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There are some who claim that ‘good’ literature is actually untranslatable  Before I could read German, I found this thought comforting because I was completely unable to appreciate German literature, particularly the literature of the postwar period  I thought I should just learn German and read these works in the original and then my problem with German literature would evaporate of its own accord   There were exceptions, though, such as the poems of Paul Celan, which I found utterly fascinating even in Japanese translation  From time to time it occurred to me to wonder whether his poems might not be lacking in quality since they were translatable  When I ask about a work’s ‘translatability,’ I don’t mean whether a perfect copy of a poem can exist in a foreign language, but whether its translation can itself be a work of literature  Besides, it would be insufficient if I were to say that Celan’s poems were translatable  Rather, I had the feeling that they were peering into Japanese   After I had learned to read German literature in the original, I realised that my impression hadn’t been illusory I was occupied even more than before by the question of why Celan’s poems were able to reach another world that lay outside the German language There must be a chasm between languages into which all words tumble   One possible answer to my question came to me later in a surprising way One day Klaus-Rüdiger Wöhrmann called me to thank me for the photocopy he had asked me to make for him This was a copy of the Japanese translation of Celan’s book of poems Von Schwelle zu Schwelle [‘From Threshold to Threshold’] The translator of the volume was Mitsuo Iiyoshi, through whose Japanese version I had made the acquaintance of Celan’s text When Wöhrmann said to me that the radical 門 [‘tor’ in German, ‘gate’ or ‘gateway’ in English] played a decisive role in this translation, an idea flashed through my head: It was precisely this radical that embodied the ‘translatability’ of Celan’s literature   A radical is something like the ‘main component’ of an ideogram [an