out the registration form, he gets stuck on the first question: “What is your nationality?” Patrik then ventures to a café (or what may be the memory of a café) where he encounters a man named Leo-Eric Fu who appears to already know him.
Likened to Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, and Roberto Bolano's Monsieur Pain, Paul Celan And The Trans-Tibetan Angel explores friendship, conversation, reading, music, and poetry as subjects that bring us together.
Associate professor Rivka Galchen ’06 writes, “The varied characters in Tawada’s work—from different countries, of different sexes and species—are united by the quality that Walter Benjamin describes as ‘crepuscular’: ‘None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines.’”
Susan Bernofsky is the director of Literary Translation At Columbia. She has translated more than twenty books. She is a past Guggenheim fellow, a 2020 Berlin Prize Fellow, and a 2019 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Paul Celan And The Trans-Tibetan Angel is available for pre-order here.
