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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/water-thirsting-joanna-chen-conversation-natalya-sukhonos/"></div>Natalya Sukhonos’ poetry takes you gently by the hand and then pulls you in. Her poetry drops out of the sky and then grinds to a halt at a near-car crash in New York City. Most of all, Sukhonos’ poetry asks you, the reader, to listen to a roar that is silence.
A scholar of 20th Century Russian and Latin American literature, Sukhonos teaches at the College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Zayed University in partnership with the Minerva Project. Her first collection of poetry is Parachute (Aldrich Press, 2016), and her latest collection is A Stranger Home (Moon Pie Press, 2021).
Sukhonos spoke to me from her home office in New York. It’s a room with bright yellow walls, a painting by one of her young daughters pinned to the door, an open closet with clothes peeking out, a pile of books and papers, a framed photo I can’t quite decipher. A vibrant, busy room that is almost as surprising as Sukhonos’ poetry.
¤
JOANNA CHEN: You were born in the Ukraine and immigrated to the US many years ago. What, rather than where, is home for you?
NATALYA SUKHONOS: One of my favorite rock musicians, Boris Grebenshchikov, in the lyrics to one of his songs, said that “love is a way to return home”. I really identify with this. Home is certainly where love is, and yet I would say that the obverse of the feeling of home is estrangement. For me, they go together, so home is thus a source of both comfort and tension.
How do you relate to the Ukraine today? 
My relationship with the Ukraine is nostalgic. I left the Soviet Union when I was nine and a half.  I have memories of strolling under chestnut trees in Odessa with my grandfather, going to the sea, spending time at a dacha with my parents and grandparents and my great aunt, eating apricot ice-cream. Mostly I think of Odessa, a city built by French and Italian architects in the 19th century, and just being filled with a beauty that is very fleeting and effervescent, people walking through the grand boulevards that were probably inspired by Paris.
Do you believe in the concept of a mother tongue? 
I’ve spent the majority of my life in the US. I am bilingual, but I probably speak more English than Russian at this point. Despite this, I do believe in the idea of the mother tongue. All of my life outside of the Ukraine I’ve tried to maintain my Russian very consciously. I feel it’s a huge part of my childhood, and I associate it with being able to say really intimate things, to reach back to who I really am, or who I was back in Odessa, strolling under those chestnut trees.
Why Russian and not Ukrainian? 
I grew up in Odessa, a multilingual, multi-cultural city with a sizable Jewish population that aligned itself with Russian more than Ukrainian. This was because Russian served as a lingua franca for speakers of Yiddish and Turkish, Italian, Greek, and Ukrainian alike. Russian was also appealing to Jews because there was a lot of anti-Semitism among Ukrainians. I grew up speaking Russian and this is why I consider it my mother tongue.
My husband learned Russian while he was dating me and now he’s fluent and we’re raising our children bilingually, which I think is fantastic. The other reason I think I’m so passionate about Russian is that I’m an academic, a lover of literature. If I hadn’t been able to maintain my Russian and speak it as well as I do, I wouldn’t have been able to master Anton Chekov or Fyodor Dostoevsky or some of my favorite poets such as Anna Akhmatova. It’s really important for me to be able to read in the original. For me, those works really express who I am and every time I read them, I rediscover myself.
Your poetry collection sits on the intersection of fairy tales, the fantastical and bald reality. 
This poetry collection came together organically after my mother died in 2017. It isn’t that I sat down and said, I’m going to create a lots of poems about my mother’s death, I used poetry as a way to process her death and my grief. It was really difficult. That was the reality part. The fairy tales and the fantastic were a way for me to approach some questions that I had and still have on what death really is. What happens to the body as it loses its senses and enters a different realm? Is there a soul? Where does it go?
Fairy tales and the fantastic really have to do with a different way of looking at the world. It’s a way to recontextualize reality. My favorite writers, including Jorges Luis Borges or Julio Cortázar, take the everyday and make you look at it in a radically different way. Julio Cortázar has a short story called “Axolotl” about a man who stares at a tiny lizard through the aquarium glass because he’s lonely. At the end of the story, you suddenly realize he’s become that lizard.
I’m interested in that slippage between stark reality, harsh emotions like loneliness and grief, and what can be imagined. The fantastic could be an escape, but I don’t want to look at it that way.
What role does memory play in your book? 
I think memory is another way to construct a narrative. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, we read about the extraordinarily prodigious memories of his childhood, full of these beautiful optical illusions and monochromatic landscapes created in his mind. After a while you understand memory is a construct of the imagination, that memory is another way to tell the story. I tried to play around with that a little bit in a couple of places in this collection. The first poem, “Parachute,” is about my grandfather who was an air trooper in WWII. The poem narrates what it must have been like for him in the war and to have made these jumps 94 times.
These are vignettes of his life but also of the Ukraine and the experience of immigration. The poems consider my own memories of Odessa and also my mother’s memories, in which I have to actively decide whether these memories are constructed or not. There are also poems about my great aunt, who brought me up, so these poems are about the Holodomor, the manmade famine in the Ukraine, which she had to endure, in 1930… and these poems play around with memory because they narrate her experiences. I’m considering what her memories must have been like, so I take her stories which she told me many times over, with the tendency of an older person to retell the same story, adding and taking away details, not always being consistent. I think memory is a way of making craft more physical and a reimagining of other peoples’ experiences.
One poem I particularly enjoyed is “The Fragrance, the Garden”, in which you write:
<blockquote>If all the plants 
are quiet I can hear 
words flicker 
in the glass 
behind the garden. 
I can hear water 
thirsting for itself, 
a hand wreaking havoc 
with metal and twine.</blockquote>
The whole collection, in fact, is teeming with noise — not the kind of noisy noise we are used to but what might be termed quiet noise. Your tendency toward the fantastical prompts you to hear sounds that the human ear cannot pick up. The roots of a tree growing, water thirsting for itself, light warming our veins. What on earth does this sound like? It’s interesting to me because you’re asking the readers to actively listen with their imagination.
It might have something to do with the fact that I grew up in a loud Ukrainian Jewish family. The more disturbing aspect was you couldn’t really have quiet, there was always a lot of laughter, a lot of toasts, people interrupting each other. I think somehow it slipped into my poetry.
Invisible sounds have to do with life that still flows, that still happens, in spite of disruptive events that might make it seem as if life has stopped, like immigration, the loss of love, a moment of loneliness and, of course, death. I think that’s part of it and I think the other part is that I am interested in these in-between states of mind where you have strong emotion but you don’t necessarily have the words to describe it. Paradoxically that’s where poetry comes in. It’s apophatic, as used to describe mystical experience, like St. John of the Cross in The Dark Night of the Soul, and used a lot of negations to describe the experience of ecstasy that he experienced. I’m not necessarily writing about ecstasy, but I am writing about trying to reconstruct memory, about moments of death and what it must be like. I think I might be unconsciously filling these moments with sounds to make the reader understand that something is going on, we can’t quite put our finger on it, but there is a music to it. We can listen to the unknown and it will manifest itself.
In an email prior to this conversation, you said you’d like to talk about exploring the ways in which your poems touch on what&#8217;s hard to articulate. These thoughts reminded me of Adrienne Rich, who wrote that “a poem is a construction of language that uses, tries to use everything that language can do, to conjure, to summon up something that’s not quite knowable in any other way.&#8221;
You’ve given me a lot to think about. Essentially, there’s a paradox here — some things are difficult to describe, but precisely because they are difficult, poetry might be the best vehicle to describe it.
I’m thinking of that line in “After the Rain” from your collection: “Poetry is the harried man your car missed by a few feet.”
I remember reading the surrealist novel, Nadja, by André Breton — beauty was a way to render this electric state of shock that the speaker was talking about. I remember reading this and getting this strange idea that an aesthetic experience might be an asymptote, a mathematical function that gets close to the absolute but doesn’t quite get there. This is what’s so alluring and interesting about language and poetry as a way of manipulating language in a particular way. It’s funny you mention that particular line from my poem, about the man leaping out from the bus stop and into this poem, because that came from a really traumatic experience for me.
I only learned how to drive three years ago. The poem was conceived when I was driving home after yoga, and I almost ran this guy over, who was running toward my car. I had to write a poem about it, to transform that horrible experience into something else.
Something beautiful emerged from that horrible experience.
That’s really what poetry is for me — it seems to have an almost alchemical quality of transformation. This is because poetry is a puzzle. My younger daughter, who’s two years old, loves jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes I think of poetry precisely as such a puzzle. How do we put lines together a way that creates the most interesting effect? How do we play around with sounds? Even as we approach somber things, these things that cannot be said, we should still retain that sense of play.
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Water Thirsting for Itself: Joanna Chen in Conversation with Natalya Sukhonos

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/voice-across-broken-bridge-talking-rami-aman/"></div>Before the latest hostilities between Palestinians and Israelis, I was in contact with 40-year-old Rami Aman, a peace activist from Gaza who has dedicated himself to building bridges between people. In 2020, he organized a two-hour video chat via Skype between Palestinians in Gaza and Israelis in Jerusalem. Two hundred people took part in the dialogue, wryly named “Skype with Your Enemy.” Shortly afterwards, Rami literally disappeared. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations demanded information of his whereabouts and then, when it became apparent he was undergoing torture in a Hamas jail, they rallied for his release. At the time, it was presumed he’d been arrested for skyping with the enemy. 
In fact, it was because he’d recently married M., whose father is an official in the ruling Islamic militant group of Hamas. (Rami’s wife&#8217;s name has been omitted for her protection; here, we refer to her as “M.”)
After his release, Rami and I arranged to talk, but then he stopped answering my emails. I presumed he was wary of speaking to me, since I live in Israel. Not wanting to get him into trouble, I respected this and let it go. A few weeks later, he wrote me again: “I’m sorry for disappearing. Let’s talk.”
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JOANNA CHEN: What made you get in touch with me after such a long silence? 
RAMI AMAN: The idea that I should keep going. I want my voice to be heard outside of Gaza. It’s been tough for me since my release. I was tired, I wanted to give up. I felt hopeless, like I’d disappeared all over again, the way I did in jail.
I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for you.     
It wasn’t my first time in jail, but it was the worst. I was held this time for a total of 200 days. Much of the time I was interrogated and tortured.
You were in the notorious “bus”.
Yes, I spent most hours blindfolded in a narrow room on a small chair, sometimes with my hands tied above my head.
How did you get through this?
I learned how to control myself in the darkness. I thought inside myself that I’m in a movie, and I just need to act my part really well. I thought about the future. I sent messages in my head to M. and other friends I was sure were thinking about me. I felt sure I would be released sooner or later. Mostly I thought about M.
When did the two of you first meet?
She joined the group I formed, the Gaza Youth Committee, a group dedicated to reconciliation, both between Christians and Muslims, men and women in Gaza, but also with Israelis. I wanted to promote Palestinians and help them to be decision makers. We worked to get everyone sitting around a table, even a virtual one. M. joined the group about three years ago. She believed in our cause.
Was it love at first sight?
No! At first, I didn’t think about her in a romantic way, I thought she was a good speaker and I was impressed with her dedication. She came every day to help fundraise for the organization. When we released 150 doves into the air in 2018, she was there. We spent a lot of time working together, we built our own world. M. gave me the courage to keep going. She was my friend, we spent hours and hours together. We hid it all and finally married, but quietly.
In a strange twist, it was your marriage to M. that led to your arrest.  
After hours of interrogation in prison, it became clear what they really wanted. M. is the daughter of a Hamas official and they couldn’t accept that she was reaching out to Israelis. As founder of the group, I was being pressured to divorce her.
At first, I said no to everything to do with M. I had no idea where she was or what was happening to her at that time. Eventually I understood she was in prison but would be released if I divorced her. I signed the papers.
This also led to your own release from prison. 
Yes, but M. had meanwhile been forced to leave Gaza and join her family in Egypt. So we’ve been separated. Two months has gone by since she left Gaza. We email, but the words are empty. Nothing personal. This is not the M. I knew at all.
I tried to leave Gaza immediately. I wanted to join her. The Israelis gave me a permit to cross the border into Israel; Hamas has banned me from traveling anywhere. So I’m stuck here in Gaza. They’re afraid I’ll say bad things about them. I told them I’ll say bad things about them from inside Gaza if they won’t let me go. People tell me to keep my voice down, that it’s not a good time. My friends are afraid for me but I don’t care anymore. I gave my life for peace and now I have no life left.
What has all this been for? Because of what? Because of nothing. I’m still here, talking to you, but what about my own private life? Things change, you know. I might look strong but there’s another Rami inside me who’s removed from everything and no one knows about him. I’m two people in a single body – Rami the activist is stronger than ever, surer than ever — but Rami the private person is destroyed, dead, eroded.
How can you go on under such circumstances? 
I’m trying to find my balance. I realized when I began all this that I’d face risks and challenges.
Are you afraid of further reprisals from Hamas? 
As a person, yes, but not as an activist. As an activist I’m ready for anything. But listen, I watch for cars when I’m out. I need to see them coming at me, not behind me. Three years ago I was kidnapped while walking outside on the street. A black sack was pulled over my head, I was held for 6 or 7 hours and then released.
What do you wish for yourself?
To reunite with M.
Can you imagine that?  
No, of course not. I can’t even get out of here, it chokes me inside to think of meeting her again. We planned so much together. I see M.’s face before my eyes all the time. That’s all I have now.
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A Voice Across a Broken Bridge: Talking with Rami Aman

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/parallel-lives-buzzards-barn-owls/"></div>At two a.m. I get out of bed and check what the long-legged buzzard is doing. Unlike me, she’s  sleeping, her head tucked under one wing. Everything is so still, I wonder if the webcam is working, so I lean into the screen and notice the buzzard’s feathers ruffling slightly and a few emerald rock plants, close to the nest, rippling as though underwater. I read through a sheaf of papers on my desk, translations of poems I’ve been working on this week. Now the buzzard is looking straight at me, her eyes luminous in the dark, her hooked beak slightly open. From time to time she inclines her head, listening to the distant howling of a coyote.
She blinks.
I blink back in the darkened space of my office.
The wind whistles through the night.
Then I check the donkeys in the <a href="https://www.safehaven4donkeys.org/donkey-cam-one/">Safe Haven Sanctuary</a>, a rescue center for animals from Israel and the Palestinian territories. The webcam is set over the trough, and tonight there are three donkeys in the frame, one white and two brown, their soft necks dipping down into the fodder, their tails swinging. A fourth donkey rests nearby on the straw-strewn floor. They typically sleep standing up, although I’ve heard donkeys sometimes sleep in a sitting position when they feel secure.
I like being the only person awake, the house to myself; this past year has made me appreciate these small moments of tranquility. The quiet house, the occasional creak of a crack in a wall, the sound of my own breath.
The sharp cry of the buzzard cuts through my earbuds. Something has startled her outside of the frame, and she stretches her neck and flies off. The wind whips up again, and outside my window the branches of the terebinth tree begin to dance.
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I became interested in animal and bird webcams during the second lockdown. They’ve become my soundtrack when working, blocking out sounds from my own habitat, and a gentle diversion when I need a break.
I follow the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLLdLn9Lpok">CritterCam</a> of racoons, deer, and even an alligator in a backyard of North Carolina, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-yzxULbA8I">Barn Owls, Kestrels &amp; Other British Wildlife </a>in the UK, along with thousands of other people from all over the world who are drawn to these creatures.
It’s these parallel lives I find so fascinating. They have their own rhythm, and they have patience, something I’m still learning. Often nothing happens for hours and hours, but still there’s comfort in watching these creatures go about their daily lives, the owls tending their nest, flying off to look for prey, and the donkeys back at the sanctuary, jostling at the trough, standing by the barn door, nuzzling up against each other.
It’s addictive, although most of the time nothing much happens.
Years ago, a buzzard crashed into my living room through the open French windows. We’d recently built the house on the edge of the Ella Valley, close to the forest. I’d always imagined birds of prey as huge creatures; this buzzard was no more than 20 inches in length, although in flight it has a wingspan of around 50 inches. In its talons, the buzzard held three-quarters of a bloody mouse. It was hard to tell who was the most shocked: the buzzard who had taken a wrong turn, or me. The mouse hung upside down, quivering, probably dead already. Back then, no one believed us.
The Ella Valley sits on the slopes of the Judean Hills. We still reminisce about the deer we used to see roaming the area, and the porcupines who rose up alarmingly on their hind legs when startled by the headlights of cars at night. As building continues to take over stretches of land, these are rare sights today, but I’ve seen raptors circling above the valley, their wings outstretched, or perched on treetops in the forest. They’re usually in couples; when I see one, I know the mate is somewhere close by.
Long legged buzzards can be found in parts of Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Asia. They eat mostly rodents, but also small birds, lizards, and insects. The location of this particular <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXWM3WVgeFo&amp;t=71s">Raptor Nest Cam</a> is kept secret in order to protect the birds from overzealous humans. The nest rests on a narrow shelf of pale limestone, evidently high up on a cliff, because last year I watched the fledglings learning to fly there. I even saw one fanning his wings determinedly, revealing speckled white feathers in a magnificent V, before taking off into the sky.
In the late morning, the buzzard stands up, shifts position, and settles down again. A fly hums  around the nest. Last month, the female laid two white eggs speckled with brown. Whenever she flies off, I wonder whether it’s wise to leave those eggs so exposed, even briefly. Last year, an eagle owl swooped down in the middle of the night and snatched away one of the fledglings. This particular incident is available for viewers to see on the Raptors Nest Facebook page, which has 28,000 followers.
The tawny owl in Yorkshire, affectionately named Luna by the webcam owner, also laid two eggs last month in the stump of a beech tree. On a recent chat with other owl enthusiasts, I learned she spends twenty-three hours a day in the nest, with only brief forays away. Her mate, Bomber, delivers her food offerings. I watch Luna, motionless except for her head, which occasionally rotates from side to side. Finally, she twizzles her head briefly in the direction of the camera, and struts purposefully out of the beech stump. Another camera is trained on Gylfie and Finn, two adorable barn owls who can usually be seen leaning amicably against each other, dozing through the day.
Later that afternoon, I take a break and wander into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. My father calls me into his room, which overlooks the backyard. He lifts a finger to his lips and gestures in the direction of the pecan tree we planted more than twenty years ago. Hammering away at the trunk of the tree is a woodpecker. We watch it in silence for a few moments and suddenly there’s a cry in the air as another woodpecker soars over the tree and they disappear from the frame.
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Top image from feed maintained by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU0LJ9et5Tb3m7COFzShgLg">Robert E Fuller</a>.
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Parallel Lives: Buzzards and Barn Owls

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/ground-gives/"></div>For two weeks after arriving in Dublin, I stay indoors. I prowl around the apartment until I know it takes 25 steps to cross over the living room to the kitchen and 17 steps from bed to shower. I spend a lot of time looking out the window. The leaves on the willow tree, tossing about in the wind, almost reach the balcony. I consider dangling over the side of the black wrought iron railings to touch the leaves with the tips of my fingers but decide against it.
<blockquote>Anything can happen.</blockquote>
It’s called restricted self-isolation here. Buying groceries is allowed; going to the pharmacy is permissible. I don’t go anywhere. I finish translating a book on a woman who time travels, the Hebrew melting into English; I read Seamus Heaney poems, and let the lines float around; I unsubscribe from several newsletters and delete myself from a few WhatsApp groups. My mind wanders, strangely unrestricted.
<blockquote>You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky.</blockquote>
There is the occasional rolling thunder. There are two weeks of listening to the screech of the train on the tracks of the railway behind the house, of watching seagulls winging through the air as dusk falls, and people who work at Google and Wix and Facebook wheeling their bicycles along the pathway to the bicycle shed.
<blockquote>It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth </blockquote>
One morning, standing in the kitchen cradling my first coffee of the day, an ear-piercing howl rips through the cold air. Peering down, I see a silver-gray fox standing on the asphalt of the parking lot, her snout tilted upwards. She howls again, raises her head to me on the third floor. It’s a howl of despair, uncannily human. I wonder whether she’s been separated from her pack, or whether her mate was run over by one of those huge garbage disposal trucks. Why else would a fox in the middle of a city howl like that? She glances around, raises one front paw and trots off across the lawn, jumping up with agility onto the mossy stone wall that circumvents the garden. Quick as a flash, tail up, she runs along the wall and disappears. I stand there in the kitchen, the sun flickering weakly through the trees, and I wait.
<blockquote>Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded.</blockquote>
A few minutes later, the fox is back, standing by the bicycle shed, to the left of the parking lot. It’s more of a yelp than a howl this time. Later, I look up foxes online.
<blockquote>1. In early Mesopotamian mythology, the fox was a sacred creature, messenger of the goddess Ninhursag.
2. In Greek mythology, the Teumessian fox was a gigantic animal destined never to be caught. The fox was sent by Dionysus to prey upon the people of Thebes as a punishment for a national crime. (An illustration reveals a red fox spiraling into the air.)</blockquote>
I look up foxes in Dublin city. There are plenty of them, but they’re all russet colored. Except for mine. A fox was even seen trotting along Grafton Street during lockdown, pausing to observe his reflection in the window of the classy Brown Thomas department store. As for what my fox might have been doing out there in the parking lot, I discover that fox cubs begin venturing out on their own in October.
Now and again I glance down at the parking lot, thinking she might return.
The two weeks of isolation pass, and I stop conducting my life through a glass pane. I bundle up and march over to Sandymount, a nearby village with a parade of shops, wooden benches painted green and poodles on leashes. Rain scatters across the narrow streets. Beyond it, the sea,
<blockquote>the River Styx 
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.</blockquote>
As I arrive, the rain tapers off. A waiter arranges tables and chairs outside the café on the green, but all four tables are taken. The waiter shakes his head no when I ask if I can just drag a chair out. “It’s against the rules, social distancing and all that,” he mumbles through his beard and Perspex shield.
<blockquote>Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.</blockquote>
I stand outside, tea in hand. The red café awning billows in a sudden gust of wind. The scent of fresh coffee wafts across the tables. A woman smiles at me from the table near the door. I’m no longer used to random smiles. She has shocking white hair in a bob, and eyes as blue as the sea at its deepest point. A plump corgi dog sits at her feet, a fluorescent raincoat strapped to his sagging belly. He looks up at me inquiringly.
Don’t be standing on ceremony! Come sit here, the woman addresses me, revealing buck teeth. I hesitate. I like a nice chat with strangers, but COVID and all that, I think. The dog pitter-patters two steps toward me. He’ll be looking for treats, she says.
I adjust my facemask, pull the chair a little away from the table, and sit down.
On the table lies a meticulously folded beige bobble hat, a half-finished cappuccino and a blue ceramic plate with four sausages that glint with grease. There’s a knife and fork too, thick silvery ones, but the woman eats with her fingers, carefully wiping them afterwards with a napkin.
In the last lockdown, she tells me, there weren’t even tables and chairs outside. We had to stand up to eat our sausages, she tells me.
The dog is called Barley. He’s 14, which accounts for the weight, the white around his face and the needy look in his beady eyes.
The woman goes into the café. The dog and I sit. A man in a suit nods at me, standing in line outside the café, waiting to go in. He winks at the dog. Nice dog you have for yourself, he says.
<blockquote>Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.</blockquote>
It’s a cold, crisp day. The horse-chestnut trees that line Sandymount Green are tall and thick, their leaves burnished yellow and bronze at the edges. Through the black railings I see a toddler hurtling across the grass, his father running behind him clutching a cellphone and a raincoat. A gray-haired man on a bicycle goes by, wobbling precariously. Watch out for them birds! Your last day on earth! he cries out. No one pays any attention; it’s as if he isn’t there.
<blockquote>Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.</blockquote>
For once, the wind here by the sea has died down but the leaves flutter and dance; occasionally one twirls to the ground, falling outside the perimeter of the green.
<blockquote>Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.</blockquote>
This is where Seamus Heaney lived for many years. Last time I was in Ireland, poet Tony Curtis told me how Heaney used to write in the attic of his house overlooking the sea. I ought to walk down to the sea.
Above, the skies have cleared, and blue appears between chinks in the clouds. The fox will be back.
<blockquote>Anything can happen.</blockquote>
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Top image courtesy of Daphne Sade.
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Ground Gives

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/literature-uncomfortable-joanna-chen-conversation-colum-mccann/"></div>Colum McCann is the kind of person who establishes instant rapport with others. When we spoke on Skype in July, he immediately leaned forward, trying to read the titles of the books stacked on the shelf behind me, as if figuring out what makes me tick. He did, in fact, spend five years figuring out what makes Palestinians and Israelis tick. The result, a staggering book named <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/207433/apeirogon-a-novel-by-colum-mccann/">Apeirogon: A Novel</a> (Random House, 2020), details the parallel worlds of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, a Palestinian and an Israeli who both lost daughters in the ongoing conflict. McCann, who teaches creative writing at Hunter College, won the National Book Award for <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110437/let-the-great-world-spin-by-colum-mccann/">Let the Great World Spin</a>, (Random House, 2009) and is the recipient of numerous other literary accolades. 
Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages. As co-founder of Narrative 4, a non-profit global story exchange organization, McCann is particularly interested in having Israelis and Palestinians read Apeirogon in their mother tongues. To date, he has been pretty much met by a brick wall — so far, no publisher has agreed to translate and distribute Apeirogon in either Arabic or Hebrew.
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JOANNA CHEN: Even your own publisher in Israel, Am Oved, ultimately turned the book down.
COLUM MCCANN: I was shocked, to be honest. I want people to read the book. I want to extend the conversation to the innate nature of the book itself and its themes. I worked really hard to get it to a place where I felt I could stand behind everything that was being said, whether that be emotionally or factually, I probably worked harder on this book in terms of fact-checking and everything else than any other book I’ve worked on in my life. A lot of people gave me some really profound and serious feedback; I was hoping it would open up a debate. Apeirogon is appearing in Lithuanian, Catalonian, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and even in some less widely used languages, such as Croatian. It will be translated into 30+ languages — I really hope that Hebrew and Arabic will eventually be among them.
Am Oved said a stranger wouldn’t understand.
I respect the fact that they said no, but I don’t respect the fact that they say a stranger wouldn’t understand this. It seems to me a stranger can come in and do precisely what they’re talking about.
Literary translation, to my mind, provides an essential bridge into other cultures and beliefs, and opinions. Perhaps Israelis and Palestinians aren’t ready to cross this bridge.
There was more positive interest, I have to say, coming from the Arabic language world… Just last week I had someone get in touch with me saying — “I want to translate this into Arabic. Is there anything I can do to translate this?”
But Arabic and Hebrew language publishers feel the book is too hot to handle.   
Is it something that’s a little bit uncomfortable? Yes. But literature should be uncomfortable. Literature should sort of rock people back on their toes. It should be something that knocks people off their comfortable balance and confronts some of the heartbreak but also confronts some of the multitudinous aspects of this. I think the brave artist, or the brave reader, or the brave publisher, is one who says, “I am going to scuff this up a little bit — I am going to throw a little spanner in the works so we can begin to look at ourselves a little differently.” The job of the artist is to complicate things and to talk about the multitudinous aspect of our character.
Rami and Bassam are longtime members of the Parents’ Circle Family Forum, an organization that advocates acknowledging the narrative of others.     
I like Walt Whitman’s idea: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Rami and Bassam do this. They’re complicated people with complicated emotions. But in the end their fundamental duty is toward each other’s humanity, recognizing you can maybe turn grief into a weapon for dialogue and for peace. This is what they call for. They say, “If I don’t know you above ground, I will end up knowing you six feet below ground.” And I think that’s a powerful argument.
Did your own experiences growing up in Ireland impact your treatment of the Middle East conflict?
Yes, I’m from Dublin but my mother’s from Derry. Every summer we’d get on a bus and go to Derry for at least two weeks. On that bus, we’d get stopped at the checkpoint, on the border, where immediately things changed, the postboxes became red, the roads changed and widened, and soldiers would come on the bus and we would have to step off, or change buses.
I had extended family in Northern Ireland who were — I suppose it’s safe to say — peripherally involved in what was going on, so I grew up in a time when we were not at peace. I also managed to see what shape peace might possibly take, even though it’s shaky right now. But what was done by the Women’s Coalition, for example, in Northern Ireland, reminds me very much of what the women in black, Machsom Watch, are doing today in Israel. You know, people on the ground, making a difference.
Apeirogon risks having people roll their eyes and say, “I’ve already read that a thousand times.” The thought crossed my own mind, to be honest.
I knew I had to tell this one differently and I knew I had to gamble. There are lots of powerful narratives out there. I thought if I can shake up form, shake up the literary form, I can perhaps disrupt in the way that I want to disrupt. Yes, it’s a conventional enough story. Oh yeah, I’ve seen that before. But my belief in these men and in the fact it had to be told in a different way was paramount to me.
The great writer John Burger, who died a few years ago said: “Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one.” And he also suggested that in order for stories to live they have to be told over and over and over again. Even in the face of adversity. Even if they feel like they’re being flung into the void. Because eventually someone is going to hear it. and I think that what the women did in Northern Ireland and what these women are doing in Israel and in Palestine, what these young people who are going out and protesting are doing, and it seems like they’re throwing their voices into the void, but they’re actually keeping the voice alive — and someday it’ll twirl up like some whirlwind and this will be important.
How did this impact the crafting of the narrative? 
When I started it, to be honest with you, I thought I’d do it in maybe 100 sections, and the more I got into it the more I realized how hard it was. It began to be symphonic for me — and I thought, 365 sections — and then it became so alarmingly clear to me when I realized that Rami and Bassam were telling their stories in order to keep their daughters alive — which is like Scheherazade. I thought, That’s what it is, it’s One Thousand and One Nights, and I have got to echo it.
Symphonic is a good way to describe it.
It’s a conventional narrative that takes place over 24 hours — and it also becomes a compendium of experiences. I am so proud of my publishers for allowing me to call it Apeirogon, which means “multifaceted”, and it really changed things straight away.
Yes, who can even pronounce that word.
I only ever met two people who know what this word means! I discovered it accidentally, and for the publishers to have the bravery to call it that — they’re even calling it Apeirogon in Germany and France — is quite something. I wanted to be brave with this one. It felt like a certain amount of culmination.
The book is multifaceted, not just in its opinions but also in structure. It flits around from subject to subject, crossing physical and temporal boundaries, zigzagging through people’s lives.
Do you know who my best readers are? The young kids, 15 to 16 years old. They are used to jumping around from subject to subject, they do it online all the time. So we can jump from migratory birds to tightropes and the kids get it. I’ve never had as many letters from 15- and 16- year-olds for any other book of mine.
This leads me on to the work you do with youth at Narrative 4 and the global story exchange that you facilitate there. 
We have a number of projects going on now in Nablus, South Africa, the South Bronx, and Kentucky, where we turn empathy for each other into action. It’s driven by young people and teachers, and inspired a little by artists. It’s good work. We’ve worked in 12 countries now, to my mind the only way we’re going to get through this is by getting to know one another in more profound ways.
Telling stories.
Because stories are dangerous things, stories are tough, it’s not some airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky notion, you know. So we find that when these kids step into someone else’s shoes, something extraordinary happens.
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Literature of the Uncomfortable: Joanna Chen in Conversation with Colum McCann

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/poetry/telling-stories-joanna-chen-interviews-poet-tony-curtis/"></div>I met poet Tony Curtis by the railings of the Irish National Gallery in Dublin, right after lockdown was eased in Ireland. The author of numerous books of poetry, he has won several prizes for his work, and is a longtime member of Aosdána, Ireland’s coveted association of artists. His latest collection, This Flight Tonight, was published last year with Occasional Press.
I recognized him immediately, a quirky figure in a black waistcoat and crisp white shirt, looking anxiously up and down the road, one leg resting on the railings, a brown leather satchel bulging with books in his arms.
We skipped shaking hands on this blustery day, and began walking in the direction of Kilkenny, a long-established café on Nassau Street, just off Merrion Square where the poet Elizabeth Bishop, one of Curtis’ favorites, walked. Curtis is a mine of information and a treasure trove of literary anecdotes, showing me where James Joyce first met his wife, Nora Barnacle, pointing out a dark building where Thomas Beckett lived and the famous Sweny’s Pharmacy, which hasn’t changed since Ulysses was published, back in the 1920s. Later, over scones and jam, Tony told me story after story, because that’s what he is at heart — a storyteller.
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JOANNA CHEN: In “Currach,” a poem named after a traditional Irish boat, you say, “My people’s story was written on water, / most of it was washed away.” Might this define your role as a poet?
TONY CURTIS: That’s how we are in Ireland. We’re storytellers. Our storytelling goes way back into the mist. Do you know the reason? Because the Romans never came here. If they would have come, they would have replaced our gods with their gods, they would have straightened all our roads (which might have been a good thing) but of course they never came.
So poetry is something of a tradition for you.
Poetry has always been in my life because my granny, who died 11 years after James Joyce, loved poetry. She was almost a hundred when she died. My father was a great storyteller. So when the family got together at night — they were teetotalers — we could tell a story, we could sing a song, we could recite a poem. And these were working-class Dublin people. My granny could recite reams of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Robert Service. And as I got older and began writing my own poetry, I would ask her, why do you always do such a long recitation? And she said, “I always do a long recitation because after that it’ll be a long time before they ask me to do it again.” So that’s where I come from.
Nice story. 
I’ll tell you another one. My granny was a tea-oholic. She spent all her time going to church and after Mass you got tea with the priest. When she heard WWII was coming she sold the double bed that she slept in with my grandfather, she moved him in with my father and his brothers, and she filled the rest of the bedroom with boxes and boxes of tea. My father said she could have made a fortune during the war selling tea on the black market. Did you read my poem about tea? “Sometimes I think I’ll drown in all the tea I can drink.”
You seem to go from story to story. I’m thinking of the line you wrote: “The end of one voyage is the beginning of another.” I like that. 
I wrote that sitting on Puget Sound, on the coast of Washington, watching the ferry going back and forth, back and forth, all day long. I said to myself, I’m like a boat, this is my life as a poet — I go from poem to poem, book to book, I finish one poem, I go on to another poem. The ferry goes across, comes back. It just grows rustier and rustier — and that year they even found cracks in the bottom of the ferry… So I’m like an old cargo ship, you know, I thought it was very interesting.
During normal times, I know you travel a lot. But what is your writing practice like here in Ireland?
I’m very mono. I go to a town called Skerries, North County Dublin. I leave the house every day at half seven, I drive three miles over the hills to Skerries, and I have my breakfast in Olive Café. I always have the same thing — coffee and toast. COVID disrupted this terribly. I hadn’t had breakfast at home for 40 years and suddenly everything was closed and I had to start having breakfast at home. It was very disconcerting.
I go to this place on the headland. It used to be called Red Island. It had a popular hotel and all the Irish bands used to play there. Now it’s just a carpark.
That doesn’t sound too promising.
This place is made for writing poetry. The hotel was famous as a place where couples used to come from all over Ireland. They’d spend the weekend there on the island, dancing and making love and all that, so the energy is still there, in the ground. For a hundred years they came from all over Ireland. They danced, laughed, drank beer and made love. And it was all there when I was a child.
And now it’s gone and all that’s left is the carpark, and me, and there’s a big sign for the swimmers that I love: “Competent Swimmers Only.” And sometimes when the tide is way out and there’s no water, I think it’s really funny. So that’s where I stay until lunchtime.
After lunch have you finished writing for the day?
I won’t say I’ve finished, but I’ll read. If I didn’t read, what would be the point?
Do you read your poems out loud, like your granny?
Yes, on the beach. That way I can remember them all.
But you take a notebook.
Oh yes. But sometimes poems just come to me quickly, in my head. I wrote one between the red and green traffic light. There was no time to write it down.
You also read a lot in public.   
I especially love reading to children. From the age of about 3 to 13 children absolutely love poetry so I enjoy writing poems for them. “The whole world is watching TV. Me? I’m watching a tree.”
Is that also from one of your poems? 
Yes, but I never read on poetry day, I think it’s an awful idea. Every day should have poetry. It would be more dramatic to have a day of no poetry. When I’m asked to read on poetry day, I always say, “Put me down for the following week. That’s world mental health day.” And I always read on that day.
In “The Blackbird’s Lullaby” you admit “my rhythm /has always been / off beat. When young, / I was often found asleep / face down in a book.” I’m intrigued by that.
You see, my other granny lived with us for a while. My brother Brian, she called Brian. My brother David, she called David. My brother Phillip, Phillip. But she always called me Odd. She’d say, “Where’s Odd?”
“Odd” was how my granny used to introduce me to strangers. Men we’d meet on the steps of church, women we’d meet when visiting the dead or the dying. I can’t imagine she brought much comfort. She’d point to me and say, “He’s Odd.” She’d also say I was good at poetry, as if she meant, He’s a bit slow. Even though my granny loved poetry.
As you also did. 
I was terrible in school as a child, no school could hold me, but I had a very good memory. The teacher, Brother Kenny, wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Mr. Frost” on the blackboard and we had to learn it by Monday. I was 11 at the time, and there were 45 boys in the class and I started laughing. Brother Kenny came up to me and said, “What’s so funny Mr. Curtis?” For me he may as well have written “Falling Leaves by Mr. Autumn” or “Water Flowing by Mr. Rivers.” But it was easy for me to remember that poem. There was no other word than the next word. That’s how it’s always been.
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Telling Stories: Joanna Chen Interviews Poet Tony Curtis

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/quiet-world/"></div>After Jeffrey McDaniel’s “The Quiet World.”
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Annie and I are having a dance party. I push the coffee table to one side so there’ll be room to move. Annie’s already dancing; from time to time the screen freezes and there are a thousand staggered Annies. “Can you hear? Can you hear?” she asks and I nod my head, do a thumbs-up. I can’t hear. I follow her movements, arms up, arms down, twist and turn. Someone crosses Annie’s living room, bends down, removes a book from the shelf.
<blockquote>In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.</blockquote>
I watch a guy on Facebook playing guitar and singing. He leans into the screen but he can’t see me, he’s reading comments sent by viewers. I click on a heart emoji and watch it quivering up the screen like a balloon let loose, like a salmon shooting up the river, along with all the other hearts and smileys.
Outside the leaves on the lemon tree glitter in the rain, stars in a vast sky. The birds start their dawn chorus, crows and parakeets, wrens and robins. There’s a faint rustling through the hyssop bush. The lavender, the wild mustard.  Blue lupines sway in an early morning breeze.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-13815" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wild-mustard-497x1024.jpg" alt="" width="497" height="1024" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wild-mustard-497x1024.jpg 497w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wild-mustard-146x300.jpg 146w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wild-mustard-768x1581.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/wild-mustard.jpg 777w" sizes="(max-width: 497px) 100vw, 497px" />
There was a power cut yesterday. We fumbled around in the dark looking for candles and matches using the light from a cell phone. We need more matches. We need to charge laptops when the power returns. We need to check on the kids.
<blockquote>Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.</blockquote>
Dorothy is keeping busy. On Skype she tells me she’s finished cleaning the door handles in her apartment and is now cleaning the doorbell, just in case.
<blockquote>I saved the rest for you.</blockquote>
My phone isn’t working. The line is distorted, the calls cut after a few seconds. I get the point and stop trying.
<blockquote>When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.</blockquote>
I’m adjusting well to this new way. The café up the road is closed. I’ve stopped asking Raz to read me the news. I read it myself. I read this poem, I read the novel assigned in my book club last month. The words dance around, settle on the page. The wind whips up outside and the windowpanes rattle nervously in their wooden frames. The dog looks at me mournfully. I pat her soft little head, rub her fur the wrong way so it sticks up. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear. It’s Petra, my friend from way back when. “Joanna?” she asks.
<blockquote>When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.</blockquote>
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-13816" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/blue-lupines-2-497x1024.jpg" alt="" width="497" height="1024" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/blue-lupines-2-497x1024.jpg 497w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/blue-lupines-2-146x300.jpg 146w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/blue-lupines-2-768x1581.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/blue-lupines-2.jpg 777w" sizes="(max-width: 497px) 100vw, 497px" />
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The Quiet World

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/making-people-feel-uneasy-joanna-chen-conversation-katherine-young/"></div>Years ago, poet and translator Katherine Young gave me a lift back to the apartment where I was staying in Washington, DC. I’d been invited to attend a meeting of the DC-area Literary Translators Network ALTA, of which Young is a founding member. We’ve stayed in touch since then and last week Young sent me the manuscript of her latest full-length translation, Look at Him by Anna Starobinets, (Slavica, forthcoming in 2020).
Young has translated numerous works of poetry and prose in Russian and is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow for Farewell, Aylis, a trilogy by the Azerbaijaniani writer Akram Aylis, (Academic Studies Press, 2018). Young’s own poetry collection, Day of the Guards (University of Arkansas Press, 2014) was a finalist in the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize; her new collection is forthcoming in 2020.
I read the manuscript Young had sent me through the night, unable to put it down, a memoir of a young woman in Moscow who discovers in the 16th week of her pregnancy that the baby she is carrying has a fatal defect. The book chronicles not only the author’s personal anguish as she contemplates abortion but the inflexibility of the Russian medical system and Russian society in general.
We spoke the next day on Skype.
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JOANNA CHEN: Look at Him is a book that tears at the heart. How difficult was it to translate?
KATHERINE YOUNG: I read it very quickly before I translated it. I knew what I was getting into. I’m able to compartmentalize, and in work like this when so many pages are heartbreaking, my general compartmentalization skills were useful but not totally effective.
What kind of a process did you go through?
While translating the book, I found it tremendously moving to be in the head of a person who I might not have much in common with, to be able to connect on this really deep emotional level with this process that she was going through. That’s the power of writing, right? It breaks down the superficial, it goes to what unites, or divides, all of us.
In your translator’s note you mention the book came in for a lot of criticism when it was published in Russia.  You quote, for example, a review by Agalya Toporova who writes, “As a human being, as a woman, I am physically sickened by this text”.  
There is a huge and vocal community of people in Russia who believe that abortion is wrong for religious reasons. But it is also because the book itself develops its own genre, no one in Russia has seen anything quite like this. Women don’t talk about these things, even with their partners, so to write a book in which you expose the most intimate details of your body and the choices you made medically is a violation of a lot of subtle taboos about women who are supposed to  grin and bear their trials and tribulations.
Reading it in the United States will be a totally different experience to reading it in Moscow, a culture that is so different. This is undoubtedly part of the complexity of literary translation.
People air their deepest and most private material in American literature. But for women to do so in a Russian context is a rare thing. Over and over Starobinets cites older women who scold her and say, “If you talk to your husband about this, if you involve your husband in this, you’re going to lose him. Women need to keep this to themselves.” That’s not the situation in America, culturally.
You told me you like literature that makes people feel uneasy.
If a work doesn’t make you feel uneasy — and I don’t mean uneasy in a sense of a horror hanging over you — if it doesn’t stir you up and make you think, what’s the point of translating it, what’s the point of reading it? Obviously, there’s escapism, but if I’m giving 6 to 8 months of my life translating a book, I want the book to have resonance and I hope that the book will speak to people, perhaps challenge them and hopefully enlighten them.
What attracted you to literary translation in the first place? 
I honestly think it goes back to language, just the pleasure of language. I used to like codes when I was a child. I liked thinking about why we would disguise what we wrote or said; I suspect that language functions in that way for me. It’s a mask. Especially when you’re learning a language, as I was. I felt I had a different name in Russia, I had a different persona in Russian because I was so limited at the beginning in terms of what I could say. It felt like having an alternative personality. Less so these days but at the time it was like having another identity.
What is special about the Russian language?
As a writer, part of my formative training took place in Russia. I had written all my life but didn’t get very serious about it until I was living in Moscow in the 1990s and was lucky enough to make contact with a wonderful poetry teacher, Nadezhda Mirova, who spoke no English. It took almost two years for me to read through pretty much the entire canon of Russian poetry; working with these poems in Russian brought about a magical change in the way I heard language.
Russian is so different from English grammatically and structurally. The sounds are different, and when you are working in a language that is not your own, when you have to think about every word, you are always translating in your head to some extent, paying much more attention to those basic sound formations. It’s not possible for me to go to a long lecture in Russian and just tune out, the way I can go to a long lecture in English and know I’ve gotten the gist of it. It’s an active listening as opposed to a passive one. But in translation, and specifically in the translation of poetry, each language has its own rhythms, its own music, its own sound. What I’m trying to do is capture something of this.
There’s a really good analogy that Edith Grossman cites about what translation is, essentially comparing it to what an orchestra does. An orchestra gets a piece of paper with notes, right? It’s up to the conductor and the individual musicians and the audience to hear and interpret that music in a way that makes sense to them, so translation is a performance in that way for me. There’s not necessarily one right translation although there are many wrong ones but all of us are going to hear and shape that music a little differently. I can’t replicate the music of Russian in English; I can only take a Russian poem and try to perform it in English with the tools and the music of English.
One of the important aspects of literary translation is enabling people who do not speak the source language to read the work in a language they understand. I recently read your translation of Iya Kiva’s poem “little green lights,” in which she writes, “let’s start, yes, let’s start visiting neighbors to borrow war / on the other side of our green park.” It seems to me she is almost talking about the act of translation, explaining what war is to people who have not experienced it.
Translating it into English was a way of entering into that world. For me as a translator it’s not so much to get the work out there to other people. I’m happy to do that and happy when people love it, but it’s mostly because I can’t resist going in there, and the way for me to enter it is to work on it, to get my hands dirty and to play with the language, to find out why they chose one verb as opposed to another verb, so it’s a study of writing in some senses.
This is an evocative and heartbreaking poem, Iya Kiva is of course a transcendent poet, very much on the rise today in the Ukraine, she has written about the fact that her life changed entirely when her hometown was bombed in the current war with Russia and her father was killed. She became a refugee, and everything she’d written before had no relevance to her, and she began to pare down, strike to the heart of the matter — and her writing has taken off as a result.
What attracted you to Akram Aylisli’s trilogy? 
His supporters and friends in Moscow, people who worked on his behalf, contacted me and said, “You know this work needs to be out there, would you be interested in taking it on?” What really clinched it for me was the astonishing fact that his books were burned in 2013 in Azerbaijan, a country that considers itself progressive and civilized and a citizen of the world. Azerbaijan has taken important roles in cultural and human rights commissions as if a writer’s books had not been burned in their country. All Aylisli wanted to do was to write and tell the truth. How can we not respect this?
In the broadest sense I feel like everything we say is a representation of who we are and where we come from, what the poet is experiencing in the world. Even a poem about flowers is saying something within that larger context.
Despite some great works in translation that have been published recently, literary translation is still not being given the acknowledgement it deserves in the US.    
So many people who consider themselves literate and intellectuals in the American context are not willing to look beyond something originally written in English. They feel the translation couldn’t possibly give them a sense of the original so why should they bother. It’s a really interesting prejudice. I don’t know if it’s true of other English-speaking countries but it’s certainly true here.
What has translation done for your own writing?  
For me translation and writing are almost inseparable. My poetry comes out of the work I’ve done in Russian, whether it’s in translation or not; reading, interacting intellectually with authors, looking at their concerns and their world views, and absorbing to some extent some of those perceptions of writing and the world and what is needful in writing, so it’s almost a mindset.
I feel very much more informed by Russian poets than most American poets. I’ve read Walt Whitman, but I don’t identify with him the same way I might say Alexander Pushkin or Mikhail Lermontov or Anna Akhmatova. My first book in English of my own poetry was very much tied to Russia. The poems were themed around Russia, Russian poetry and literature, the experience of dissidence, being there and observing life in the Soviet Union. My next collection, due out this year, is much different. It has to do with the theme of trauma and abuse, a very America-of-the-moment theme — but none of these poems would exist without that Russian literary background.
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Photo of Katherine Young by Samantha H. Collins.
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Making People Feel Uneasy: Joanna Chen in Conversation with Katherine Young

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water

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-view-from-here/close-bone-joanna-chen-conversation-rachel-eliza-griffiths/"></div>Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an award-winning multi-media artist, poet, photographer, and writer of essays and fiction. She is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books 2010), The Requited Distance (The Sheep Meadow Press 2011), Mule &amp; Pear (New Issues Poetry &amp; Prose 2011), and Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books 2015). Her next book, Seeing the Body, will be published by W. W. Norton in June 2020. 
She is also a very generous person. I first contacted Griffiths a few months ago when a student in my literary translation class asked if I had the full text of “The Human Zoo”, a poem from her last book, a fragment of which my student came across online. I wrote Griffiths, asking if she could send me the rest of the poem. To be honest, I half-expected her not to answer. In fact, she wrote me right back, attaching “The Human Zoo” in its entirety, and told me she would be honored to have a poem of hers translated into another language. And if this wasn’t enough, she later sent me an audio clip of her thoughts on translation. 
Some of these thoughts I have incorporated below into a conversation we had on Skype last week. Griffiths had just stepped off a plane; she was speaking to me from her hotel room in New Orleans, where she had arrived to document Dread Scott’s reenactment of the 26-mile rebellion march taken 200 years ago by black slaves. “I don’t know what I’ll find,” she told me, leaning close into the screen of her laptop, “but I’m here.” 
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JOANNA CHEN: Will this be a form of witnessing?
RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: I think when you witness something in your own voice, so to speak, in your body, it lives in you in a certain way. You carry it wherever you go, you understand you have a right to your own memory and your own narrative about what you’ve witnessed. It’s meaningful because it happened to you — and you hold it and you carry it. There are so many poets, visual artists, and musicians who conjure up events and feelings that happened before I was even born. I carry James Baldwin with me. I carry Toni Morrison with me, and I’m grateful for it. Witnessing is not this anonymous thing. It always has a voice. It has a certain kind of singularity to it.
There’s a poem that appears in your next book that I’m carrying with me right now: “Whipping Tree.” In this poem you write that you are “trying to translate a word / that glows like a chain.”
I was on a tour with the poet Tracy K. Smith. She had asked if I would be the image designer for her upcoming libretto “Castor and Patience” — and that involved us traveling. We spent some days traveling around Savannah and Hilton Head. It was like going back in time, and going back into the Gullah Geechee language. I fear that in two or three decades those people may not be here to speak that language and there may not be people here to help us understand how important the history and culture of the Gullah people is.
What was the trigger for this outstanding poem?
On the last day of our tour in Savannah we came to a cemetery. It was once a plantation — and when it became a cemetery it was divided, it was segregated — white part, black part — which is ridiculous for dead people, but that’s what it was. There was a cluster of trees in this cemetery, one of which is called “the whipping tree,” and sitting here right now in New Orleans it makes me almost tear up to think about this kind of memory of our American history. I guess this tree was quite young when it happened — slaves were bound to it and lashed with whips. The brutality of these lashings left lacerations in the tree. You can actually see which way the lash hit the human body, a black body, hitting the body so hard that it left marks on the tree. The bodies are gone, probably buried in the cemetery, but the marks remain on the tree. Today this tree is the language. The only redemptive part of this is that the tree continued to grow in spite of everything. None of us could talk afterwards. It was so deafening to look at the tree and see this.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12971" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/tree.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="600" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/tree.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/tree-300x180.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/tree-768x461.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
When did you finally sit down and write about it? 
Only months later. I kept thinking: I’m going to write about the whipping tree. And I would see nothing — just white space — and when I did write about it I was in a very beautiful place, Cativa, in the Gulf of Mexico, surrounded by jungle, and very free trees, and art, and water was nearby, and life, and I thought, only here can I get near to what I want to say about the tree. I printed the photographs I’d made of that tree and put them up on the wall and I kept looking at them. I felt I had to reclaim this — to think of those bodies that are like mine, tied to that gorgeous tree. And that’s when I wrote the poem.
I love that you express yourself through a variety of mediums.
I like to experiment. If I have a phrase I think might be a poem, I might see what it looks like visually — it’s almost like having dishes in a laboratory — I might see what happens if I try to photograph this phrase before I put it in a poem and vice-a-versa.
You’ve said you wouldn’t be the poet you are today without translators. 
Half of my favorite poems I only have access to because of literary translation — Rilke’s world, for example. I wouldn’t be able to enter these worlds without translators. There’s an energy with translations, a passion to have an exchange that’s really important for the rest of the world to listen in on. It’s a mysterious, exacting, demanding process. Unfortunately, literary translation has not yet gotten its dues in the world, but I feel as though in the last 10 to 15 years I’ve seen such a difference in the energy and tenacity of translators. I encourage the poets I teach to get involved as much as they can with translation, that there’s a really serious commitment to it — the research and the knowledge and the pushing and challenging of one’s self to get as close to the bone of the original language as possible while recognizing the difficulties and challenges, but also the beautiful openings that translation allows us to meet each other in.
Lorca is one of my favorite poets. Machado, Milosz, and also Cavafy, Neruda, Szymborska — all of them give a sense of the world.
When you say “a sense of the world,” what exactly do you mean?
It makes me think and imagine a very different perspective that comes together in a way that it would not come if I only relied on the American perspective, which I find very claustrophobic, for me, in terms of identity, and very frustrating at times. Having said that, I feel limitless in my own expansion of my identity and the different selves that I am.
How does all this manifest itself in your forthcoming book?
Seeing the Body has photographs as well as poetry — it’s the first time I’ve ever brought my photographs and poetry together. In Lighting the Shadow I started to visualize in language. The actual title Lighting the Shadow has different resonances for me, but one of those is my identity as a photographer — and the acceptance of a kind of gray world that is necessary to see — whereas if I have all black I have no image. If I have all light, I have no image but it’s in that grey nuance and that dimension that images, surfaces, and faces can be seen, and landscape and all these different things. In Seeing the Body there are now literal photographs — all of them are self- portraits that make up one section of the book. There’s no text around it, just the images, which feels terrifying to me.
Terrifying is a strong word to use. 
Well, I think to have a section of a book of poems that is all image and it’s all your body, it’s all you, I feel quite vulnerable — and at the same time this was a moment where I knew there had to be a section of images and I knew that I had to not try to narrate or write illustrative notes about the images, not even titles, because I didn’t want to control them and I don’t want to control the person who looks at the images and tell them what they see. They can enter the photographs or not, on their own terms — and I’ll be waiting.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-12973" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/water.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="600" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/water.jpg 1000w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/water-300x180.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/water-768x461.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
What would you like to tell me about Seeing the Body? 
The book is about my mother who died in 2015, two weeks after I turned in Lighting the Shadow to my editor. Seeing the Body is a book about my own transformation, of being in the world in a kind of motherless way, coming to grips with a lot of different things in my life. Most of the poems are about my relationship with my mother and there’s also a section about American identity and what was happening around me while I was working on the poems: Mike Brown, Eric Garner. All this was happening while I was trying to grieve for my mother. So, there was the very private grief that I was experiencing and also a very public grief and rage that appears in the book. My struggle of being in the world during those years makes me feel very exposed in this book, I feel it’s very different territory for me, I just got the copyedits back. It’s always an exciting  moment to think, wow, this is going to be a book. And it’s helped me to be close to my mother again and to think of her life, her humor, and her courage. She’s always near me, so I’m very happy about that.
I think she’d be really proud of you.
I’m definitely crying right now but I’m comfortable with that. You know, I’m in New Orleans and I’m making art, and things are great and I’m crying and that’s life.
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Close to the Bone: Joanna Chen in Conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/poetry/unfortunately-care-joanna-chen-interviews-olga-livshin/"></div>The first time I saw Olga Livshin she was passing by the window of the studio I was working in. It was raining heavily. She was carrying a brown carton and talking animatedly on her cellphone. Five minutes later, she passed by my window carrying a stack of books, still talking on her cellphone. We were at a writers’ residency in Virginia and, I deduced, she was moving into the studio next door. We would be neighbors. She went by a third time, a cup of tea in one hand, still talking.
Livshin is poet and translator, multi-tasker and rapid-fire talker whose words can be read in her newly published book of poetry, A Life Replaced (Poets &amp; Traitors, 2019). This slim volume weaves Livshin’s own poetry through her translations from Russian of work by Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman. In doing so, Livshin grapples with her own life as an immigrant, her childhood in Odessa, and her life in the US, where she lives today. As a translator and immigrant, Livshin’s work particularly resonates for me. We reconnected on Skype last week, she in her home and me in my office in the Ella Valley of Israel.
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JOANNA CHEN: How did this book that straddles two languages come into being?
OLGA LIVSHIN: It goes back to something that most children of immigrants share when they move to another country. I think the original language is still a little bit like the mother’s milk and then the second language is something like Coke — delicious and fizzy but not ultimately as fulfilling as what they’re used to.
You were 14 when you arrived in the US from Moscow.
I think, like most immigrants, I veer between two languages, two cultures. We are in the process of translating our own lives in our heads, where one part of us is hidden.
I dealt with my own culture shock at that time by translating poets that I really liked, beginning with a contemporary poet, Nina Iskrenko and then, in college, I gravitated toward one of the authors who came to be in this book, Vladimir Gandelsman. I absolutely think of my relationship to his poetry as an apprenticeship.
I think where it differs from Akhmatova is that, for me, Akhmatova&#8217;s poetry is like swimming in an endless but still — controlled-waters, whereas Gandelsman&#8217;s work is full of linguistic surprises: images that connote dark humor, interruptions of one register by another (i.e. lofty poetic diction by conversational languages and back), and dissonant rhymes. His poetry challenges, and I like being challenged by it and hopefully incorporating some of its features into my work.
Do you remember the first time you wrote a poem of your own in response to another poem?
Anna Ahmatova has always been looming over my world as a seminal figure; as Ilya Kaminsky says in his foreword to my book, she is “the great poetic mother.” Akhmatova is pictured in all these portraits as an arrogant poet who doesn’t look you in the eye, who’s posing, she has this long shawl, and I always found that intriguing because the more people create these layers around them the more likely they are to be actually vulnerable inside. Her poetry is quite steely and impenetrable, deceptively simple, but actually there is a smaller and more vulnerable self, and when I taught a class on her, a few years ago, in Alaska, I read some biographies about her, and I got to know the hardships and also the love affairs of this woman, and the difficult childhood she had. She came from a family where the father was away and cheating on the mother and eventually they were divorced, and these experiences shaped her. And so I realized that this posing as a poor Russian old lady with gorgeous hair was a kind of armor she created around herself and when there’s an armor I guess it creates an instinct in some of us to go after people who have armor and to undress them and see what’s underneath the armor and to say — I am like you and you don’t have to do this, I see this and I understand why you had to do this.
Is this when you first wrote a poem in response to Akhmatova?
Yes, my first poem in this book dedicated to her is “Annas at the Stove” before I even had the idea for this book… and I thought, My goodness, we think of Akhmatova as the strong feminist — and she is — but she also had to live through self-destructive acts such as burning down the library and works of a loved one. What did that feel like? And then I reread her poems through those eyes and write my own poems, addressing Akhmatova.
I think a lot of the work of a translator is a very deep reading of the text as you have just said — the armor, the undressing, what lies underneath. Isn’t that what we do as translators?
It’s one of our many odd jobs as translators, including this imposed striptease. I first got this when I read an interview with Tatyana Tolstaya, the contemporary Russian writer. I don’t remember the exact image but it was about navigating other people’s souls, it was about a hankering to understand very deeply and very closely how another being breathes and walks and I think it comes from a certain impatience with the liminality of life, of one life, and wanting to live more than one lifetime, this fantasy, right? It’s not realizable but we at least try on other people’s selfhoods. We can be male, we can be of another era, we can be collective, as when one translates an epic poem, we can move to other places. So absolutely, I find that it’s a kind of travel.
There’s this stripping off, but it’s also about listening to voices very deeply. This comes out in the intertextuality of your book, your own voice responding and interacting with the two poets.
I think it’s so fascinating that you’re bringing this up, the interactions that happen in life experiences, in cultures and history, and it just occurred to me that this book is in English, not just because of the practical reason that I’m addressing an American or at least English reading audience, it’s also that this book establishes some kind of idea of a common language that doesn’t really exist in principle, right? We each of us speak slightly differently, not even an idiolect, but a language of a self that is not fully comprehensible. We are mysteries to each other and I really like the idea of what it would be like if we could try to see another person as fully complete, in all their glory.
In “Dressing a Memory” you write, “Well, these are child words: / Моя радость, a lantern on some other life.” It’s a very rich line. A lantern not just on some other life but a life from another place or time. On the other hand, you say “child words,” so it could be your childhood as well.
I wrote that poem before becoming a mother and now, having seen my own child communicate in a way that’s not verbal, it’s interesting to me… there’s trust that happens before words are formed, and I think it’s that part of language we keep seeking our whole lives. We want to be understood and appreciated in exactly that way by others, we want to have agency in the world, to define… Language breaks down. Language is an imperfect medium as we know. Just because it doesn’t work doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop trying. I dream of a world in which, for example, immigrants get to define some of the agenda for how they are seen, outside the narrow ideologies into which they are squashed. A world in which various marginalized groups would have some kind of say in the respect that is due to them and in the way that their cultures and languages are honored. I see that breaking down all over the world right now. It’s very disheartening to see. We want to have some kind of agency, some kind of role in defining the agenda for how we are seen in the world. obviously our actions matter too but trusting the world, the idea that we’re not like I say in one of the poems just “murderous strangers,” it would be very nice if that were the case.
Isn’t translation very much a lamp on some other life?
So I think yes, translation can be that lantern. I think what’s going on in this poem is another dream of language without language, language without translation, that the two lovers, who might have been totally incidental to each other, might have touched each other literally and metaphorically in a way that somehow left a mark on their lives. And so that is not unlike the childhood language we were talking about earlier. I think translation attempts to do that, I think that translation also probably fails in a myriad of ways because we can’t translate somebody without adding something. So rather than making it some kind of pure correct translation, actually what we produce at best is a kind of touch, the impression of how somebody touched us and why, how that author affected us when we were reading them. At best, as translators, that is what we carry. We actually carry our fingerprints all over the finished product. We carry the author, we carry ourselves, it’s not a pure effect at all.
Do you regard yourself more a translator or more a poet?
For me, poetry and translation come fundamentally from the same place. I think they momentarily put a little patch on the holes that language leaves. And by language I mean everyday language. We do a lot of harm with accidentally said words and these days these words stick around because of social media, people cause harm through imprecise language, language that creates cruel actions. The use of language and imagery, whether its poetry or translation, someone else’s words or mine, language and imagery that trickle down into the heart, we translators can do a little bit of damage control.
In this way, translation is also a lens into another world.
Yes, I think that is beautiful, translation as a kind of lens in which to look at the world. You can’t get this by only reading yourself or the same five poets you read…With translation I agree that there is a sustained, close way of interacting with the text that you don’t get elsewhere. You live with that text, right? I guess for me writing my own work is important because I do feel like my Russian is censored or rather sent to its room because it’s been bad. And so for me, even when I write in English, it’s as if I am writing in Russian because I’m releasing something that was the first fourteen years of my life, it’s like I carry this genie inside me and I need to let it out occasionally. Let it walk around a little before I bottle it back up.
Do you write in Russian?
No! I gave up on writing in Russian. So there is not a lot of self-censorship but there is an audience that I address. I live here [in the US] and this is where most of my community is and this is where the people that I want to speak to are. But actually I can’t speak to them the way that want to. So every time I write it is a translation from the original.
Mother tongue!
It’s very personal isn’t it? We appropriate it for a particular thing and then that thing becomes us, who we are. The voice is very much in that language, in the maternal language, for both you and me. that voice wants to talks and wants to be heard.
Immigration is a strong theme in your book. In your introduction, you describe how you were attacked in your first year at junior high in San Diego. You were different, you looked and acted different.
It’s not like xenophobia began yesterday. I found it very odd when I came to this country that it was ostensibly such a multicultural society but when you got to know people, when you spoke to them, they were more interested in your gratitude to be here and how now you’re an American teenager so there’s an implicit push of assimilation into the melting pot. And to me that in itself was rather crushing at 14. But, you know, I survived and am probably stronger for it. For these kids who are detained [today] it’s unimaginably cruel and, you know, like everyone else I am frantically watching the news and this nightmare. There are many ways to help. 
Right now it’s extremely difficult to look at what’s going on and, when I began writing this book, the forebodings of it were there and Trump got elected. It’s a question of what can poetry accomplish and what can translation accomplish. There are now several great literary groups that have events to try to donate some money to migrants… I’m not part of those groups, I’m a busy mom who teaches. But I started a reading group in Philadelphia with my friend Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach for refugees and immigrants, descendants of immigrants and Americans who care. I believe in visibility and in voice; there are many ways to help.
I’d like to end with a really beautiful line from one of your poems: “And her husband texts her Come home and she types Where’s that / And he texts her With me.” So what is home?
I think that the word refuge is relevant here because when we talk about home it seems like something that is warm and permanent but refuge is a more realistic idea of what we can create for each other. As a person who’s moved all over the US, as well as from country to country, I’ve come to really appreciate the validity of refuge. It appears in the first poem of my book, “Translating a Life”:
Unfortunately, I care. And, sitting here 
by a huge flowering bush, I see no refuge.
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Unfortunately, I Care: Joanna Chen Interviews Olga Livshin

My Wild Garden: A Writer’s Eden

Joanna Chen is a writer and literary translator whose work has been published in Guernica, Asymptote, and Narratively, among others. Her latest full-length translation, The Mulberry Tree, is forthcoming from Shearsman Books in 2024.

Joanna Chen

Translation and the Terebinth: On Translating Meir Shalev

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Living the Repercussions: A Conversation with Doireann Ní Ghríofa

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

The Home of Language

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

Figs and Facebook: The Poetry of Agi Mishol

Joanna Chen is a writer and literary translator whose work has been published in Guernica, Asymptote, and Narratively, among others. Her latest full-length translation, The Mulberry Tree, is forthcoming from Shearsman Books in 2024.