Extraordinary Renditions: An Interview with Andrew Ervin

Here's my interview with Andrew Ervin, as promised in yesterday's post on this same book.

Andrew Ervin grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and has lived in Budapest, Illinois, and Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Fiction International, and the Southern Review, and his criticism has appeared in the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, USA Today, and The Believer. Extraordinary Renditions is his first book. Learn more about him at andrewervin.com

(If you'd like a primer on Hungarian literature, by the way, Ervin wrote a great piece last year at Publishing Perspectives.)

Kyle Semmel: I want to start with the composition of this book. It's not every day you stumble on a collection of linked novellas. What is the genesis of this book? Did you always plan to write linked novellas, or was there another idea behind it?

Andrew Ervin: The formal decision—three novellas, as opposed to one linear novel—was meant to reflect the thematic concerns of the stories. The typical long novel has one central and hierarchic authority that moves the plot through the paces of Freytag’s triangle (in much the same way, I might add, that a bereaved widow will pass through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief). There’s unity to it, and a march-step progression toward some kind of resolution. Extraordinary Renditions however is in many ways about disrupting authority, so I wanted to find a way to move away from the traditional linearity.

The three novellas are set on the Ides of March, the day of Caesar’s assassination, and each looks at different methods of freeing oneself from imperial authority. Of course, the fact is that reading is a linear activity; the words travel left to right across the page, one after the other (at least in English) there’s no real getting away from linearity entirely. The order of the novellas alone creates hierarchy, sure, so I understand the limitations, yet it was important to me to at least attempt to undermine the traditional, monolithic authority with a polyphonic interplay of voices. In this case, the voices are those of an elderly Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust, an American soldier stationed in Mitteleuropa, and a young violinist finding her way in the new world order. Disharmony has its own beauty.

KS: Speaking of beauty, at least from a writer's point of view, one of the remarkable things about this book is how each novella is told in such radically different voices, from an aging musician's stoic formality to an outcast military man's rage and a young woman's almost sad morose-ness-turned-wonder. Can you talk about how you wrote these stories? Did you complete each novella before beginning the next, or did you jump back and forth?

AE: That’s very nice of you to say, thanks. I almost always write my first drafts in first person and it take me an awful long time to finish a draft. During that time, I don’t research the character or setting in the traditional ways—going to the library and looking shit up—but instead I listen to the music that my first-person character would listen to. I read the magazines she would read, make playlists of her favorite music, watch the TV shows or movies that would appeal to her. I can gain a fuller understanding that way, one that originates inside the character rather than gets based on superficial or exterior details. Those come later.

I also find it difficult to transition between projects, maybe because each one is so tied to a particular voice and worldview. (That’s true too of book reviews and grading student papers. I enjoy doing those things most of the time, but it takes a good amount of time to segue back to the character I’m working on.) Once I had these three novellas more or less done, the voices where I wanted them, I was able to go back to them with a bit more distance and move between them more easily.

Some people have found it surprising that I wrote “Brooking the Devil” first (it was published as the second novella in the book). I found the character of Brutus a long time ago, in an undergrad workshop with Madison Smartt Bell. It took me years, literally, to figure out what I wanted to do with him. “The Empty Chairs” was the second one I wrote (it’s now third), and with those two stories I thought I had a complete book. Fortunately, a few very smart people read it and persuaded me it needed a third novella to tie everything together. One person suggested writing it about the bartender Jimmy, but the composer Harkályi was a lot more compelling to me. His story, “14 Bagatelles,” ended up being my favorite of the three, I’m pretty sure.

KS: Each novella does a remarkable job of portraying Americans living in Hungary at the same time they're true to, and respectful of, Hungarians and their culture. How difficult was it to write about a foreign culture and balance the storytelling with the sense of place?

AE: Characterization and setting are intimately related, of course. I used to have a great deal of trouble writing about a place until I’d left it and my thoughts could congeal into something sensible. Shortly after I arrived in Budapest in 1994, I started work on a novel about Americans living there. But I had absolutely nothing to say. I knew I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t really know what that meant. It was only when I moved back to Philadelphia in 1999 that I could start to make sense of everything I experienced over there, but even then it took a few years (and quitting a horrible job) to be able to begin what would become Extraordinary Renditions.

Shortly after its publication last year, I got an angry email from a Hungarian reader in Canada. She was livid about my depiction of post-communist Budapest: the pollution and graffiti and public drunkenness. That was how one of my characters viewed the city, and maybe it wasn’t as respectful—to use your word—as she might have wanted. But the conflation with my characters’ opinions with my own came as a real shock. Maybe I was naïve? But it was easy to balance story and place because my characters were all foreigners and thus stand-ins for readers I wanted to escort around an exotic location they might not have seen otherwise.

KS: Have you gotten responses from other Hungarians?

AE: Not a great deal. Some of my friends have enjoyed it a lot, or so they say. My father-in-law is a published author in Hungary. I sent him a copy months ago; he even came to visit the States recently and never said a word about it. It’s tempting to read a response into his non-response.

KS: You mentioned studying with Madison Smartt Bell. Who were your other early influences?

AE: If I had to cough up some specifics, I’d say that my main creative influences have been Terry Gilliam, Kafka, Joyce (who is all over Extraordinary Renditions), Gaddis, The Golden Bough, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass. Bartók. I’ve learned enormous amounts from reading A.M. Homes. She is fearless, and she’s probably the only living author who I’d be too geeked-out nervous to talk to if I saw her in public. There isn’t a better writer at work right now. But, again, each character has his own set of aesthetic inspirations.

Shortly before I moved abroad, while I was still an undergrad, I sent a series of letters to the English author Julian Barnes. I asked for advice, tried to pawn off my own horrible early stories on him, and so on. His replies were always thoughtful and unfailingly polite, even in the face of my sophomoric and ham-handed invasions of his privacy. One of the things he told me has been vitally important to my development (such as it is) of my writing: Barnes told me to write for myself and for that part of myself I see in the people closest to me. That is still how I think of my audience, and his advice informed my treatment of Budapest. I love that city. I still have family and very close friends in Hungary. Beneath the polluted surface, Budapest is the most amazing city in the world, and I hope my love of it comes through in Extraordinary Renditions, even if indirectly. And, if Mr. Barnes is out there reading this: please forgive me for being such a little snot.

KS: Have you sent him a copy of Extraordinary Renditions?

AE: No, I’m mortified now to think of the ways I pestered that man. I’ve enjoyed his recent work a great deal, though. He’s one of those people—like Ha Jin, maybe, or Jim Shepard—who gets a ton of attention but whose genius, as expressed in body of work, still isn’t fully appreciated. These people are treasures, every new book an event to celebrate.

KS: What's next? What are you working on now?

AE: I have two projects nearing completion. One's a novel titled Orwell on Jura, about a man who attempts to get off the grid by going to live in the house—on a remote island in Scotland's Inner Hebrides—where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. It started as an independent study project with Richard Powers while I was in grad school, and I've made some dramatic formal changes recently that have me feeling very excited about it. In short, I removed the first 1/3 of the novel and turned it into a series of flashbacks, so that I could actually start the book on Jura instead of in the character's native Chicago. The other one is a collection of stories tentatively called "Distortions" (as opposed to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations). Most of the stories have already appeared in various magazines, and there's one forthcoming in the next Conjunctions. I've decided to anchor the book with a strange five-story cycle titled "Down the Shore," and the last two of those are a struggle to finish. It feels like I'm writing another novella, which is not something I ever would have predicted I’d do again, but each of the five parts should ideally stand alone too. It's been quite a challenge and "Down the Shore" is rather violent, so I'm looking forward to not living with this character, Zach, very much longer. Finally, this summer I plan to begin work on a huge novel I'm thinking of as Shackamaxon, with six storylines set in Philadelphia and organized--chapter by chapter--as a sestina. I'm a little bored of the origin-myth trope that's everywhere these days, but I am thinking that one or two of the storylines will be historical fiction. At least that's the idea. We'll see.

An Interview with Andrew Wingfield

On October 17, The Writer's Center will host a special Open Door reading featuring the Washington Writers' Publishing House fiction and poetry winners. Poet Holly Karapetkova (Words We Might One Day Say) and Andrew Wingfield (Right of Way). Yesterday on FPP Jared Clark reviewed Right of Way. Today he interviews the author. Look for a review of Karpetkova's collection next week.

Jared Clark: Can you tell me a little bit more about your background and how it influenced Right of Way?

Andrew Wingfield: Well I grew up in Northern California in a small town. It had been an agricultural town, but during the years I lived there, between kindergarten and college, it got swallowed up by suburban sprawl. That really made an impression on me and I think that's part of why I'm a place-based writer. I'm interested in how people relate to the place that they live, how they shape the place and how it shapes them, and I find that especially fascinating when the place is changing in a dramatic way. 

JC: So what is your own relationship with the neighborhood of Cleave Springs? 

AW: I moved into the Del Ray neighborhood in Alexandria, Va. about ten years ago, and in that time I've seen a lot of gentrification. So I've been on the ground participating in that and watching it unfold over the last decade. I've been exposed to a lot of interesting sights and scenarios and characters in the neighborhood and I thought that some of that stuff would make good material for fiction.

JC: As a writer, what are some of the challenges posed by creating this fictional locale and writing stories that take place in just one environment?

AW: Early on, I had to decide whether I was going to try to do this in a novel or a group of stories. And I think that was a really critical decision. I decided to go for stories because one of the things I observed about this neighborhood was that, although it was diverse, it wasn't very integrated. And so there were lots of individual characters and relationships, lots of stories and situations, but they were sort of happening simultaneously—parallel, but not necessarily integrated with each other.

JC: What motivates you to write?

AW: Not money [laughter]. I think it's just that I have the urge to tell stories, and I enjoy the practice of writing—working with words to try and make something shapely and resonant.

JC: When it comes time to tell these stories, do you conduct neighborhood interviews or let the imagination take over?

AW: I didn't do interviews for these stories. I listen. A neighborhood is a place of proximity, with people living close to one another and crossing each other’s paths all the time. I've spent a lot of time outside, and a lot of action in this neighborhood is unfolding in the playground and on the main avenue and at the café – and I've been to those places and I listen to people. You could say I eavesdrop on them, I interact with them, I know them. So none of it has been formal research, but I think it's fairly common for writers to be always doing research through observation and listening no matter where they are.

JC: One of the things I noticed in your stories is a very acute attention to detail. Your stories wrap up with a decent level of resolution but still leave things a little bit open, and I felt it really encouraged re-reading to understand some of the hidden depths and internal conflicts you've created with the characters. Does this come about naturally as you write, or is it something you've learned?

AW: I like complexity. So I would say it's natural that I like to layer things and I like stories that you can chew on. As a reader I like that, and that just tends to be the way I write. I'd say for me, the challenge in writing short stories comes from packing that kind of complexity in such a short form. Early in my development as a writer, I would ruin my attempts at short stories by trying to pack a novel into a shorter form. I've had to actually leave a lot of things out, believe it or not, from these stories. I tend to like shaggy endings because, to me, what's satisfying about a short story is not necessarily that it has absolute resolution, but that by the end you feel like you really glimpse something meaningful and important, and you feel like something has changed for the character.

Jared Clark is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and English master's student at George Mason University.

An Interview with Translator Christopher Burawa

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Christopher Burawa is a poet and translator. His book of poems, The Small Mystery of Lapses, was published by Cleveland State University Press in 2006. His translations of contemporary Icelandic poet Jóhann Hjálmarsson won the 2005 Toad Press International Chapbook Competition, and was published as Of the Same Mind in 2006. He was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2003, and a 2006 Witter Bynner Translation Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, a 2007 Literature Fellowship for Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, and most recently a 2008 American-Scandinavian Foundation Creative Writing Fellowship. He is the Director of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay University in Clarksville, TN. Since September 30 is International Translation Day, I thought it was fair to post this interview today. I admire Burawa's translations of Jóhann Hjálmarsson in Of the Same Mind. Want to learn a lot about Icelandic language and literature? Keep reading. Kyle Can you tell us a little about the Icelandic language? I’ve always understood it—perhaps wrongly—to be a “modern” version of Old Scandinavian? What’s its story? Well, Icelandic, like Faroese and dialects still spoken in isolated areas of Western Norway, is a part of what are called the Northwestern Germanic languages. It is an inflected language, which means it has tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and case. I think some people believe that if you learn Old Norse you can learn modern Icelandic, and that’s just not the case. Learning Old Norse might helpful in beginning to learn Icelandic, but it’s not equivalent. In fact, one of the issues in education in Iceland today is that young people studying the sagas in school have difficulty reading them. Icelandic spoken today can be argued to be a product of 19th-century pan-nationalism—that is, political in its origins, but with its morphology already in place. All promising Icelandic students up to that time—and those who excelled at the Latin School at Bessastaðir, now the president’s residence—were sent to Denmark to be educated in Copenhagen. Iceland had been a commonwealth of Denmark for centuries and as for any colony of the era, the Danish rule had a lot of influence on Icelandic culture, especially in Reykjavik. For example, my great grandmother spoke a pidgin of Icelandic and Danish, something that I imagine was quite common for people who were on the periphery of the ruling class. This was a time when well-off Icelanders dropped their patrilineal last names (i.e., if the father’s first name was Jón, his son’s last name would be Jónsson and his daughter, Jónsdóttir) and adopted the Danish form (following my previous example, Jensen). Many people believe that Icelandic is a pure language and Icelanders have certainly been a part of that perception. Even before independence from Denmark, there were nineteenth century Icelandic patriots living and studying in Denmark who looked to the “golden age” of Icelandic history—the Saga Age—as a means of establishing Icelandic identity. Needless to say, no nationalist movement is effective without the propaganda of a golden age—a time that reflects the glory of that nation’s past. So these students published a journal, Ný félagsrit, or New Society’s Journal. I did some research on this publication as part of a research fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation a few years ago. The articles in the journal cover a variety of topics, but the articles relate to reclaiming Icelandic culture. One article I read and have a copy of was written by Jón Sigurðsson, often called the first president of Iceland (even though the seat of president wasn’t formed until Icelandic Independence on June 17, 1944), about the history of bloodletting in Iceland. Halldor Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel Laureate of Literature, poked fun at Icelanders’ perception of their purity and romanticized notions of their history in an essay for the 1100 anniversary of the Settlement. But this perception of purity was a product of a concerted effort by the government and abetted by scholars. Committees to ensure the purity of the language from foreign loanwords have come and gone. The Icelandic Language Committee, Íslenzk málnefnd, has been around since the early 1960s and even with its efforts and the efforts of a popular newspaper column that has appeared in the Morgunblaðið newspaper on the use of language, Icelandic is like all languages—fluid and changeable. That said, Icelanders are particular about how the language is spoken and expressed in written form. But what I discovered on my last trip back to Iceland is that young people are having difficulty writing essays in Icelandic. Several university professors I spoke to complained that many of their students couldn’t write a proper essay in Icelandic. I know that teachers in the United States complain about how poorly prepared students are coming into the university system, so the dynamics of this issue may reflect more on the deterioration of the educational system. I just can’t say for sure. How did you get involved with it? I was born in Reykjavik and was “involved” with Icelandic from the first. Icelandic was my first language, although I find that claim to be difficult to defend since I don’t “think” in Icelandic. My father’s employment had our family moving all over—Bermuda, Spain, and finally the States—but every summer my mother and I went back to Iceland. My family in Iceland are big readers and like to discuss what they are reading. My Uncle Jón is a translator in his own right but only for his own enjoyment. I was totally won over by his fascination of what is lost in translation, specifically in translating from English into Icelandic. He’s almost 90 years old now, and he’s still at it. Recently he’s been fascinated by the limerick and sends me his translations. He was instrumental in developing in me the sense of play in language and translation. What particular challenges do you face while translating from the Icelandic? I translate both poetry and fiction, but have been translating fiction only for the past two years. I encounter fewer challenges in translating poetry, which I attribute to the fact that my family in Iceland are great readers of poetry, and recited poetry and discussed exceptional poems (meter, word choice, et cetera). Inspired by their example, I memorized poems I enjoyed—and these poems would become my first forays into translation when I was a teenager. I have discovered in translating poetry that I draw upon a completely different lexicon than the one I use in my own poems. Forest Gander once asked me if I was able to devote myself to my own writing at the same time I was translating, and I answered that I found it impossible, that it was as if I was using a different set of skills and sensibility. Exciting things happen when you translate, but I resist the urge to try understanding what is happening and incorporate it into my own writing. The fine-tuning of the trot into a working poem is a wonderful act of creation and intuition, a place where I can clearly hear the voice of the poet; it becomes distinct and a style appears. Translating fiction requires other skills from poetry. Being able to capture the voice within the story and being consistent over many pages is demanding. Icelandic is rife with the conditional, and past and present perfect verb forms and subjunctive. So the trot seems overburdened with words, of actions about to happen and having had happened, and so on. And for me that is where the challenge lies—revising to make the narrative more active and to make the sentences English friendly while being honest to the original and true to the writer. Another challenge for me has been dialogue and characterization. Characters have their own voice outside of the narrative and so that requires a great deal of attention. I enjoy it but translating fiction requires a lot of energy. And Jóhann Hjálmarsson: The poems in Of the Same Mind deal thematically with fish, the sea, death—things you might expect of an island nation. Where does Hjálmarsson fit in the grand picture of Icelandic literature?  Jóhann was very much a bohemian, and was a significant player in the burgeoning arts scene in Reykjavik in the early 1960s. His friends were artists like Alfreð Flóki Nielsen and musicians like Jazz composer and performer Carl Möller, who were importing and infusing Icelandic arts with a new sensibility, creating new forms for expressing Icelandic subjects. What’s remarkable is that the generation of poets writing at this time are not all alike in style but each is actively redefining Icelandic prosody. This was a time when there were traditionalist voices (see my comment to your first question because the protests for traditional verse forms is very much a political reaction) arguing against the new forms. What a dynamic time it was. Jóhann continued translating and writing and, as he told me, with each book, he was reinventing himself as a poet. But so was everyone else. Matthías Jóhannessen, Nína Björk Árnadóttir (who was also playwrighting and a leading feminist voice), Þorri Jóhannsson, Una Margrét, and Ari Gísli Bragason. There aren’t too many translations of these poets. There is one volume, The Postwar Poetry of Iceland, edited by the writer Sigurdur Magnusson, an anthology he compiled, I believe when he was in residence at the University of Iowa. The selections are meager and probably not representative of these poets’ work. Also, in his introduction, he really says some disparaging things about Jóhann’s poetry that I believe are mean spirited and possibly politically motivated. While some of the subjects Jóhann was exploring in his work, such as the ones you cite, are typically Icelandic, he was doing it in a new way. His mentor, the modernist poet Jón úr Vör, had instructed Jóhann to travel, to get an education outside of Iceland. And so Jóhann moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he enrolled at the university and began studying Romance languages. At the same time, Jóhann started translating the works of Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo, Quasimodo, Breton, Machado, among others. These poets had a profound impact on Jóhann and he began experimenting with writing surrealist poems in Icelandic. Now he wasn’t the first to do this, but he was a much better poet than the others who attempted it. And shortly after returning to Iceland he published two books of poetry. The reviewers, however, hadn’t any idea about how to read his poems let alone critique them. I wrote an essay a few years back for Hayden’s Ferry Review, “What’s Icelandic for Duende,” to accompany a few poems from this period. Anyhow, Jóhann was experimenting and, well, critics really were at a loss in trying to enter these poems. But as I said, anyone who was a traditionalist really would have had difficulty. Now, though, there are poets writing out of this poetics that Jóhann pioneered, like Sjón who has written lyrics for Björk or the very talented Kristín Omarsdóttir. The collection draws poetry from throughout his career, and serves as a kind of map of his creative life. How did you determine which poems to use? I tried to choose poems that represented his growth as a poet over time. He really is a remarkable talent, and wrote several book-length poems that dealt with family history in the context of national history, as well as one about his friends, a married couple who traveled to conflict areas in the world—the wife working as a United Nations nurse in the 1970s. This book in particular reflects how Jóhann’s vision took in the affairs of the world. And I included a few poems from a trilogy he wrote based on Eyrbyggja Saga, one of the Viking sagas that take place in an area that his father’s family came from. I drew from his selected poems, Með sverð í gegnum varir: úrval ljóða 1956-2000 (With a sword between the lips: selected poems 1956-2000) but I also made choices based on my own preferences in reading his 18 books. I should have probably just worked from the selected, and feel that I must return to that project in order to properly honor this great poet’s work. In 2006 you published a collection of your own poetry: The Small Mystery of Lapses, winner of the Cleveland State University First Book Competition. How has the act of translating assisted you in your own creative work? There is a certain freedom in translation, what I called earlier intuition, and many of the poems about Iceland I wrote in Small Mystery I wrote after I began translating Johann, not imitating the translations but inspired by them. I decided to explore my own family’s history and how the stories I grew up hearing fit into my life.

Behind the Line: An Interview with Translator Marian Schwartz

2017: A Novel

It has been a while since I've done an interview for First Person Plural. But today we have a very special interview subject: renowned Russian translator Marian Schwartz. She is a prize-winning translator of Russian fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated the New York Times bestseller The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky, as well as classics by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Lermontov. Her most recent book translations are Olga Slavnikova's 2017 (Overlook Press), Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard (Yale University Press) and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (Seven Stories Press), now out in paperback from Yale University Press. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. For more on Marian Schwartz, visit her Web site at http://www.marianschwartz.com/.

K.E. Semmel: You once said: "Russian literature has developed differently from the rest of Europe." What do you mean by that? How has Russian literature developed differently from the rest of Europe's?

Marian Schwartz: Under glasnost, beginning in 1987, Soviet publishers focused on putting out all the works that had been denied the public lo those many decades, virtually all of them works known in the West, leaving little opportunity at the outset for contemporary writers. Once that backlog had been covered and they turned to current authors--by this time in the post-Soviet period--their focus moved to kinds of literature that could not have been published before. Writers were drunk on the possibility of writing about sex and violence in particular, subjects that were no longer inherently provocative in the West but are there. Also, curiously, Russia produced a serious "women's fiction" genre into which they slotted most of the worthwhile women writers, though some, like Tatiana Tolstaya, had the wit to remain with the general pool. This curious departure highlights one important way Russian literature differs from Western European: gender relations. Russia generally favors the "separate but equal" view of gender status, and as a result, the romantic relationships can be hard for us in the West to swallow. The other marked trend in post-Soviet literature is a deeply intellectual focus on style per se that is studded with allusions to Russian culture and history in general and Russian literature in particular. Russian writers have retained the intensity that has always intrigued the West but it can be inward-looking.

KES: That's interesting, because as I was reading 2017 I got the sense there was a lot of Russian history and culture in there (some of which I may not have fully understood). The most obvious example is the fact that 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The novel won the Russian Booker Prize in 2006. Why do you think it was so well received in Russia? Was it the comic elements of the narrative which poke fun at society in a smart way? The social critique the book offers on the current state of Russia?

MS: All these qualities played a part, certainly. Slavnikova's social critiques are right on the money but they also acknowledge the all too human plight Russians have found themselves in since the Soviet Union's demise. She is sympathetic to the longing for glitz that goes hand in hand with people's feeling that they've lost their moral bearings and their alarm at Russia's fragility. So yes it's comic and smart but it also feels very real. Another aspect that struck me when I was translating was her deep connection with heartland Russia, here, the thinly disguised Urals and the city of Ekaterinburg. She was able to incorporate the local lore associated with prospecting and minerals into the plot and make a mythological creature one of her characters in a very appealing way. But beyond the incredibly engaging stuff of her stories, she is a remarkable stylist and has a tremendous sense of pacing. This book is very well put together.

KES: In a recent (and very informal poll) I conducted on The Writer's Center's Facebook fan page, I asked our fans to tell us what great books they'd meant to read but hadn't quite gotten around to yet. There was a wide range of great books named, but the largest segment actually were written by Russians. The classics like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. Besides Slavnikova, which contempory Russian novelists should the rest of the world be paying attention to?

MS: I know more about the more established fiction writers, some of whom have been published with some success in English already--Viktor Pelevin, Tatiana Tolstaya, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin, and, lately, Vladimir Sorokin and Ludmila Petrushevskaya. To these I would add, besides Olga Slavnikova, Mikhail Shishkin ("Maidenhair"), Leonid Yuzefovich ("Cranes and Pygmies"), and some of Dina Rubina's massive output, especially her relatively recent "On the Sunny Side," about growing up in Tashkent after her family was evacuated there during the war. And these are just the ones I'm familiar with. As for younger writers, I recently translated some of the stories in the forthcoming "Moscow Noir" anthology (Akashic Books) and was impressed in particular by Andrei Khusnutdinov, Sergei Kuznetsov, and Aleksandr Anuchkin. Russia's a big country with a vigorous literary tradition and I don't pretend to have the complete picture, but I do try to keep up.

KES: How did you get involved with Russian literature to begin with? When did you begin translating?

MS: I was an innocent, not to say naive, victim of Russian literature. I began studying the language as a freshman at Harvard and somehow it wouldn't let me go. Believe me, I am not the first American fly to be trapped in this particular web. I began translating in graduate school, at the University of Texas in Austin, where there were some remarkable translators--Paul Schmidt, Sidney Monas, Richard Sylvester--and a genuine appreciation for the endeavor as such. My first published translation was an excerpt from Vladimir Mayakovsky's travelogue, "My Discovery of America," about crossing into the United States from Mexico to the United States at Laredo, Texas, originally published in a New York art magazine and then republished a few years ago in Two Lines.

KES: 2017 is a dense book that unfurls slowly (in my end notes I write "a strange, difficult, beautiful, rewarding book"). How long did it take you to translate the novel? And what were some of the challenges you faced while working on it?

MS: This book has had several incarnations, and excerpts have been published in Glas and Subtropics. An NEA grant allowed me to complete the full manuscript, which made finding a publisher a little easier. By the time I received the grant, Slavnikova had produced a somewhat shorter version for Gallimard, for the French translation, and this is the manuscript I eventually used for this edition.

One of the most interesting challenges I faced was one I faced once before, when I translated Lost in the Taiga, another book with extensive descriptions of geological formations. R. Michael Conner, a fine scientific translator specializing in geology, helped me both times to translate the terminology accurately. He explained the exact land and rock formations being described as well as the properties of the various minerals that appear. Precision on that level gives a text a conspicuous sparkle, or at least that has been my experience.

KES: On a very nuts and bolts level, what is your process for translating a project? What steps do you take?

MS: When I teach literary translation, I talk about the Four Passes.

In the first pass, after I know I'm going to translate it, I translate very quickly and put every inspiration--good and bad--down on paper. I look up very little, let some phrases stay as trots, even leave bits in Russian.

For the second pass I do a painstaking cross-check between the translation and the original, making sure I've got everything there and solving many of the issues that arose in the first pass. Because often a question that arose at the beginning will get answered by the text itself later on. Or the answer will have come to me. At this point there will still be things I can't figure out how to express properly as well as words and phrases, even situations, I don't understand at all. All of this is duly noted in the translation.

The third pass, I read only the English, keeping the Russian close to hand. When I'm wholly in the English, many more problems will jump out at me, so I do heavy rewriting and draw up a query list for the author or whatever native informant I'm using.

For the fourth pass, I incorporate the answers to my queries and polish polish polish. I think of this as one pass, but I often do it several times.

Last but not least, I find someone to read the entire translation to me out loud while I follow along with the Russian. A kind of fail-safe. If I can't get a live person, I use reading software, whose pace I can adjust and which works all kinds of crazy hours.

The first pass is by far the most exciting.
***

You can read my review of 2017 at Three Percent, the blog of Open Letter Books, here.

The Art of Racing in the Rain: An Interview with Garth Stein

On Saturday, April 17 at 7:30 P.M. at The Writer's Center, Garth Stein, author of the NY Times bestselling novel The Art of Racing in the Rain, will read from and discuss his work. Here's an interview to whet your appetite. Bio first.

Garth Stein (from Garthstein.com) is the author of the New York Times best selling literary novel, The Art of Racing in the Rain (Harper, 2008). Now published in 23 languages, The Art of Racing in the Rain was the #1 BookSense selection for June, 2008, the Starbucks spring/summer 2008 book selection, and has been on the IndieBound™ bestseller list since its publication. Stein's previous novel, How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets (Soho Press, 2005) won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and was a BookSense Pick in both hardcover and paperback. Raven Stole the Moon (Harper, 2010) was Stein's first novel. He has also written a full-length play, Brother Jones, and produced a number of award-winning documentaries.

With an M.F.A. in film from Columbia University (1990), Garth worked as a documentary film maker for several years, and directed, produced, or co-produced several award winning films.

Kyle Semmel: The Art of Racing in the Rain is told in the point of view of a dog. Can you tell us a little about some of the challenges you faced while writing in this point of view?

Garth Stein: Well, to be perfectly honest the challenges of writing a book are extreme enough. The challenges of finding an authentic voice from any perspective. I’m not quite sure it’s any different if you’re using a narrator from an alternative viewpoint. For me, I’m not writing from a dog’s point of view. I’m writing from a character’s point of view. That character is Enzo. And Enzo is a nearly human soul trapped in a dog’s body. He’s very anxious to be reincarnated as a person, so he can do all the things he wants to do. But at the same time he’s very attached to his family and wants to stay with them. That’s the classic double bind. That’s a character who’s stuck between two worlds and doesn’t really know which way to go. So from that grows a certain amount of frustration that Enzo then takes out on his enemies non-verbally. That kind of character could be a dog, as I chose, but it could be someone else, someone who has medical issues, someone trapped in a body that won’t move, fully aware, fully awake, fully conscious yet unable to speak properly. That person is essentially Enzo. I’m not sure it was ever a dog’s point of view I was concerned about but being authentic to the character and the character’s hopes and dreams and fears and intentions and desires.

KS: What should a writer be doing to make sure his or her character’s voice is authentic?

GS: I really do think it goes back to this idea of intentions. One of the things I often suggest to writers who want to better their craft is to take acting classes, and specifically improvisational classes, just because they’re so spur of the moment. If you’re an actor you have to know not just what’s happening in the scene, but also what came before that scene. I wrote a play called Brother Jones and it was staged in Los Angeles a few years ago. I went down there for the rehearsals and one of the actors came up to me during the break and she says to me, “Oh, I’m acting the scene in which my husband is there, it’s the morning and we have this fight. And I have one question for you: What did my character have for breakfast?”

Which seems like an irrelevant question, possibly. But it really isn’t, because if she had half a grapefruit and six cups of coffee she’s going to feel differently than if she had a cup of yogurt and went for a three-mile walk. In other words, she wanted to know what her character was bringing into the scene to inform how she reacts and how she acts in the scene. If you extrapolate that and say, Now, do that for every single character in your book, for every single scene, for every moment. Go back to what they had for breakfast that morning, where they came from, what they’re thinking, what is informing what is happening now. The thing we get to do in long-form fiction, which is different from what you do in drama. In theatre you’re dealing with the now; it’s the drama that’s unfolding right now in front of people. With fiction what you do is get to say, Okay, there’s the now of it, but we also get to go back as far as we want with as much depth as we want to find out what informed the now. So I think that how you build a character and stay true to the character is by understanding that you need to lay the groundwork on where that character’s coming from. Why did I pick a purple popsicle instead of an orange popsicle? And it can’t be random—oh, I just happened to pick up a purple popsicle. No, no, no. It’s because when I was a kid I once picked a purple one and my brother punched me in the head. We’re constantly making decisions based on things that happened a long time ago. For the most part we’re well-adjusted human beings. Maybe we think about it for a flash and then it’s gone. If we’re not so well adjusted I dare say—if we’re a character in a novel—we don’t just think about it in a flash; it triggers a flashback, or it triggers a phone call to our brother with whom we haven’t spoken in 20 years. Or it changes us in some way, acts as a catalyst for something. That’s why I think that, if you want to make a solid character, you need to trace back as far as you are willing to do it.

KS: How much of that “tracing back,” for you, comes in revision?

GS: It depends. Honestly, some people write extensive biographies of their characters. I don’t, because I have it somehow organically for the most part. But sometimes it goes wrong, and that’s when you have to go back and figure out what happened. I was talking to another writer out here a few weeks ago about revisions, and how so many people despise revisions. I despise some revisions, but love other revisions. The way I look at it is this: The first draft of anything I’m writing, I’m writing for myself. I have these ideas, I have these thoughts, and I want to tell a story. Then when I go over it I have to look at it very carefully to make sure that I didn’t betray my characters or my story in any way, so at that point when I’m revising, I’m revising for the piece, I’m revising for the characters in the story, because I have to make sure I didn’t contrive anything for my own interests. In other words, you have to be true to your characters. If you’re going to have a purple popsicle, there’s got to be reason why he picks the purple popsicle. If I’m going to say, Oh, well, one day an alien fell from the sky. Well, that’s not in the story. So I have to make it work. Then that history becomes part of the revision process, and I make sure that the initial idea I had still works with the character having evolved in the book.

KS: This might be the first novel I’ve read where auto racing figures so prominently. You create such a rich metaphor with it that I have to believe that A) you’re a big racing fan, and B) you kicked around the idea of this novel for many years before you wrote it. Can you tell us about the genesis of this book?

GS: I’m a fan of race car driving, but I’m not a fanatic of anything, really. As a writer, it’s good to be a fan, but I can’t go over that edge and become too deeply involved. I don’t want to write about the same thing for the rest of my life. I first got into race car driving when I was a kid. My Dad and I used to watch races on Saturday afternoons on our black and white Zenith television. It was sort of a heyday for Formula 1. Coincidentally—and this could’ve been one of the first germs of the book—we would watch the races with our dog Mugs. My father and I would have this big bowl of sunflower seeds and we’d spend two hours eating sunflower seeds and watching a Formula 1 race. Mugs would sit there with us watching the race, and I thought to myself, “How interesting that she likes watching race cars.” Well, she didn’t like watching race cars. She wanted sunflower seeds. She was waiting for us to drop something so she could eat it. For me as a five year old, I thought, this is kind of cool that she watches TV with us. That goes into hibernation for 25 years, and then I see a film. I see a film about dogs in Mongolia and how there’s a belief they get reincarnated as people. That germ takes hold and that sits for seven years. I go to a poetry reading and hear Billy Collins read a poem from the point of view of a dog in heaven, berating his master for all the things he did wrong in his lifetime. It’s a very funny poem. Then at that point I was ready to write the book. I have a dog who wants to come back as a person. I have a dog who is very judgmental about the world he sees around him. And I’ve got this idea of racing in the background, as a metaphor. At the time I started writing the book I was racing cars myself—I raced for about four years, on the amateur level, just for fun—and so it all kind of came together at the right time for me. The first draft of the book I wrote in four months. But it took me 38 years, I guess, to put all the pieces together.

KS: Chapter 18 of the book is pretty much given verbatim in the video trailer for the novel. As a documentary film maker, how much role did you have in creating that short video?



GS: I made it. Harper said they wanted to do a video and I said that’s great. You pay for it and I’ll make it. They said that’s great. I had this idea of using that narration and having the dog sitting in front of a television. I got great racing footage from the folks at Red Bull Racing. They were really nice to give that to me for free. I found stock footage from Mongolia, from the Mongolian mountains. And some stock music of a little Mongolian dance. Then I needed a dog. I did some casting for a dog and found one that looked like Enzo here in Seattle. We went to the studio to shoot the parts where he was staring at a television set. But the dog was absolutely a horrible actor. He couldn’t sit still, couldn’t focus. It was just a disaster. Then I thought, Well, there’s only one dog I know—though she doesn’t look like Enzo—who would stare at a television for two weeks if I put a cookie under it. That’s my dog, Comet, and that’s how Comet got cast in the trailer. We shot it and watched it and decided it needed a little more, some family. So I got out my old 16mm film camera and went to the park with a friend of mine, her daughter, and Comet, and we shot the scenes where Comet is running around in the park. Kind of like a home movie style. We’re introduced to Eve and Zoë and then that was it. We put it together and that was the video.

Videos are interesting ideas for marketing a book. They’re kind of antithetical to the whole idea of a book, which is that when you read you create your own images in your head. Yet here we are with videos putting images into people’s heads. Does it greatly affect the marketing of a book? It can. I’m sure it can. There’s some that are really good. They’re getting much better, now that some people are getting savvy to the world of putting together these videos. Two or three years ago I don’t think they were nearly as good as they are now.

KS: How has the success of The Art of Racing in the Rain changed you as a writer?

GS: It’s a good question that’s a little difficult to answer because there are a few layers to it. It’s certainly freed me up to spend all my time writing. But I can’t spend all my time writing. I have to spend a lot of my time continuing to do promotion and marketing for The Art of Racing in the Rain. It’s my obligation. My job as a writer is not just to write a book and leave it be. My job is to make sure people read the book. So the ongoing marketing is very important for a writer to follow through on. At the same time, I do have to write my next book. It’s a very tricky balance. In terms of time, generally writers—at least from my experience—sequester themselves in the world of their book and don’t come up for air until it’s finished. I don’t get to do that.

In terms of managing expectations of readers, I don’t know what to say about that except that I have to write what I feel is my next book. I have to make sure that it’s true to what I want to say, and I have to make sure that it’s true to my feelings. And if it is, then I think it will be good enough and people will love it. When I teach workshops I say to people, You have to feel the joy of the writing process and you have to feel it to your very essence while you’re writing, because, if you don’t—if you’re writing for another reason—the reader will see through that and know that it’s not from the heart and is not genuine.

Keep Poetry Sacred: An Interview with Dora Malech

At our Sunday, March 7 Open Door Reading at The Writer's Center, Dora Malech--a Bethesda native and former workshop participant--will join one of our current workshop leaders, Nancy Noami Carlson, for what will be a great, great poetry reading. Here's an interview I recently conducted with Dora. But first, here's Dora's bio:

Dora Malech was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1981 and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. She earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale College in 2003 and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. She has been the recipient of a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Writing Fellowship from Yale, a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Writers’ Workshop, a Glenn Schaeffer Poetry Award, and a Writer’s Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy. The Waywiser Press published her first full-length collection of poems, Shore Ordered Ocean, in 2009. The Cleveland State University Poetry Center will publish her second collection, Say So, in late 2010. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Best New Poets, American Letters & Commentary, Poetry London, and The Yale Review. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. In Fall 2010, she will serve as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in Poetry for the MFA Creative Writing Program at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her paintings and drawings are represented by The Chait Galleries in Iowa City, Iowa, where she lives. Find her online at doramalech.com.

Kyle Semmel: Before I ask about Shore Ordered Ocean, I want to know when you took your workshop(s) at The Writer's Center? Who was your workshop leader(s)?

Dora Malech: I must have “discovered” The Writer’s Center in the mid-nineties, in late junior high school or early high school. My family went to the Chinese restaurant (it used to be called Peking Hunan, but it’s Moongate now) at the other end of the big parking lot from TWC, and when I saw The Writer’s Center, it felt like destiny. Keep in mind that I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and thus prone to interior drama and believing in destiny whenever possible. That said, it truly was exciting to open the doors and discover a place where people were making a life out of what I loved to do, which was write.

I remember the coffee-and-photocopier smell; I remember flipping through the literary magazines and reading contemporary poetry for the first time, really. I bought a copy of Hayden’s Ferry Review and pored over it and eventually ripped out a poem by Jon Pineda that I held onto for years.

I ended up taking a Summer workshop with Rose Solari, and then a Fall workshop with Rose Solari, and so on. In short, I fell in love. Rose was a passionate, sensitive, intelligent, no-nonsense workshop leader. I remember her as being reverent when it came to poetry and irreverent when it came to everything else. I bought her collection of poems, Difficult Weather, and carried it with me everywhere. I underlined and dog-eared and asterixed it up. She was like the high priestess of poetry to me as a teenager: I worshiped the way she carried herself in the world and the way she carried herself on the page. In her presence, poetry was no longer a lofty abstraction; it was a life.

KS: How did your experience at TWC help prepare you for future writing workshops--at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, for example?

DM: Being in writing workshops at TWC, as opposed to English classes at school, taught me to read as a poet, to tune into language and form and image and so forth, as opposed to trying to hack past the language to critique the so-called content. I learned to share my reactions without being proscriptive; I learned that asking good questions is usually more helpful than trying to sound smart; I learned to take criticism and I learned the importance of rigorous revision. I also learned, however, that different writers have different visions of what a poem should “do”, of what a poem “is”, and that we should value that diversity instead of trying to homogenize. Internalizing those lessons at TWC enabled me to be a more constructive workshop participant and, eventually, a more constructive workshop leader.

KS: You've had a lot of success in your career. What would your advice be to young poets who aim to make a life out of writing, reading, and teaching poetry?

Oh, boy. My first impulse when I see the words “success” and “career” is to start self-denigrating, to list the publications that have rejected me, to admit to the great literature that I still haven’t thoroughly read and absorbed, to rail against the adjunct system in American colleges that leaves so many of us underemployed, or benefit-less, or unsure if we’ll have a job from year to year or term to term. That, however, is just my first impulse. Then I take a deep breath, and try to take my own advice, which is the following: don’t blame poetry for the shortcomings of people/things/society. Keep poetry sacred.

Don’t let a rejection slip, or an egomaniacal workshop leader (not at TWC, of course, but they’re out there!), or a snarky blog, or a careerist prize-winner, or a rude editor get between you and the page. The only thing between you and the page is a pen or a pencil. I hope this makes sense; I guess I’m trying to say that if “po-biz” or academia or interpersonal tzurrus or apathy or small-mindedness get you down, which they will, don’t let that poison your relationship with poetry. Easier said than done, I know. But we have to try.

My other piece of advice for young poets is much simpler: read like crazy. Read it all. There are conversations happening on the page that defy time and space; when you read, you enable yourself to enter those conversations. Your world becomes richer and more complicated, and your writing follows.

KS: The poems "Makeup" and "S.O.S."--which, along with many other poems in this collection, explore death--are immediately followed up by a wonderful "birth" poem called "Delivery Rhyme." Can you talk about the writing and the structure of Shore Ordered Ocean? How did you go about putting these poems together?

The book came together much like my poems come together: I don’t force a “theme” or “subject” when I’m generating a poem; I’m more like a hunter-gatherer than a farmer who can cultivate a particular crop. I do, however, eventually step back and look for patterns and threads, rearranging for juxtapositions and maximizing discourse between images and moments of language. With Shore Ordered Ocean, I had a big muddle of individual poems and I tried to let them talk to each other, literally spreading them out on the floor, shuffling and reshuffling. They talked to each other about love and death and family and relationships and war and distance… all kinds of distance. I wrote the poems during a time when I was trying to navigate different kinds of distance: the frustration of being a citizen of a country at war when the media mediates all of the horrors of that war for me; the more straight-forward physical remove of a long-distance relationship. I tried to weave these, and other, distances together to create not a narrative exactly, but perhaps a trajectory or momentum through the collection. I think about that Dylan Thomas line, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”; I hope that that “force” is present in the collection, even if I can’t exactly explain it. I hope there’s at least some resonance, or friction, when birth and death or love and war rub elbows from poem to poem, and within poems as well.

KS: I'm curious about "The Numbers Game." How did you come to write a poem consisting solely of surnames of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq?

When I wrote that poem, I was thinking a lot about the war in Iraq; I was living in New Zealand, so I felt doubly removed from what was being done in the name of my country. I watched the war from a distance, and the Bush administration from a distance, and America from a distance. I struggled with how to make the images and events in newspapers and on television real to me, and then I struggled with my own lack of agency. What did I think my individual empathy could accomplish? I didn’t have an answer and still don’t.

“The Numbers Game” is actually kind of a companion piece to the poem that precedes it in Shore Ordered Ocean, “O-Dark-Hundred”, in which I explore the aforementioned frustrations and doubts. I finished venting in that poem, and obviously, the dead remained. We can’t will them back (or will them away). Mission never accomplished. I felt like my usual “materials” (images, syntax, etcetera) were inadequate, so I just let the names speak for themselves.

Reading the names of the dead aloud is certainly not my own idea; every year, on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, we read the names of the dead. There are readings of the names of service-people who died in Vietnam. There are readings of the names of individuals who have died of AIDS. There is something incantatory about saying those names, even if the incantation can’t possibly “do” what we might hope it could.

KS: This summer, coming full circle, so to speak, you'll be teaching at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. Can you tell us about your philosophy of creative writing teaching? What can your students expect?

I’ll be teaching an eight-week Graduate Summer Poetry Workshop through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; usually the Workshop’s courses are open to graduate students only, but undergraduates and non-students can also apply for this summer course. I’ll also be teaching a few workshops through the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. I believe in a balance of rigor and nurture in a workshop; a workshop should be a place to take risks and explore new possibilities, to get out of your comfort zone. Of course, to enable participants to take those risks, there has to be a supportive atmosphere and a constructive classroom community. I think that a workshop leader has a responsibility to strive to establish that balance right away, although the participants themselves are ultimately responsible for their own community as well. I try hard to get the ball rolling and then park my ego, allowing my voice to be one of many voices in the room. I think a good workshop requires energy on everyone’s part, but a good workshop also creates energy that propels and informs its participants’ writing even after the workshop itself is over. I’m getting excited already!

The Difficult Beauty of Translation: An Interview with Yvette Neisser Moreno

As readers of this blog may know, translation and international literature are near and dear to my heart. As readers may not know, The Writer's Center offers translation workshops taught by Yvette Neisser Moreno, the Pushcart-nominated poet/translator of Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty. (Incidentally, since Yvette introduced him to us, we've also brought Luis into the fold as a workshop leader. He teaches a poetry workshop exclusively in Spanish.)

Kyle Semmel: In your translation of Ambroggio’s Difficult Beauty, there’s a beautiful poem called “Conversation” that would probably ring true for any writer: “I know how it hurts to be tortured by words,/ to use them, to live insufficiently in their weak outlines,/ to want to eat them again, convinced they will taste of needles.” When a writer writes, it’s obviously a matter of finding the exact right word. For translators the process is really the same—though textured by an extra layer of cultural and linguistic skin. What advice would you give to a young translator?


That’s kind of a tough question. In my translation workshops here at The Writer’s Center, I spend about six weeks answering that question!

The best brief answer I can give is to spend the time trying to find the exact best word or phrase for every key word that you translate. This is especially true for poetry. Literary translation is not to be rushed through—take your time to dwell in the words of the original language, and then take the time to dwell in the possible ways to convey the meaning in the target language. When I’m translating from Spanish to English, I find a good English thesaurus indispensable.

KS: Though you are the translator for the majority of the poems, some poems are translated by other translators (including Writer’s Center workshop leaders C.M. Mayo and Naomi Ayala). Can you talk about the collaborative process of working, as editor, with so many translators? What if you disagreed on the translation of a line, for example?

I didn’t actually collaborate with most of the translators, but I did have the chance to collaborate with Naomi Ayala in editing her translation of “The Poem Bodies Make,” which was a real treat, as Naomi is one of my favorite poets. In this case, the editor at Cross-Cultural Communications, the book’s publisher, had pointed out to me some aspects of the translation that he wanted me to revise. I then went through the (English) poem carefully and made notes for Naomi of how I thought those issues might best be addressed. Then we sat down together and went through it line by line, discussing options, brainstorming, and then coming to agreement. It was fun and very interesting!

KS: In the Ambroggio translations there is an admixture, to me, of playfulness, sexuality, and social critique. This may reflect the range of translators, perhaps, and Ambroggio has many books. How did you determine which poems to include, which to leave out? The poems demonstrate significant range, in other words. For readers unfamiliar with Ambroggio’s work, how would you describe it? What should they look for or expect to find in his poetry?

That’s very true—Ambroggio has an incredible range of topics and styles in his poetry. Sometimes it is hard to believe from one page to the next that you are reading the same poet. This is partly because his writing style has changed over the years, and Difficult Beauty covers a period of 20 years.

What readers should expect to find in this book are all the features you mentioned—an appealing sense of humor, poems of love and sexuality, poems about social issues—as well as beautiful lyric poems, poems about the human condition, about human relationships, about death… What you will encounter is a poet fully engaged with the world around him at the macro and micro levels—a poet concerned about what happens in all parts of the world, and also who is moved by the flight of hummingbirds. You will find moments of surprising tenderness and beauty, moments of social outrage, of political commentary, of musings on ancient myths. You will encounter short lyric poems and long prosaic poems. You will find wisdom and insights, and beautiful language.

KS: To shift to your own work, you’re also an emerging poet in your own right. How has your translation work inspired or influenced your own poetry writing?

First, reading good poetry—and translating is a form of very close reading—often inspires my own poetry.

Second, the play of words and attention to words required in translation may indirectly influence my own poetry, as the words I use and discover while translating get stored in my head and added to my poetry “word bank” if you will.

And finally, one of the reasons I encourage young poets to translate is that by translating you get to try out a style of writing that might be different from your own. You get to take on a new, different voice. The words in the translated poem, to some extent, become your own. So, while I can’t trace a direct influence from Ambroggio’s poetry to my own, I do think the experience of translating has probably influenced the way I write.

Can you tell us a little bit about your poetry translation workshop here at The Writer’s Center? What should participants expect when they take it? How much of a foreign language do they need to know?

I LOVE teaching the poetry translation workshops. In the first session or two, I give an overview of the various approaches to translation used by well-known translators, as well as the major issues that one has to consider when translating poetry. Then we usually look at a few different translations of the same poem as a way to see how a translator’s choices can impact the poem’s effect in English. And I typically do a translation exercise where I ask all the students to do their own “translation” of the same poem. (To find out how I do this when the students don’t always know the same languages…you’ll have to sign up for the class.)

After these introductory sessions, I run the workshop very similarly to other types of creative writing workshops, in that we spend most of our class time reading and discussing students’ translations, and giving suggestions for improvement/revision. Students choose which poet/poems they want to translate.

Also, I’d like to point out that I teach two different versions of this workshop: the Spanish-English translation workshop (which will start this month) and the general poetry translation workshop, in which students can translate from any language into English.

In the Spanish-English workshop, obviously we focus on these two languages only. The emphasis is on translating from Spanish to English (my specialty), but students are also welcome to translate from English to Spanish. In this workshop, we have the opportunity to delve more deeply into the two languages and how they are used in poems.

In the general translation workshop, English is the only common language among the students, so we concentrate mostly on the English translations, with context about the original language provided, as needed, by the student-translator.

For both workshops, however, anyone who can read a foreign language with the help of a dictionary is welcome. My personal experience has been that the act of translating itself can improve your knowledge and comprehension of a language.

Finally, I’d like to mention that students can expect to be part of a diverse and fascinating group of classmates, from whom I always learn as much as they learn from me.

***
Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her translation (from Spanish) of Argentinian poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in May 2009. In addition to working as a professional writer/editor, Moreno teaches poetry and translation at The Writer’s Center and has taught poetry in public schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Hard Wins: An Interview with Matt Bell (Part II)

Here's the conclusion to the interview with Matt Bell, begun yesterday. I'm particularly struck by his description of a "book story."

KS: In your short fiction, from the stories published in How the Broken Lead the Blind to The Collectors, there's a wonderful conciseness of language that becomes poetry. Take "Once She'd Been a Brunette," for example; so much life, so much heart, is given in so few words. Can you talk about how important it is for fiction writers to work in the margins between poetry and fiction? What can fiction writers learn from the brevity of poetry?

MB: One of the hardest aspects of writing for fiction writers to talk about is language and the way we use it. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case, but I think that it’s partly because fiction writers—unlike many poets, who in my experience have developed a very large vocabulary for describing their work—often have a more limited set of terms with which to describe what they do. Most of what we're taught in MFA programs and other types of workshop settings has to do with plot or point of view or characterization or setting, rather than rhythm and sound and language, which probably makes sense, in some ways. Plot and story are probably what attracts most writers to fiction in the first place, with language emerging as a primary concern only later. So reading essays about poetry or taking poetry classes can be a great way to get a jump start on learning some of the vocabulary that fiction writers generally lack, which in turn allows you to think a little deeper about language than maybe you have before.

In general, I've always gotten a lot out of time spent seriously reading certain poets, and certainly out of taking poetry classes—I'm not a poet in any way, but just hearing the concerns of people who are has taught me a lot. In undergrad, I took several playwriting workshops toward a similar end. Working under a different set of constraints forced me to grow in ways that fiction hadn't up to that point. I think that there's a lot to be learned by crossing over to another genre, as a reader or as a writer.

Thankfully, there are fiction writers who do know how to talk about language and sound in more concrete and useful terms. Gary Lutz's Believer essay "The Sentence is a Lonely Place" is an excellent example, as is "A Ribbon of Language That Can Be Heard Without Speaking," an interview from Unsaid between Michael Kimball and Blake Butler. I've returned to both of these pieces over and over again during the last year or so, and continue to learn from them.

KS: In 2010 you will publish a collection of short fiction, this time with Keyhole Press: How They Were Found. Can you talk about that collection? What should readers expect?

MB: How They Were Found is made up of twelve stories plus The Collectors, giving people who missed getting one of the limited edition Caketrain chapbooks another chance to own a print copy of the novella. At the time I began assembling the manuscript, I’d published about fifty stories, and had another half-dozen or so that were out making the rounds that I was pretty sure were among my strongest works yet. Michael Czyzniejewski, the editor at Mid-American Review and author of Elephants in Our Bedroom, was a great help to me during this process, reading the first long-list draft of the collection, which included every story that I thought might be something I’d want to include. One of the best pushes he gave me was to learn to distinguish between what was a “book story” and what wasn’t. That was a great way of thinking about things that helped me cut out stories which I think are good—like “BeautyForever,” which you mentioned earlier—but that, for whatever reason, probably won’t be collected and certainly didn’t fit into this book. In that story's case, it's maybe a little too derivative? That's a clearly Saunders-esque story, and the fact that I can so easily point out its literary ancestors probably means I was right to leave it out of the book, even though it’s a story I’m proud of and really enjoyed writing.

What was left: These thirteen fictions, which I think represent me best as the writer I am right now, showing off what I believe are my most distinct qualities, while also (hopefully) coming together to make a book that is more than the sum of its parts when read as a whole, instead of jus a random grab bag of stories I've published. In the end, this meant very little older work made it into the book: There is only one story in How They Were Found that was written before the summer of 2008.

KS: Many of the stories in How They Were Found have been published in various literary journals, and you yourself are the editor of The Collagist. Everyone talks about the slow decay of publishing, but one thing that's often overlooked is that there's a wealth of literary journals and small presses, like Keyhole, who're publishing some seriously good work. I like to ask this question to writers and editors: Where do you see the future of book publishing going?


MB: I don't think the situation is nearly as dire as it's made out to be, at least for most writers, who were never going to be part of the big press end of the business anyway. Obviously, the big presses are struggling and will continue to struggle—for some reasons that are of out of their control and also others wholly of their own making—but that's not the same as saying that literature is dead, or that fiction is dead, or that no one reads in this country, or that e-books are killing books, or any of the other "truths" constantly being trotted out in all these doomsday articles that seem to crop up every day now. I don't know personally what the future of book publishing is, but I do think it's more likely to be figured out by the great indie presses than it is by the giant conglomerate presses in New York. I think it’s most likely that publishing is headed in a direction that is similar to that of the music industry, where small and independent labels have become a driving force not just artistically but financially as well.

Looking at literature purely from an artistic point of view, I don’t see any doom and gloom at all: This is an incredibly exciting time to be a reader and a writer and an editor. There's so much talent out there right now, and so much great work being written and published. The indie presses like Dzanc and Keyhole and ML Press and Publishing Genius—all less than five or six years old—are, in my mind, publishing some of the most innovative and interesting work around, as are the independent magazines like Hobart, Barrelhouse, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. Plus there's the Internet, with its own plethora of literary magazines—1200+ online, when we did our search for Best of the Web. It takes an awful lot of writing to fill all those magazines, and much of it is very, very good. And those are just the newer magazines and presses. There’s tons of important and enjoyable writing being publishing by more established houses and journals, including the biggest presses and magazines.

The economics of literature may be changing, but that's only one aspect of it, and hardly the most important. I feel very fortunate that I spend most of my time as a writer and an editor with people who are actively trying to push forward the state of our art, rather than just moaning about its impending end. I have no doubt that many of these people I’ve had the pleasure to meet and work with and befriend over the past few years are—each in their own way—contributing right now to make whatever future literature awaits us.

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If you'd like to learn more about Matt Bell, visit his Web site at http://www.mdbell.com/.