The Disaster Artists: Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada’s Delicate Dialectic
Yoko Tawada, transl. Susan Bernofsky | Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel | New Directions | July 2024 | 144 Pages
There is a certain delicacy to the novels of Yoko Tawada. They possess a lightness that is unusual, especially given her themes. Against the backdrop of dying cultures and apocalypse, her characters float across the surface of her pages, not so much unbothered as they are unimpeded. It is strange then that one of her most recent works, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (translated by Susan Bernofsky) takes as its inspiration and focal point the work of Europe’s most brutal poet. How can Celan and Tawada be reconciled?
First, a brief detour through Japanese literature. Delicate is the adjective most pertinent in describing Japanese literature. Assuming, of course, that we are forced to generalize. This delicacy reaches its peak in Yasunari Kawabata. His characters face the normal domestic dilemmas of the modern novel, but the plot unfolds slowly and carefully. In The Sound of the Mountain for example, the novel centres on the internal conflicts the protagonist Shingo faces. His concerns about his family, his adulterous son, his wife whom he does not love. In the end he acts to correct his son’s foul behavior, to little effect. His novels are delicate in the sense they are fragile and carefully constructed, like a thin glass globe that could easily be destroyed simply by removing it from its box. Delicacy here is synonymous with lightness and softness. Kawabata’s novels move with all the force of a gentle breeze, rustling ever so slightly the leaves of his characters’ lives. In Japan, however, it is always autumn and such a gentle breeze is more than enough to knock the leaves from their branches. This is a quiet scene, but not one without its beauty and its tragedy.
This delicacy cannot be fully dissociated from brutality. In an English language interview, author Yukio Mishima pointed this out, declaring that “after the war, our [the Japanese’s] brutal side was completely hidden…I don’t like that Japanese culture is represented only by the flower arrangement, as some sort of peace-loving culture.” For Mishima, his characters are heroic actors trapped on a modern stage. They are outlandish, singular and violent, and everywhere the world is conformist and calm. The temporality of this dynamic is on full display in Runaway Horses, where the central character Isao’s samurai heritage, his feudal vestiges, cannot fit in the world of the modernizers he so despises and sets out to murder. The options are annihilation (of oneself or others or both) or conformity. Brutality or flower arrangements. In this characterization of Isao, however, Mishima overcorrects. Mishima had Hegelian impulses, but he was only ever half a Hegelian. The dialectic culminates all too soon in his works, he remains in a previous form of ethical life (if you want to get technical).
Tawada’s work contains a more compelling version of the dialectic between the delicate and the brutal. Tawada, who was born in Japan and moved to Germany in her twenties (she writes in both languages), writes novels that are best described as inverted dystopias. This does not mean that they are utopian. Rather they are “cheerfully dystopian.” The settings are apocalyptic, but everyone carries on as if everything is fine. Tawada’s books are not delicate in the way Kawabata’s are, but they possess a similar kind of lightness, and Tawada pushes this lightness to its extreme, all sense of sombreness often evaporating from her prose.
Tawada does not approach her subjects from the standpoint of heroic individualism. Her heroes are the alienated, modernist, subjectivist protagonists of contemporary fiction. While Mishima places brutal and pseudo-heroic characters on a stage of quotidian modernity in which nothing ever happens, Tawada places her everyday self-conscious, and anxious heroes on an apocalyptic stage where everything has already happened.
The word “apocalypse” has a certain futurity. The apocalypse will happen, and when it does finally arrive, it is the end of all things and time may no longer be the right tool with which to take its measure. Paul Celan and The Trans-Tibetan Angel deviates from her previous works The Emissary and Scattered All Over the Earth by staging itself now and not in some ill-defined future. The book bears the stamp of its original 2020 publication date. In it, the protagonist Patrik is emerging from, but also still in, the ravages of covid isolation. His confusion has annihilated his sense of selfhood: he rolls dice to make decisions, and is stumped by a form asking for his nationality.
Tawada’s apocalyptic staging in her other works is undermined by her protagonists’ optimistic attitudes. Frail Mumei, the titular emissary of The Emissary, enjoys himself despite his condition. In that book, the world is cursed by a strange affliction. Children are born sick and weak and only grow weaker. The adults age without deterioration. Despite the apocalyptic implications of a generation of frail children, The Emissary unfolds as a domestic drama, driven by the small complications Yoshiro, Mumei’s great-grandfather, faces in everyday life: tense family relations, concerns for the future, the buds of potential romances yet to bloom. Small disastrous issues reign in the background—closed borders, censorship, resource scarcity—yet life continues and frail Mumei remains ever upbeat.
Scattered All Over the Earth centres on Hiruko who is, as far as she knows, the last surviving speaker of Japanese. Living in Denmark, she has created her own bastardization of various Scandinavian languages, Panska. This is the language of those who are learning, of children and foreigners alike. It gives Hiruko an innocence which makes her optimism more believable in the face of her imminent cultural extinction. Scattered all over the Earth hints consistently at a world unmade that nonetheless goes on. Here the drama is not so much domestic as it is quotidian. There is a lot of hanging out. There is adventure but no heroism.
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel contains some of these formal elements, but trades its futurity for contemporaneity and shifts from the amusing to the quirky. Patrik, or the patient, is not nearly as upbeat as Mumei or Hiruko, but the narration steps in to keep things light. Pondering racing across the street while the light is yellow, we are told that for Patrik “to seize this opportunity he’d have to turn into a panther.” This is the world of interiority, but it is quickly broken: “the patient—not a panther—should forget all about trying to zip down that crosswalk’s zebra back, and instead hang a quick left.” A little heavy handed and self-conscious certainly, but also drole and engaging.
Patrik has given up on making decisions. At a café he tells the waitress to choose something for him, he can’t possibly decide. Later she brings him milk and he declares “but I didn’t order anything!” This is the kind of delightful vexatiousness only a Tawada character can possess. A man asks to join him at the table, the man looks “Trans-Tibetan”, whatever this word might mean. His name is Leo-Eric Fu and seems to know much about Patrik already. He knows he owns a first edition copy of Celan’s collection Fadensonnen (Threadsuns). While Patrik is discussing his desire and need to be free to move in all directions, Leo-Erics offers a rejoinder. He leans across the table and tells Patrik: “but four directions are already too much for you. To avoid the necessity of making new decisions at every moment, you’ve found a single answer that you apply to each situation.” Patrik is aghast at how Leo-Eric knows this. On the verge of tension or maybe learning something about Leo-Eric Fu, Patrik forces a joke and the conversation changes pace. Despite the strangeness of their conversation, things never get too intense, too serious, or too grim.
Patrik is certainly suffering. Yet he seems more adrift than in any kind of great pain. Out of joint, rarely feeling “the continuity of time,” his thoughts drift in and out of the present. Despite whatever horrible social faux pas he has made and continues to make, and despite whatever relationships he has ruined, he can’t exactly be described as tragic. He might be depressed, or anxious or indecisive, but he is not waking up screaming. Despite the change in tone and content from Tawada’s other disaster novels, this all is very light for a novel about the poetry of Paul Celan.
Which begs the question, why would Tawada, so cheerfully dystopian, write about Celan? In her fundamental sensibilities she seems so far from him. Celan is dark and brooding, serious and tragic. Tawada is funny and quirky, light and carefree. Tawada is by no means lowbrow, and Scattered All Over the Earth is also a deep meditation on language, but still the gap between her and Celan seems unbridgeable.
Celan’s poetry lasers in on the single greatest catastrophe of his generation: the Holocaust. Both his parents died in concentration camps, and he, surviving miraculously, travelled westward from his native Czernowitz to Paris where he settled in 1948 at the age of twenty-eight. His poems are decidedly morbid. In “Death Fugue,” Celan writes that “we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie.” In “Tubingen, Janner,” we learn of “visits of drowned carpenters.” Things are regularly torn asunder or found and left in silence. Somewhere eastward a great smokestack billows ash over the terrain of his poetics. A single line in his poem “Blackearth” simply reads “Despair.” In his later years, he honed his poems into sharp bursts of horror. For example, here are the closing stanzas of the masterful “Ashglory:”
Ash-
glory behind
you threeway
hands.The cast-in-front-of-you, from
the East, terrible.Noone
bears witness for the
witness.
Here Celan is, in all his unrelenting misery.
More separates Celan and Tawada than tonal differences, however. There is a deep divide on a fundamental question of language and its ability to communicate. This is evident in their varying comments on translatability and the importance of one’s mother tongue for writing literature.
Celan’s translator Pierre Joris cites a remark by Ruth Lackner, Celan’s friend and an actor in her own right, in his introduction to Celan’s selected poetry. When asked why he wouldn’t write in Romanian or French, Lackner reports that Celan quipped “only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies.” This comment partially explains why Celan—who was fluent in French, Russian and Romanian—stuck so doggedly to the German language, the language in which the order to murder his parents was uttered.
Tawada, on the other hand, has committed herself to art in at least two languages. She practices exophony, the art of writing in a language other than your first. Her feelings about her mother tongue couldn’t be further from Celan’s. In an interview with Lerke von Saalfeld she says: “you become very cowardly in the mother tongue. If you live only in your mother tongue, you are very helpless.” Tawada sees herself as caught between her native Japanese and her learned German, but this is a source of literary inspiration for her. As she told the Paris Review in 2018, “that in-between space has given me so much poetry.”
This difference in attitudes further explains the tonal differences. Celan’s alleged hermeticism is in part due to his focus on a singular language. Tawada’s buoyant novels are more interested in the possibility of understanding, and are in this way fundamentally optimistic.
Despite their differences, however, Tawada and Celan share an experience of exile and an obsession with disaster. Celan looks backward to a past disaster that we must come to terms with. Tawada looks forward to an impending disaster looming on a rapidly approaching horizon. Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel meets in the middle of these two perspectives, taking an immediate disaster as its subject matter. There is something characteristically Tawadian about this gesture – to meet in the middle, to try and make some kind of cosmopolitan compromise.
However, do we need to understand Tawada’s multitudinous references to Celan and specific poems of his to understand her novel? For example, Leo-Eric Fu, the so-called angel Patrik meets, is named in part after Celan’s son, Eric. In “When I Don’t Know, Don’t Know” a poem at the heart of Threadsuns, Celan writes of a “a word without meaning, trans-Tibetan.” The poem also features the line “without you, without you, without a You,” but in the German this final you is “du,” the informal and familiar term of address. Patrik will torment himself over the proper terms of address to use with Leo-Eric. The juxtaposition between the German “du” and the name “Fu” conjures a reference to the ancient Chinese poet Du Fu. And yet all these references can be passed over without sealing Tawada’s artwork away from us.
In Peter Szondi’s Celan Studies (also translated by Susan Bernofsky) he pulls this question of foreknowledge out of a close reading of Celan’s poem “You Lie.” The poem is about the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 at the hands of the Freikorps. It is not impossible to figure this out on one’s own. Berlin’s Landwehrkanal, mentioned in the poem’s closing lines, is the canal into which their bodies were thrown. And “Eden,” the word which holds the center of the poem, can be identified as such if one also knows that the Hotel Eden was where Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed.
It does, however, save one much effort if they happen to know, as Szondi does, that Celan was given a book on Luxembourg and Liebknecht’s death during a visit to Berlin shortly before the composition of this poem. Szondi knows this because he gave Celan that book. Aware of the difficulties presented by this confluence, Szondi asks, “To what extent does understanding the poem turn on the knowledge of biographical/historical framework?”
Tawada self-consciously raises this theme with that one question Patrik can’t answer. Does his nationality matter? Does he need to know it to understand himself? Tawada’s gambit is that understanding is possible. At the start of the novel Patrik is isolated, unsure of himself, unable to give an account of himself. It is Patrik’s encounter with Leo-Eric Fu that brings him out of his isolation. The optimistic humanist thread is belied in a short passage, equal parts strange and delicate. Patrik and Leo-Eric walk together, side by side, in stark contrast to Patrik’s lonesome ambulations that open the novel, and enter a snack bar. There, seated at a table, we are told that for Patrik:
Life will now go on excellently with or without mushrooms. There was a time when he used specifically cultivated mushrooms to combat his low mood. A Tibetan momo requires no hallucinogens to taste good. Deep fried or pan friend isn’t such an important question either. The essential thing is for the friendship to remain delicious even after passing through the purgatory of the frying pan.
This is a partisanship of the human. Singular Patrik, unsure of himself and unable to answer basic questions about his selfhood is, through his friendship with Leo-Eric, transformed. Shortly after this pivotal moment Patrik’s blockage will dissolve. Suddenly he is registered for the conference, and one must assume he has resolved this tricky question of his nationality. He is on his way, the path has been cleared.
Difficulty is not to be confused with impossibility. And crucially, understanding can happen without decoding. This insight seems charming and naïve, but it is at the heart of Celan’s oeuvre. Celan is a powerful poet because he is sombre, and because the beauty of his work does not necessarily require unsealing. It is hermetic and transparent at the same time. You can let his poems wash over you, startled by the complex imagery, caught in their movement. Or, you can pick them apart relentlessly, your head buried in the archive. You can admire the brutality of their imagery, or notice the delicacy of their meaning.
Celan is also, like Tawada, a partisan of the human. In a letter to Erich Einhorn, he writes of his poem “Stretto” which had recently appeared in his collection Speech-Grille. This poem has a quintessential Celanian line, “Ashes,/Ashes, ashes.” Things are “asunder,” “darkening,” and there is plenty of mention of all kinds of “nothing.” Yet, Celan tells Einhorn that this poem was written “for the sake of the human, thus against all emptiness and atomizing.”
In his poem “Threadsuns,” which can be found in the collection Breathturn (and not Threadsuns as one might expect), Celan writes:
Threadsuns
Above the grayblack wastes.
A tree -
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
The poem is Celan in a more optimistic tone, looking forward. It is a rare moment where his gaze is heavenward and not hellward. The German title of the poem “Fadensonnen” takes us closer to the compact meaning in the text. It is, as Joris points out, in this word “faden” (thread) that we can hear an echo of the English word fathom, which simultaneously conveys grasping and measuring. The distance, this time, is skyward, the question one of measuring outward. Or perhaps (perhaps being a favorite word of Celan’s when he was forced to write prose), of measuring’s one’s distance from the depths and at the same time grasping it. To write poems in the language of his parents’ murderers is not so much a cynical task but an optimistic one.
Even on this question of language Celan and Tawada are closer than first appears. There is German and there is the German of the poetry of Paul Celan. As Joris notes, Celan’s poetry is difficult even for native German speakers. He goes so far as to call Celan’s German a “very private German.” Which is to say that Celan was in his own way in-between two languages in his work, two forms of German. In “The Meridian,” the speech Celan gave after winning the George Buchner prize in 1960, he describes poetry as juxtaposing two kinds of strangeness. And for him the strangeness of a genocidal language appears within, amongst, and apart from the strangeness of his attempts to revive it. He shares Tawada’s love of strangeness, even if we recognise in it a more highbrow form of strangeness, one that does not delight but that gives pause.
We can see in Celan and Tawada a shared outlook, just with a reversed polarity. Celan pushes what is light and human in his work into the background, to bring tragedy to the fore. Tawada does the opposite, pushing tragedy into the background to foreground what is light and human. Paul Celan and The Trans-Tibetan Angel is where they meet. In the dialectic of delicacy and brutality, of the light and the sombre, they start at opposite poles and meet along the ridges of another line of poetry by Friedrich Hölderlin, in his poem “Patmos”: “but where the danger is, the saving power grows also.”