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Susan Bernofsky

Author, Translator

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Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel

By Yoko Tawada

Published in the UK and many other countries as Spontaneous Acts

Longlist, 2024 Barrios Book in Translation Prize, National Book Critics Circle

“[A] poignant ode to artistic inspiration… Readers will fall in love with this inventive and deeply human story.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“[A]n inventive homage to modernist literature, wrapped up in an unexpectedly personal depiction of illness… A dark but charming portrait of a man unmoored by his love of an artist.” —Kirkus

“Bernofsky reunites with Tawada for a fourth title, proving again to be extraordinarily adept at distilling Tawada’s enigmatic, exacting, German-specific wordplay into an impressively gratifying anglophone experience… [A]n esoteric, erudite lull before a brilliantly shocking revelation.” —Booklist

“A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation, Tawada has absorbed a kind of anti-language from Celan, a deeply affecting, sui generis diction unmoored from nationality or obvious tradition.” —New Left Review

“Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel reads almost like a cautionary tale…this is what happens if you devote your life to poetry” —Harper’s

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  • Writing
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Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

By Susan Bernofsky

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Memoirs of a Polar Bear

By Yoko Tawada

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The Metamorphosis

By Franz Kafka

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The End of Days

By Jenny Erpenbeck

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About Susan Bernofsky

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. She earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University and her PhD in Comparative Literature at Princeton.

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.

About Susan Bernofsky

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. She earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University and her PhD in Comparative Literature at Princeton.

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.

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