Chance Meetings, Choice Contexts: A Review of PAUL CELAN AND THE TRANS-TIBETAN ANGEL
By Zara Karschay
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. Yoko Tawada (trans: Susan Bernofsky). New Directions, July 2024. $14.95.
Behind closed doors at a Potsdam hotel, a far-right movement proposes racist plans to force out millions of citizens with migrant backgrounds. This is not the Germany of 1933 but of 2023. While the press was quick to express outrage over the ideas exposed in this private event, this was no meeting only of outliers and political extremists. Since its inception in 2013, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party—three of whose members were said to have attended the meeting—quickly gained ground among voters disgruntled with Germany’s immigration policies. The party’s voters may not all share the anti-immigrant views of its politicians. And yet, questions remain whether the AfD could be a threat to democracy, having since its establishment staged several public-facing events where party members deny historical association with the slogans they use, slogans that are banned by German law.
It is within this milieu that Yoko Tawada’s probing novel is set, inflecting her contemporary Berlin with a geographic and lexicographic tenuousness, where words can be wilfully stripped of context and yet maintain an agency both dangerous and valuable. First published in German in 2020, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel presages the so-called Düsseldorf Forum’s exposed flouting of human rights: “[T]he police have started to record parental countries of origin on a blacklist. A person being German no longer suffices […] Skin color is no guarantee either.”
New Directions, 2024.
The novel’s protagonist—known variably as the patient, or Patrik, or ‘I’, though he longs to shuck these labels—nails his semiotic desires to the novel’s framework like a modern-day Martin Luther. Patrik is a psychology patient, an opera fanatic, and a literary researcher, perhaps in that order, perhaps not. He pursues an opera singer who lives nearby, resorting to sending her letters when she performs abroad. This is one of many metafictional moments in the novel, in its echoing of the poet Paul Celan’s (more successful) letters to the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange.
The flitting of the protagonist’s labels, from ‘the patient’ to ‘Patrik’ to ‘I’, presents a man who attempts to manipulate his ‘personhood’ to his advantage, and yet Patrik’s identity is constantly maligned from the outside. An emerging scholar, he is exiled to the edges of academia by his morally lax “boss” and the organizers of a Paris conference on Paul Celan, who first flummox him with a question concerning his identity and then rescind his invitation. Patrik recognizes how external influences shape our being with a play on words reminiscent of Celan’s poetic style: “If I don’t take anything personally,” Patrik wonders, “what becomes of my person?”
Questions of ‘not belonging’ abound, but this is no novel of identity politics. This is a novel of observation. The protagonist is painstaking in his self-flagellating exercises, paying homage to superimposed parameters (revealed as meridians, the humors, and even embroidery hoops), and his inability to influence any one of them (“I don’t know how to cut or sew. All I can do is count.” p87). Incapable of choosing, because choosing would be a kind of creative act, Patrik seeks avenues that take choice out of his hands. We first meet him putting the mundane questions of daily life (where to walk, what to purchase) to a roll of the dice. And Patrik continues to prefer leaving choice to proxies, infuriating a waiter by asking her to select from the menu for him. She chooses a glass of milk, a choice that readers of Celan will interpret as both sage and spiteful—one of many blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nods to Paul Celan’s poetry in the novel.
The Romanian-born French poet Celan comes to inhabit the novel’s recognizably Modernist poetic fugues: “His head isn’t a space, it’s a dense mass of unconnected words.” And yet they are connected through the lines of Celan, pinning words and objects to their semiotic essentials. A body can gain currency when separated from mind and soul, as when Vincent van Gogh “…cut off an ear and gave it to a prostitute.” Words orient Patrik in a changing world.
The novel opens with Patrik—here, as the patient—yearning for the “neutral in-between” of the yellow traffic light. And Yoko Tawada bathes Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel in this winking amber world of neither-nor: The setting is a barely recognizable Berlin, though such imprecision is precisely the point. Written during the pandemic, its isolating force is ever-present through Patrik’s interpretations of the changes in his life. For one, lockdowns exhaust his fascination with structure—social and emotional. Operas and theatres close, programs change with little advance warning. With the streets of large cities like Berlin bare, the stages of his beloved opera houses are narrowed to Patrik’s personal existence and then stretched over the realpolitik of Europe besieged by a virus: “Society is a theater, it seems to me.”
Patrik’s ‘lockdown loneliness’ begins to be resolved with the appearance of Leo-Eric Fu, the eponymous “Trans-Tibetan Angel”, himself an elusive figure of Celan’s imagination—a man who may not exist, whose name Patrik surmises could be three first names—and most importantly, a man happy to speak with Patrik about the poet and his connection-making. Through this friendship, Patrik begins to penetrate the world of social and emotional structures he previously could not.
The fact that I am reading this novel in translation, and that Susan Bernofsky inserts Pierre Joris’ translations of Celan’s German poetry into her own rendering, make a composite of the novel-in-translation that parallels Tawada’s interests in the frailty of linguistic transposition, belonging, and the work of Paul Celan. Readers unfamiliar with the post-WWII poet will miss the novel’s intertextuality, but they will certainly enjoy it for its adjacent interrogation of contemporary life: the novel is rife with modern-day fears of an extreme right-wing revival, out-of-control pandemics, identity and belonging, ‘paranoid’ self-diagnoses, anti-intellectualism. Life is easier observed from the stalls.
Death—a laced tonic in poetry and opera bubbles in Tawada’s novel, too. Patrik despairs of his girlfriend labeling poetry, opera, and love (essentially, his interests) as “dead.” And yet Patrik’s perception of ‘death’ defies finality, applying Paul Celan’s fuguelike style to loop into multiple forms, from the inanimate to the ideological. These ‘deaths’ are taxidermied back into existence by his newfound friend, who puts Patrik’s academic career and romantic interests under amicable scrutiny. Tawada, no stranger to the university, may have with a smirk penned Patrik’s psychologizing of himself and the wildly disproportionate nature with which he assumes professors attending the conference will react to his work. It brings to mind exactly the self-aggrandizing conduct that populist movements like to accuse academics of indulging in.
Patrik’s stymying relationship with his ethnicity (he is Ukrainian) also configures a ‘death’ of democracy, when Patrik finds himself unable to board a bus “according to the new immigration law.” This law, like everything else in the novel, appears an article of fast-produce, not built to last. Perhaps we can read the novel as a cautiously optimistic project—that thin-skinned politics weaponizing language may be only fleeting, anyway: “That’s all the first voice in Threadsuns asks. Life can be as transparent as a poem. Arise and collect yourself!”
Zara Karschay’s writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Baffler, La Piccioletta Barca, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere.
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