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.