Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel is an absorbing, daring novel about collaboration, friendship, and trans-continental interpretations. Originating in the author’s own discourse with the titular German poet, the story tells of the engagement between two Celan readers, unfolding an exploration of literary texts as they traverse oceans and cultures—a phantasmagorical, radical exploration of words and their potential for transformation. Translated with great finesse by Susan Bernofsky, who has worked with the author on many of her German-language works, the novel takes further steps in English to multiply even more fascinating tangents along our globalized era, drawing on the miraculous nature of conversation. In this following interview, we speak with Bernofsky on her process and ideas of multiplicity in authorship, how the translator lives in and writes the worlds of their favorite texts.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Given how richly textured Tawada’s novel is with literary and cultural references, not only to Celan’s poetry but also to other arenas of knowledge, could you speak a little to the kinds of research that you undertook in preparation for translating this text?
Susan Bernofsky (SB): Yoko Tawada wrote the book during the pandemic, and I also translated it during the pandemic, during the active period of shutdowns in the US. I had a lot of time to look things up, so I sat down and read a whole lot of Paul Celan, because I wanted to be able to spot the words and images that Tawada was taking from his poetry. The novel is also full of opera, and references to literary works by other writers who meant something to Celan. Some of it were things I already knew, because I’ve been translating Tawada since 1992, and I have a sense of who she likes and who’s important to her. Nelly Sachs is in there, and Ingeborg Bachmann and Franz Kafka, the usual suspects and her favorites in the world of German-language literature.
XYS: Were there any specific rabbit holes that you remember going down, or any particular segments that you had trouble with?
SB: I wound up reading a lot about acupuncture, because I wanted to be able to translate the passages that pertained to this subject. Tawada writes in this playful, slanting way, but you can still understand what’s going on. And as I’m translating, I’m trying to also write in a playful, slanting way—but I wanted somebody who understands acupuncture to not think that my descriptions were absurd. It’s a very Celan-ian thing to take scientific language and apply it to literature. Like his great poem, “Engführung,” has a lot of geological terminology, and he uses the words in a way that they sound psychological. I feel like Tawada was also playing with that possibility of taking language from one sphere and applying it to a different sphere.
XYS: You’ve translated other works by Tawada, including The Naked Eye and Memoirs of a Polar Bear. How would you position Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel in relation to those texts?
SB: Didn’t you two write about the contrapuntal, the Bach aspect, in your review? This one seems to me the most densely intercut in terms of having the motifs woven together so tightly. I feel like the weave is tighter here than in anything else by her that I’ve worked with previously, which makes it a lot of fun to translate, because you can see the things coming back again. I did a lot of keeping track of how I translated things that showed up earlier—to make sure that I was catching the right vocabulary so the reader would also pick up on these things coming back. It’s easy for translators to lose track and to use different wordings throughout the text.
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel is a book that Tawada wrote in German about a German context, with German characters. In contrast, The Naked Eye is set mostly in Paris, with a Vietnamese main character—she wrote that book half in German, half in Japanese, so there’s a very complicated linguistic thing going on. Memoirs of a Polar Bear was written originally in Japanese, and then she translated it herself into German. She claims she’ll never do that again, that it was a miserable experience, but we’ll see. And then I translated the German into English, because that was her preference. She told the US publisher that she preferred to have the German translated, saying: I’ve already moved the book from an Eastern language to a Western language for you, and if you translate the German, it will be more aligned with my intention.
Which is wacky, although her translation is much more straight-up than the way she writes. There is a section in the Knut chapter, where Knut is running around the zoo and meets other kinds of bears. I looked up the names of the bears, and one of the bears is the “Malayan bear” in German, and the other bear is the “collared bear” in German. I looked up the scientific names, and look! One of the ways to name the Malayan bear is the “sun bear,” and the way to name this so-called collared bear is the “moon bear,” and I’m like, wow, it’s just like a fairy tale. Yay, my translation got lucky! And I was like, wait a minute, what was this in Japanese? I did some research, and of course, they were actually just sun bear and moon bear in Japanese. So she had written it with these fairy-tale names—but they were also just the real names.
This is how it works with Yoko Tawada: she would not have called them sun bears and moon bears if they had not also been the real names of real bears. She doesn’t want to just go into the fairy-tale realm; she wants to find the places where the real world overlaps with the fairy-tale realm. So then, when she herself had to make the taxonomic decisions in translation, she picked the actual names of the target language, seeing that to call them sun bear and moon bear in German would have been to make them purely fairy-tale creatures. And I learned a lot from that. I was very happy that I could make it “sun bear” and “moon bear” in English, but it was only possible because these were legitimate names in English. She’s not a random fairy-tale writer. She’s a “fairy tale embedded in the real world” kind of writer.
XYS: I’ve read in a previous interview where you said you were drawn to Tawada because she’s such a radically political writer. In this novel, for example, Patrik rejects any notion of nationality being imposed on him, but Leo-Eric is described with discernibly Asian or Tibetan elements. It was interesting to see that tension play out between the two of them.
SB: It’s because Leo-Eric is a Frenchman. Tawada’s interested in all these layered identities. She’s interested in East and West in the European political sense: the division between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, and mapping an Asian character onto that. The protagonist in The Naked Eye is Vietnamese because that allows Tawada to work out the politics of having that character brought to East Germany to be part of the Soviet bloc—just as in Memoirs of a Polar Bear, the first section is set in the Soviet Union. She’s very interested in playing with the idea of Orient and Occident, and how all these things map onto each other because they’re completely different, geographically and politically. She mashes them together to see what happens.
In the case of Leo-Eric Fu, his grandfather—a part of Celan’s generation—came from China to Paris to practice Chinese medicine in Paris, but Tawada never really refers to him as Chinese; he’s only ever referred to as “the Trans-Tibetan man.” For her, she’s defining China as the country that’s on the other side of Tibet, which is fierce, given that China doesn’t recognize Tibet. It’s playful, and at the same time completely outrageous. And the German title of this book is Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel, or Paul Celan and the Chinese Angel. The US publisher asked after reading the manuscript: why the “Chinese angel”? The character is only ever called Trans-Tibetan in the book. Yoko Tawada said: well, this was something my German publisher wanted. We asked what the original title was, and she said: Paul Celan und der transtibetanische Engel. So, with everybody’s approval, we reverted to what had been her original title.
The UK title, Spontaneous Acts, also has an interesting story, because Dialogue Books—which is a really great publishing house—had a vision for the book that was, among other things, a little more commercial than the New Directions version. We asked Yoko Tawada what she thought about Spontaneous Acts, and she said it seemed like a fine title to her. She’s very interested in rolling the dice and seeing what comes up, so now we have a chance to see what fortunes this book will have under the title Spontaneous Acts. Will the different titles and different covers find different readerships? I’m noticing it was picked up in a feature in a very glossy magazine called Dazed and Confused in London, and I think the equivalent magazine would not have picked it up in the US on the basis of the presentation of the book.
XYS: It’s so fascinating! Tawada seems able to so easily let go of her artistic products, and obviously that’s her ethos when it comes to taking inspiration. The fact that she doesn’t take total creative control over how her work is unleashed into the world is very interesting.
SB: Yeah, she’s absolutely interested in collaboration and what a plurality of artistic visions produces together. She’s also a performance artist, she’s shared the stage with musicians, and she’s very interested in surrendering control and seeing where it leads. Of course, this comes from a place of great artistry and control in the first place. She’s published well over forty books, and she’s extremely prolific. She has a strong mark and personality as an artist, such that her own vision is not going to get lost in the mix. But this whole book is about collaboration too, and friendship being a form of collaboration.
XYS: I want to go back to what you said before, which is that this book is in conversation with some specifically German politics and themes. Could you tell us a bit about that? Might any of it be lost on the English-language reader?
SB: I think a lot of the political stuff transfers well. Tawada talks a lot about the rise of poplar. . . populism. Sometimes I mix it up because she calls political parties “poplarists,” like the tree! I can’t unhear that. She’s made this very frightening thing into a pretty tree.
That certainly transfers to the US. I can’t speak for the whole world, but she’s writing about political movements in a way that is imaginable in other contexts: for example, politicians pretending to be of the people in order to manipulate support, even though they’re doing something that’s helpful only to billionaires and such. Definitely, there are also lots of references to Holocaust history in Germany, but I think that’s pretty widely known in the international community.
XYS: It seems that this intercultural paradigm Tawada instates in this text has more of a European flavor to it, because North American readers are very sensitive to the kind of language, politics, or potential conflicts that can arise around race, whereas I do find that the European literary world sometimes treats this as something that has been dealt within the context of World War II—a post-racialism of sorts. And I think changing “trans-Tibetan” to “Chinese” on the German edition is such a profound iteration of that. If you spoke with Tawada while translating this, or when you were reading the book, did something in that vein stand out to you?
SB: Yes, there is this amazing section where the two characters have just met, and Patrik essentially goes: “Hmm! I see an Asian face. Let me guess where he’s from; let me guess his story.” And then he goes through four different stereotypical hypotheses, linking him to one or the other country—but he eventually gives up on them all. I feel like Tawada is really making fun of the desire to categorize, which I think in Germany is perhaps even stronger. In the US, it’s like, you meet somebody and they ask: where are you from? As in, where are you from from? It’s turned into this bad joke because it happens so often.
In Germany, people are referred to by their nationality way more than anywhere I’ve ever seen. If there’s a Croatian guy who’s running a grocery and you’re dashing down to it (I’m thinking of a particular street in Berlin I lived on as a student), people would just say, “I’m going to the Croatian.” Instead of saying, “I’m going to the store.” And you would say, “Where do you want to have dinner tonight? Let’s go to the Italian.” In the US you might say “to the Italian restaurant,” but in Germany you would say, “to the Italian person.” It’s like you can’t even put a sentence together if you don’t know how to categorize that person. This is a deeply in-built tradition in the German language, the sorting function—you don’t know how to talk about people unless you label them, and I think we have that less in the US. So these things take different forms.
XYS: Going more generally to your relationship with her as her official English translator, what role does she play for you in your personal canon in terms of all the works you’ve translated?
SB: This is my fourth book by her. Before this one, I translated Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Naked Eye, and a book of stories that I co-translated with Yumi Selden, who’s a friend of mine. It’s a book of short stories entitled Where Europe Begins. Half of them were translated from German by me, and half were translated from Japanese by Yumi; we sat down and worked on each other’s translations to give the book a little coherence. That was a really fun project, and that was the first book of Tawada’s that I worked on.
But I started translating her literally more than thirty years ago. When I started, we were both in our twenties—it was a long time ago. I was reading an Austrian literary magazine and saw a story by her called “Canned Foreign,” and I translated it because I loved it. It turned out to be the first story she had published in German in a German literary magazine.
I feel like I’ve been accompanied by her work my whole professional life. In a sense, she’s been a favorite author of mine for decades. These days, she writes more in Japanese than she does in German. So I don’t have to translate every book—which is work as well as pleasure—but I get to read all her books, because Margaret Mitsutani is translating them.
She’s got so many different modes of writing, though she has a set of themes that show up again and again. She has certain techniques that you expect to see: the tricky point-of-view switches, the narrative surprises, the story turning unexpected corners very quickly, to become different kinds of writing very quickly. But she’ll do it in works that feel very specifically of their own universe, and she keeps coming up with new universes that still fit in her world. I feel so blessed that I get to translate some of the books, because to be inside the book from the point of view of translating it, it’s like you’re writing the book. It’s your favorite author and you get to help write it—what fantasy world is that?
XYS: Do you ever feel like your translations are in dialogue with Margaret Mitsutani’s or Yumi Selden’s translations? Did you ever feel that Tawada was doing something interesting in Japanese that you don’t see her doing in German?
SB: Yeah, I learned from doing that project together about the form her playfulness takes. In German, she’ll play with puns. German has a lot of compound words that you can have a lot of fun unpacking, and she loves to unpack words, but Yumi would tell me about phrases that mean two completely different things at the same time. We would talk through ways the translation could go. She has different ways of playing with both languages, but she uses the tools at her disposal in each language.
XYS: I remember you saying before in an interview that your advice to translators would be to turn the volume up, and to do more drastic or adventurous things with language other than to just make it sound fluid and perfect. I wonder if you ever have to struggle with that balance between doing something interesting and doing something awkward in English?
SB: Very often in my own translations I find myself doing way too much, and then when I read it back over, I’m like, “Oh my god! What were you thinking?” And then I dial it back. But I tell my students that it’s much easier to start by going too far and bringing it back than it is to take something that’s too flat, and then look for ways to enliven it. I think you get much a better voice going if you exaggerate too much; I regularly translate too over the top, and then I tame it in revision. Otherwise, the translation can just turn into this wild caricature where the weirdness doesn’t seem motivated or earned. Great writers use language in really weird ways, but if it’s a great writer, the work absorbs the linguistic strangeness, and it feels compatible with the work. You never want it to feel like something that’s slapped on top.
XYS: In terms of the translator being another passage through language, how would you feel about the translator’s role in conveying the author’s weirdness? Does the translator have a role in adding some sort of strangeness, or flair, or authentic authorship?
SB: You have to. The thing is, if you are not thinking hard about style and how to produce this literary interest, you wind up with something that is inevitably much quieter, blander than the original, because very often writers express themselves in slightly quirky, unusual ways. If you just distil that to the essence of what they’re saying—if you just say what they said—the work becomes much plainer and less literary, and you lose that energy that makes the work literary in the first place.
So if the translator is not also being a writer while they translate, chances are the translation will not be very interesting to read. And people won’t understand from reading it why people were so excited about the author in the original. You want the reader of your translation to have some access to the level of excitement that the work had in its original language.
XYS: We were really interested in how you worked with Pierre Joris’s translations of Celan, and how you incorporated his iterations into the manuscript. You did mention that you had to revise them from time to time. Could you maybe speak about that idea of revision? And since now there are so many kinds of authors to this text, does it make you think differently about authorship?
SB: Because I’m so steeped into Tawada universe I already feel like authorship is a collaborative process to begin with. I wanted to bring Pierre Joris’s translations into the mix, because it’s a whole book about collaboration, friendship and the meridians that hold different people’s projects together. I mean, I’ve translated Celan before; I translated a book of essays about Celan by his good friend Peter Szondi, but I wanted to use Pierre’s translations, because I like them very much, and that way, there would be a different voice entering in. Early in the book, the first of the Celan quotes that shows up is the “nocturnal tonguejests,” and it’s kind of perfect because the narrator mentions that using “nocturnal tonguejests” would be plagiarism—and here I am plagiarizing a different translator’s translation there! Basically, I used them whenever it was possible to use them without it not fitting in the context.
Joris likes to do the Celan thing of just sticking the nouns together to make compound nouns, which in German is how you make a compound. It’s not special in German, but in English it sticks out a lot. So there are a few places where it was obtrusive in a way that didn’t feel right, so I would change those. But most of the quotes are from Joris’s translations.
XYS: I’m glad that you voluntarily used another translator’s works; we’re always fighting with ego in terms of literary creation, no matter in what respect, and I think any iteration of somebody forfeiting ego is beautiful to see.
SB: Also very much in Tawada’s spirit.
Susan Bernofsky is a writer and a leading translator of modernist and contemporary German-language literature into English. She directs the program in Literary Translation in the MFA Writing Program at the Columbia University School of the Arts. A Guggenheim, Cullman Center, Leon Levy Center for Biography, and Berlin Prize fellow, she is currently translating Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton. Recognitions of her work include the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, Hermann Hesse Translation Prize, the Ungar German Translation Award, the Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work, and the Friedrich Ulfers Prize.
Xiao Yue Shan is a writer, editor, and translator. shellyshan.com
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: