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About Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel
Patrik, who sometimes calls himself "the patient," is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, "What have you done to your head? I don't want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp!" He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik...
In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew, Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received numerous awards, including the Tanizaki Prize and the Goethe Medal. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.
Susan Bernofsky is the prizewinning translator of seven works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Uljana Wolf, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and others. Her biography of Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small, appeared in 2021. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she teaches literary translation at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press 2017), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Awardee. Her next book, Clam Down (One World 2025), is a hybrid memoir about a woman who turns into a clam, inspired by Yoko Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (translated by Susan Bernofsky). Chen teaches creative writing at Columbia University.