Interviews

Image: “DNA fragments in agarose gel stained with ethidium bromide” by Rainis Venta is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

During the opening webinar of our Poetic Vision series in spring 2021, SAND 19 contributor Kanika Agrawal presented on her ongoing series of poems “Okazaki Fragments,” which adapts language and images from a series of scientific papers on discontinuous strand synthesis during DNA replication, research led by the Japanese molecular biologists Okazaki and Okazaki. Okazaki Fragments (re)constructs Okazaki and Okazaki’s experiences by reading their lives into (or out of) their scientific papers.

A week after the webinar, our Editor in Chief Jake Schneider sat down again with Kanika over Zoom to discuss her work in greater depth. The video below, from our YouTube channel, includes both her original presentation and that subsequent interview, covering such topics as:

  • Emotional relationships with science: threat, passion, eros, and intimacy
  • How both science and poetry approach the unknown
  • The story behind Kanika’s project: the process of discontinuous DNA replication combined with the biographies of the scientists behind it
  • Exploring continuity and discontinuity through poetic forms such as couplets and ghazals
  • The challenges of trying to pursue a career in two disciplines at once

We hope you enjoy it!

You can also find Kanika’s writing prompt, along with those of our other webinar presenters, here.

And some of the poems generated using Kanika’s prompt will be read in the concluding reading of the series on 23 May 2021, also on SAND’s YouTube channel.

Kanika Agrawal on Science and Poetry Read More »

During the 2019 internationales literaturfestival berlin, the celebrated Dutch-Australian-British novelist Michel Faber had a public conversation onstage at the Collegium Hungaricum with the German writer and dramatist Thomas Oberender. We are very pleased to feature a transcript of their conversation here, which, besides delving into Faber’s books and the migrations and tragedies of his life, explores one of SAND’s perpetual questions about the role of transnational – and even transplanetary – literature, from aliens to alienation.

(Spoiler alert: They talk a great deal about endings, though not in too much spoilery detail. Plot points are less of a sacred cow in the German literary world.)


PLANET FABER

 A Conversation between Michael Faber and Thomas Oberender

20 September 2019 at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin

 

Thomas Oberender: Michel, a warm welcome to the international literature festival berlin. It’s a great pleasure to have you here. Ulrich Schreiber, the Festival Director, is with us this evening and I know he is delighted to welcome you and to have the opportunity to discuss your books, each of which is so unique and fascinating.

Before we begin, I would like to introduce you to the audience. Michel was born in 1960 in Den Haag, Netherlands. At the age of seven, he moved to Australia with his parents and his brother. There, he studied English Language and Literature of the nineteenth century, which I think we see traces of in his later writing.

Michel Faber: I have to interrupt you there, because you mentioned that I emigrated to Australia with my brother. In fact, my brother was left behind in the Netherlands. This is one of the things that probably lies beneath all my writing: My parents were very fucked up by World War II. They decided to leave the past behind them, and the past included their children from previous marriages. So they left those children behind in the Netherlands and emigrated to Australia just with me.

Was it only your brother who was left behind in the Netherlands?

No, there was also a sister. I only met her for the first time when she was seventeen. I saw her again a few years ago and she is a nice lady, but I didn’t know her. I met my brother again when I was about thirty-four.

How did he manage his life?

He had a troubled youth. He did a lot of those things troubled young people do, but then he straightened out and got a job. He’s become a very fine human being, but still very damaged by the way our mother treated him. She is dead now.

How was it for you to move as a young boy to Australia with your parents and to live there with parts of your family?

I think the theme of alienation and encounter with a foreign culture is present in all my books. And of course, as a Dutch kid arriving in Australia, separated from my brother, I felt those jarring emotions. I would often ask my mother how my brother was doing and what he was up to. She would say, “Oh, it’s so long ago, he will have forgotten you.” And when you are a kid, you don’t question that kind of narrative. It was only when I was in my thirties, that I began thinking this didn’t add up and made contact with him again myself.

But it was strange growing up in Australia. I’m a very Northern Hemisphere creature, so growing up in a hot country was weird for me. When I was 33, I emigrated to Scotland and lived in the far north of Scotland in the Highlands, which is where Under the Skin is set. That was weird also in a different way. Now I live in England which is the fucking weirdest place I’ve ever lived in my life. The English really are very strange and they don’t think they are strange, which is strange in itself. I don’t have settled status, so I don’t know where I will live in the future. I’m Dutch. My passport is Dutch. After Brexit, all us Europeans will automatically be illegal aliens. We have to apply for permission to stay. That basically means me asking Boris Johnson or whoever is in power: Please can I stay in your country? But you know what? I don’t want to, it’s wrong, it’s just wrong. We will see what happens. If they get tough on those Europeans who have not applied, then maybe I will have to leave, and there will be another part of my life in another country. We’ll see.

Why the UK? You made a first attempt to become a British citizen in the 1980s?

Yes, I was married at the time to a woman who came from Winchester in England. She decided she wanted to go back home, so we saved up for a long time with the idea of emigrating to England. In the end, we must have been there about six weeks. She of course went back to her home town that she remembered from her childhood. But everything was different. She was taller and everything was wrong. So that didn’t work and we decided to go back to Australia. At the airport, I found out that I didn’t have the right stamp in my passport, so I wasn’t allowed to get on the plane. I spent a week homeless in London, until the next option opened up to fly. I’d spent all my money thinking I was going back to Australia, so I had to survive on the streets. I think a little of that in The Crimson Petal and the White, my novel about a nineteenth-century prostitute.

Is there perhaps a trace of this experience in The Book of Strange New Things, in the scene when Peter is returning to the station after a long period with the aliens? Somebody asks him to get into a car, and he realizes that he is dirty. He doesn’t dare sit down for fear of getting the seat dirty too. Was this also a memory of how it feels to have no home?

I think that making the choice to be homeless, while having a safety net in a week’s time, is completely different to being genuinely homeless. There is a reason why people are homeless. In fact, it’s usually many different reasons and they are to do with your life going down the toilet. My life didn’t go down the toilet; I just wasn’t allowed to get on the plane. That’s a completely different experience, but it’s still a glimpse into another world that you thought you wouldn’t be in, and then suddenly you are. It’s interesting for a writer, but I don’t imagine that I was ever really homeless.

When did you start writing?

I was writing books already as a kid. I wrote a book when I was about eight years old that was half English, half Dutch because I’d only just arrived in Australia.

Do you know what was it about?

It was called Knobble and Bobble go to the Moon. In Holland, there were these cartoon characters called Knobble and Bobble and the two mice. Later, I started a lot of novels in my early teenage years and I would read bits of them out at school at lunchtime. Some kids would come to to where we would eat lunch and I would read them the latest chapter of my books. One of them was like a cowboy novel. I knew nothing whatsoever about cowboys, so I just made it up. It had violence in it, which children like. Then I wrote a novel that was based on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I wrote about a hundred pages of that and then that died. And I wrote about 120 pages of a science fiction novel, which was a typical novel that teenage boys write, where you wake up one morning and everyone in the world is dead except you and you’ve got the whole world to yourself, that kind of thing.

Every year, as I got older, I would read back what I’d written the year before and realize it was shit. And then I would start again and write a new version. By the time I’d written that, I would be a year older and I would realize that it was also shit. And this went on and on. Having started and failed to finish about five novels, I then got married to this Englishwoman, who also wanted to be a novelist. She was writing an autobiographical novel, a sort of “portrait of the artist as a young woman” novel. She got terribly stuck with that. About halfway through, she didn’t know what to do with it. And because of my failed attempts to write a novel and her failed attempts to write a novel, I thought there must be a better way to write a book than this. I figured maybe I need structure, planning. So I thought about who was good at planning books, and decided the Victorians were very good at the architecture of novels. I read Middlemarch by George Elliot, which is a beautifully constructed novel, and I thought this is it: Before you start you just plan what the book is going to be. So, with The Crimson Petal and the White, I knew everything that was going to happen in every chapter, virtually every scene.

I can imagine it’s a complex structure.

I had about two pages of planning and then I wrote the book ­– and it worked.

But it took you twenty years?!

Well…I didn’t spend all those twenty years writing The Crimson Petal and the White. I also had a marriage which was dramatic, and I worked as a nurse for many years. Also, my big passion is music and I spent about ten hours a day listening to music. So I didn’t write very much for a number of years. When my first marriage fell apart, I had more time and I got back to the book and finished it quite quickly.

The original version of the book had a very bad ending; the heroine, Sugar, came to an awful end. And when my second wife Eva read it, she said “You can’t do this to this girl, people love her, they have been through 800 pages with her, you cannot kill her in this horrible manner.” And I said “No, you don’t understand tragedy.” And she said: “I do understand tragedy, I just don’t think you should do that in this book.” So then I wrote a different version of The Crimson Petal and the White, in which she survives.

It’s a very special ending. The heroine leaves the story and nobody knows her future. Except you, maybe?

I don’t know actually. To me, that felt appropriate. Eva once advised me to give Sugar free will and let her be a human being instead of a puppet in a Greek tragedy. Throughout the novel, we have seen everything about her, including her sex life. We have full access to her life. It felt right at the end that she should have her privacy, that she just goes into her own future, and we don’t know what that is.

I worked very hard on that final chapter. But some people are not very happy with it. I get lots of letters of disappointment saying “you cannot do this, where did she go?” ­­– particularly from American readers; Americans really want things tied up.

There’s also a very short, special chapter after the heroine, Sugar, has left the story into this unknown future. And it’s when the book itself speaks to us and says farewell. We understand then that the book was our mistress, a living being that has many sides, many contradictions, its own time, its own dignity. For me, this was the greatest shift in voice since Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

I’m glad that you are happy with that farewell. There is certainly this element of the book saying to the reader: Come with me, I’m going to show you the best time of your life. The question is whether the book will deliver on that promise. While you are reading the book, it has this grip on you. But when the book is over, the relationship is over. I’ve never gone to prostitutes, but I think it’s an encounter that has that kind of fulfilled or broken promise.

I think often with serious literature, there is a promise made which is not delivered. If the writer is really serious and literary, they feel it’s okay not to give thrills or emotional engagement because you can get that stuff from bestseller books, from some crappy airport writer. There’s this assumption that you come to the prize-winning literary author for something higher. I never respected that distinction. I feel that if someone is going to give time to a book, then they should care about its characters. They should be turning the pages and worrying if the protagonist is going to be all right. They should be getting angry, they should be stressed ­– all those things that you get from a romance or a thriller. It should all be there. There shouldn’t be this division between high and low literature.

Thinking about endings, The Book of Strange New Things has a very tough conclusion for me, but one can see it from different perspectives. Perhaps you can elaborate a little on that book and its ending?

For me, The Book of Strange New Things was the final book I was going to write. I had this sense that I only had a certain number of novels in me and this was going to be the last. It is an immensely sad book about a Christian minister who gets the job of ministering the spiritual needs of the native population of an alien planet called Oasis. There is a shadowy multinational cooperation that has a base on the same planet and they are somewhat liaising with the native population. The one thing that the aliens want is the word of God and a Christian minister. They had one before but he has disappeared, so they want another one. So Peter gets this job and goes to Oasis. His wife is left behind on earth and they correspond. The novel looks at what happens to that relationship between two people who love each other but are now separated by an immense distance. Peter is doing his job on Oasis: it’s actually a wonderful job because the aliens want nothing more than the word of God. His wife, meanwhile, is here on Earth and everything is falling apart: all the climate change and societal breakdown that we are already seeing. She is trying to communicate this with him but he is up there and she is down here; there is a tension between their different realities.

Shortly after I started writing this book, my wife Eva was diagnosed with incurable cancer. We knew that she was going to die within a few years. That added another dimension to the book. I don’t know how many people here have had this experience, but when the person you love has cancer and you don’t, they really are on a different planet; they are on planet cancer. And you can love them, you can support them, but you can’t really be with them. So that all fit into the book. Saying goodbye to all the things the book says goodbye to was also saying goodbye to Eva. And she helped me with that book a lot. She helped me to edit it and to finish it. She knew that it would be published, but she didn’t live long enough to see it published. It’s a goodbye book. I thought that it would be my last novel. I still think that it will be my last novel for adults, but I have since that time written a short novel for children, coming out in 2020.

Was Eva also a writer?

Yes, she was also a writer. Do you have this saying in Germany that to get really good at something you need to do it for 10,000 hours? Well, she didn’t do it for 10,000 hours. She was also a mother and a teacher. There were a lot of things in her stories that she hadn’t worked out. But she had a very interesting way of seeing the world and she wrote about interesting subject matters. As a child, she was a Jehovah’s Witness. Her parents were from Poland, but they were Polish-German. This meant they were on the Nazi Volksliste, which determined who had German blood, and who would get a better deal. Basically, if you had any German blood, you got more calories ­– that’s what it boiled down to. After the war ended, these German Poles who had received favorable treatment were in big trouble. So Eva’s parents emigrated to Australia, where she grew up, but with this whole World War II cloud and German-Polish Jehovah’s Witness complex hanging over her . She wrote about all that in a very interesting way, but most of her stories are not finished. What I want to do is to finish her stories. I’ve done four so far. I’ve shown them to some other writers, and what delights me about their response is that they notice this distinct sensibility which is not mine, and which is consistent in all four stories. I’m very happy about that, because one of the stories is about 99% her prose – I just made a few editorial adjustments. Another one is maybe 60% her prose and 40% mine, and another story maybe 40% her, and 60% me. The forth story is almost all my prose and just her ideas and sketches, but it’s her voice in each of the four and I’m hoping that I can achieve that with the other stories as well. Then there will be a book by Michel and Eva Faber.

In The Book of Strange New Things, Peter returns back to Earth and his wife, but the planet is in a state of catastrophe. He learns that he will be father and at the same time, the world is disappearing.

We are living in a very scary world. Just look at the climate protest we had in Berlin today. We are living in a world where parents cannot do that thing that parents have always been able to do for their children: to say everything is going to be all right. We’ve got a civilized world full of parents who are terrified because they know it’s not going to be all right, but they still have to bring up their children. It’s an impossible human ritual.

The Book of Strange New Things is trying to look at that dilemma and be honest about it, but without leaving the reader depressed. It’s a very difficult challenge. You can write a book that brings everyone down and says there is no hope. It’s easy to write such a book because we have so much supporting material, but that doesn’t help anyone spiritually. I think one of the things that literature should do for people is give them the strength to carry on. With The Book of Strange New Things, I’m trying to find a way to confront all that real stuff while still having some consolation.

One of the things my wife did before she died was to help me to write a different ending for the book. The original ending had Peter, our hero, in the exercise yard of this alien compound. He knows that he is going to go back to Earth and trying to find his wife. BJ, one of the other characters, says to him: “Look after yourself, be careful, it’s a dangerous place down there.” And he says: “Scout’s honor!” That was the end of the book.

I thought this was so clever because Peter used to be a Boy Scout, and the “Scout’s honor” sign is this three-fingered gesture, like the shape of a Gothic church, and the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I thought this was great, but Eva said “It’s just clever, it doesn’t have emotional punch. After a book that’s got so much emotion in it, you can’t end it like that.” She said: “No, go back and write an ending that has emotional resonance.” So then I went back and wrote what you have described.

Peter is thirty-three years old, by the way, the same age as Jesus at his death. Why is that? Is it by accident?

Of course it is not by accident! Nothing in my books is by accident. But I wanted it to look like it’s an accident. There’s a lot of religious stuff in all my books. If you dig beneath the surface, you can find many levels of reference and meaning: mythology, the bible, and so forth. But I make sure that nothing gets in the way of the reader’s enjoyment. This differentiates my work from the work of a lot of serious authors, where you often have this sense that unless you put in all the research and understand all the references, you can’t go on with the book. I try to do it differently in my books. With The Book of Strange New Things, if you want to see it as a story about two people who love each other and are losing touch with each other, you can read it on that level and keep turning the pages. Likewise, with Under the Skin, there’s this sci-fi thriller backbone to the narrative, and if you want to go purely on that journey as a reader, you can. But if you want to read it again and see more layers, you can. If you don’t want to read it again and never see the layers, that’s fine, but they are also there if you want to discover them.

In your first novel, the aliens speak about humans as aliens on earth. For them, we are just an animal species. Could you talk a little about this framework of dehumanization and othering?

All my books are about alienation of one kind or another. Often, the way people give themselves permission to treat other people badly is by defining them as Other. That’s how we get into gender issues, race issues, war. It is this notion that the other person is a different kind of life form and therefore, you can do whatever you like to them because they are not like you, they don’t suffer like you, they are not important like you. I’m looking at that from one perspective in Under the Skin and from a different perspective in The Crimson Petal and the White, because the protagonist is a prostitute and from a lower class, so she is treated as a completely different kind of creature.

For me, it’s also important how you create a distinct language for the alien beings in The Book of Strange New Things, so they have their own kind of pronunciation and expression. And you actually use special typography to designate this special way of speaking, as well.

In my original manuscript, I had Thai letters which looked really beautiful. But I have to accept that there are a few people in the world who speak Thai. So my publisher designed a new language which looks a bit Arabic, and a bit Hebrew, which is appropriate for The Book of Strange New Things.

You also play with the lettering in different books: font sizes and effects.

I’m a huge comics fan and in all the Marvel comics that I read when I was a kid, all that stuff was happening and I thought: Well, why not use that in literature.

You use another thing from comics: names. Can you tell us a little about that?

All the human characters in The Book of Strange New Things have names based on the surnames of writers and artists from Marvel Comics from the 1960s and 70s. I love all that stuff and it is my way of saying “Thank you and Hello”. For example, Kurtzberg who was the Christian minister who went to the planet before Peter, is based on Jacob Kurtzberg, aka Jack Kirby, one of the great comic creators. He invented the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and all those characters. A lot of the names I chose are the names of inkers; Marvel Comics had a sort of production line where one person would draw the comic in pencil, and then it would get passed on to someone else who would do the inks. One of the inkers was called John Severin. He was very talented and had a very special style on his own. I borrowed his name for one of the characters in The Book of Strange New Things, a man that Peter meets on his journey to the planet.

You have said that you never saw writing as a career. How did you see writing?

For me, writing was claiming the right to be in a certain spiritual state unaffected by other things. I got the same thrill from listenting to music. I wanted to use what I did in that space in a way that could be useful to other people. I didn’t want to be self-indulgent.

I think it worked!

Question from the audience: One thing that confused me in The Book of Strange New Things is the conception of the aliens. I still found them very human; they are all individuals and can communicate with each other. Did you ever think of making them completely different?

If I had made the aliens in the shape of a container, making sounds that we could not understand, that would have given the message that is is impossible to cross the divide between us and the other. I don’t think it’s impossible, I just think that it’s fucking difficult. And it needed to be difficult, and the reader needed to be reminded that when we think that we understood other people, we probably haven’t. But I did want there to be a sense that understanding could happen, so I made the aliens just human enough for that to seem possible. There is a bit in the book – for those of you who haven’t read it – where Peter first encounters the aliens.  They are human in shape, with two legs and two arms, and he thinks this is weird because you would expect them to be giant spiders or something. And then they pull back the hood from their faces and there is nothing in there that looks like a face. He doesn’t know what he is supposed to look at. He doesn’t know where the noises are coming from. That’s a reminder of their alienness without taking it so far that it becomes conceptually impossible for him to relate to them at all.

Thomas Oberender: Under the Skin is another example of alienation through the body.

One of the things that fed into the creation of that book was the rapid surge in cosmetic surgery. Among women, it started to be very common to say: “I’m gonna have my face or my breasts done. And it’s not that I want to be beautiful, I just want to be normal. I always knew that I wasn’t normal and that this was a problem that needed to be fixed.” I was a nurse for nine years and I know what surgery is. The idea that someone would allow themselves to be willfully mutilated to be considered normal was so bizarre to me. This made me think: What would it be like if someone needed to be surgically adjusted in order to pass for a human? This is what Isserley in Under the Skin has done in order to convince human beings that she is a human. There is gender politics in there, there are body issues, and once again the alien and the other – those same themes that come up in my books over and over again, just seen differently.

Question from the audience: What do you think of the movie adaption of Under the Skin?

I thought it was a terrific film. It’s very different from the book, which is exactly what I wanted. If a movie tries to be the book, it’s always going to be inferior because when you read a book, you make the movie in your head, and that movie is always better than any movie that someone else can come up with. So the only way to make a good movie from a book is to take some of the ideas and do something very different with them. This is something Francis Ford Coppola did with Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, turning it into this Apocalypse Now war movie which is of course extremely different from Conrad’s nineteenth-century novel. I think something similar was achieved with Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. It’s a film I have seen five or six times now, because I have introduced it at film festivals. Every time I see it, I admire it more. I think it is an extraordinary work.

A lot of films give you all the information and tell you the context. This film captures an alien [who is] supposed to be making her way in this world, trying to figure out how to communicate with these men that she is trying to pick up. And that confusion is in the film; it’s a very puzzling movie, but it’s very strong. If you want to grapple with it more, you can watch it again. Or you can say to your friends: I don’t know what the fuck this was all about; I’m never watching another film by that director. That’s okay as well, but the movie doesn’t compromise and I admire it for that.

Michel Faber: Transnational and Transplanetary Literature Read More »

By Emily Bieniek

Body language is how I first understand translation, interpreting movements to carry certain meanings. It’s essential when a barrier exists between people – whether a child hasn’t learned to speak yet or two people who speak different languages interact. I’m always thinking of what my body is saying, how I am communicating my gender, how subtle details create huge signals.

I’ve found that life is translation. Existing in different spaces and communities forces one to develop ways to communicate between these constantly shifting environments, whether it be with people around us or our own internal thoughts. I’m often blending parts of my personality and practice, translating them into new ways for people to experience. I love to add a performative element to a poetry reading, specially curated for the audience to see how they interpret the combination of my actions and words.

I’ve talked about this with my friend and former boss, Elizabeth Metzger Sampson, on a few occasions, but never so formally. Sampson is the Executive Director of the Chicago Poetry Center, which runs two school poetry programs and curates a traveling reading series.

 


Tell me some stories about your experience with translation.
Knowing just a little bit of several languages has given me the opportunity to: create poetry out of mistranslation, create a bilingual issues of a literary journal (Arabic/English), build a dual language poetry residency for young people (Spanish/English). Knowing a little bit also allows me to make fantastic errors — once in Cairo I was looking for garbage bags and, in an attempt to cobble together a few words I thought I knew, asked the store clerk if they had any “yogurt purses.” Learning a second script/character set (to learn Arabic) was perhaps the single most humbling education experience of my life, it broke my brain open in a really wonderful way.

When I was running a literary magazine for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (the gorgeous and now-defunct Dear Navigator) we published an issue of contemporary art and literature coming out of Cairo. The magazine was electronic, which allowed us a lot of freedom to support visual and literary work, and experimental electronic literature. Ironically though, what had been digital freedom became a sort of digital curse when we tried to program outside of our Western script — the site coding was not suited to Arabic, and truly everything went wonky. It took a wild amount of tests, fails, trial and error, to get that issue out. It eventually came out and looked stunning, which is very much thanks to friend of the magazine, artist and writer Amira Hanafi who essentially became our volunteer-tech-and-language-editor-at-large, as she can both code and read Arabic. It was also a very good lesson for me in how the internet (in 2011) was very much set up for my native language of English to thrive, which of course, I hadn’t yet bothered to notice, as it was set up for my convenience.

 

As you know, SAND is a German publication. What is your relationship with Germany and the language?
One of my names is German for “butcher.” I’ve had work shown in Germany, I’ve had German friends, and my family has roots in the French/German border area of Alsace-Lorraine (and as such, no one can decide if we’re German or French – obviously this is deeply important and I hope someone makes a final decision for us soon). Aside from a delightful layover at the Munich airport (great teacups!), I’ve not been to Germany and hope to rectify that as soon as possible.

Actually, my favorite translation story of all time has to do with my German name, a German Egyptian friend, a Cairene friend, and my time in Cairo. I was doing a project in Cairo and one extremely pleasant part of this was that I went out early in the morning to meet the Egyptian writer, Hamdy el-Gazzar, for a long walk through Cairo. We had our coffees and had just crossed the Nile when I received the most fantastically cryptic text from my friend Phillip that went something like “You are walking with a man with whom you share a name. Figure it out and come over for pancakes.” Hamdy and I started by listing off all our names, and none of them were “the same,” by our early standards. We tried everything, gave up, and insisted that Phillip tell us and make us pancakes. It turns out both Metzger and Gazzar mean butcher. (Surely Hamdy knew what his own name meant, but I did not, until that day, know the meaning of my own name.) It’s all thanks to Phillip’s fluency in Arabic, German, and English that I know what my own name means.

 

In what other ways do you experience translation? I find myself interpreting communication from others in the form of movement mostly. Is this the case for you?
I think almost everything is translation — certainly any use of language is translation, but also cognition, gender expression, fashion, art… it’s all translation. For me, in my daily use, my most common translations are actually between different communities. It’s a natural place for me to live because I seem to exist in a sort of in between realm.

 

I know that right when I was leaving the Chicago Poetry Center, you had just announced that next school year there would be Spanish-language poetry classes, which was super exciting to hear. How is the program going?
We’re hiring even more right now because the program is growing, I’m so happy to report. We’ve been building curriculum in collaboration — myself, our teaching artists, classroom teachers and curriculum designers in the schools – to make sure it’s super high quality for our young people.

 

All right, now tell me about some exciting things coming up for your organization.
We’re about to have poets read on a boat as it cruises down the Chicago river, right through our gorgeous skyline. I love this reading because not only does our audience get to look at sky and water and Chicago while poets do their thing, but everyone along the banks gets peppered with lyrical moments that they didn’t even know were about to magic up their evening. Everything is better with good poetry. After that we’ll have poets reading in the store where I buy all my tarot cards and artist-made banners of bones, so that should be fun. Next month our students from across Chicago will get to read at a big festival in Chicago’s iconic and central Millennium Park. And of course, we’re ramping up to the school year – every year we’re paying more poets to teach in schools and supporting more Chicago schools with poetry programming.

An Interview With Elizabeth Metzger Sampson of The Chicago Poetry Center Read More »

by former Poetry Editor Natalie Mariko

 

It’s difficult to talk about exactly why a poem works. How it strikes in the moment of reading is something (to appropriate the language of a dear friend) close to a physiological centre of the non-corporeal exposed, or the nebulous ‘phenomenon’ of language made bilious or gastrous. When it hits u it just hits u, man, & right in the gut. Not uncommon is the contention that there seems to be no concrete or at least no hold-able substance to substantiate the ‘why’ of a poem. Maybe that’s why people avoid reading it altogether. Because it’s scary not simply because it can appear occluded or riddling or hifalutin or deep-fried in the fat of academia, but also because it’s abject goop.

Because it ‘hits’ us.

Idk when I first read Uma Menon’s submission to SAND, but I do remember the unsettling sense of something calmly furious blinking in bluelight on my computer. I remember the power that seemed so wizened & controlled. I remember being hit.  

Thereafter feels simple, w/out the need for explanation. I wanted the poem. But when I looked @ the poet’s biography, I admit I was shocked. The words didn’t seem like they were coming from a 15 year-old Floridian. They felt vital. They felt (o dreaded phrase) ‘beyond their years’. Which is a type of ageist predisposition no writer deserves. When it’s good writing it’s good writing, regardless. No academic gatekeeping can keep the physiological ‘why’, the bilious goop of poetry from seeping thru when it’s there. Simply put, my response to her age made me question that response.

So Menon & I sat down in front of our respective devices for a little chat about writing, influence, age & activism.

 

Natalie Mariko: What drew you to writing poetry? I read online that you wrote yr first poem as an infant – is that true?

Uma Menon: I did in fact imagine my first poems as a pre-kindergartner. At that point, I was still learning English, so I would dictate and my mother would transcribe. Throughout my life, a lot of my interests changed and morphed, but the one constant has always been my attraction towards language. For me, poetry is a form of writing that is accessible beyond other genres, in that almost anything can be expressed through [it]. So as a young child, I channeled my imagination into poetry as a means of storytelling.

At a certain stage, I lost poetry. I thought that I had grown out of rhyming words and nature imagery. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I really rediscovered my love for poetry. I realized its potential to convey important narratives and political messages. It was then that I truly understood what it meant for poetry to be self-expression. I use it to explore myself, my culture, and my experiences.

NM: What poets (contemporary or otherwise) inspire you in yr writing?

UM: Adrienne Rich is probably my favorite poet. In fact, I performed her poem “Planetarium” (my favorite) for my English class this year. That poem really influenced my understanding of form and figurative language. The subject matter is also really important to me, as it tackles the issue of failure to acknowledge women, despite their achievements.

Joy Harjo, Meena Alexander, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Naomi Shihab Nye are also poets whom I greatly admire. They all tackle very important issues in their poetry, and in doing so, use beautiful imagery and/or form.

NM: You’re a debater & activist as well – what is the focus of yr activism? Do you have any future public policy plans or political ambitions?

UM: I think that, at its core, activism is the use of words or communication to implement change. As such, writing and activism are deeply interconnected, which is why my poetry is so heavily influenced by social and political happenings. An issue that is really important to me is equality, across gender, race, and identity. As a female and person of color myself, I understand how identity can often be a barrier in today’s world, but I envision a world that embraces people of all identities. Through my poetry and activism, I aim to amplify the experiences of minorities to create greater awareness of the issues we face.

Apart from writing, I’ve also been involved in activism for other issues, such as gun control, net neutrality, and educational access. I’ve collaborated with organizations [including] Demand Progress, College Board, and DoSomething to tackle these issues. In 2019, after winning a writing contest on youth civic engagement, I was chosen to be US Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy’s guest to the State of the Union Address, one of the most selective political events in America. As such, I am also an advocate for youth participation in politics and communities.

NM: Gonna be a little long-winded here so bear w/ me: Since the time of Plato’s “Ion”, poets have been regarded w/ suspicion, & I would argue many people’s conception of poetry is this lazy Romanticism–all odes & sonnets, love & nature… Yr poetry, to me, as well as yr age seem to reflect a slowly gathering change in this perception – political poetry seems to be gaining mainstream popularity in the time of climate change & openly xenophobic populism. What role, in yr opinion, can poetry play in affecting change in the world?

UM: I completely agree. I think the stigma around poetry is something very different even from other literary genres, and some of this may be attributed to the emptiness and frivolity that plagued poetry in previous centuries. There’s the idea that poems come only in two types: trivial or esoteric. But poetry, I feel, has morphed in a way very similar to that of visual art. Both have become very political, since our world today is almost defined by politics. As you say, we are faced with so many problems in the present-day, from climate change, to xenophobia. And the reason why today is different from yesterday is that today, for the most part, we are aware of those problems. We instead lack awareness or [the] drive to create solutions. That’s where poetry and other art forms come in – they use the power of narrative to propel people into action. We’ve seen, from movements such as #MeToo, that sharing narratives is the best way to create tangible change. Poets do the same – we tell the stories and convey the messages that can change the world.

NM: Do you still have the first poem you wrote?

UM: I do – all of my early poems are in a little diary that I still have. It’s titled “Penny at the Store,” and is a six-line narrative poem. Of course, I was still learning to write at that time, so the poem is transcribed by my mother. Something really interesting about this poem is that it is written in all capital letters, as I was oblivious of lowercase letters. A lot of my poetry today, including the poem that is published in SAND, is written entirely in lowercase. So there’s an interesting juxtaposition there.

Penny at the Store

COIN WENT TO A STORE TO BUY FRUIT SALAD

CLERK SAID THAT WILL BE A DOLLAR

COIN SAID I DON’T HAVE ANY

CLERK SAID I WILL TAKE YOU

COIN SAID NO YOU WON’T

AND HE RAN AWAY.

 

NM: How do you think your age hinders/emboldens yr poetic praxis? Have you had any backlash from individuals in the poetry community? Do you have any specific teachers or elders in yr life who have helped you in some way to become a “better poet” (problematic term, I know)?

UM: My age makes my poetry experience very unique. Although a lot of young people engage in poetry, most limit themselves to leisure writing. When I began submitting to poetry publications, I faced a lot of barriers. Many journals and anthologies would not allow minors to submit. Others would require undergraduate status. As a fifteen-year-old, my only income is from freelance writing, so submission fees also make it difficult for me to access many publications.

Though I haven’t necessarily experienced direct backlash, I have no doubt that my age has likely played a factor in some rejections, especially from major publications. The idea that young people won’t take such opportunities seriously is a misconception that exists (pervasively).

My English teachers in elementary and high school have impacted my love for language and encouraged its growth. I am a firm believer in the fact that any ability I have is a direct result of my teachers. My family is an important inspiration within my poetry; most of my poems feature my parents, grandmother, or extended family member as a character within them.

I don’t have any connections within the poetry world. I, unfortunately, don’t know any professional poets apart from my editors. I’ve navigated the poetry and publication world all on my own, and it is very difficult at times. I just finished my first full-length poetry collection and am currently trying to find publishers for the collection. As a fifteen-year-old, and as someone without any guidance, I’ve found the publication process to be particularly difficult.

NM: &, a bit of fun: If you could sit down w/ any 5 writers living or dead, who would you choose  & why?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is my favorite book, so I would be so honored to sit down with her. Reading the book was a major turning point in my writing career, as it made me realize that my story matters. I had reached a point where I felt like what I had to say didn’t matter enough, that I had already said enough. Interpreter of Maladies is one of the few books that I have read focused on the Indian-American experience. After reading the book, I realized how necessary it was to write out my own story. I just recently finished writing my first full-length poetry collection, and I’m not sure that I would have finished it if it weren’t for Lahiri’s novel.

Celeste Ng is a new favorite when it comes to fiction. She has only published two novels, but unsurprisingly, both are critically acclaimed and extremely successful. I definitely believe that she represents the future of the writing world.

As I mentioned earlier, Adrienne Rich, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Naomi Shihab Nye, are among my favorite poets who I would also be excited to sit down with.

Interview with Poet Uma Menon Read More »

With ever-accelerating globalisation, an escalating refugee crisis, and, of course, Brexit, issues of “place” have been on people’s minds a lot recently. SAND #19, titled “Out of Place,” is testament to that, and so is the work of Paul Scraton. Here’s a chance to read a conversation he had with us on questions of place, history, and writing about them both, followed by his original short story “Trans Europa Express.”

Alexandra Gunn“Britain First,” “Make America Great Again”: ideas of national identity seem to define modern politics.  How do you think issues of “place” – in all its diversity of meaning – have come to the fore and/or altered in the public mind in recent years?

Paul Scraton: I think this is fundamental and a key question. And it is not only in the UK and the USA. This rise of nativist and nationalist movements can be observed in Italy and Sweden, Germany and Poland, France and Hungary (and that’s just in Europe). What they stand for varies from country to country, but one common thread appears to be the idea that there is a rootlessness not only born out of but encouraged by the globalised world we live in, and that it is has fractured communities that were once solid and whole. There was, the argument goes, a better world once and it could be better again, if only we could go back to it. It’s nostalgia and dangerous nonsense, but it is extremely persuasive, especially for those people who are struggling right at the time when the social safety nets seem to be fraying all around them.

The issue for those of us who are interested in “place,” and how it relates to ideas of identity and belonging, is whether or not it is possible to engage with this topic in a way that is inclusive and does not, step by step, automatically lead to the kind of exclusive understanding of identity and belonging that can be observed in all the political movements mentioned above. I’d like to think it is possible (but I am also only too aware that I might be wrong). It is crucial, I think, that we do forge or re-establish connections to the places that we live, because beyond the political movements gaining strength at this time, we are also facing environmental catastrophe. It is only by understanding these processes – the historical, the ecological, the societal – through the many and varied stories of place that I think we can find positive solutions. At least, I hope so.

Alex: In an interview about your previous book, Ghosts on the Shore (2017), you mentioned Christopher Isherwood as one of your early literary introductions to Berlin.  Now you know the city well – how much of Isherwood’s Berlin can still be experienced today?

Paul: Much has changed in the city since Isherwood called it home, but of course you can still find traces, and part of the interest I have in exploring places is trying to find those links to the past. I’m not an expert on what physical remains there are of Isherwood’s Berlin, as I think what appealed to me when I read his books was the atmosphere he was invoking, and I liked to think I could feel that as a younger person, staying up late in the bars and riding the night bus or the U-Bahn in the early morning. I’m sure that still exists, but maybe I’m just too old for it now!

In general though, I think lots of people have an interest in not only hearing stories of a place, but also hearing them “on location.” So there are Isherwood tours of Berlin, and Bowie tours, and Cold War tours, and Rosa Luxemburg tours… whatever the topic of interest, you can find someone to take you on a walk and tell you about it (and I should know as I have led some of them!). Quite often they are as much a tour of the imagination as they are of actual places that can still be experienced today. The Berlin that we see today was basically built from the late 18th century on and has always been a sandbox for whoever is in charge to make their vision of the city real, in concrete and stone, steel and glass. So you can see the Kaiser’s vision of a European capital along Unter den Linden, Nazi megalomania in the Tempelhof terminal building and the Finance Ministry, GDR-grandeur along Karl-Marx-Allee and the brave new reunified world built along the Spree with the new government district. The city changes, always changes, and the layers are built alongside and often on top of each other.

Alex: What says “Berlin” to you? Where can you see “the real Berlin”?

Paul: Everywhere and nowhere. However we engage with the city, as someone who lives here or is just passing through, we are engaging with the “real” Berlin. But yours will be different to mine, and mine will be different to my neighbour’s. We all have our personal geographies of place – the walk to work, the tram-stop, the bakery, the supermarket – which are our authentic version of that place. But the idea that Neukölln, for example, is more “the real Berlin” than Alexanderplatz, or Marienfelde, or Hohenschönhausen is ridiculous. And the idea that people who are living in one area as opposed to another are having a more “authentic” experience is too. I think the same is true for the tourist, or the short-term visitor to the city. Even if you spent your entire stay in a combination of Ku’damm, Potsdamer Platz and Hackescher Markt, it is still a true Berlin experience. My Osloer Straße, with its tram-stop, its bakery and the Lidl around the corner, is no more “real” than Hauptbahnhof, Rosenthaler Platz or the Sony Center.

Alex: Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019) will be your debut work of fiction. What encouraged you turn away from nonfiction for this book?

Paul Scraton: I would say it was more a “next step” than a “turn away.” In Ghosts on the Shore, a predominantly nonfiction journey along Germany’s Baltic coast, I also included three short stories which told the tale of a German family through four generations. The reasoning behind that decision was that I felt I needed to use a different technique in order to tell those particular stories, that it allowed me to discuss certain themes – around how history weighs on individuals, on the moral choices faced when living in totalitarian regime – that could be explored better through fiction than otherwise.

I knew my next book was going to be about Berlin, and perhaps because it has been my home now for over 17 years, I felt like I needed a bit more distance in order to write about it. And I had received some positive feedback on the short stories in Ghosts on the Shore, which gave me the confidence that I could write a novel and still explore the themes – history, memory, identity and place – that more interest me. So although many of my earlier readers seem convinced that the narrator of Built on Sand is me, and that most of the characters that appear are real people in my life, it is most definitely fiction and the decision for that was simply that it seemed to me the best means of telling the story and stories that I wanted to tell.

Alex: What different joys and challenges come from writing fiction compared to nonfiction?

Paul: It is hard to compare, and ultimately it comes back to what I just mentioned: what do I think allows me to tell this particular story best? It might be fiction, nonfiction or something in between. Indeed, I am not sure whether “Trans Europa Express” – the text I wrote for the Brexit Wake in Berlin that is accompanying this interview – should be called a short story or an essay. It is certainly fiction, but I think this time I am most certainly the narrator. And at least some of what happens in it is true…

Alex: I’ve long been intrigued by the concept of “place memory,” the belief that places that have witnessed violent or otherwise momentous events can become haunted, so that the event plays out there, in ghost form, over and over again.  Of the places you’ve been, where do you think is the best candidate for being haunted in this way?

Paul: I don’t believe in ghosts and I don’t believe that places have a memory, but I do believe that people have a memory, both personal and collective, and it is this that makes somewhere “haunted.” It is what we know about a place that can give it a power. Early on in Ghosts on the Shore I stand at the water’s edge and look out over the Bay of Lübeck. In and of itself it is a typical, coastal scene. In the winter it was dull and grey. In the summer, I am sure there is a beauty to it. And all those beaches and small stretches of sand will have positive connotations for so many people. Places they went as children to play and swim. First kisses on a long summer night. Walks with friends. But once you know that it was in these waters that boats containing the survivors of concentration camps were mistakenly attacked from the sky by RAF planes only day before the end of the war, and that the bodies would be washing ashore for months on those same beaches that are also places of fun and games, then it cannot but have an influence on how we take in the scene.

The ultimate example of this is, of course, those places that we as societies have decided to formalise as “sites of memory” in some way. Berlin is full of these, from the former Forced Labour Camp at Schöneweide to the entirety of the Berlin Wall Trail, all 160 kilometres of it. But it is not that they are ‘haunted” places that interests me, so much as what they represent insofar as we as individuals and a society come to terms with our history, and perhaps more importantly, how we can use the stories of the past to both inform the present and serve warning for the future. Storytelling is crucial, and right now it feels perhaps more urgent than ever, whether it is done through memorial sites that we then visit, the films that we watch or the books we read (and write).

The following story was written for the “Brexit Wake: And now what?” event held at the Literaturhaus Berlin on 29 March 2019:

TRANS EUROPA EXPRESS

By Paul Scraton

For Daša Drndić, Joseph Roth and away fans everywhere

 

I watch the spinning letters and numbers on the departure board and wait for them to fall. Times and platform numbers. Cities and towns. Places I have seen and others I have only imagined. From here the lines reach out, crossing boundaries and borders, of rivers and mountains, languages and culture. When I was a child I would look at my Playmobil train set and try to picture the places listed on the tiny, plastic departure board. PARIS. ROMA. HAMBURG. BEOGRAD. Every name offered something. Each place a potential story, waiting to be written. Back then they had not even started digging the hole that would link the island of my childhood with the rest of the world. But still I saw the possibility of the train and where it could take me.

***

Letters drop. Numbers too. Platform Six. I find my seat as the train eases out from the station, and we leave the city behind. Beyond the window the countryside unfolds. Villages of squat houses huddled around a church spire for protection. Ploughed fields and wind farms, blades turning in the late afternoon breeze. Forest plantations cut through with electricity lines and patches of older, mixed woodland. In recent years the fires have been burning with more frequency, the sky glowing red and visible for miles. A warning.

This train will take us through the night. I have company. She is here, waiting patiently for me to engage. Eventually I turn from the view out the window.

We don’t have much time, she says, even though the journey is stretched out before us. As I listen, she starts to tell me her stories. They are all connected, she says. The train links us to them all. This train. The tracks, laid out in long, connecting lines. I picture a map of the continent as she speaks, as she gives her lists of names. Lists of places, that echo like the destinations on my plastic departure board. Lists of people, the names of the dead and disappeared. Each story is another location to be marked on the map, linked by the black lines that reach out across space and time. Outside the window the trees seem to move ever closer to the tracks, a blur of trunks and branches and spiky pine needles.

Her voice:

We cannot allow the forest to swallow the stories.

***

Another train. The carriage was full of men and women in uniform. The Italians up the front, along with the British and the French. The Belgians in the smoking compartment. The Austro-Hungarians in the dining car, already drunk. My carriage was the domain of the Germans; Germans who spoke with Essex accents.

You can’t expect them to want to do it, a man told me, after lifting his canvas bag and replica rifle onto the luggage rack above our heads. It’s sensitive. You know? But we can’t do it without the Germans, so someone has to take it on. It might as well be us.

They were on their way to the battlefield, a journey they made each summer, to meet up with old friends and new faces, to rehearse and perform, and to pay their respects in a field lined with white crosses and at the chapel, the only building left standing in a village otherwise long abandoned. The forest had reclaimed the poisoned and cratered landscape, filling the empty, battle-scarred space where the village once stood. Outside the chapel, a statue of Mary was draped in a European flag.

It was the same every year, the man told me. The men and women in uniform came together on the battlefield and down in the town. The Italians and the French. The Belgians and the Austro-Hungarians. There was even an annual football match, between the English and the Germans. I asked him who would win.

We will, of course, he said with a smile. After all, for the next few days, we’re the Germans.

***

Our train slips across a river and over the border, from one country to the next. There is no announcement, no stop in some no-man’s land and no slow shuffle of guards along the train. The waters are choppy beneath the bridge. As we cross, she tells another story of another journey across the border. More than thirty years have passed but still she can reel off the names of the stations along the line. One after the other, ever closer to her destination, ever closer to him.

For eight summers they met and never once did their trains arrive in the small resort town by the lake at the same time. It didn’t matter, because they knew where to meet. It was planned when they said goodbye the year before. So she would walk down from the station to the promenade, and the beer garden by the jetty where the steamers left for the north shore. There she waited until his train came in and she spotted him walking the narrow street between the kiosks.

The way she tells it, it sounds romantic, this one week a year when they could walk the shore and swim together in the soft waters of the lake. But I know there is a lot she is not telling. About the half an hour each day they had to split up in order to return, via the telephone wires, to their respective realities. About all the different stories told. About the attempt to tell as few lies as possible.

We are across the river, able to spot the difference now in the road signs and billboards, in the shape of the houses that face each other across the water.

It was the border that kept us together, she says. Later, after everything changed, it just all got too complicated.

***

I leave her for a while and go to the dining car. The man at the next table speaks with my accent. It is the sound of my childhood in this place far away. He is on his way home from the match, he says, nursing a beer. It was going to take them 34 hours. 68 hours in total, there and back, just to watch your team lose. Still, he adds with a shrug, there is always the second leg.

I ask him why he didn’t fly.

It’s John, he replies, meaning his friend, who sleeps in his seat two carriages down the train. Ever since a trip to Thailand he refuses to fly. Like Mr. T. or Dennis Bergkamp. But we go to the match together. We’ve always gone to the match together. So now we have to go overland. By bus or train.

He gives me a list, for it is a night of lists. Marseille and Seville. Madrid, Rome and Prague. Athens. Minsk.

He shakes his head. Minsk was a long one. Then he asks me my story. It’s what you do on trains. And although I could tell him anything, and he could do the same, both of us speak the truth. Continuous movement. The darkness of the night. Full disclosure.

You must like it, he says, after I finish. He tells me his own tale of living in another country. Of five years in New York. After five years it was time to make a decision. Was that it? He liked the city, the life he had there, but it wasn’t enough. He missed his friends. His family. Going the match with John.

I remember sitting there, he says, and I was thinking: do I really want to grow old here? In this place that is not my home?

He looks at me and then drains his beer. It’s finished. I tell him that I’m not sure what home is any more.

Fair enough. He looks at his watch. Twenty hours to go, he says, with a rueful grin. He shakes his head. Dennis Fucking Bergkamp.

***

Beyond the carriage window, the black night. Inside, a dim light shines above the table. It will shine all night long, but it doesn’t matter. Not to her. My companion doesn’t want to sleep, and she doesn’t want to let me sleep either. More stories. More lists. More places to add to the map. Verdun. Guernica. Stalingrad. Dresden. Srebrenica. The uneasy waters of the Mediterranean. She speaks of responsibility. To the names of places and people. To the memory of what was done in our names. We have to own the stories, she continues. We cannot cut ourselves off from the past. Because those who do remember will not be around forever.

We are in danger of forgetting.

A page turns, and she is quiet now. Still, I don’t sleep. I watch the darkness through the window until it lifts above the villages and fields. They look just like the ones from yesterday, the ones we left behind. We pass through suburbs and the red-brick factories and warehouses of a long-passed industrial age. As the city looms larger beyond the window the train slows. We move between and below the city streets, crossing bridges and plunging into tunnels, before emerging for just a second to offer a glimpse of glass and steel towers shining brightly in the morning sun. It is journey’s end and I have reached my destination. She is quiet now, and yet I can still hear her voice.

We are in danger of forgetting. Here and now. Right at the wrong moment, we are allowing ourselves to forget.

***

I choose the station hotel. I want to wallow in nostalgia for a time I couldn’t possibly have experienced. I want to find the remnants of something long lost. I want to feel that it is indeed impossible to extinguish all trace.

I think of another travelling companion. He knew this hotel and the people in it. Deep down I know I will not find them here today. Not the Swiss chambermaid or the French receptionist, the Italian porter or the Austrian waiter. As for my travelling companion, he long ago drank himself into mythology. He prefered hotels. He liked their mix of anonymity and familiarity, and that they allowed him something that was always there, waiting, whether he travelled through choice or in exile.

I was a stranger in this town, he said. That’s why I was at home here.

It is nearly twenty years since I left the island of my childhood, and sometimes I feel a stranger both there and in the place that I now live. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. We are all strangers in this hotel and we are all at home. The floors creak and the pipes rattle. The paint peels and draughts blow. The hallways echo with half-remembered stories, and not all of them good. Yet the hotel stands. The hotel stands. And that’s something.

This story was written for the “Brexit Wake: And now what?” event held at the Literaturhaus Berlin on 29 March 2019.

Paul Scraton is a British-born, Berlin-based writer and editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His books include Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic Coast (Influx Press, 2017) and The Idea of a River: Walking out of Berlin (Readux, 2015). His debut work of fiction is Built on Sand, published by Influx Press in April 2019, a novel-in-stories set in Berlin and Brandenburg. It is now available to order from the publisher and wherever books are sold.

Write Place, Write Time: Paul Scraton Read More »

Our Editor in Chief Jake Schneider was invited to speak on a panel about literary magazines at the 2019 Society of Authors Translators Association Symposium, an annual event held in London the day before the book fair, alongside Clare Pollard, editor of Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT). SAND has published translations from at least sixteen languages since our founding in 2009; MPT, a venerable institution of translated literature in the English-speaking world, has been at it for more than fifty years. Still, we were positive that our two publications’ unique sets of experiences could not possibly encompass the breadth of translation’s role in literary magazines.

To get a broader view, Jake reached out to the other magazine editors in the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), of which SAND is a proud member, for their own experiences. Within hours, he received an outpouring of insights on how translations fit in to the world of literary journals, and why publishing them in that format is a great way to expose emerging translators and to build the reputations of talented authors whose work is still obscure or unknown in English.

Besides sharing some of their insights on the panel, we’ve decided to post a selection of them below, including comments from:

  • Jennifer Acker, editor-in-chief of The Common, which is devoted to “deepening our individual and collective sense of place”
  • Curtis Bauer, translation editor of The Common who also translates from Spanish himself
  • Dede Cummings, editor of the magazine The Hopper and publisher of Green Writers Press, both with a strong environmental focus
  • Ann Kjellberg, editor of the journal Little Star, but also the literary executor of Joseph Brodsky and a former contributing editor of the New York Review of Books
  • Mindy Kronenberg, editor of Oberon Poetry Magazine
  • Minna Zallman Proctor, editor of the quarterly The Literary Review (TLR), established in 1957

All of these publications eagerly accept translated submissions. The emails were sent to Jake privately and are posted here with the editors’ permission.

 

Why should a literary translator submit their work to literary journals?

Ann: Of course! Who could think otherwise? How else do you expect the awareness of an author and the eagerness to invest in and read their work, to spread beyond specialists in the language? If an author is already well-known in English, there is the necessity of making the case that you have something to offer beyond easily available existing translations.

Minna: Translators, especially emerging translators, don’t often think of submitting works in progress to journals because they are focused on book-length projects for book publishers. Changing that paradigm should really just take a nudge from journal editors – who should do a better job of opening their pages to translation, and reaching out to translators to solicit new work. And translators will certainly have an easier time proposing a book-length translation if parts of it have already appeared in literary magazines. The extra exposure provided by a magazine publication is great for an emerging translator given that the business of literary translation has such a strong word-of-mouth component to it.

Poets/poetry translators should definitely be looking at magazine publication from the start of their collaboration. Most of the poetry books that come out in the US are comprised of poems that have all already appeared in lit mags. That’s the model that’s already in place for poetry and so poetry in translation works similarly. Poetry translators should familiarize themselves with the poetry-literary magazine model so that they can use it effectively.

Curtis: It definitely helps people learn about the new voice in a new language. Take a look at Shearsman Books: their webpage more or less says that if you, as a translator, haven’t published a substantial portion of the book of poems in journals in the UK and US, they won’t even look at it. From a publisher’s perspective, individual publications indicate that there’s an interest in the work in literary circles, and that interest tends to lead to better sales.

 

Have you published excerpts of a translation project that was later published as a book?  Did the magazine publication help?

Dede: A few years ago, I received an email from a translator [Ellen Skowronski Polito] who wanted to know if I would write a letter on her behalf so she could enter for an [ASLE translation grant]. I wrote to say that we were very interested in her work translating the work of a Spanish poet, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, and that if all went well, we would very much like to publish it. Jenna Gersie, the managing editor of our literary magazine, The Hopper, attended the ASLE convention in Detroit and the award was announced with the translator winning! We then made a firm offer to publish the actual book [Landscapes with Donkey]. The editorial process proved to be quite lengthy, but rewarding. One of our editors at Green Writers Press [Anna Mullen] has a knowledge of the Spanish language, so I signed her to work with the translator to make sure that every word rang true to the tone and meaning of the original.

Curtis: Yes, several. The reasons are obvious, as stated above, but there’s also the publicity aspect. One of the things I love about The Common (there are many) is that the journal publicizes the work that comes later: if I publish a poem there, and then a book comes out, I can tell the editors and they’re going to make that announcement in the journal and on their social media sites. The Common isn’t the only place that does this, but it’s one of the few that does it really well.

Ann: I have. […] It is hard to say how precisely this helps. A good source of evidence about this would be editors at publishing houses who publish a lot of translation. Book editors have told me on the whole that they wished they had time to read literary magazines more. We do struggle on our end with readership and distribution – on the other hand, of course, it helps the translator, when going to an editor, to be able to say that parts of this have been published in X, Y, and Z. As an editor myself, I am aware of magazines I appreciate, and I notice when they have given a writer or translator the thumbs up. I think one has to make a somewhat amorphous case that increasing the presence of an author in English is a drop-by-drop process and anything you can do to support this will help a book publisher to commit to your project and will help readers to respond to it. An unknown name in a foreign language is a hard sell, likewise a redundant translation. Literary magazines are your natural ally: they are looking for great work, and you are looking to be seen. Unlike many of their submitters, your writer is a known quantity in their original country and likely to deliver as a writer.

 

On magazines soliciting translations, and where they look for them.

Ann: When I find an author I like I try to find out if there is anything new on the way; I even try to put authors together with translators. I have reached out, for instance, to winners of the PEN and Sontag prizes for works in progress to see their manuscripts. 

Minna: Translators who have been hired by a publishing house to translate literary works are often not included in the serial rights process at all, so they have to leave publishing of excerpts to the publishing houses. The publishing houses that publish more translations are small and independent and often running on limited resources and are not good at getting early excerpts out to magazines (which have long lead times – if we wait for review copies to arrive we usually wouldn’t have time to consider and schedule an excerpt). And literary magazines often don’t have the resources to scour catalogues to look for excerpts. Literary book publishers and literary magazine publishers should work together, because translations – whose authors are often unknown abroad – need more exposure in the literary marketplace to get to readers. Translators can help in this process if they have connections to literary magazines and if the publishers are open to suggestions – even when they are not actually part of placing serial rights.

TLR tries to reach out to publishers for forthcoming work. We’ve found we have to do extra legwork on our end to get publishing houses to think of submitting to us. Again, it’s about forming relationships and keeping up with what people are working on. 

Of course the most important way to know about possible excerpts is through relationships with translators. If we hear from a translator about an interesting work in progress, we’ll approach their publisher to see if there’s something from it that might work in terms of length, and timing. We make a very deliberate effort to engage translation. To that end we have editors at TLR who are focused on soliciting and evaluating works in translation. We’ve definitely found that it’s not a genre of literature that just arrives in the slush pile; we have to reach out for it.

 

On rights to publish translations.

Minna: Most literary magazines are even more under-resourced than small presses and so most of us ask translators to only approach us with projects that they have the rights to – or projects in which they have the author’s permission already to send out for publication. If translators don’t have their permissions in order, most magazines won’t be able to publish. This is very different from how publishing translations work with a book publisher, because in all cases it is the responsibility of the book publisher to seek out and acquire translation publishing rights. Lit mags are the only publishing entity that asks translators to do that work. (Explaining this structure to a room full of seasoned translators can cause gasps of dismay and outrage.) But lit mags for the most part do not have the money or legal experience to deal with translation rights, so that’s how it is. It’s a good idea anyway for translators who are doing a translation for love (rather than under contract – where they don’t have the serial rights anyway) to know the situation with the rights so they don’t spend time on a project that’s already been promised elsewhere.

 

Do you edit translations?

Jennifer: We accept unsolicited translations, and we also commission translators to render works into English, especially for our Arabic portfolios. All pieces are thoroughly edited from an English-language point of view, and our editors work closely with the translators, and often the authors as well, to arrive at the best possible English-language version.  The collaboration can be somewhat unwieldy, given the multiple people reviewing and consulting, but we find we are still able to retain the author’s original voice and stylistic choices. 

Ann: I definitely edit. I usually feel that my suggestions are consistent with an extrapolatable underlying text, and I am counting on the translator to correct me if not; it is a back-and-forth process. In the case of a living author they often participate.

I have been grateful when translators and publishers from whom I am publishing translated work are willing to excerpt it in ways that purists might challenge (The author didn’t mean for it to end there!), in some rare cases even restructuring work. In the later case, one says, “adapted from” in an author’s note or a credit line. One would ordinarily only do this with a living author. I think that it helps to make the work available to an audience and shows the author in a beneficial light.  When translators are able to step back from what might call a dogmatic allegiance to the original, it can often create good opportunities for the work, in the right hands and under the right circumstances.

 

How do you handle edits if the original was already published in its current form, potentially in a language you can’t read?

Mindy: We recently included Korean translations and conferred with the scholar/translator when small inconsistencies were discovered within her own submissions (some of which had previously appeared in other publications). Rules for languages can vary (and dialect and time period can determine linguistic tradition). Admittedly, these were not “substantial,” but one has to try to check for accuracy so that the translation is true as possible to the original work.

Curtis: When editing translations, even when I don’t read the language – I’m thinking of an Israeli poet I published a few years ago (I don’t read Hebrew) – I listen to the English. If there’s a problem, I usually hear it when I read it out loud. In the case of the Israeli poet, I asked the translator about a few lines that I found problematic, how they were constructed in Hebrew and the choices she made in her translation. That evolved into a more focussed conversation about grammar and metaphor (the metaphor in the poem seemed odd, and I wondered if it was “odd” in the original, too; it wasn’t), and ultimately the translator resolved the “oddity” that I heard. I guess what I’m getting at here is that I read the poems and stories and consider their complexities and nuances in English first; if something catches my attention, I mark it as a point for a conversation about the text; that conversation usually leads to a conversation about translation choices and requires that we look at the source text and the translation.

 

Have you taken risks on a translated work that would be unlikely to be published as a book?

Ann: Certainly. I have often excerpted pieces that are strong on their own when I had reservations about the whole. In cases like that I think I am giving the translator a leg up! Publishing a book is a much bigger financial gamble than including a piece in a literary magazine, but seeing that some of a translation has been published before may help to give a book editor confidence, and suggest some ideas about how an editorial process might bring out the text’s strengths.

Curtis: Of course. I think that’s the only way that “unlikely to be published” piece will eventually find its way into book form; new authors and translators needs exposure. They have to start somewhere, and I’m willing to consider work that may never find its way into book form.

 

When publishing translations, do you focus on a particular language or region?

Jennifer: The Common publishes work in all genres with a strong sense of place. It has led us to include a wide variety of international works from more than 16 languages over the last 10 years. Recently, we have begun to highlight translated works in place-specific portfolios. For example, in fall 2018, we published a 100-page portfolio of works from Puerto Rico, the majority written in Spanish and translated into English, to mark one year after Hurricane Maria.  We have also developed a particular focus on translating and publishing contemporary Arabic fiction. For six years now, I have worked with prominent Jordanian writer Hisham Bustani to select, translate, edit and publish works from the Arab world. In 2016, we published TAJDEED (Renewal), entirely devoted to contemporary fiction from the Arab world, representing 26 writers from 15 countries. This momentum has continued so that we are publishing a special portfolio of works translated from Arabic every spring – in 2018, we published a portfolio from Jordan; and in 2019 we are just about to release our Syria portfolio in Issue 17.

We are currently putting together a call for submissions for Lusophone portfolio, works from and about the Lusosphere – Portuguese-speaking countries and their diaspora. We’ve found these portfolios not only allow us to publish a diverse array of writers, but help us find new readers. These issues are also very popular among teachers who use our The Common in the Classroom program.

 

Do you hold translations to a different standard than originals?

Curtis: I don’t think so. I hold both to a very high standard. 

Ann: No. I expect translations to hold up as a literary experience: they don’t get a pass because they are translations.

 

Do you have any other advice for translators submitting to magazines?

Ann: Only, please do it! It seems so valuable to me. Try to identify sections that are free-standing and give the editor a choice. Offer to provide more if they want. 

Curtis: Yes! Be open to a conversation with editors about multiple aspects of the work. I often encounter translators who are unwilling to engage in a conversation about polysemy. That’s one of the things I love most about translations, so I often ask translators to reconsider word choice and syntax.

Minna: Keep an eye out for literary magazines that publish work in translation and submit to the ones you like best. Tell the translators that TLR loves work in translation. 

Mindy: Think of it as a process of literary outreach, and discovery for readers.

 

A big thank you to Ruth Martin, who is co-chair of the Translators Association and translates from the German herself, for inviting us and for facilitating this discussion at the symposium. And thank you to all the editors for sharing their experiences and agreeing, after the fact, to us posting their illuminating comments on our website.

Why Translators Should Publish in Literary Journals (archive) Read More »

Since our founding in 2009, SAND has published work in translation from at least 18 languages. Although journals like ours eagerly await the arrival of translations in our submissions piles, many translators don’t think to submit to literary journals. This is despite journals being a great way to expose emerging translators and to build the reputations of talented authors whose work is still obscure or unknown in English.

Wanting to get other publishers’ take on the issue, translator and former SAND Editor in Chief Jake Schneider reached out to other magazine editors from the Society of Authors Translators Association Symposium and in the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), of which SAND is a proud member. Within hours, he received an outpouring of insights, including comments from the following editors, all of whose publications eagerly accept translated submissions.

  • Jennifer Acker, editor-in-chief of The Common, which is devoted to “deepening our individual and collective sense of place”
  • Curtis Bauer, translation editor of The Common who also translates from Spanish himself
  • Dede Cummings, editor of the magazine The Hopper and publisher of Green Writers Press, both with a strong environmental focus
  • Ann Kjellberg, editor of the journal Little Star, but also the literary executor of Joseph Brodsky and a former contributing editor of the New York Review of Books
  • Mindy Kronenberg, editor of Oberon Poetry Magazine
  • Minna Zallman Proctor, editor of the quarterly The Literary Review (TLR), established in 1957

Should a literary translator submit their work to literary journals?

Ann: Of course! Who could think otherwise? How else do you expect the awareness of an author and the eagerness to invest in and read their work, to spread beyond specialists in the language? If an author is already well-known in English, there is the necessity of making the case that you have something to offer beyond easily available existing translations.

Minna: Translators, especially emerging translators, don’t often think of submitting works in progress to journals because they are focused on book-length projects for book publishers. Changing that paradigm should really just take a nudge from journal editors – who should do a better job of opening their pages to translation, and reaching out to translators to solicit new work. And translators will certainly have an easier time proposing a book-length translation if parts of it have already appeared in literary magazines. The extra exposure provided by a magazine publication is great for an emerging translator given that the business of literary translation has such a strong word-of-mouth component to it.

Poets/poetry translators should definitely be looking at magazine publication from the start of their collaboration. Most of the poetry books that come out in the US are comprised of poems that have all already appeared in lit mags. That’s the model that’s already in place for poetry and so poetry in translation works similarly. Poetry translators should familiarize themselves with the poetry-literary magazine model so that they can use it effectively.

Curtis: It definitely helps people learn about the new voice in a new language. Take a look at Shearsman Books: their webpage more or less says that if you, as a translator, haven’t published a substantial portion of the book of poems in journals in the UK and US, they won’t even look at it. From a publisher’s perspective, individual publications indicate that there’s an interest in the work in literary circles, and that interest tends to lead to better sales.

 

Have you published excerpts of a translation project that was later published as a book?  Did the magazine publication help?

Dede: A few years ago, I received an email from a translator [Ellen Skowronski Polito] who wanted to know if I would write a letter on her behalf so she could enter for an [ASLE translation grant]. I wrote to say that we were very interested in her work translating the work of a Spanish poet, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, and that if all went well, we would very much like to publish it. Jenna Gersie, the managing editor of our literary magazine, The Hopper, attended the ASLE convention in Detroit and the award was announced with the translator winning! We then made a firm offer to publish the actual book [Landscapes with Donkey]. The editorial process proved to be quite lengthy, but rewarding. One of our editors at Green Writers Press [Anna Mullen] has a knowledge of the Spanish language, so I signed her to work with the translator to make sure that every word rang true to the tone and meaning of the original.

Curtis: Yes, several. The reasons are obvious, as stated above, but there’s also the publicity aspect. One of the things I love about The Common (there are many) is that the journal publicizes the work that comes later: if I publish a poem there, and then a book comes out, I can tell the editors and they’re going to make that announcement in the journal and on their social media sites. The Common isn’t the only place that does this, but it’s one of the few that does it really well.

Ann: I have. […] It is hard to say how precisely this helps. A good source of evidence about this would be editors at publishing houses who publish a lot of translation. Book editors have told me on the whole that they wished they had time to read literary magazines more. We do struggle on our end with readership and distribution – on the other hand, of course, it helps the translator, when going to an editor, to be able to say that parts of this have been published in X, Y, and Z. As an editor myself, I am aware of magazines I appreciate, and I notice when they have given a writer or translator the thumbs up. I think one has to make a somewhat amorphous case that increasing the presence of an author in English is a drop-by-drop process and anything you can do to support this will help a book publisher to commit to your project and will help readers to respond to it. An unknown name in a foreign language is a hard sell, likewise a redundant translation. Literary magazines are your natural ally: they are looking for great work, and you are looking to be seen. Unlike many of their submitters, your writer is a known quantity in their original country and likely to deliver as a writer.

 

On magazines soliciting translations, and where they look for them.

Ann: When I find an author I like I try to find out if there is anything new on the way; I even try to put authors together with translators. I have reached out, for instance, to winners of the PEN and Sontag prizes for works in progress to see their manuscripts. 

Minna: Translators who have been hired by a publishing house to translate literary works are often not included in the serial rights process at all, so they have to leave publishing of excerpts to the publishing houses. The publishing houses that publish more translations are small and independent and often running on limited resources and are not good at getting early excerpts out to magazines (which have long lead times – if we wait for review copies to arrive we usually wouldn’t have time to consider and schedule an excerpt). And literary magazines often don’t have the resources to scour catalogues to look for excerpts. Literary book publishers and literary magazine publishers should work together, because translations – whose authors are often unknown abroad – need more exposure in the literary marketplace to get to readers. Translators can help in this process if they have connections to literary magazines and if the publishers are open to suggestions – even when they are not actually part of placing serial rights.

TLR tries to reach out to publishers for forthcoming work. We’ve found we have to do extra legwork on our end to get publishing houses to think of submitting to us. Again, it’s about forming relationships and keeping up with what people are working on. 

Of course the most important way to know about possible excerpts is through relationships with translators. If we hear from a translator about an interesting work in progress, we’ll approach their publisher to see if there’s something from it that might work in terms of length, and timing. We make a very deliberate effort to engage translation. To that end we have editors at TLR who are focused on soliciting and evaluating works in translation. We’ve definitely found that it’s not a genre of literature that just arrives in the slush pile; we have to reach out for it.

 

On rights to publish translations.

Minna: Most literary magazines are even more under-resourced than small presses and so most of us ask translators to only approach us with projects that they have the rights to – or projects in which they have the author’s permission already to send out for publication. If translators don’t have their permissions in order, most magazines won’t be able to publish. This is very different from how publishing translations work with a book publisher, because in all cases it is the responsibility of the book publisher to seek out and acquire translation publishing rights. Lit mags are the only publishing entity that asks translators to do that work. (Explaining this structure to a room full of seasoned translators can cause gasps of dismay and outrage.) But lit mags for the most part do not have the money or legal experience to deal with translation rights, so that’s how it is. It’s a good idea anyway for translators who are doing a translation for love (rather than under contract – where they don’t have the serial rights anyway) to know the situation with the rights so they don’t spend time on a project that’s already been promised elsewhere.

 

Do you edit translations?

Jennifer: We accept unsolicited translations, and we also commission translators to render works into English, especially for our Arabic portfolios. All pieces are thoroughly edited from an English-language point of view, and our editors work closely with the translators, and often the authors as well, to arrive at the best possible English-language version.  The collaboration can be somewhat unwieldy, given the multiple people reviewing and consulting, but we find we are still able to retain the author’s original voice and stylistic choices. 

Ann: I definitely edit. I usually feel that my suggestions are consistent with an extrapolatable underlying text, and I am counting on the translator to correct me if not; it is a back-and-forth process. In the case of a living author they often participate.

I have been grateful when translators and publishers from whom I am publishing translated work are willing to excerpt it in ways that purists might challenge (The author didn’t mean for it to end there!), in some rare cases even restructuring work. In the later case, one says, “adapted from” in an author’s note or a credit line. One would ordinarily only do this with a living author. I think that it helps to make the work available to an audience and shows the author in a beneficial light.  When translators are able to step back from what might call a dogmatic allegiance to the original, it can often create good opportunities for the work, in the right hands and under the right circumstances.

 

How do you handle edits if the original was already published in its current form, potentially in a language you can’t read?

Mindy: We recently included Korean translations and conferred with the scholar/translator when small inconsistencies were discovered within her own submissions (some of which had previously appeared in other publications). Rules for languages can vary (and dialect and time period can determine linguistic tradition). Admittedly, these were not “substantial,” but one has to try to check for accuracy so that the translation is true as possible to the original work.

Curtis: When editing translations, even when I don’t read the language – I’m thinking of an Israeli poet I published a few years ago (I don’t read Hebrew) – I listen to the English. If there’s a problem, I usually hear it when I read it out loud. In the case of the Israeli poet, I asked the translator about a few lines that I found problematic, how they were constructed in Hebrew and the choices she made in her translation. That evolved into a more focussed conversation about grammar and metaphor (the metaphor in the poem seemed odd, and I wondered if it was “odd” in the original, too; it wasn’t), and ultimately the translator resolved the “oddity” that I heard. I guess what I’m getting at here is that I read the poems and stories and consider their complexities and nuances in English first; if something catches my attention, I mark it as a point for a conversation about the text; that conversation usually leads to a conversation about translation choices and requires that we look at the source text and the translation.

 

Have you taken risks on a translated work that would be unlikely to be published as a book?

Ann: Certainly. I have often excerpted pieces that are strong on their own when I had reservations about the whole. In cases like that I think I am giving the translator a leg up! Publishing a book is a much bigger financial gamble than including a piece in a literary magazine, but seeing that some of a translation has been published before may help to give a book editor confidence, and suggest some ideas about how an editorial process might bring out the text’s strengths.

Curtis: Of course. I think that’s the only way that “unlikely to be published” piece will eventually find its way into book form; new authors and translators needs exposure. They have to start somewhere, and I’m willing to consider work that may never find its way into book form.

 

When publishing translations, do you focus on a particular language or region?

Jennifer: The Common publishes work in all genres with a strong sense of place. It has led us to include a wide variety of international works from more than 16 languages over the last 10 years. Recently, we have begun to highlight translated works in place-specific portfolios. For example, in fall 2018, we published a 100-page portfolio of works from Puerto Rico, the majority written in Spanish and translated into English, to mark one year after Hurricane Maria.  We have also developed a particular focus on translating and publishing contemporary Arabic fiction. For six years now, I have worked with prominent Jordanian writer Hisham Bustani to select, translate, edit and publish works from the Arab world. In 2016, we published TAJDEED (Renewal), entirely devoted to contemporary fiction from the Arab world, representing 26 writers from 15 countries. This momentum has continued so that we are publishing a special portfolio of works translated from Arabic every spring – in 2018, we published a portfolio from Jordan; and in 2019 we are just about to release our Syria portfolio in Issue 17.

We are currently putting together a call for submissions for Lusophone portfolio, works from and about the Lusosphere – Portuguese-speaking countries and their diaspora. We’ve found these portfolios not only allow us to publish a diverse array of writers, but help us find new readers. These issues are also very popular among teachers who use our The Common in the Classroom program.

 

Do you hold translations to a different standard than originals?

Curtis: I don’t think so. I hold both to a very high standard. 

Ann: No. I expect translations to hold up as a literary experience: they don’t get a pass because they are translations.

 

Do you have any other advice for translators submitting to magazines?

Ann: Only, please do it! It seems so valuable to me. Try to identify sections that are free-standing and give the editor a choice. Offer to provide more if they want. 

Curtis: Yes! Be open to a conversation with editors about multiple aspects of the work. I often encounter translators who are unwilling to engage in a conversation about polysemy. That’s one of the things I love most about translations, so I often ask translators to reconsider word choice and syntax.

Minna: Keep an eye out for literary magazines that publish work in translation and submit to the ones you like best. Tell the translators that TLR loves work in translation. 

Mindy: Think of it as a process of literary outreach, and discovery for readers.

 

Some of the comments above were made as part of a panel about literary magazines at the 2019 Society of Authors Translators Association Symposium. A big thank you to Ruth Martin, who is co-chair of the Translators Association and translates from the German herself, for inviting us and for facilitating this discussion at the symposium. And thank you to all the editors for sharing their experiences and agreeing, after the fact, to us posting their illuminating comments on our website. This article originally appeared on our website in 2019 and has been edited and shortened in its current form.

Why Translators Should Publish in Literary Journals Read More »

by Jake Schneider

Back in 2005, as a high school student in New Jersey, I was assigned a history project: to interview an “eyewitness to history.” I immediately thought of the state’s most controversial poet, Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones), a figure whose many poetic and political affinities spanned from Beat poetry to Black Nationalism to revolutionary Marxism. He was a man of many strong convictions who was not afraid to voice them in any context.

In 2003, two years earlier, Baraka’s brief tenure as state poet laureate had been revoked and the position abolished in the wake of accusations of anti-Semitism in his poem “Somebody Blew Up America?” The poem, a response to the 9/11 attacks, insinuated Israeli foreknowledge (“Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion / And cracking they sides at the notion”). As a gay white Jew, I was in some ways petrified of the person I’d chosen to interview; he had a history of hostility towards all three of those categories, despite being an admirer of Allen Ginsberg.

But on the phone, Baraka was friendly and forthcoming as he described the odyssey of his life, the oppression of his community, and his quest for artistic liberation – without pulling any punches about his resolutely radical and sometimes violent politics. Perhaps perceiving the interviewer as a version of his bookish teenage self, he set out to re-educate me about class, race, and the revolutionary role of words (and to defend some of the more troubling moments in his past).

After all this time, I remain unconvinced that poetry should directly serve political ends, if that is the implication – but in rereading his arguments, I agree wholeheartedly that the often unspoken questions of who writes, who publishes, and who reads are both deeply political and vital to the enterprise of literature.

Amiri Baraka died five years ago on 9 January 2014 and would have turned 84 in October. This interview is appearing here for the first time, thirteen years after his candid telephone conversation with an anxious high school kid. Needless to say, the views expressed are Baraka’s, not SAND’s.

On becoming a writer early in life, inspired by the blues.
Amiri Baraka: I started writing really in elementary school. Matter of fact, I had published a newspaper when I was about eleven or twelve. It only had ten editions, ten copies, because I had to write them all out by hand. And then I had a whole little strip that was published by the school in the seventh grade. Then I took writing courses. I took all the writing courses I ever took in high school – I took a year of creative writing.

I liked poetry as a teenager; I mean, I liked the blues. I always liked spoken-word blues by people like Larry Darnell. Even the old blues like Lionel Hopkins. My grandparents had the blues, my parents had Nat King Cole, and teenagers – we liked the Bird groups, The Orioles and all those groups. And I always liked the spoken word in that. Because in the church, there’s always that. They’re always speaking around the music. I always thought that that was a single thing, words and music.

There was three of us who thought we were intellectuals: this Italian[-American] guy, this Jewish guy, and myself. We were the three intellectuals. I was sort of on the outside because I was Black, but we were all tight friends and we all had this kind of alienated commentary on everything. And we thought we were going to be writers in high school. I mean, it might have seemed bizarre at the time, but we thought that. And the poetry thing was something that emerged, finally, because it was the easiest thing for me to write. It was the thing I wanted to do more than, say, write stories or plays, although I’ve done all of that. But still the thing that strikes me as the most effective and direct expression of my own feelings is poetry.

On learning about class and race at school.
I came from a social worker mother and a postman father, the bottom of the middle class. So going to a ninety-percent Italian[-American] high school was a shock, in the sense that I had gone to mostly Black schools before. I saw a certain kind of social relationship reversed, since I was suddenly a minority. But I still lived in the Black community. I had to come back from school every night, so it was like having two different contexts to develop in. Makes you kind of schizophrenic. I didn’t like the high school because of that, although I stayed there.

Howard [University] was the first time I came to grips with the meaning of the Black middle class, the Black bourgeoisie. Coming face to face with a more mature context, and beginning to understand the meaning of what that was in the world. And that’s always a kind of learning process, not all of it very pleasant. It’s a learning process of what it is to be a minority and to be excluded in some sense from the social life of a place.

I didn’t like going to Rutgers either, because I was tired of being that kind of “isolated Black.” Obviously, you could slide into that… and that would be your identity, as the isolated Black person… but I never felt good in that situation because I wasn’t really raised in that kind of situation. I was raised in the Black community and its social life. My family was mainly in that Black community. And so, both the high school and the early college experience were really dissatisfying, as far as I was concerned. It left a lot to be desired, emotionally.

An Air Force librarian.
Well, I had a friend who was sort of my hero in high school. He was a track star. I was on the track team, and I looked up to him. He was the state champ in the mile and the half-mile, and we ran cross-country. Plus, his parents knew my parents, so I looked up to him. Then he graduated and moved to New York. And that was fascinating. He lived in the Village; he was a bohemian. I finally went over there and saw him and began to talk to him, came to his house, saw how he was living. It impressed me. And I would go there before finally I got kicked out of college and went to the Air Force, and I still communicated with him.

Then I became willfully determined to become an intellectual because I’d been thrown out of school and I felt kind of ashamed, but at the same time I felt that the reason that I got kicked out is that I wasn’t interested in that stuff. So I was determined to find out, “Well, what were you really interested in?” I became the night librarian in the Air Force. Even though I was flying planes – I mean I was a gunner on a plane, a weatherman. Still, in the evenings, when we weren’t flying, I was the night librarian.

And that’s where I began to do more deep reading. There were a group of us who used go in every night, a mixed group: Black, white, Latino. We’d go in there, and we actually educated ourselves to a great extent. We studied the history of Western music, Western literature. I would get stuff and we would read it and discuss it night after night. So it was really ironic that although I hated the service, I have to say I learned a lot there, certainly about literature. I would read the bestseller lists religiously, order those books, and then I began to find a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about before. You know, reading nineteenth-century lit. I read Proust, Thomas Hardy, and all that garbage. And at the same time a lot of modernist stuff: Gertrude Stein, and Eliot, and Pound, all that kind of stuff. So it was like people do in jail. You have all this time on your hands, and if you’re motivated to do certain things, you’ll learn more than you would otherwise because you don’t have as many diversions.

After about two and a half years, I finally got kicked out of the Air Force. They said for false enlistment. I never told them organizations that I belonged to when I was in the college. But that’s fake too. I mean, that was, I thought, trumped up. I mean, I might have passed out some leaflets for some organization once but I was never really…

But at the trial, when they started bringing this stuff up, I was happy. I mean, I wouldn’t fight it. They wanted to kick me out and I said, “Right on.”

On Allen Ginsberg.
Well, see, I had found out about Ginsberg when I was in the service. He’d just come out with that book Howl. I was fascinated by that because I had been sending poetry out in the service, and it was getting rejected, because that was the period of the kind of academic chokehold on literature just like it’s getting to be today. I mean, this period now [the mid-2000s] is sort of a replay of the fifties. You know, the reactionary essays of those people, those Southern agrarian poets, you know… I can’t even think of their names. Swanee Review, Southern Review, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review. You know, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson’s book, all that stuff. You know, people writing poems where they have to quote Latin or Greek. And that’s just the kind of atmosphere that poets faced then, so if I came to New York I always thought I was going to get together a group of people and publish anybody to make a kind of statement against that kind of dull stuff. So this was just because they rejected my poetry.

Well, you know, the newspaper called The Village Voice was just coming out. That should get you to around 1955. And they had a lot of stuff about Ginsberg. And I finally got the book and read it and I liked it, and I contacted him. He was in Paris when I got out of the service, he was living in Paris. And I wrote him a letter. I wrote him a letter on a piece of toilet paper, and asked him, was he for real? And he wrote me back on a better piece of toilet paper. Said he was for real but he was tired of being Allen Ginsberg.

And then he gave me a whole list of people that he thought should be published. And so I was glad to get that, and I started publishing all those people [in my journal Yugen]. You know, Burroughs and Kerouac and Whalen and McClure and Snyder. But I was publishing all those people that he had listed as being part of the new poetry and I liked their poetry. So that’s how that started. And then I met a lot of people in New York: Frank O’Hara, Creeley, and Olsen, and all the people associated with the Black Mountain and the New York School.

Moving to Harlem.
I think myself and a lot of people had this truck about organizing a Black theater and Black arts organization. When Malcolm [X] got murdered, that simply just put it all into perspective. I decided to cut ties because it seemed absurd to be downtown, you know, bullshitting people about art when the real thing had to be done. Because you remember during that period, the Civil Rights Movement was in motion. 1957 was Dr. King down in Montgomery and then 1959 was Cuba, Fidel Castro [whom Baraka met in Havana in 1960].

The Black Arts Repertory Theater/School.
It was a group of Black writers, and painters, intellectuals, living in [the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York]. Some in Harlem. The Malcolm X thing tore our relationship with the white world. That was no longer important. We had thought of the Village as a place where one went to be an artist. It seemed to us then that it was more important for us to be in Harlem, and that the art we made had to be part of Black people’s struggle to liberate themselves. We wanted an art that would help the struggle that Malcolm laid out, that King was involved in, that the Black Panthers later on would take up. But that’s what we were doing: trying to make art revolutionary.

What we did was mobilize Black artists in New York and then it spread throughout the country. Suddenly the focus of Black artists at that period became to help in the revolutionary struggle, not just to decorate the walls in theaters of white bourgeois America. And so, of course a lot of people took that as being very negative. A lot of the white officials condemned us, and I guess we were extreme in our attempt to disconnect ourselves from things that we had been connected to the minute before.

For the first time we had Black audiences because we went to them, we went to these people, we went to the parks, we went to vacant lots, we went to taverns, we went to street corners.

It wasn’t under white people up there. Black Arts was aimed at, and succeeded in reaching, thousands of Black people who, as avant artists, we would have heretofore missed. That’s what we were trying to do. We were trying to do three things: create an art that was mass art, an art that was revolutionary, and an art that actually would fight on the side of the people for liberation. That’s what we wanted. That’s what we said. That’s what we tried to do.

The problem was that Black is not an ideology and so when people call themselves Black anything, when they try to define that, they find they got twenty-five different versions of that and it started to just combust. We were just “Black” as opposed to being a specific ideology, and you find that Black can be Black communist, Black capitalist, Black Panther, Black preacher, Black vegetarian.

The 1967 Newark Rebellion.
The Black Arts Repertory Theater/School fell apart by ’66. I moved to Newark just before it broke up. That’s one of the reasons it broke up, because I got disgusted with it. People were fighting, pulling guns on each other, and so forth.

Now people were fighting back. After the three hundred years of slavery, etc., the people started openly resisting. Each generation resists its own way, and when it came to my own generation’s youth, they were the ones that fought. The fact that China got liberated, India got liberated, the Vietnam War was going on – all that influenced us, and we figured: “Hey!” We learned from what was going on. We learned from Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. We learned from the African Liberation Movement and [Patrice] Lumumba. So that was all part of it.

You had a majority Black population [in Newark] ruled by an outspokenly racist little Mafia-oriented administration. And then there were some things: the race brutality issue. They had broken into this mosque and beat up the people in this mosque. They wanted two hundred acres of land for a medical school, which I guess they might eventually get. There was a Black man who was supposed to become secretary of the Board of Education who had this master’s degree from Cornell, and [Mayor] Addonizio rejected him and appointed this guy who was a high school graduate (laughs), one of his cronies. The John Smith thing was a cab driver who got beat. So there were all kinds of things, plus a kind of sentiment that had been building up.

Down in the Central Ward, it just went off. It was an explosion. That day we were picketing outside the precinct. It was just all over, you know, I mean everywhere you had the feeling that “This cannot go on.” We were talking already about wanting to elect a Black mayor. That was ’67. (In ’70 we achieved it, but [meanwhile] all of this kind of unrest was going on.) We were organizing – this was my wife Amina and I – at the Spirit House, we were using the same things, we were using the Black Arts, using theater and poetry. We had put out a little newspaper. You know, we were agitating. Stokely Carmichael would come out and talk about “Black Power.” So it was an agitational sense and so when the thing went off, people started breaking out windows. It just spread: “Chooom!” Remember, Detroit had happened. Two years before that or three years before that, Watts had happened. So there were paradigms that people took up and they went and did it.

Baraka’s arrest. “Didn’t they say you had firearms or something?”
Yeah, they said I had two guns. I mean you know, one is not enough. That was all trumped-up stuff. They had been looking to jam me up because we were very outspoken about what we were doing. And even in the coroner’s report, they said that Spirit House was a place full of agitators, and so forth, and so on. The judge read out a poem of mine called “Black People” and he included that as a reason. He said it was a “prescription for criminal anarchy.” Poetry really gets you in trouble.

It’s my feelings obviously, but to try to say that because I’m writing about a rebellion that I know is going to happen… I mean, even a fool, if he lived in this community, he’d know after a while these people are not gonna take that. They’re not gonna take that. I mean Shakespeare’s talking about stuff that’s still happening today. Do you know what I’m saying?

If you talk about something like that and someone says “Wow. You… did this. You planned this rebellion.” I mean that’s so crazy. You would not be able to write anything. Anything that you envision.

It’s just the nature of mediocre people that they are so opposed to literature that is alive, and literature that sticks its nose into what’s going on in the world at the time. I’m not interested in writing about flowers and birdbaths and birdies and stuff like that. I mean, if I had to write about that, I wouldn’t write.

Reading Wittgenstein many years ago, I read that “ethics and aesthetics are one” – and I believed that, but seeing it put into those words or, for that matter, reading Mao Zedong or Lenin, then it becomes clear that that’s true. What you write shows what you love, what you hate, what you uphold, what you put down. It shows what your class relationships are. It’s obvious when you read something that’s a prescription, a description of you, but that doesn’t mean that you have done the things that you’re writing about.

What to write about.
Well, you’ve got to write about what concerns you, that’s all. What concerns me is the world. You have to find out about the world to write about it. And it has to do not only with your reading and study, but it has to do with what you actually do, what kind of practice you engage in, what’s your day-to-day work.

Amiri Baraka: Literature for Liberation Read More »

The writer and performance artist Lena Chen moved to Berlin and adopted a new name and identity. The Galician-born and proudly Icelandic poet Elías Knörr has “localized” his pen name in a rejection of insular ideas of nativeness and foreignness. They both perform (under even more personas) at the Poetry Brothel, a series of burlesque-style literary cabarets in nine countries that include private poetry readings in place of lap dances. The next Berlin session of the Poetry Brothel – Bacchanal edition – will be on 30 August.

In parallel, we asked Lena and Elías a few questions about their alter egos.

 

Can you tell us how you decided to adopt an alter ego?

Lena: I started writing an autobiographical novel shortly before I moved to Berlin, and Elle was my protagonist, based on myself. I was simultaneously working through a lot of trauma related to being a victim of revenge porn and Internet harassment). I decided to start modeling as a way to reclaim my image – which had been disseminated without my consent. I took on the name “Elle Peril” in real life, created social media profiles for her, and lived under this identity for five years. I shot with photographers across Europe and the US and went by the name Elle, which is still the name most of my friends know me by in Europe. Embodying Elle Peril meant that I could escape unwanted online attention, rebuild a life beyond my trauma, and explore my sexuality and relationship with men.

Sexuality has been a source of shame for so much of human existence, because it’s powerful and threatens those in power. If we can find a way to understand our desires and harness our sexual energy, we can heal ourselves and correct social injustices.

Elías: I’ve always worked with alter egos. For more than ten years now, I’ve been publishing by putting myself in somebody else’s shoes. I’ve done a little bit of creativity theory and I prefer to neutralise the author’s ego and always look for inspiration outside myself. That’s how you always find more new and unexpected stuff. I like setting aside romanticism and my inner feelings and searching for inspiration in the outer world rather than in my own heart, because no matter how deep and broad my mind is, the outer world will always be wider and will always surprise me…

I could speak about this for hours, but let’s say that creating an alter ego is one of the many ways to forget about yourself and look for new creative strategies. It also helps you get out of your comfort zone and be more permeable. I often also work as if I were the translator, the interpreter, or the editor of my own texts; it makes things much easier when you see them from outside.

 

Does inhabiting an alter ego feel comforting? Confining? Liberating?

Lena: Identity is confining when we limit ourselves to one identity or kind of life. I found that creating an alter ego freed me from the expectations of others.

Elías: It doesn’t have to be less comforting or comfortable than the clothes you decide to wear. I don’t find it confining at all but, then again, it can imply some self-imposed restrictions. These are actually very useful, since accepting a character also means accepting new rules for the game. These rules make you travel in new directions and they help you avoid certain areas that you might wish to stay away from, in order to change. Maybe it sounds like they could be a problem, but actually, the challenge is what calls for intelligence and creativity.

I live in Iceland, which has a great literary environment but the community is very very small. It can be quite dörflich [village-like] and full of expectations and prescriptivism… So the theatricality of alter egos can break all those limitations and bring a lot of freedom to a writer.

Besides, I have foreign origins and, for a tiny society, that’s quite a heavy issue, which is better to avoid as much as possible in order to protect one’s work from being spoiled by one’s real identity. Using an alter ego that nobody knows can serve as a mask. Maybe it doesn’t help with promotion, but if you get good responses, everybody knows it’s because of the value of your work, not because of who you are. I’m such an ugly duckling that I would never have got here if I hadn’t put on that mask in the first place.

 

Where would your alter ego feel most at home?

Lena: Living in a temple with a cult of priestesses devoted to goddess worship.

Elías: That depends a lot on the alter ego or on the work. It’s a matter of performance, so it always belongs to some kind of scenario; this can be a film or the pages of a book, but of course also the place where one is performing. Some voices, like the SpiegelHaut-project that I’m working on in Germany, only materialise while singing in Late Latin, but there’s another alter ego that fictionally died a hundred years ago and maybe could only come to life through a comic book… Let’s see. My brothel character, Michaël Drake, claims in his bio that he only feels at home when he’s performing poetry, wherever he is at the time.

 

When you write or perform as your alter ego, do you feel like a different person?

Lena: Yes, within the Poetry Brothel, I perform as The Poetry Oracle, who writes custom poems in response to a question and a card drawn from an oracle deck. Depending on the client, I can be extremely seductive or more sage-like. I find myself becoming more confident or even dominating. These are probably aspects of my personality that exist, but for whatever reason, I haven’t felt comfortable showing it in my “real” life as Lena Chen, though that’s quickly changing.

Elías: I do as an actor does. As Michaël Drake in the Brothel, I sell dreams and the client is paying for that, not for my boring reality-self, so I stay in character and talk and act as he would do. He’s 577 years old, so his human feelings have a very different perspective than mine, but at the same time, he ignores many things that I know and has even bigger memory problems than I do… So, yeah, we’re quite different. Sometimes it takes me a while to get into a character, but the funniest thing is when you’re still in character and you continue acting like him/her and start flirting with the waitress even though the show is over… Once I had a character for a project (a physically impaired, rich young lady called Magda) who never came to life because I went to a literary festival and I started behaving like her. It actually had a good impact on my performance, but it freaked me out a bit so I killed her.

When writing as an alter ego, the process can be a bit more complex… Sometimes I make up funky rituals in order to get into the mind of the character, and I try to surround myself with things that inspire that personality. In a way it’s like an invocation. Sometimes I also feel like the alter ego’s text is already written before I start it, that I just need to rescue it from oblivion or edit it… I don’t know if it makes sense, but it helps to have that certainty as a starting point when actually there’s still nothing.

 

Would your alter ego do or write things that “you” wouldn’t, or vice versa?

Lena: Absolutely – being Elle allowed me to interact with men again and overcome fears about being taken advantage of. I felt really unsafe and paranoid in men’s presence for many years. Within the context of a photo shoot, I was able to carry on a conversation and sometimes even become friends with men. Of course, there have been photographers who have tried to cross my boundaries, but the art modeling community is really strong and conscious about safety. Before #MeToo ever happened, I have spoken with so many models about being hit on, harassed, or violated in the course of our work. Models have blacklists and whisper networks which attempt to hold photographers accountable for inappropriate behavior.

Elías: For sure, that’s what alter egos are made for, for doing crazy things! And it’s very healthy, sort of a carnival. Some of Michaël Drake’s texts I would never publish under my name, but they’re perfect for the Brothel. Also, when I compose melodies for my readings, I always tend to do medieval and folkish things, but for the ContraFaces film I was being somebody else with somebody else’s texts, so I wrote some kind of a singer-songwriter song with Erin Moure’s poem “Dog of Water.”

Also, when you’re only being yourself, both the person and the author are the same thing and you might need to defend your literary authority in quite an academic way. But when you’re being a character, that’s totally out of the question and you might even feel more free to talk about tricky political or social issues as long as it fits in the game.

I would even dare to say that in a modern society where context is systematically ignored and words are constantly misplaced, the “masquerade” of expressing yourself as an alter ego can easily be more authentic than the fake reality and post-truth that surround us in traditional and social media.

 

Lena, what made you decide to retire Elle last year?

Lena: In order to move on psychologically, I needed to merge my two identities instead of compartmentalizing my trauma (and therefore, my life). I never set out with the intention to become a full-time model. In addition to using it therapeutically, I also saw it as a challenge (could I do this and be good at it?). But after five years, I was honestly bored of modeling and felt like I was not getting much out of it artistically anymore, though still I remain interested in collaborating with visual artists. I became interested in pursuing other forms of art, particularly performance/live art and film. In order to move on psychologically, I needed to merge my two identities instead of compartmentalizing my trauma (and therefore, my life). I had two sets of social media accounts. My friends in Europe didn’t know my background story, and my friends in the States had only vague ideas about my modeling. I also never set out with the intention to become a full-time model. In addition to using it therapeutically for writer’s block and trauma, I also saw it as a challenge (could I do this and be good at it?) But after five years, I was honestly bored of modeling and felt like I was getting much out of it artistically anymore, though still I remain interested in collaborating with visual artists. I’m still a writer at heart and now I’m interested in pursuing other forms of storytelling, particularly performance/live art and film.

 

Elías, is there anything else you’d like to tell me as “yourself”?

Elías: Well, I’m Elías Knörr, an Icelandic writer but born in Galicia. I’m mainly a poet and translator but I also write so-called “weird fiction” and I do some performing and music. I’m living right now in Berlin on a writer’s fellowship from the Republic of Iceland, but I’ve already been to Germany six or eight times for festivals organised by Lettrétage and several universities. I write in both Icelandic and Galician, though I use more languages when I perform. The UK Poetry Review once considered me one of the three most representative poets of the post-crisis period in Iceland, and once I also won the biggest poetry prize in the Galician language. My texts always have avant-gardish tastes. I like to work on “the possibilities of words” and search for external, not personal inspiration. I love queer issues in the broadest sense you can imagine. I’m a regular collaborator with the UNESCO City of Literature in Reykjavík and I sell dreams at Rauða Skáldahúsið, the Poetry Brothel of Reykjavík. I’m a very boring person in real life but I haven’t felt bored since I was a teenager. I find literature to be one of the most hygienic tools we have for our souls and for society. Some people read my poems and then ask my publishers whether there’s a woman hiding under my boy’s name. English translations of two books of mine are coming out soon, and now and then I read individual translations of my poems in German. I’m actually learning German… but my accent sounds more like Zara Leander’s than like standard Hochdeutsch.

 

Learn more about Lena Chen’s life and work on her website (NSFW). Or see her at a future edition of the Poetry Brothel.

While we eagerly await Eliás Knörr’s books in English translation, you can read four translated poems here and a profile of the poet here. Or purchase a private reading at the Poetry Brothel on 30 August in Berlin.

Alter Egos: Poetic Performers and Their Personas Read More »

Nate McCarthy’s essay “The First Steak of the Rest of My Life” appears in SAND Issue 17, and they will be reading at our Berlin launch on 25 May. SAND Nonfiction Editor Susanna Forrest talked to Nate about the ethics of food writing and the difficulties of tackling chronic illness as a literary subject.

SAND: You were born in Sydney and now live in Berlin. Could you tell us a little about your life and what you’re discovering about your adopted hometown? When did you start writing?

McCarthy: I used to mainly write songs in Sydney and only started writing stories and the odd bit of creative nonfiction in the last couple of years in Berlin. My mother has a way with words and we write letters to each other. She has a beautiful turn of phrase. When I visited Australia earlier this year, instead of saying “Have a safe flight,” she wrote “My thoughts wing their way to you as you are about to wing away.” So that is my inheritance. 

Berlin and Sydney are hard and soft in different ways and when you experience the harshness of one you wish for the troubles you had in the other. At the moment it’s the troubles of Sydney that beckon. I’ve always loved to have a chat but you know the old joke: What did one German say to the other German on the street? Nothing!

SAND: Literary food writing tends to focus on sensual experiences, memory or travel. When the ethics of meat-eating are addressed, the result usually seems to be polarised rather than ambiguous, as in your essay. Did it feel like a big topic to undertake? Of which dilemmas were you thinking?

McCarthy: It felt a little delicate. I didn’t want to write as if I was justifying myself, yet I wanted to show that it was anything but a flippant decision and that it was born from sheer physical weakness. I wondered, who would want to know about someone’s excruciatingly complicated diet and how they feel about eating meat? Does drawing attention to physical suffering in an essay my own or the animals that we eat come across as indulgent? But I just started with Dave and our friendship; how the steak dinner was an act of care on his part and an act of desperation on mine. That felt right.

SAND: Chronic illness – especially the “invisible” kind – has a growing profile in public discourse even when the realities of dealing with one of these conditions can be frustrating due to a shortfall in research or knowledge among primary carers. Did you always know you wanted to write about your health experiences? What did you want to take into consideration when you tackled the topic? 

McCarthy: I have never wanted want to write about my illness and at the same time I couldn’t completely avoid it. I don’t name what ails me in the essay because I didn’t want to commit to educating people about it, to engage with the lack of public understanding and old narratives that hamper research and treatment and that are difficult not, at some point, to internalise. That will be another piece. The thing about invisible illnesses is that there is such a gap between what one experiences day in and day out, and what other people see and wish to understand. If I wrote about my condition in greater detail I would need to reckon with that gap. But in this piece I wanted to just nod at it, and keep a strong line going to the parts of the story that I am most comfortable writing about. I wanted to recall all those lovely nights with my mate, the whole wash of being very sick but making the best of it together and leave a fair bit of the difficult stuff to the imagination. 

SAND: And lastly, some questions for all writers. What’s inspiring you now (books, film, music, people, experiences) and what are you working on? 

McCarthy: I’m working on a short story – there’s a nurse, Big Trish, who has moved into a small town in Australia. She’s working the night shift in the emergency department and finds out that John, a big man in town (he runs the community gardens and is on the council), is violently abusive to his wife. John ends up in the emergency room himself after treading on a poisonous fish and finds himself in Trish’s capable hands.

 

Book: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

Music: Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe

Susan Sarandon as Reggie Love in The Client

Balls of Balkan string cheese sold at the Turkish supermarkets

Nate McCarthy on Invisible Illness & Eating Meat Read More »