The Brooklyn Rail

“Now and then we have to remove the language from the paper it’s written on,” claims our protagonist, “and take it back into our own hands.” What, only now and then? This new fiction from Yoko Tawada never quits picking at its phonemes and morphemes. Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel makes an origami of the very term “protagonist.” The main character starts out as “the patient,” isolated and struggling with OCD, hardly able to get around his home blocks in Berlin, but over time he transforms into “Patrik,” more sociable and spirited. On top of that, whether patient or Patrik, he slips at times into first person: a narrator. And whatever his guise, it allows Tawada a fresh opportunity for linguistic play—the wit that distinguishes all her work—as well as insights that aren’t solely playful.

In this case, the core narrative is a return to wellness, and so we begin at a low point, when games of perception and expression provide the patient’s only release from fright and withdrawal. Hesitating before a city crosswalk, he reflects that “he’d have to turn into a panther … to zip down the crosswalk’s zebra back.” After that, in the café and eyeballing the women, his fantasies are verbal: “The patient … finds traditional words ugly … The word kissing, for example, tastes like dill pickle salad. Nocturnal tonguejests would work as an alternate expression.”

Bizarre as the neologism is, it then gets yet another torque; the patient calls it “plagiarism.” The original isn’t specified (or not that I can see), but for this man such echoes always reverberate out of the same source, namely, the poet of the title. Paul Celan figures on just about every page, if not him then one of his obsessions, like Kafka or the pomegranate. A sizable list of such totems appears in the afterword by translator Susan Bernofsky, an essay that juggles erudition and enthusiasm as impressively as she handles the German; this is her fourth Tawada title. But “the patient” himself has already, in the novel’s opening, emerged from his dithering enough to fill in Celan’s essentials. Born a Romanian Jew (in what is now Ukraine), Celan spent the Holocaust in a Romanian work camp, then went on to make a home in Paris, compose poetry in German, and translate several other languages (including the American English of Emily Dickinson)—all while afflicted by demons. Before he turned fifty, he threw himself in the Seine. He left behind a body of work distinguished by verbomania much like the protagonist’s, rife with portmanteau singularities. “Tonguejests,” yes.

Tawada’s protagonist may contend with demons of his own, but he “can enter the darkroom of poetry and gingerly touch his future with a fingertip.” He’s a scholar of some esteem, scheduled to deliver a paper on Celan’s masterwork “Threadsuns” (1968). But that’s over in Paris, and just now he can barely manage Berlin. To him, Continental high culture looks like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), shadows and angles that rattle him almost as badly as they did his poet-subject. Celan had seen the very worst of Europe, in the end falling victim to PTSD, and the same poisons leak into Tawada’s linguistic wizardry. Her novel is mostly conversations over coffee and the clutter of a bookworm’s mind, but as it reaches climax—as its protagonist starts to revive—the text meditates on how the young Celan, amid the terrors of the camps, used the imagination to comfort himself: “Sorcerers, witches, and monsters will protect the sleeper from the nightmare of genocide.” On these same pages, Patrik confronts similar nightmares: “I am flying over a battlefield full of bloody, ripped-open bellies. I fly among vultures … caught up in a whirlwind.”

By this point, too, we’ve seen how the patient’s problems have more than little to do with his society’s rising Fascism, the “populists” he prefers to call “poplarist,” thus “getting around the word people.” Again, the wordplay is a relief, a pie in the monster’s face, but that doesn’t change the fact that opera houses, libraries, and borders are closing. It doesn’t make the scars of this man’s late-life initiation any less horrific. Yet his shaman guide seems at first harmless.

Leo Eric-Fu may have an Asian last name and a “faint accent,” but when Patrik calls him “Trans-Tibetan,” at first encounter, it’s nothing to do with ethnicity. It’s another slice off Celan. Wherever Leo’s come from, though, this “fleeting café acquaintance” proves capable of soaring across all sorts of boundaries. He seems to have visited the patient’s library, even his bedroom. He hangs in amiably through conversations that are all “constant leaping around and derailments.” Leo helps Patrik back on track, but in no way like classic dramas of recovery; this is no Magic Mountain, but rather a magic floating bubble, a brief narrative that concludes with a flourish of legerdemain, as a man changes more than roles or names, and so a more fitting comparison would be Italo Calvino.

I’m not the first to make that connection. Yet while I agree, for me this story also recalled the Berlin genius Wim Wenders. He too has worked magic with angels, of course. More than that, he’s tackled other art forms like the memoir—as well as poetry, such as the Whitmanesque praise-song he wrote to introduce the 2007 translation of Where Europe Begins. Tawada too shrugs off aesthetic confinement, not just writing in other genres, like poetry, but in more than one language.

Born in Tokyo in 1960, she first published in her native language. In her early twenties, however, relocated in Hamburg, and moving later to Berlin, she began working in her adopted German. By now she has a bilingual bibliography that runs upwards of thirty titles; New Directions has released five of those originally written in Japanese, translated by Margaret Mitsutani. Altogether, the oeuvre seems well-nigh unique in international literature, a shelf of books in which picking a standout makes desperate work. The New Yorker made a claim for The Naked Eye (German, 2004; US, 2009), whereas The Emissary (Japanese, 2014; US, 2018) won the US National Book Award for Translated Literature. As for me, I’d single out Memoirs of a Polar Bear (German, 2014; English, 2016). The bears themselves relate these three linked stories, and while their roguish carrying on again recalls Calvino, their entrapment, lack of family, and decimated natural environment raise concerns far more serious. The bears’ privileged status, indeed, allows them to express their losses and limitations more poignantly—just as Patrik’s psychosis illuminates the “poplarist” menace more garishly. The genius of Yoko Tawada is to dramatize how speaking in tongues, tearing language from its roots, may offer the best option for humanity under ever-worsening threat.