Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, originally published in German in the fall of 2020, was an early—one might even say premature—response to the anxiety caused not only by COVID-19, but also government lockdown policies implemented worldwide. The novel is narrated in the third-person by Patrik, a literary researcher who most frequently refers to himself as “the Patient”. COVID lockdown seems to have inspired some truly debilitating fears for Patrik, including agoraphobia, and obsessive compulsive behaviors.
Even Patrik is uncertain of how extensive his neuroses are. He may be leaving his apartment every day; he may be sheltering in place. (“People say I’m sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home,” he confides to the reader.) The result is a story that is as disquieting and disorienting as the early months of 2020 themselves.
Paul Celan is not a plot-driven novel. The only real events are Patrik’s encounters with the titular “Trans-Tibetan Angel”, a man named Leo-Eric Fu who approaches Patrik at a cafe. Leo-Eric and Patrik share long discussions about the meaning of life and the poetry of Paul Celan, a non-native German literary figure who has been an important influence on Tawada, another non-native writer who works in German. For both Patrik and Leo-Eric, the meaning of life and the poetry of Paul Celan are very much connected.
As in many of Tawada’s novels, Paul Celan takes up language itself as a major motif.

Spontaneous Acts, Yoko Tawada, Susan Bernofsky (trans) (New Directions & Dialogue Books respectively, July 2024)
Although the novel misses a lot of the day-to-day drama of 2020 (how high are transmission numbers at the moment? what is the death toll now? which countries are “winning the war on COVID”?), Paul Celan is nevertheless a COVID novel. Patrik’s elevated anxiety and disconnection from reality is undeniably tied to lockdown. And the reader never quite forgets the ongoing danger posed by the virus to Patrik and the people around him. Every hint of illness in the novel is unusually ominous, notably when an opera singer is taken with “a devilish coughing fit”.
Tawada aptly captures the sense of everlasting monotony of life under lockdown conditions as well:
… time can’t be measured with the senses anyhow. Our sense of time is always imaginary. Timelessness, on the other hand, is definitely a real sensation. It began when all the concert halls closed. Before that, the patient could pick up complimentary flyers in the foyer containing the season’s program and set them up on his desk like miniature folding screens… Eventually the program contained only broken promises.
Paul Celan also links 2020 to the last great global pandemic, the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, another disaster almost forgotten by popular culture. “The pandemic robbed Celan of two authors: [Franz] Kafka and [Guillaume] Apollinaire,” Leo-Eric notes. Apoillaire died of the flu in 1918; Kafka died of a heart attack in 1924, likely after the flu weakened his heart several years earlier.
But while the novel is about COVID, Paul Celan is also about all the anxieties of modern life. The reader will likely identify the ways COVID hasn’t merely created new anxieties for Patrik but also exacerbated old ones. He struggles with the demands of masculinism and late-stage capitalism. Patrik is particularly haunted by a lifetime of encounters with his bully of a brother who thinks poetry constitutes “books written for girls” and has become a right-wing extremist. Patrik himself repeats misogynist language often enough to cause possible discomfort to a female reader. “Every sort of well-meaning female manipulation is like snake venom,” he tells Leo-Eric.
Patrik also fears the German far-right’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. The fears are probably exaggerated for Patrik himself; as a second-generation Ukrainian immigrant, he is not a prime target. When a bus driver uses a new immigration law to forbid Patrik to board a bus, it is almost certainly a delusion, and there is no such new immigration law. Patrik’s concern about far-right xenophobia, though, is entirely fair. In January 2024, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned a far-right meeting at which members allegedly discussed plans for the mass deportation of non-white immigrants.
“Trans-Tibetan” comes from Pierre Joris’s translation of Celan’s poem “When I Don’t Know, I Don’t Know”.
As in many of Tawada’s novels, Paul Celan takes up language itself as a major motif. Characteristically, Tawada plays with the German in which her novel is written. Susan Bernofsky’s translation does a lively job including the English language reader in the joke:
[Patrik’s] body was being occupied, overrun by letters that were tin soldiers firing hard figures at him. His testes, for example, which had six letters, neither fit in his pants nor his brain, where there was only room for five. He was forced to attend the institute with this body part exposed. His buttocks, of course, were far too big for a pair of five-letter pants.
The English-language title of Tawada’s novel perhaps also deserves some explanation, particularly because the UK edition, published by Dialogue Books, has been published instead under the title Spontaneous Acts. The original German title, Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel, renders more literally as “Paul Celan and the Chinese Angel”. But as Bernofksy explains in her highly useful afterword, she follows the English-language Celan translations of Pierre Joris whenever possible. (Her choice is likely to please both existing English-language Celan fans and those for whom Paul Celan might serve as an entree into the poet’s oeuvre.) “Trans-Tibetan” comes from Joris’s translation of Celan’s poem “When I Don’t Know, I Don’t Know”. The phrase “spontaneous acts” recurs in the novel and is presumably a reference to Celan’s work.
As Bernofsky also explains in the afterword, Paul Celan (1920-1970) has been a long-standing influence on Tawada’s work. (Bernofsky’s afterword provides so much vital context, readers should consider approaching it before the text of the novel itself.) Celan was a Jewish Romanian imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp when he was in his early 20s; he learned his parents died in a different camp in 1942 before he himself was freed. After a decade moving around an unstable, post-war Europe, Celan became a French citizen in 1955. Celan spent the rest of his life in Paris writing famously opaque poetry in the German language. Bernofsky explains that his poetry is known for
the diamond-hard density of his lyrical lines, his technique of compounding and compacting language into often surprising portmanteau images, estranging words from their inherited meanings, and thereby opening new avenues of association and interpretation.
Celan drowned himself in the Seine in 1970.
Readers would benefit from a working knowledge of Paul Celan’s poetry; in Bernofsky’s words “surreptitious, unidentified Celan quotes” appear on many of the novel’s pages and Tawada has “constructed a world that embodie[s] the protagonists’ Celanian desires.” In fact, some passages invite enough background knowledge about Celan that the German-to-Japanese translation by Sekiguchi Hiroaki is heavily annotated. Nevertheless, that knowledge isn’t truly necessary. Tawada—and Bernofky’s deft translation—provide context when needed, notably for the shared poetry analysis between Patrik and Leo-Eric without which most readers would most likely be unable to follow without the intervention of author and translator. One such conversation links Celan’s poetry collection The Meridian with the meridians of Chinese medicine and lines of longitude. And, again, Bernofsky’s afterword enriches the novel because she identifies some of the most meaningful allusions.
It takes only a passing knowledge of poetry and the world of academia, though, to understand Patrik’s quietly ironic sense of humor—one of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel. His wry jests are often aimed at himself, as when he guesses at the needs of the girlfriend he isn’t entirely sure he is still dating:
Her boyfriend is a weakling who sits in a café reading sickly-sweet lines of verse. And what should he be doing instead? Starting a business? Not exactly. All he has to do to satisfy his girlfriend is systematically select relevant poems, interpret them incisively, and land an academic position on the basis of this work. Of course, it’ll have to be an interpretation you can’t stab holes through. He’ll have to submit to several needle pokes without screaming.
Tawada’s choice to write and publish a COVID novel in October 2020 is something of a mixed blessing for readers. (It’s worth noting that publication in 2020 also coincided with the 100th anniversary of Celan’s birth and the 50th anniversary of Celan’s death, a fact that drew attention in German-language reviews.) On the one hand, it is refreshing to read a “COVID novel” at all in an English-language landscape that seems ready to blithely pretend the crisis never occurred—never mind that people continue to die from the virus in English-speaking countries in summer 2024. On the other hand, the result is, in retrospect, somewhat naive. Germany’s most extensive lock-down measures didn’t even occur until after Paul Celan made its original German-language debut; the Berlin theaters which have already re-opened in Tawada’s novel didn’t truly reopen until spring 2021. While Tawada’s novel does a remarkable job capturing the levels of anxiety many people suffered during lockdown, it dramatically understates the scope.
The patient’s disconnection from reality when he emerges from lockdown, however, will surely feel familiar to many readers with uncomfortable memories from 2020-2021. And Tawada accurately predicted what it would feel like for many when lockdown restrictions did finally end. Patrik leaves his apartment with a sense he no longer knows how to live in the world as it was—if it’s truly the same world at all:
Meanwhile all the opera houses are open again. At least that’s what people are saying. But the patient has forgotten how to use any form of transportation.
Paul Celan is not an easy book, stylistically or emotionally. And far from bringing clarity, consolation, or closure, the novel’s conclusion raises more questions than it answers. But it is a fascinating reflection on a global experience world literature seems determined to forget. Broad-ranging in scope, well-contextualized by an experienced translator long accustomed to working with the author, it is an important novel well suited to its moment in history.
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