For a reviewer, an apposite comparability is at all times an enormous assist: In the event you preferred X, you then may like Y. It’s just a little lazy, selecting to match fairly than describe, nevertheless it’s a pleasant shorthand that all of us perceive. The issue is that a number of instances in each era, there’s a author that defies comparability. A groundbreaking writer out on the sting doing their very own factor. These writers usually grow to be overused adjectives themselves: Joycean, Kafkaesque, Beckettian. You can’t be in comparison with your friends if you’re taking part in your individual sport. Yoko Tawada is one such author.
Winner of a handful of prestigious awards in Japan and abroad, “Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel” (translated by Susan Bernofsky) is the newest of Tawada’s many works to be rendered into English. The titular Celan was a German-language poet and Holocaust survivor who died in 1970. His work is, in keeping with the translator’s afterword, a “longstanding affect” on Tawada, and so this novella is one thing of an mental love letter.
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, by Yoko Tawada. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. 144 pages, NEW DIRECTIONS PUBLISHING, Fiction.