The winners of the 74th National Book Awards—given every year in Young People’s Literature, Translation, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction—will be announced next week in a ceremony hosted by LeVar Burton at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City (and online).

Ahead of the festivities, Literary Hub caught up with (almost) all the finalists to ask them a bit about their books, their reading habits, and their writing lives.

FICTION

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

How do you tackle writer’s block?

By writing. I don’t say this in a flippant “haha” way. I say it meaning I try my best not to assign to myself a state where I absolutely cannot write. And so I try to remember the fun of writing the play aspect. If I’m in a project I try to think about how just writing a single word, then another then another is all I’m doing. When it is difficult, which is often I allow myself to try my best in a specific amount of time and if nothing comes then I’m okay with that. (I’m not but I tell myself it’s okay.)

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

I think in general we need to remember that no advice is catchall for everyone. And so bad advice is usually just bad advice for you. It might be great for someone else. I think the worst advice is that which situates itself as an absolute. I think the best advice I’ve been given which was given directly to me in consideration of my tendency to get bogged down in some of the less important parts was: be simple, be precise. Also a bonus from Dana Spiotta: A story needs to swerve.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

I like this question. I have a lot of people who have been insanely impactful but I think I’d say Lynne Tillman at the State University at Albany has the hugest impact. Working with her was my first real time seeing myself as a writer and also being acknowledged as such. She taught me that aggressive line edits are a love language so I was and am never resistant to receiving them. The made me feel like I could do this thing that was as far as I could tell impossible. She also introduced me to a lot of the other writers I’ve come to love and led me to knowing what an MFA even was so yeah, Professor Tillman changed my life.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

I want to talk more about the costumery associated with being a writer and the weird hierarchal elements we preserve to the detriment of basically everyone. I do end up talking about it but usually in the context of pushing back against the idea that, for example, a short story is less creatively ambitious than a novel.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

Make music (album coming soon but that’s still a writer so let me think of something else.) I think I’d be involved in directing probably (also often associated with writing kinda). Maybe I’d be a filmmaker/photographer. Yeah.

Aaliyah Bilal, author of Temple Folk

Who do you most wish would read your book? (your boss, your childhood bully, etc.)

Barack Obama. I imagine him sitting in his study reading Temple Folk.

What time of day do you write (and why)?

Always in the afternoon. Morning is too mentally chaotic for me.

How do you tackle writer’s block?

I respect writer’s block. I wouldn’t tackle her. I try to sit patiently and ask myself what it is that I’m not seeing. The right words are often on the other side of experiences we are avoiding.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you ever received?

“Sit down and just write.” It’s important to think clearly first. Forced words makes for bad writing.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

Learning different languages as well as learning to read music have had the greatest impact on my writing. They add dimension to my thought process.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

It might surprise readers to know that most of my process is prior to language. The reader sees the words, but in my mind they are oils and acrylics.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

“Blue in Green” is my all-time favorite song.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters. It’s a story that really troubles me now, but I remember loving that book as a kid. As for chapter books I loved a middle grade novel called Jacob have I Loved. I loved that the setting was in my home state of Maryland, but especially connected to the protagonist’s struggle as a very special girl who was belittled by her family.

Which book(s) do you reread?

Aside from Edward P. Jones, I’ve read the collection Everything that Rises Must Converge several times. I know Flannery O’Connor is out of fashion with a certain kind of reader. I agree that the way she wields race is lazy, but the technique impeccable.

What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be writing?

I play solitaire.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. I wanted to fly after reading that book.

How do you decide what to read next?

My work dictates my reading.

What’s one book you wish you had read when you were young?

I would have benefited from bell hooks’s Sisters of the Yam. It would have helped counteract some of the unhealthy ways I learned to think about gender and race as a kid.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

It’s rare that anyone asks me about the individual stories within Temple Folk, just the ideas behind the book.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

I wish I were funny enough to be a comedian. Making people laugh feels like power to me. I’d be that or a bass guitarist. That would be so fun!

Paul Harding, author of This Other Eden

What time of day do you write (and why)?

I write wherever and whenever the spirit strikes. I think I’m probably always turning sentences and words and riffs around in my head, so whenever anything clicks, I write it down on whatever’s handy. I always have a writing notebook around, but I also have dozens of Post-It Note pads of various sizes all over the house and in my work bag, too. Periodically, I’ll go around and scrape up all the Post-It Notes that are stuck on books and walls and tables and tape or staple them into the current writing notebook, then put them all into the master manuscript at hand or, if they’re just orphan ideas or images or whatever I’ll put them into some sort of “miscellaneous” document.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

I’m not sure it’s the same these days, but there used to be a prevalent idea that you needed to sit down every day and “face the blank page.” That seemed pretty foolish to me. Why waste time staring at a blank page when you could be listening to great music or reading a book or looking at a painting or taking a walk? To me, writing is not the same thing as, say, typing. If I’m awake, I’m writing, that is, composing, if it’s just in my head. I think I’m probably composing or riffing half the time I’m asleep, too! I love lying on the couch, half asleep, riding the updrafts, as I call it.

How do you decide what to read next?

One of the hardest things for me to do when I first got the fever to read the best books I could get my hands on was to find the best books. Pre-internet, I’d just haunt bookstores and at first the only real standard I used, if you could call it that, was to go down along the fiction shelves and look for the widest spines I could find. I loved huge books, the longer the better. Nothing like that joy of finding a book you love and seeing that you have, like, six or seven hundred pages left to just live in over the next days or weeks. That’s how I found writers like Carlos Fuentes (Terra Nostra), for instance. I looked up some of his essays and found that he loved Thomas Mann, so I picked up The Magic Mountain next. I found out who Mann liked and read whoever that was. Eventually, I ended up with an inexhaustible reading list. There are so many books I’d love to read I’ll never run out. I don’t really decide what to read next anymore; the books just seem to pile up everywhere in the house. I just kind of waft around reading in a dozen or two books at a time. They all sort of mix up with one another and synthesize with one another and suggest all kinds of ideas and idioms and images I’d never be able to conjure on my own.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

No hesitation; I’d be a musician. I played drums for many years in bands, and I still do, in the basement, for myself. I’d kill to play in a good band again, in fact. I was never good enough to be a session player. That’s a whole other order of artistry. But if I could, actually, I’d be happy to be, like, a fourth assistant gofer at a good recording studio. Nothing I loved more back in the day than just being in the studio with a bunch of great musicians and producers and engineers, putting music together.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

It wasn’t so much specifically bad advice, but when I started trying to write fiction there was still a read danger of running into teachers, editors, writing programs who or that presented one or another particular genre or idiom as the be all and end all of how “real” writing just had to be done. Back then, the standard I kept running into was what might be called the Church of Saint Raymond Carver. I love some of Raymond Carver’s stories—some of the most beautiful, artful stuff I’ve ever read. But if I had had to write stories like his, I’d have become a plumber decades ago. Every person should write exactly what seems true and fine and honest to themselves, to their own soul. I shudder when I think of the universes of art and beauty that may well have been lost because some genius followed someone else’s path rather than her own.

Hanna Pylväinen, author of The End of Drum-Time

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

I was in the one of my phases of anxiety that there was no point to writing The End of Drum-Time—no point for me in particular to write it, but also no point in writing fiction at all; by then I’d done so much research I could have written a good deal of nonfiction about the place and era, I mean, if I’d wanted to—but there I was, making up things that definitely hadn’t happened, but using one or two real people from the past, and not others—there seemed to be a basic stupidity to the project of being a writer. I was discussing this with a friend in Sápmi and she said—well, if you were an artist you would paint it. And if you were a singer you would sing about it. But you’re a novelist and so you write a novel about it.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

I don’t want to imagine my life without Bach; I would have lost out on so much feeling. If I have to choose which Bach I’d have to say the first movement to his G minor violin sonata, in part because it was once incredibly hard for me to learn, and because it remains so difficult to play, and because when I first heard it I thought it was a little ugly—but that was because I didn’t know it yet. It required so much of me and taught me the value of art that asks a lot. I love in particular how demanding it is in its slowness and how notes in a given chord drop out—it’s quite difficult though it doesn’t sound so, it’s not a show-off piece—but if you are a violinist you recognize its secret trials, and you respect the player who can do what Bach intended, which is to wound you and restore you to yourself.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

I fell in love first with Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because it was about a little girl who also loved to read, and because it was the first book that transplanted me completely to a life unlike mine and made true the adage, a writer’s job is to make the unfamiliar familiar, etc.., so that the details of Francie’s life, the particularity of the poverty of the Williamsburg slums she was in, became commonplace to me, in part because Francie’s world is filtered through her particular feelings––it is not just that there is a rich girl named Mary who wants to give away a doll to some poor girl named Mary but that Francie despises her, is humiliated by her, and still raises her hand to claim the doll for herself…which is to say Francie is the first character of contradictory impulses that I wanted to befriend. Years later someone explained to me that “the Tree of Heaven” which is, in fact, the tree that grows in Brooklyn, is a weed, and I was dismayed for Francie, as if she were a real person whose feelings could be hurt by this.

Which book(s) do you reread?

I tend to read old books with too many characters. Give me a Russian with four Alexeis any day. Or even a parlor room, or a neighborhood—worlds of judgment or gossip where people are constantly getting in each other’s way, changing each other’s lives in silly little instances. The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen is like this, foregrounded in coincidental shoulder-jostling—half the time you have no idea why you are following a particular character, but I enjoy it, because I trust her as a writer to not waste my time and indeed she never does.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

I think we could all do more with more discussion of the systemic lack of support for the arts in this country that makes it incredibly difficult—nearly impossible—to have time to write, or compose, or make art of any medium. Whenever I see a great work of art or read an excellent book I always think, now how did they get the time to make that? Who or what supported them? As such my interest in a writer’s life is rarely one of process, but one of life: how did they manage to have a process at all? It’s such a luxury. A room of my own sounds wonderful, but what about four uninterrupted hours a day? I’d settle for two.

Justin Torres, author of Blackouts

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

Some good advice I received early on: Pay attention to each sentence. But the best advice is even more general: Slow down.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

I’ll talk a bit about my high school English teacher, Laura Iodice, who taught me new ways of reading and relating to the text. She was fiery, from the Bronx, with a fuhgeddaboutit accent, and somehow, like my parents, had ended up far, far upstate, in a very small town. What brought her there I don’t recall, but what luck for me. She felt immediately familiar, and she recognized something in me as well. She plucked me out of one English class and enrolled me in the honors class instead. There, she taught us about Jungian archetypes; she taught Beloved; she taught us existentialism; she essentially taught us critical race theory, though no one called it that at the time. On the side, outside the regular curriculum, she would slide me books, just for me – difficult books she knew I could not fully understand, but somehow needed: Neitzshe’s Human All Too Human, Sartre’s Nausea, Ferlinghetti’s Wild Dreams of a New Beginning. She introduced me to the Puerto Rican writer Irene Vilar, and her book, A Message From God in the Atomic Age. Inside the jacket flaps she would inscribe personal messages, wisdom, much of it, again, went over my head. But as I read, I began to decode what she was trying to tell me. I had lost a lot of faith in the world, and she thought I might find it again in literature. I had her for both junior and senior year. Difficult years. I was in a very dark place. I remember each and every book she gave me. I would stare at the titles (the titles alone!) in amazement. I’d think, I want to write something beautiful. Then, about midway through senior year I was institutionalized. One day, at visiting hours, she was there. With books. She came back again, with more books. We’ve remained friends through the years, and even when we haven’t spoken in a very long time, she’s a voice in my head. I think of her often.

How do you decide what to read next?

I don’t have a system. I buy books all the time, they stack up. I have another stack of books awaiting blurbs—way more than I will have time to get to. I move between one stack and another, reading the opening pages. Depending on my mood, something or other will grab me, and I’m off. Right now I’m enjoying an advance copy of a biography of Candy Darling, by Cynthia Carr, who wrote the biography of Wojnarovicz.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

I wanted to be a painter. I tried. Acrylic on brown paper bags, which I’d open along the seams. I wasn’t very good. These nude figures, haloed or bleeding, or both. I was young and stretching and imitating (which is to say, I was a hack). I was also broke, and even cheap acrylic paint and cheap brushes were not cheap enough. The equipment required more care and attention and space than I could muster. And I hated to clean up after. Still, today, I wish I could paint. Early on in our relationship, many years ago, my boyfriend bought me a book by the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner, as a gift. (He’s an expert on Milner, who was an incredible woman.) I died when I saw the title: On Not Being Able to Paint. I thought, This is the book I need! I thought it would be about creative frustration, and paths out of frustration, and in a way it is, but it was a much deeper book than I’d imagined, and much more strange and unexpected, and therefore much more useful.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

These days I look for opportunities to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Human rights organizations, the UN leadership and the international community in general are all overwhelmingly calling for a ceasefire—only the US and small handful of countries refuse to sign on. I hope for a shift in public sentiment, a recognition of our government’s complicity in the suffering, and enough public demand for a ceasefire that leaders are forced to listen.

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NONFICTION

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Who do you most wish would read your book?

When I first began envisioning this book and eventually writing it, I hoped to get readers to see American history in a different register. I have long believed that the study of American history has failed on a fundamental level to analyze the experiences of North America’s Native peoples and to see those experiences as central to the continent’s overall development. Moreover, many histories of the United States continue to be overly celebratory. So, I begin with a simple question: How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy? How do we reconcile the fact that American democracy was built on Indian dispossession and what has that experience been like for Native peoples? I also write that the exclusion of Native Americans was codified in the Constitution, maintained throughout the Antebellum era, and legislated into the twentieth century, and far from being incidental it enabled the development of the United States. I believe that U.S. history as we currently know it does not account for the centrality of Native Americans. I wanted readers to confront these historical truths—especially students, because they are the future of the field, and scholars, because they have the power to reorient narratives of American history. It was also important to me that this book be read by anyone interested in our history and how Native Americans have shaped and been shaped by the United States.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education? 

I wasn’t much of a writer as a young person and did not have a computer until my second year in graduate school. At a key point in my development I had several professors who really pushed me to refine my approach to writing and to bring more focus and clarity to my work. They may not realize the impact that they had but their edits and feedback proved particularly helpful especially with each passing assignment. This focus only intensified in graduate school. I have now been teaching writing for over twenty-five years and draw often upon these earlier experiences. I believe I still have those early papers with their marginal notes.

Which book(s) do you reread? 

These days I mostly read to keep up. Native American history is in a period of such exciting growth and richness, and there is a great deal of wonderful work being published all the time. I also have three kids, and generally, I don’t often have the luxury of re-reading books from cover to cover. There are a few titles that I keep coming back to: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, and David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb. Each is monumental in its own way. These books tell of individuals confronting great tragedy but surviving and resisting. I read each during a time when I was uncertain about my own writing and progress, and while it may sound unusual, I found not only inspiration but also reassurance in them.

What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be writing? 

I try to write at desks with windows so that I can look out and reflect on whatever I’m doing or supposed to be doing. I also like to peruse library bookshelves to find inspiration, often finding myself absorbed in new and interesting subjects. I may even have a habit of ordering books that I find particularly captivating. Much of this book was written during the summer, and I often took small walks to regain focus.

What’s one book you wish you had read when you were young? 

Growing up, I rarely encountered any contemporary—let alone positive—representations of Native peoples. I wish I had read Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich much sooner than I did. I find Erdrich’s works to be brilliantly expansive and humanizing, and this book is full of beautiful narratives of families, love, and humor—as well as sadness and tragedy—that are familiar to many Native people.

Cristina Rivera Garza, Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice

What time of day do you write (and why)?

With any luck, I write early in the mornings, as soon as I open my eyes but when I’m not fully awake just yet. That liminality, the weaving of dreams and ideas, is both productive and liberating. You would find me wearing pajamas and sipping green tea on those glorious days, completely unaware of time.

How do you tackle writer’s block?

What is that? 

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

I read and underlined The Diary of Anne Frank when I was very young, thinking that I too could become a writer. But the book I read and transcribed entire paragraphs from was Pedro Páramo by legendary Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. I did not fully grasp the complexity of themes or the structure of the narrative, but there was an elusive beauty on those pages, a void of sorts, an opacity that continued to draw me in.

Which book(s) do you reread?

I re-read all the time, especially theory books and poetry. I go back, attracted by a strange echo. A reverberation. It´s like visiting an old friend who, not surprisingly, has changed over time. I recently re-read some poetry by Mexican author Rosario Castellanos, which was key in my upbringing. Listening to audiobooks counts as re-reading? During the pandemic, I listened to books I had read when I was very young, curious about what had happened to both of us over the years. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by García Márquez, or Remembrance of Things Past, by Elena Garro, passed the test of time.

What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be writing?

I clean my house thoroughly. I sweep and dust and declutter as if my life depended on it.  There is something somber around my house when it is sparking clean.

How do you decide what to read next?

I am a voracious but disorganized reader. I pay attention to what friends recommend and I let chance work its wonders. I have been disappointed quite often, but this method has also led me to books I would not go to otherwise. That´s how I run into Milorad Pavic, for example. Or Peruvian author Cesar Calvo. Or Bolivian writer Claudia Peña Claros.

Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

What time of day do you write (and why)?

I am a morning person but I don’t have a particular writing schedule. I do a lot of writing, plotting, in my head and I can write any time of day.

What was the first book you fell in love with (and why)?

There are so many. I learned to read when I was 3. This likely wasn’t the first (that would have been Bread and Jam for Frances or Bedtime for Frances) but Bright April is up there. It was the first time I read a book about a little black girl who experienced some of the same things that I did as a child. It was also just a lovely book—illustrations and story.

Which book(s) do you reread?

I am a huge rereader. I reread for teaching and for writing, for pleasure and for work. Among my current most reread are books by Toni Morrison, John Keene, Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman and Canisia Lubrin. (I also reread a lot of mysteries….)

How do you decide what to read next?

Recommendations and books by writers whose work I respect. Right now I am reading books by Emily Robateau, Steffani Jemison, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Justin Torres, and Teju Cole.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

Well, I’m also a professor so I do that as well. But if I weren’t a nonfiction writer, I would (want to) be a poet or a visual artist.

Raja Shehadeh, author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir

What time of day do you write (and why)?

I write in the morning when my mind is clear before the distractions of the day have begun.  I find that at that early hour I can be most creative energetic.

How do you tackle writer’s block?

I’ve never experienced writer’s block. There have always been more subjects to write about than I’ve had time to get to them.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

A lot of my writing is done as I walk when ideas, words and a grasp of what I’m writing about comes to me most easily.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I appreciated his stream of consciousness style and how the book proceeds from the point of view of the child and develops from there.

Which book(s) do you reread?

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

What time of day do you write (and why)?

Morning is that liminal, lucid time when the replenished and still-accessible dreamtime unconscious gets pressurized into the world by incoming caffeine, turning my head into an espresso machine for language.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

 A few years ago, Miguel Syjuco told me that Jonathan Dee exhorts his students to write what they want to know. I really resonated to that because it’s what I’ve been doing for my entire career: writing to learn, to push myself beyond my comfort zone, to explore someplace new.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

 That would be a toss-up between Miss Gabron, my first grade teacher who sat us all down to write poems, urging us toward essence and economy of language, and my first magazine editors who really took time with my work and pushed on it. Those early editing encounters with thoughtful, patient people who loved language, and who understood that I did, too, are among the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. Reflecting on it now, I realize that I’ve had really attentive, language-loving teachers and readers throughout my life, and I’m deeply grateful to all of them.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

How much time I spend not writing.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

 Rian Malan’s memoir, My Traitor’s Heart, shook me to the core. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Suttree both required me to stop reading periodically and reorient myself in the room: “The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?”  Etc.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

The question of whether or not fire is alive.

•

POETRY

John Lee Clark, author of How to Communicate

How do you tackle writer’s block?

I don’t. When Nibby insists on blocking me, I go to a bean bag and let him doze on my lap.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

The Magers and Quinn used bookstore in Uptown Minneapolis. More specifically, the shelved cart they put outside that was always filled with obscure titles, for sale at a dollar apiece. “From Caesar to the Mafia: Sketches of Italian Life” by Luigi Brazini, 1971, is a memorable example.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

The crucial part, when I’m not typing. That’s only transcription, not the writing.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

I remember crying twice while reading, both times over a long poem: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Evangeline” and Robert Francis’s “Valhalla.” As it happens, Longfellow’s “The Spanish Student” was such an insult to me as a member of a marginal community, it made me spit.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

Gossip about my elders, Deaf and DeafBlind poets who tousled my hair and patted my back. Questions I’d love to answer include “Wow, you knew Bob Panara?”, “What did Merv Garretson say about his time in Montana?”, “How did Eric Malkzkuhn sign his emails?”, “Can you show me again how Patrick Grabybill held that glass of wine?”, “No! You didn’t! Not to Bernard Bragg! For real? You rascal!”, “How far down her back did Melanie Bond’s hair go?”, “How about Peter Cook’s hair, and, um, his feet, did you get to backchannel his bare feet?”, “Why did Tim Cook walk with folks in that strange way?”, “What did Bob Smithdas’s letters smell like?”, and “Did you ever manage to ruffle Geraldine Lawohron’s cool?”

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Bora Chung, author of Cursed Bunny

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers? 

I hope people don’t find this disgusting: I trim my fingernails before I start typing. I used to learn martial arts and my teachers all advised me to keep my fingernails short. The reason was because if your fingernails are long, you could end up ruining expensive gear (kendo gloves can cost a fortune), hurting yourself (especially the palm when making a fist), or scratching your opponent, which was a very big no-no. Over the years I learned to enjoy the sensation of my fingertips touching the keyboard or squeezing the pen. I quit martial arts long ago but still keep my fingernails very short.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without? 

I love horror movies and absolutely cannot live without them. Doesn’t matter which genre—ghost stories, slasher films with serial killers, zombies or aliens—I devour them all. Fear of death is universal but perhaps that is why it is so difficult to build a good horror story with something fresh and creepy.

What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be working? 

I do the dishes. When there are no dishes to be done, I do the laundry. If there’s no dirty laundry, I vacuum the apartment. And then I feel like I’ve done so much work for the day and don’t feel guilty about taking a nap. I may have not written a single word but at least the house looks spotless, my dishes are shining and all the clothes are clean.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)? 

I Burn Paris (Palę Paryż, 1923) by the Polish author Bruno Jasieński. As the title says, the novel is set in Paris and there is one chapter that describes a family drama between two brothers who are from Russia. The older one is a White officer in charge of the situation and the younger brother is a Communist dying of a fictional plague. The White officer doesn’t recognize his brother at first and asks his name and rank, only to find out that the dying “enemy” before him is his long-lost sibling. The depiction of love, despair, pain and loss rips my heart every time. And the author’s own life story is perhaps even more dramatic than his works.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead? 

Teach language and literature. I used to be a teacher for more than a decade and if you count my days as an assistant instructor (that’s what they called the job at IU) I taught for almost 20 years. I thoroughly loved the job. I was a good teacher because I believed in knowledge and education. It seems that now my life picked a different path for me so I won’t be going back to teaching at least for the foreseeable future. But the faith is still there.

Anton Hur, translator of Cursed Bunny

Who do you most wish would read this book?

Men, because men are trash. Yes, all men. Trash. Patriarchy is an airborne disease that infects everyone. As a man, you don’t even need to consciously buy into patriarchy, you’re still benefiting from it at some non-man’s expense. You can be the most woke feminist man in the world, it doesn’t matter—patriarchy will make you trash. As a cisgender man, I do not want to be trash, which is why the patriarchy must be dismantled, and for that to happen, men need to make a concerted effort to learn, to feel, and to think about misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. Books like Cursed Bunny will help, plus, it’s fun to read! There’s a talking head in a toilet! Can’t beat that.

What time of day do you work (and why)?

I am a night owl but due to the fact that I am interested in keeping my marriage intact, I have been forcing myself to work during daylight hours for the past ten years that I have been together with my husband. Before I met him, I would work all night and submit at dawn and sleep through the morning. I was gaslit throughout my childhood by parents and teachers into thinking this was not a “normal” way to live a life and my health would deteriorate, but then I found out about Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. To this day, I have trouble keeping 100% conscious in the hours between 1 pm and 7 pm—I feel jetlagged and it’s torture to stay awake—but on the other hand, my husband is very good-looking.

How do you tackle writer’s (or translator’s!) block?

There is kind of a thing translators have where we’re not translating as swiftly as we normally are, and I think this has to do with not having found the right voice or rhythm to translate in yet. This usually happens in the beginning of a project where you have to teach yourself how to translate something or you’re coming off a project that has a different voice. For example, I was coming off of Blood of the Old Kings by Kim Sung-il when I dove into Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, so I had to go from high-register high-fantasy to contemporary music journalism overnight. When you’ve been producing 80,000 words in one voice and have to switch to a completely different voice right away, you’re going to be a bit blocked. You just have to be very quiet and listen very carefully to the source text until the voice comes to you. It’s trying to find you!

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

I recently sold my first novel to HarperVia and it’s coming out in July 2024, and I was able to write it based on the advice of the Korean poet Lee Seong-bok in his book Indeterminate Inflorescence, which I translated into English and published through Sublunary Editions. It’s a series of aphorisms taken from his poetics lectures. This book changed my life. Here’s aphorism 178: “Write in one sprint. Once thinking begins to intervene, time and place scatter, and the flow of action is interrupted. Think when you’re not writing, don’t think at all when you’re writing. But we always end up doing the opposite.” Not only are the aphorisms inspiring advice, they are pure poetry.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your literary education?

My parents had the most significant impact on my literary education by preventing me from receiving a literary education when I most wanted to have one. They gave me an ultimatum. Either I study law or medicine or I do not go to college at all. Because I loved books, I wanted to go to college, even if it meant studying something I didn’t want to study. I picked law because it looked easier. It was such a weird experience because I ended up at a Korean university that did not allow you to change majors and I ended up with a full ride the whole way, so I was free to ignore my parents—I practically disowned them throughout my 20s and allowed them back in my life only in my 30s—but I could do nothing about my major without losing my scholarship. I hated my parents more than I hated law, so I stuck with law, delaying my formal literary education into my 30s.

David Diop, author of Beyond the Door of No Return

Answers translated by Ian Van Wye

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

The best advice I’ve ever been given came from my father, who sadly passed away a few months ago: “Never give up, persevere on your chosen path. To exist is to insist.”

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your literary education?

It was my mother who inspired me to write. As a child, I would always see her with a pen in one hand and a book in the other. To this day she remains passionate about literature and philosophy.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

I write my novels with a pen, in notebooks with black or blue leather covers. Then I type out what I’ve written before sending it to my editor. Even though I draft my academic books on a computer, I realized that for my works of fiction, I had to return to the almost primordial act of writing by hand—what I learned to do with a pen and paper growing up in Senegal. It’s in this way that I manage to make what I write conform as exactly as possible to the images I have in my head.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

Homer’s Iliad. I was twelve years old, I believe. All of a sudden I began to understand that men and women, whenever or wherever they lived, were haunted by the same questions of love, friendship, war, and death. I think I realized then for the first time that some of the greatest lessons about life are found in reading and literature.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

Black Boy by Richard Wright. A book that recounts the painful birth of a great writer. Despite the insurmountable obstacles Wright describes, I began to understand how there was nothing, ultimately, that could entirely thwart him in his journey toward writing. The book is nothing short of an ode to liberty.

Sam Taylor, translator of Beyond the Door of No Return

How do you tackle writer’s block?

I don’t suffer from writer’s block in the traditional sense of lacking inspiration, but I do sometimes feel like I have to scale a wall of dread before I start. I tend to get over this by running or cycling or meditating and letting my subconscious loose on the next scene. Once I’ve got the first line, the rest of it usually falls into place. I don’t think I’ve ever had translator’s block.

What was the first book you fell in love with (and why)?

The Lord of the Rings. I was ill in bed, aged about eleven, when I first read it, and it… transported me.

Which book(s) do you reread?

The one I’ve reread the most, other than children’s books, is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I quite often pick it up, thinking I’ll just read a few lines, and end up being sucked into the story again.

What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be working?

Answering interview questions. Or lying in a hammock and reading.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

The one that comes to mind is something I read recently: A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe. It first made me cry about twenty pages in, which is just ridiculous. When I came to the final part of the story, I went up to my bedroom to finish it because I knew it was going to make me sob my heart out and I didn’t want to alarm my family.

Stênio Gardel, author of The Words That Remain

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

The best writing advice was given to me by author, teacher and friend Socorro Acioli: tell the stories only you can tell. It helped me stop comparing my writing to other people’s work as well as made me more clearly understand how my life and experiences play such a pivotal role in the stories I want to write.

What part of your writing or translating routine do you think would surprise your readers?

Maybe the fact that I don’t write each day. It’s quite common to hear that it is mandatory to write something every single day if you really want to become a writer or an author. It might work for some people and that’s great, but I believe each one can find their own process in a free and honest way. Before I started The Words That Remain, I outlined the entire story first, thought carefully about every event I’d choose to tell in Raimundo’s story. That part of imagining is very important for me and most of it happens away from the blank page. Only after I started putting down the words did I push myself to work every day until the book was finished.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)? 

One of my earliest literary influences is The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I was amazed and scared sometimes by the suspenseful atmosphere and intrigued by Sherlock Holmes’ methodic intelligence. I was beyond surprised to feel that way, becoming so involved and engaged in the story. Today I am sure that reading Doyle’s novel was largely responsible for my dream to pursue writing. I believe it was back then that I realized what books could do and that I wanted to invent stories that would reach and move people.

Which book(s) do you reread?

I try to read Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner every year.

How do you decide what to read next?

One thing I try to do is find a balance between classic and contemporary literature, which is not always easy, because there is so much wonderful new literature nowadays, but at the same time I still have a lot of classic authors to keep up with. 

Bruna Dantas Lobato, translator of The Words That Remain

What time of day do you work (and why)?

I’ve tried to be a morning person, or even a daytime person, but the truth is that I only start to come alive at around 10 pm. Blame it on my delayed sleep phase syndrome. My best fiction and translation writing happens after 2 am, when I’m all alone and I have no other commitments, not even mealtimes to break up my day. My schedule feels wide open and all my own. I’m always surprised when the sun comes up that so much time has gone by without my noticing. That’s usually my cue to eat breakfast and go to bed.

How do you tackle writer’s (or translator’s!) block?

I go out on a walk, grab coffee with a friend, watch a movie, read for pleasure. I rest, which can be hard to do sometimes, with all my book projects and deadlines. But I’ve learned that the less time I have for it, the more I need it. After some time away from the page, I’ll spontaneously have the urge to get back to it again. A line or image will sneak up on me and I won’t even remember what was keeping me from writing.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

Years ago I heard Jamaica Kincaid say at a talk that she wouldn’t respect any writer who merely wanted to please, and I love that as a guiding principle for my work. The worst advice I’ve ever received, when I was still too young to know better, was the opposite of that: that I needed to keep my white American reader in mind, someone who knows little about people like me, who expects people like me to perform in certain ways for their benefit, who would love for me to write a version of Brazil that echoes their vision. Hearing Kincaid speak, and reading her books in college, disabused me of that notion. Writing and translating to please had always felt unnatural to me, and difficult for all the wrong reasons. I’d much prefer to surprise, delight, move, question. Even better if I manage to surprise, delight, move, and question myself.

What part of your writing or translating routine do you think would surprise your readers?

I did a DIY residency at a religious hermitage a couple of years ago and got into the habit of burning a votive candle while I write. Now I light one every time I want focused creative time, usually late at night, with a hot cup of tea. It helps me focus and stay away from distractions, like a slower Pomodoro timer of sorts. It feels sacrilegious to reply to emails or go on social media while the wax is melting. I also like that I can stare at the flame when the writing gets hard. It’s much more soothing than the blank page.

Which book(s) do you reread?

I’m constantly looking for a great party scene, or a lovely description of a cake, or that bit of dialogue that sounds just right and will help me with my current project. I keep my favorites on a shelf next to my desk for reference and full rereads: books by Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Italo Calvino, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Clarice Lispector, Tove Ditlevsen, W.G. Sebald, Banana Yoshimoto, Tove Jansson, Marie NDiaye, Denis Johnson, Anne Carson, Amy Hempel, Deborah Levy, Ayşegül Savaş, and Sigrid Nunez. I just finished rereading Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, translated by Thomas Teal, for what must have been the fifth time. I can’t get over how she centers dozens of episodic chapters around only two characters and manages to sustain the whole novel that way. It’s taught me a lot about structuring the subtle drama and absurdity of daily life, and how much you can accomplish with just two characters talking.

Pilar Quintana, author of Abyss

What time of day do you work (and why)?

I work from 9 or 10 am, after my kid goes to school, to 2 or 3 pm, to go running and get ready for when he’s back. My kid’s school is my room of one’s own.

How do you tackle writer’s block?

I don’t write unless I know what I’m writing about. So, lots of planning beforehand.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

The best advice I received was to never fall in love with what I write to the extent that I cannot see if it’s not good enough. The second best was to throw away what is not good enough. 

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your literary education?

After I graduated from university, writing for TV plays was very important. It taught me to write stories in an effective way.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

Crónica de una muerte anunciada [Chronicle of a Death Foretold], by Gabriel García Márquez. I had to read it again as soon as I finished it the first time, and then again and again, obsessively. It made me want to become a writer. I wanted to do just that, to write a compelling story that would one day obsess someone.

Which book(s) do you reread?

There are two: Ficciones [Fictions] and El Aleph [The Aleph], by Jorge Luis Borges. I don’t reread them whole at once but go back once and again to the short stories in them.

Lisa Dillman, translator of Abyss

What time of day do you work (and why)?

I like to work early, and ideally after swimming, which makes my brain feels fresh. On days when I’m not teaching, I sometimes get up at 5.00, go swim, and then park myself at a café with my decaf and my bagel. I have some regular spots where they don’t care how long I hang out, and I can easily sit there translating for four hours. It also helps greatly _not_ to check my email first.

How do you tackle writer’s (or translator’s!) block?

One of the most wonderful things about translation is that, by default, there is no writer’s block! You have the materia prima there before you. But at times when the creative juices are not flowing the way I need them to for tricky passages, neologisms, delicate voices and all other manner of challenges, I usually edit, reread what I translated the day before, and reread the passages to come.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your literary education?

My mother, without question. She is the most voracious reader I know and smart as a whip, and she instilled the love of literature in me from a very young age. My mom still probably reads two books a week. We talk almost every day and I love hearing which books she’s got out from the library at any given moment (shoutout to the Los Angeles County Library system).

What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be working?

Hey, I wonder what the dog is doing?

If you weren’t a translator, what would you do instead?

Are we talking dream world, here? If so, I’d be a singer. Both of my parents sang, my mother is still in a choir. I can’t sing to save my life and it strikes me as one of the most beautiful talents in the world.

Astrid Roemer, author of On a Woman’s Madness

Translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott

Who do you most wish would read this book?

People with hate in their heads for lifestyles they do not prefer.

What time of day do you work (and why)?

In the tropics. Early mornings and early evenings. Because of the temperature.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

Love songs. Bach.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

What’s one book you wish you had read when you were young?

Alice in Wonderland.

What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?

How I have been stalked for years…

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

Cosmologist.

•

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

Kenneth M. Cadow, author of Gather

Who do you most wish would read your book and why?

I wrote this book for rural kids, and I hope they read it because the perspective in it—Ian’s—may help them realize that the lives they live are worth reading and writing about. For crossover readers—particularly adults who aspire to educational or social services careers—I hope they can get a sense of what they’ll be up against, and that what they’re up against can be beautiful if they’re willing to buck the system a little. Finally, I hope that urban students read Gather. Edward, Ian’s classmate in the book, is one such person. Perhaps if Edward had found this book before being transplanted from the city to the country, he wouldn’t have sat behind his desk and judged this rural community with such unfortunate self-confidence. Our country is in dire need of building understanding and empathy between the 80-percent metro and the 20-percent rural people who comprise our population and our democracy.

What time of day do you write (and why)?

I am quoting Virginia Euwer Wolff, a friend and mentor: “I get up at least two hours before my inner critic.” I’m not self-conscious very early in the morning and the analytic part of my brain is on a different sleep schedule. For the first ten minutes or so, I read what I’ve already written. This helps with consistency of voice and reenforces the set of eyes I’m behind in telling story. But I don’t correct anything. Then I write for a couple hours, hardly ever hitting the backspace button or crossing stuff out. As the sun gets higher, I become more aware of myself and my opinions, confusions, and dubiousities. By afternoon my head is pretty much a traffic jam, so my time is better spent taking a walk with my wife and our dog. Before I get to that point, though, I go through and tidy things up. My writing schedule is limited to weekends and holidays because of my day job.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

It’s extremely rare for me to make any changes without reading my work aloud to myself, and I built my tiny cabin—96 square feet and awkward to get to—for this express purpose. I don’t know if that’s all that surprising… maybe it’s more surprising that I pretty much constantly nibble like a rodent while I’m writing. I start the morning with a home-baked cookie, preferably chocolate chip. This lasts me about an hour. As the morning goes on, I switch to fruit and then graduate to more savory foods like pretzels and hummus or cheddar cheese and crackers. I shift to water instead of coffee. If I’ve written a powerful passage, I step outside and bang my head against a tree.

How do you decide what to read next?

A lot of what I read is driven by what I’m writing and where I am in the process. I love character-driven novels, but if my own characters are still forming, they’re too inclined to be influenced by characters in whatever book I go to sleep with (I mean…. can you imagine if Eleanor Porter had been reading The Catcher in the Rye when she wrote Pollyanna? I kind of wish she had been, if chronology made that possible). In the early stages of my writing, I tend toward creative nonfiction such as Winterworld: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich, for example. But when my characters are strong enough to hold their own, I ask my wife, Lisa, for fiction recommendations. Matching readers with the right book is a profound gift, and she has it.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

I would be a hemmer and a haw-er. As it stands, I get to do a lot of this in my day job as a public high school principal in rural Vermont. I’m often at a loss for words because the systems to which leaders are held accountable seem awfully out of touch with the needs and visions and passions of the folks they were originally intended to serve. When I feel this way, I focus on listening locally and doing what I can to foster the successes that make teaching, learning, working, and living around these parts more genuinely satisfying.

Huda Fahmy, author of Huda F Cares?

How do you tackle writer’s block?

How I tackle writer’s block: I step away from the work and all the expectations that come with it. I go for a walk, spend time with my family, call my mom and sisters, read other books that are in the same genre, and look at old photographs from when I was younger to see if I could remember what I was going through when the picture was taken.

Which book(s) do you reread?

Books I reread include the Quran, Calvin and Hobbes, The Protector of the Small series, The Princess Bride, and so many romance novels.

What’s one book you wish you had read when you were young?

One book I wish I’d read when I was younger is S.K. Ali’s Love from A to Z.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?

The best writing advice I’d ever gotten was to only take criticism from people I would go to for advice.

What time of day do you write (and why)?

The time of day I write is largely decided by my children’s school schedule. When they come home, I like to put away my work and spend as much time making them giggle and laugh as possible. So I write between 8:30 and 2:30 with about an hour for lunch.

Katherine Marsh, author of The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine

Who do you most wish would read your book?

I wish my late grandma, Natalia, could read The Lost Year because the stories she told me about her childhood in Ukraine and the family she left behind helped inspire the book. She was not much of a reader because she only had a fourth-grade education. But she was a marvelous storyteller and would have been deeply touched that I chose to write a story about the love, loss, and longing she felt for her family and homeland.

Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?

In my 20s and early 30s, I worked as a long-form narrative journalist, first as a reporter, then as an editor. Journalism taught me so much about how to write fiction including how to tell a story in a way that engages the reader and how to use reporting and observational detail to bring characters and situations to life. I also learned a lot about the craft of writing, including the importance of revision.

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

The part where I throw myself down on the couch and cry. I’m only half joking! Every book I write I hit at least one, and often multiple, snags and become convinced that I can’t write at all. This despair can last for weeks. But eight books in, I know this, too, is part of my “routine” and that I will eventually snap out of it, reconnect, and find a solution. This is why I always tell kids that they shouldn’t think in terms of being “good” or “bad” writers. Like Matthew’s dad tells him in The Lost Year, “It’s the caring part that makes you a writer—not being ‘good’ at it.”

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

I cannot read Charlotte’s Web without weeping. It’s impossible. I’ve read it many times, including to my own kids, and I choke up every time. My husband is from Maine, where the story is set, and I dream of buying a farm there someday for all our animals. We already have seven chickens, two cats, a bunny and an axolotl and I’d love nothing more than to add a pig named Wilbur and invite the Charlottes of the world into the barn.

How do you decide what to read next?

I usually read several books at once—one is a read-aloud to one or the other of my kids, usually a book for young people they wouldn’t read on their own but we both might like. For the past fifteen years, I’ve belonged to a great book club of female journalists, many of whom have reported from or still report about Ukraine and Russia. We all take turns selecting books, primarily adult literary fiction. Finally, I follow my curiosity, like right now, one of the books I’m reading is David Copperfield by Charles Dickens to see how Barbara Kingsolver adapted it to write another book I enjoyed this year, Demon Copperhead.

Dan Santat, author of A First Time for Everything

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

I run a lot, and while I’m running I’ll think about a little segment of a story I’m working on. I do this for a few reasons. First, it keeps my mind out of the moment of actually running and sometimes the best solutions to a story come from just letting your mind wander and think of absurd things. Second, the running wakes my mind up and clears my mind.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

There’s so much about popular culture that I’m grateful for and to single out one thing is impossible for me to do, but if I had to choose one it really was movies which taught me how to love storytelling. I can’t play a bad video game or listen to a bad song, but for some reason I can watch a bad movie and study it and ask myself why I think it’s bad while some other person might possibly love it. I watch movies in a pursuit to make me laugh, cry, or even leave me confused with its experimentation. Animated, dramas, action, or low budget independent horror. Ultimately, I just want to feel an emotion and movies always deliver.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?

Danny and the Dinosaur by Syd Hoff. It was the very first book I ever learned to read. I remember my mother would read the book to me hundreds of times and then one day there was a moment I stared at the words on the page and it all suddenly just made sense. I immediately picked up other books on my bookshelf and realized I could read. Danny and the Dinosaur holds a special place in my heart and that’s why it’s my most loved book.

What is your favorite way to procrastinate when you are meant to be writing?

I can easily get sucked into a video game, especially video games with a compelling story. Sometimes I can get so intensely addicted to a game that the only way to break away from it is to binge the game and complete it in its entirety in order for the urge to play goes away.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. I never laughed so hard at a book. It’s my personal favorite book of all time.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

Well I spend a good amount of time in my career as an illustrator for other authors. I’ve illustrated well over a hundred books for other authors so I assume I would do that. I also feel like I’m cheating by giving you an answer like that so the other answers would be a dentist (because I almost became a dentist) or I’d be a coffee roaster or make furniture, both of which are hobbies of mine.

At the beginning of 2023, I went to Santa Maddalena, a writers’ retreat run by the Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte. It was dark when I arrived at the train station and was driven up a bumpy Tuscan hill. I entered the threshold of the big stone house, and someone in the blur of new faces called out: “Buonasera.” I returned the greeting.

“Parli italiano?” they said—you speak Italian?

“Solo un po’,” I said—just a little. They replied with something I didn’t understand, and I repeated in panic: “Solo un po’!”

Over the next few days, I began to venture further attempts. By some hostly instinct, Beatrice complimented me whenever I most feared I’d botched a phrase. Her assistant Edoardo taught me to say: “Il bicchiere è mezzo pieno o mezzo vuoto,” the glass is half full or half empty—Italians say it both ways around, such that “full” can optimistically come first. The chef Rasika was a sympathetic interlocutor, having herself learned Italian as a second language after emigrating decades ago from Sri Lanka. I still think of Rasika when using idioms she taught me: buona fortuna, sogni d’oro.

At Santa Maddalena I learned to produce snippets of Italian, but I couldn’t hold a lengthy exchange. One morning I told another guest, the translator Matteo Colombo, that I wanted to improve. “We can practice if you like,” Matteo replied in Italian. “You understand, right? I saw you laughing along last evening.” It was true; I understood the dinner table repartee; I also understood Matteo—but when I tried to answer, no words came out.

During the last week of my residency there was a book fair in nearby Florence. I took the train down with Lauren Oyler—who, like me, lives in Berlin and had turned up on a hill in Tuscany at the exact same time—and we discussed whether to attend a panel event. Pro: Our friends would be speaking. Con: They’d be speaking Italian. In the end we went. I understood less than at the dinner table, but more than I’d expected.

Leaving the conference room, I wound up speaking to a stranger in Italian. We kept chatting all the way to the bar. It was around fifteen minutes in total. I’d just had my first conversation.

*

At this point I was comfortable in German. I hadn’t known any when I’d moved to Berlin the previous summer, but by winter I was having in-depth discussions and by spring I was reading novels. When you first move to Berlin, people tell you not to “bother too much” with German. This only made me more determined to get fluent as quickly as possible. I found it joyless to treat the local language as a pothole for expats to step around—look, you might trip up at local government appointments, but otherwise there’s no need to dirty your shoe—and I wasn’t sure how people whose own German was bad could so confidently deem the language worthless. My sundry anxieties about living abroad helped to keep me on-task. When I didn’t feel like studying, I thought: what if someone mugs me in German and all I can say is Guten Tag?

There was less incentive to continue with Italian after my return from Tuscany to Berlin. All the Italian expats I knew there spoke at least one other language I was better at, so I persuaded myself that it would be an imposition to ask if we could speak Italian instead. Months passed; I forgot about Italian; I lost all the progress I’d made.

I regretted my idleness when my Italian translator Claudia Durastanti visited Berlin in June. I attended a literary event of hers and Veronica Raimo’s, and went later that week to her joint birthday party with Vincenzo Latronico. All three are terrific writers whom I could only read in translation. Groups of Italians at both events switched to English to include me. I wanted them to be able to stay in Italian; I wanted to read my friends in their own language. But still I hesitated to start. I knew if I’d continued learning after Santa Maddalena, I could have already met my goals by June. Somehow my frustration that I hadn’t worked harder seemed like a reason to continue dawdling. In Italian I’d become the laggard I’d avoided being in German.

The following week, my editor Simone invited me to visit Rome for the September Italian translation launch of my new book. The universe had spoken. My intention was fixed. I had three months to learn Italian.

*

First, I memorized common idioms: non vedo l’ora (“I can’t wait”), acqua in bocca (“my lips are sealed”). I played Italian podcasts while walking, tidying, brushing my teeth. I watched Italian films, no subtitles.

In my second week of properly learning Italian, my friend Chiara invited me to join her Italian book club. I read the assigned short story collection that weekend. My comprehension owed more to my high school French and Spanish than to my more recent exploits in Italian, but I was still elated to make it to the end. I hadn’t had that feeling in English since I was a child—that ‘I just read a whole book’ buzz.

The first meeting of the book club was in a low-lit Kreuzberg bar with mismatched furniture and decorated ceilings. Chiara introduced me to the group, explaining in Italian that I understood but wasn’t quite ready to speak. I’d asked Chiara to say this; I felt like a cuckoo, a nuisance. Still, everyone was far more patient than I had any right to expect. I managed to have a couple of Italian conversations, my first time doing so since the book fair in Florence. I was initially stubborn about not speaking any English—but as the night progressed, my resolve wavered. By the end, I’d spoken 33% Italian, 66% English. It was a better ratio than at Santa Maddalena, but I still had a long way to go.

Between this meeting and the next, I continued marinating in the language. I read Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend) quartet across late July and August. I didn’t use a dictionary. When I came across a new word, I guessed what it meant, and refined my hypothesis on each subsequent appearance. At the start of the first book I caught only the gist; by the end of the fourth, I understood everything. Like a parent, Ferrante taught me her language without the mediating tool of translation.

In late August—six weeks before my Rome trip—the journalist Laura Pezzino interviewed me for the Turin newspaper La Stampa. I’d told my publicist that I wanted to see if I could do the first few questions in Italian. As it transpired, Laura and I spent a whole hour speaking only Italian on Zoom. After we logged off, I could barely believe what had just happened.

Later that week was the next book club meeting. This time I stayed in Italian for the discussion, for the pizza afterwards, for goodbyes before catching my train.

I continued to immerse myself as my trip approached. I read Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa, Natalia Ginzburg and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose marathon decades of learning Italian had emboldened me along my own sprint.

The week before leaving for Rome, I went to the theatre with a university friend. He’s German, the play was in German, but we’d met each other through English. Whenever I speak German around him, I see his bemused expression: When did this feature get installed? My general confidence in the language evaporates under this scrutiny. Besides being awkward, our speaking German is unnecessary; he’s one of those continental Europeans about whom anglophones actually mean it when they say, “His English is better than mine.” But as we sat under a black sky by the river after the play, he offered to switch to German. Hiding theatrically behind my hand, I replied: “Ich mache immer noch Fehler und das ist peinlich.” (“I still make mistakes and that’s embarrassing.”) “Okay, well, English is fine,” he said. I’d been trying to say: please validate that my German doesn’t lacerate your ears. But by direct German social norms, I had just said: the thing I’d in fact just said.

I resolved to be braver in Italy. I would accept all offers to speak Italian, and I wouldn’t beat myself up for not being perfect.

*

Finding an English that works for me as a writer has always felt like language-learning. I didn’t read much Irish literature as a child, so there was a gap between the usages I considered literary and those I heard around me. Should my characters give a lend of something, or give a loan? Am I writing differently to how I talk, or amn’t I? By the time I started reading Irish writers in college, I’d developed a stuffy Anglo-American conglomerate style. Cautiously at first, then with relief, I borrowed from the phraseology of Joyce and Edna O’Brien in order to write like myself.

Most non-Irish people don’t know the difference between Irish English and Irish itself. Irish English is comprehensible to other anglophones—but Irish is a completely separate Celtic language, as distinct from English as Russian is. Fewer than 2% of people in Ireland still use Irish on a daily basis. More prevalent is its impact on our English: we’ve inherited the idioms that our ESL ancestors created by directly translating from Irish. “I’m giving out” means in Irish English that you’re complaining—because “Táim ag taibheart amach” is, word for word, how you’d say it in Irish.

I write fiction in German, though I’ve never shown it to anyone. I want privacy to fumble in the dark. And this August, for the first time, I typed out my first few Italian paragraphs about a hotel receptionist in Rome. She believes she speaks no English, but somehow everyone around her keeps complimenting her command of the language when she’s sure she’s just spoken Italian. The premise, no doubt, came from my having recently read Kafka in German—my second languages bleed into one another as much as they do into my English. Maybe something will come of these fragments. For now I’m just having fun.

*

I started my first morning in Italy with an aimless walk that ended by buying a vegan cornetto at a café. “Che paga, ragazza?” the cashier said. She meant, “What are you paying for?,” but I thought at first she was asking how much. “Un cornetto vegano,” I responded a beat too late, feeling like a stupid child. I ate my pastry at a round metal table outside and eavesdropped on the young women gossiping beside me. How come I understood everything they said, but froze when directly spoken to?

That evening’s launch event was in Spazio Sette Libreria, a three-story bookshop with a diamond-patterned marble floor and a ceiling fresco of angels. Just before the event, I met my translator Claudia, whom I hadn’t seen since July. She was talking to my editor Simone; after I’d greeted them, Simone ran something by me in Italian and I responded without thinking about it. Then I saw Claudia’s face doing the same thing my German friend’s does: When did this feature get installed? She gave me a big hug and asked how much of the event I want to do in Italian. My assumption had been: none. It’s one thing privately speaking Italian; it’s another thing to give a public talk on a highly technical topic. Yet I trust Claudia so implicitly that on the spot I changed my mind. We decided that she’d ask me questions in Italian and I’d answer in Italian, but I’d switch to English when I couldn’t find a phrase rather than making the audience wait.

Our conversation went well. I understood Claudia’s questions. Sometimes I switched to English after a few sentences, sometimes I barely switched at all. Claudia translated my English and clarified the dodgier parts of my Italian. She knew me well enough to fill in gaps that not everyone in the audience might. I felt safe. I couldn’t have done it without her.

*

Throughout the rest of the trip I met journalists, podcasters, readers. Most often we did the whole thing in Italian. A few exchanges started in English before shifting to Italian—and then two things happened: my grammar declined, the communication improved. People who’d been hesitant in English smiled and open up. They’d been learning my language far longer than I’d been learning theirs, but their lessons had emphasized grammar over speaking. Monolingual anglophones tend to overestimate the general level of English in Italy. If you travel only speaking English, then a self-selection bias will make the enthusiasts likeliest to engage with you. But when speaking Italian, I met plenty of people who were relieved not to have to use English.

In Rome I encountered the phrase “la nostra lingua,” i.e. “our language.” I’ve never heard the Irish refer to English as “ours” in this way. We speak it, sure—thank you, British colonialism—but so does a quarter of the world. English is too ubiquitous for me to feel that anyone who’s learned it must value my culture specifically. But nobody chooses to study Italian unless they love Italians. While I’m sure there are Italians who don’t appreciate foreigners’ attempts, all I’ve ever encountered is joy. At first I couldn’t believe it. I thought they must, on some level, hate my blunders. Then, at my publisher’s aperitivo, a guest used the Irish word “Gaeltacht” in the middle of an Italian sentence—and suddenly I understood the feeling.

This aperitivo was the moment where I was happiest to have learned Italian. I caught all the jokes; I was seamlessly included. I was the only non-Italian present, and I was proud to keep up without anyone having to translate.

*

When I write in English, I take a microscope to each word. I dialogue with a Martin-Amis-type inner editor who sneers at each prosodic peccato. I’m not sorry to have that lens available to me. There’s value in techie precision. I want my sentences to transmit an unconscious tingle of pleasure; I want my stylistics to feel new. But on my last night in Rome, I opened my novel draft and thought: my first aim is to make myself understood.

After returning to Berlin, I realized I’d left my watch behind in Rome. It’s a butterfingered form of hack symbolism that I’d sooner die than put in a novel: how subtle to have the character plant an object in the place she wishes to stay, and how especially inspired to choose a timepiece, that stopped old symbol of fate. But I’ve not seen the word “orologio” in enough iterations to link it with a sequence of clichés. The Italian for “watch” seems less tightly wound, more free to move how it wants.

__________________________________

The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan is available from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Late one night in 1951, two Englishmen were wandering downtown Athens after an evening drinking in its tavernas. Passing beneath the Acropolis, they decided to scale its rocky north side and sneak inside the Parthenon. They were caught as they left the ancient temple by the guard on duty, but they had a stroke of luck. The sentry was from Crete, and one of the Englishmen was Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had fought alongside the Cretans during the resistance to Nazi occupation in World War II. On Crete, Fermor had mastered the local dialect and memorized a vast trove of folk songs and oral poetry.

The night suddenly took a festive turn. The men drank to Fermor. They drank to the nineteenth-century English poet Lord Byron, who had traveled to fight in the Greek War of Independence in the early 1820s. They drank to the eternal friendship between Britain and Greece.

Three years ago, when my wife and I moved to Athens so she could finish archaeological research for her PhD, I found myself thinking of Fermor’s escapade. I spoke much worse modern Greek—and drank far less—than Fermor. But I saw in him an archetype of a certain style of traveler, one defined by a deep curiosity about history and culture and a desire to gain lasting friendships and a broadened view of life. I’d outgrown the assumption of my younger self that it was normal to expect everyone to speak English while living abroad. To approximate some version of the Fermor ideal, it would be essential to learn modern Greek.

Fermor mastered modern Greek by living in remote caves with Cretan shepherds, speaking and hearing the language constantly. It helped that he also knew ancient Greek. He and other undercover agents were picked to work in Greece in part for this reason. The stakes for mastering the language were high. If Fermor’s fluency failed to convince when he posed as a local, he risked being imprisoned or shot.

Like Fermor, I knew ancient Greek; I’d spent years learning the language and reading ancient Greek philosophy in graduate school. Unlike his linguistic immersion in mountain caves, my modern Greek lessons happened in our Athens apartment over Zoom, lasting barely an hour a week. And the stakes were quite low. If I stumbled over grammar at our local fruit shop, the cashier would just laugh and switch into excellent English, a language now ubiquitous in much of the country after sixty years of globalization and the enormous growth of Greece’s tourism industry.

We arrived in Athens in the summer of 2020. The strict pandemic lockdown meant there were almost no tourists in the country. Then again, it wasn’t a great time to strike up conversations with anyone. Cafés, restaurants, archaeological sites, museums—almost everything was closed. For a while, you had to text a government number to leave your apartment. Luckily, long walks were still allowed.

As I wandered Athens during the first year of the pandemic, knowing the ancient language sometimes gave me a disorienting sense of compressed time, with the lofty and ancient suffusing the mundane and modern. On the glass door of the mini-market near our apartment, the sign that told you to “push” used the same verb as Homer does in the Iliad when warriors “thrust” their spears.

At a carpet cleaners, the word for “cleaning” was essentially the same term Aristotle used in his theory of tragedy as catharsis—a “cleansing” of the soul. On cargo trucks and moving vans I saw the word that became the English “metaphor.” The ancient roots mean “to carry with.” Movers carry things, metaphors carry meanings from one domain to a new one.

Convenience stores and ancient songs of war, carpet cleaners and tragedy, moving trucks and metaphors: these millennia-spanning links somehow both enchanted the present and demythologized the past.

*

That first winter, a rare heavy snow fell on Athens, snapping branches, cloaking monuments, piling on cars and awnings. We took the day off and went for a walk around the city. Everyone else had the same idea. On the small hills near the Acropolis, people were sledding and skiing down the miniature slopes. Snowball battles raged between teenagers in the winding streets of the Plaka neighborhood, a zone of pastel-hued neoclassical architecture below the Acropolis. The whole downtown, usually jammed with traffic and tourists, now had neither.

It was a good day for Greek practice: everyone wanted to talk about the blizzard, as if to confirm it had really happened. The mood was a rare combination of elements: the joy of the snow, the release after pandemic confinement, but also the feeling that the downtown was not an overcrowded amusement park.

It was a feeling Fermor understood. He died in 2007, but by the 1960s he already saw the effects of globalization on Athens, where mass tourism threatened to replace the uniqueness of Greece with a generic nowhere aesthetic bleached of tradition. He found “many a delightful old tavern has become an alien nightmare of bastard folklore and bad wine”; after a remodel, one of his favorite haunts had “the vast and aseptic impersonality of an airport lounge.” It’s hard to immerse yourself in a new culture or language in an airport terminal.

The explosion of tourism is not just a problem for the language-learning goals of foreigners. Even many locals who make a living from tourism are disturbed by its growth. “We just want them to go home now,” a worker at a downtown store told The Guardian last year. As AirBnbs and multinationals spike rents and unsettle neighborhoods, life has become more precarious for many. “The city center is being transformed into an amusement park for tourists, like Las Vegas,” one small business owner told the newspaper Ekathimerini.

I recently met a Greek friend in Kypseli, a neighborhood near the center of the city that hasn’t yet been overrun by tourism. A painter who has had shows around Europe, he can still afford both an apartment and a nearby studio for his work. He doubted this would last much longer.

As we sat at an outdoor cafe in a square, I asked what he thought of tourism. “It’s a plague,” he said, calmly. He gestured at the charming, eclectic architecture all around us, “They’re going to want all this, too.”

*

Many travelers to Greece split into two broad types: the intellectual and the sensual. The poet Lord Byron and his traveling companion John Cam Hobhouse are good examples. Hobhouse was a seeker of knowledge, always eager to decipher inscriptions, trace references, and visit monuments. Byron was inclined to toss the guidebook, scrap the itinerary, and soak in the atmosphere. A friend recalled Byron saying: “John Cam’s dogged perseverance in pursuit of his hobby is to be envied; I have no hobby and no perseverance. I gazed at the stars and ruminated; took no notes, asked no questions.”

When I studied abroad in Athens as a twenty-year-old in 2005, there were still Byrons and Hobhouses. The former leapt from cliffs into perfect pockets of blue sea; they zipped around island coastlines on rented motorcycles; they drank heroic quantities of ouzo by driftwood bonfires on the beach. They took no notes, asked no questions. The latter lingered among vase paintings in the galleries of the National Archaeological Museum; they thrilled to distinguish different orders of capitals on temple columns; they crouched to decipher faded inscriptions chiseled into marble.

I floated between these groups. I liked the sensual spontaneity of the first, but saw how easily it became an empty hedonism. I admired the knowledge of the second, but resisted its drift toward pedantry. Years later, reading Fermor’s two classic travelogues about modern Greece, I realized what makes him so compelling: he embodied a hyperbolic form of both approaches. He somehow managed to combine sensual abandon—wine, feasting, swimming—with deep knowledge of the language, history, and culture of Greece.

For many early travelers to Greece, learning modern Greek would have seemed like a bizarre goal. They wanted only to commune with traces of the glorious ancients. European travelers sought vestiges of antiquity in the people, language, and cities of modern Greece; the 18th century poet Richard Polwhele, for instance, believed he saw “Homer’s head” in the face of “many an aged peasant.”

The modern country rarely matched their ideals. “The Greek tongue is very much decayed,” the scholar Edward Brerewood wrote in the seventeenth century.  The nineteenth century English traveler Frederick Sylvester North Douglas felt that Corinth, “the seat of all that was splendid, beautiful, and happy,” was now “degraded to a wretched straggling village of two thousand Greeks.”

This mix of reverence for Ancient Greece and condescension to its modern inhabitants had a paradoxical result: some classically educated Europeans felt “more” Greek than the actual modern Greeks and made this known by taking artifacts or leaving their mark on them. Wealthy visitors like Lord Elgin employed agents to hack the marble frieze from the Parthenon and ship the sculptures back to England between 1801 and 1812. An English magazine article from 1814 endorsed vandalism, declaring that “it was an introduction to the best company….To be a member of the ‘Athenian club,’ and to have scratched one’s name upon a fragment of the Parthenon.”

By the mid-twentieth century, writers like Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller shifted from reverence for antiquity to a sensual evocation of the Greek landscape and a romanticized vision of modern Greeks.  The prose is better, but Miller’s 1941 travelogue, The Colossus of Maroussi, resembles the countless blogs and websites that now present the Greeks as masters of the carefree art of Mediterranean living, in which clocks are a nuisance, the sea sparkles nearby, and there’s always another glass of wine to be savored with a smiling friend.

This vision has become the bedrock of the modern tourism industry. One Greek travel website gushes that a cooking class on the island of Santorini is hosted “in a traditional local’s home.” Another offers the chance to become “Mykonian For A Day.” Beside a blog post called “Live like a Greek: The Art of Slow Living,” praising relaxed Greek attitudes toward time, a pop-up window promises that any email queries will be answered within twenty-four hours. It’s the art of slow living—just not for the person who answers your email.

*

In my modern Greek lessons over Zoom, when my desire for expression outstripped my vocabulary, I would reach for an ancient Greek word and hope for the best. The result was something like an English speaker interspersing bursts of Shakespearean diction with the general level of a toddler (“Do you like coffee?” “Coffee yes, banisher of the slumberous.”) My teacher found this amusing, and sometimes comprehensible, but many people were confused by the strange contours of my knowledge. I’d stumble over a simple bit of grammar, only to rally with fantastically grand vocabulary.

Sometimes this created an instant rapport. After one taxi ride, my driver parked outside our apartment, shut off the meter, and lit a cigarette. He wanted to sit and keep talking. I’d mentioned that I studied ancient Greek, and he spent the drive developing a theory of the internet as a version of the cave in which a Cyclops imprisons Odysseus and his men in Homer’s Odyssey. The details were murky, and not only because of my imperfect Greek. But I got his gist: the internet was a realm of darkness in which we were locked by the cannibalistic giant of big tech, and we should escape. He cracked the window and exhaled a luxurious stream of smoke.

“What’s the ancient word for bread?”

I told him: ἄρτος.

“Exactly,” he nodded. “Like we have on bakeries.”

He directed a stream of smoke out the window.

“Homer knew lots of things,” he added, with a significant glance in the rearview mirror, and I began to suspect he believed Homer knew about the Internet.

My Greek teacher and I sometimes played a game in which she listened to me speak for a few minutes and then decided how she would identify me if we were strangers. For most of the first year, I sounded like what I was: an American. By the second year, on good days, she upgraded me to a Greek-American who heard the language a bit growing up, but maybe just from grandparents on summer visits. By our third year, I was a more plausible Greek-American, as if I’d actually heard the language more as a kid, though I was still short of being truly bilingual.

As I was struggling to gain the language skills of a linguistically neglected Greek-American, my teacher enjoyed highlighting the distance between cultures that language can expose. When she taught me the verb χαριζω, which has a dense cluster of meanings related to giving to others and is connected to an ancient word for joy, she smiled. “This must be strange for Americans—you don’t connect these things very often,” she said.

*

Each summer we traveled to a small village in the mountains of Crete, where my wife was on a team of archaeologists excavating an Iron Age settlement roughly 2800 years old. The modern village sits midway up the steep slope of a mountain, its small whitewashed houses rising in tiers above a valley of olive groves. The population swells slightly in the summer, but there are only a few hundred permanent residents.  Many houses have been abandoned for decades, with green vines twisting over the crumbling stone walls.

The archaeologists stay in old houses throughout the village. Ours had a single area as kitchen and living room on the ground floo. In the basement, reached by descending a ladder, was a bedroom and a bathroom. The ceiling was a mesh of branches bisected by great gnarled beams from tree trunks.

We woke each morning marked by small red bites from fleas. To cook, we cranked open a canister of gas beneath the stove.  One afternoon we met a woman who had grown up in the house, and she started recollecting her childhood, roughly half a century ago. Six children, the parents, and their livestock animals all shared the two rooms.

By last summer my modern Greek was finally good enough for more complex conversations. Most mornings, while my wife was excavating the ancient settlement, I sat with a coffee among old shepherds and farmers at a taverna in the village’s central square, chatting and listening. The world my Greek illuminated was often dark. The dogs chained on short metal leashes at the top of the village were guarding drug houses. The kids roaming the streets were avoiding their house because their father was drinking again and often violent. This was not the Greece sold with the “Live Like a Greek” mantra.

The second taverna in the square was locked in a feud with the first: the staff squabbled over parking spots and the boundary lines between tables and competed for customers. By midday, groups of tourists appeared on ATVs rented in the resort towns on the coast six miles away. I was speaking with a waiter at the first taverna one day when the growl of engines signaled the arrival of a batch of sunburned tourists. He walked a few steps toward them, but as they parked, the daughters of the second taverna’s owner encircled them, menus in hand, steering them toward open tables.

“Beer, wine, traditional food, everything you want,” the owner of the second taverna said in English, walking up behind the girls.

He walked back toward me and shook his head.

“You see how it is?” He asked me in Greek, tossing the menus on a table and lighting a cigarette.

Late one night, we heard frantic pounding on our door.  On the street outside, the air was acrid. The sky was an eerie orange, with huge plumes of smoke banking and twisting. We grabbed our passports, dog, and shoes, and tried for several minutes to rouse our 90-something neighbor by banging on her door. We shouted a host of words for fire and flame, then headed for the edge of the village, away from the smoke.

We learned a few hours later that a fire had started just below the village on a grassy hillside. Firefighters and villagers had barely managed to extinguish the blaze just a few feet from town.

A few days later, a young man with a history of drug problems confessed to the police that he had started the fire. Various theories swirled through the village, but most people thought the owner of one taverna had paid the man to start the fire to intimidate the owner of the other. The hillside below the square was now charred and blackened, and the smell of smoke lingered for weeks.

The threat of real violence in the square, always implicit, now felt sharper. For the next few days the tourists, after parking their ATVs, would wander over to look at the burned slope. They had no idea they were lunching at the site of an arson attempt that nearly destroyed the village. As an undergraduate abroad in Greece, or even when I knew only ancient Greek, I would have been equally oblivious.

By last summer, my wife had finished her PhD and accepted an academic job back in America. We were leaving just as I was becoming a more persuasive modern Greek speaker. My ancient Greek, meanwhile, had morphed far from the standard Erasmian pronunciations taught in western universities; it had the pointy vowels and conversational cadence of an Athens cafe, not a seminar room.

When I arrived, my ancient Greek would come to the rescue, however haphazard, of my modern Greek. Now it was just as common that I’d decipher a word in an ancient text by knowing its modern descendants. After three years in Greece, I occupied a murky intermediate zone, somewhere between Byron and Hobhouse, ancient and modern, outsider and local.

The night before we left the village this summer, our neighbor in her 90s stopped to talk outside our front door. She was alive when Fermor joined her parents’ generation in the resistance to the Nazi occupation. She told us about her family, and how life in the village used to be. It was early evening, the sun staining the steep hills of the valley above us, the heat of the day finally broken. At this hour, she said, the street used to be thronged with people.

Now it was all different. So many had moved away or died. It seemed quieter every year. I felt a sudden twinge: we too would be leaving soon. Most of the people who lived in the village were old, she said, and only one still came to check on her. Then she smiled and patted my wife’s arm. We were good neighbors, she said, because we spoke to her.

Grief, like relief, sneaks up on you, unannounced and unexpected. And there I was, seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies, talking with a publisher about the importance of translating Infinite Jest into Farsi. I was babbling about the importance of the “serious” literature in our era, the necessity of literature conveying the Truth amid the constant noise in the industry. Yet, those arguments were but a smokescreen for the fact that I yearned to grieve the loss of my long-time literary mentor, Kouresh Asadi, who had taken his own life six months earlier, in July 2017.

When I first met Kouresh—or “Mr. Asadi,” as I called him for more than ten years—I was a college freshman, determined to pursue my passion for literature in the violent jolt of the capital, a stranger navigating streets and faces in Tehran. Kouresh had isolated himself from the Iranian literary scene for four years after his book achieved significant acclaim, devoting himself to writing a novel that would remain banned from publication for nine years. It was an unofficial workshop, held in one of his students’ apartments, attended by a small group who either remembered him from his glory days or, like me, sought any place to anchor themselves for a few hours each week. During those years, this modest workshop became a lighthouse in an otherwise dreary academic life that seemed to be pushing me towards a career of a failed engineer.

Yet, Kouresh was never truly at home in the bustling capital and suppressed literary industry of Iran. Having escaped the horrors of the 1980s’ Iraq war, he remained a perpetual stranger, lingering in an existential detachment. “We are not aware of what goes on inside us.” He once wrote, “We pass along each other, like two people from utterly different lands. Heads down, lost, confused. At the same time, Literature makes us to face a situation that we would normally avoid. It can tell us what it is that matters about us, and others, and enemies. The miracle of literature lies within imagining what is yet to happen.”

For him, fiction was the sole sanctuary where his war-torn psyche could seek refuge, albeit in a distant, nearly inaccessible island. It was the one definitive constant in his life. He had keen eyes to detect what he called a “great fiction”, a kind of fiction that stands solely on its own merit, self-contained narratives that “expand human’s capacity to understand the next person, and how others feel.” When I first read some of Wallace’s stories to him—Forever Overhead standing out—he was astonished. “This guy, he’s the real deal, what was his name again?” he asked, lighting yet another cigarette.

As a writer who approached fiction with a sense of reverence, Kouresh, much like Wallace, meticulously controlled every aspect of his writings, selecting words with the delicacy of a poet, and polished everything until he was confident he had written a story that would never crumble. He didn’t shy away from the mysterious and absurd nature of life.

But all my perceptions of him changed with the news of his death. His sudden suicide left those who knew him grappling with an even greater mystery. If fiction was not the sanctuary, if it failed to make an imaginative access to other selves and thus offer redemption, then what else could? What is it that fiction is about? To be a fucking human being?

*

I thought about a line from Infinite Jest often in the months following Kouresh’s death: “The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you.” I found myself contemplating the Truth surrounding his choice, gazing vacantly through the window at the dimly lit, slumbering streets of Tehran, a reflection of myself fading in the glass. When I advocated for the translation of Infinite Jest. I desperately wanted to believe that maintaining faith in literature had not failed. What if, in this instance, words could speak louder than actions?

The truth is you don’t need faith to translate a book. What you need is commitment. You need to equip yourself as thoroughly as possible, to wrestle—and dance when needed—with the text, and devise solutions when countless challenges arise. The faith aspect, ironically enough, is a bit like the Higher Power concept in Alcoholic Anonymous. You don’t have to genuinely believe in it, know its name, or feel like kneeling down, but you have to go through the motions, even if it’s just pretending to kneel down to find a sock or anything under your bed, unless. Otherwise, you might find yourself back on that cliff—facing a choice to jump or to humbly admit that it does work, somehow. In other words, you have to commit.

And commit I did. Infinite Jest wasn’t my first translation of David Foster Wallace, so I knew that a linguistic labyrinth awaited me. I knew I had to go through the motions, a routine of sitting in front of my laptop with two windows open: the intimidating English version on the right, and the tentative Farsi on the left. I didn’t dwell much on the challenges ahead, trying to focus on each day’s task. If you bothered to set up a camera to record my days, you’d witness a man sitting in front of a laptop, his frustration evident, soundtracked by a playlist marking passage of time. I barely moved, except for necessary tea or coffee breaks. Then, unbeknownst to the observer, the pandemic would strike, locking the world in fear and isolation, the man would still keep sitting in the same chair. What the camera wouldn’t capture is that the man in the chair felt like he was engaged in an awkwardly sober and self-conscious dance with words—an ongoing endeavor to unearth new, nearly dormant linguistic faculties within himself, day in and day out. On the monitor, behind those two windows, was another window:  my affiliated Twitter account through which I had connected to individuals, experts, and my fellow Wallace-readers. I was divulging my daily routine there, ranting about the project, and sharing those fleeting moments of elation. Those generous people not only followed my project but also extended their hands whenever I got stuck in the quicksand of Wallace’s elegant complexities.

On one of those dull long quarantine days, as I was knee-deep in the infinite jest of translating the book, I got a reply on Twitter from Igor Cvijanovic. He mentioned that he was translating Infinite Jest into Serbian. Our exchange quickly revealed that so many of the questions we both faced within the text—phrases whose meaning eluded us, words that felt cryptic—were very similar. It was Igor—and Can Kantarcı, the Turkish translator—that reached out to fellow translators, and soon I received an email with the subject line “Infinite Jest around the World” from one of the veteran translators—Caetano W. Galindo, from Brazil. He asked me if I want to join an internal group of former and present Wallace translators.

So our mailing group started. The translators of Infinite Jest all around the world gathered to help each other, to let the words spread. The discussions often kick off with seemingly straightforward questions—”Trial-Size Dove Bar”, ice cream or soap?—which evolve into in-depth discussions about Wallace, language, and translation. If that said camera were still rolling, you would capture me with an unmistakable grin as I read each email. The Truth we sought in our little community of Wallace translators wasn’t about what the late author did, but about his words, those tiny, easily missed details that readers might skip, but we translators couldn’t afford to. It was in these minute ingredients, dissected as if the fate of the world hung in the balance, that we discovered not the Truth, but fragmented truths, reflected in each language. And then the question for each translator would become: what to reflect to the reader?

*

“The book is 1,079 pages long and there is not one lazy sentence,” wrote Dave Eggers in the preface of the 10th anniversary edition. Every sentence, every tricky word, and each grammar twist is a little gift, carrying care —or dare I say, love—to the reader. “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art,” Wallace once wrote, “lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.”

This love doesn’t just reside in the text or the author; it thrives in the space between the reader (or translator) and the text itself. If the piece of fiction “can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain”, as Wallace suggested, so that “we might also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own”, then the translator’s role transforms into that of an invisible tunnel builder, creating a passageway that makes the once-inaccessible accessible.

This is where those never-ending discussions about aesthetics and technicalities come into play. Because translation is fundamentally the act of sacrificing one thing for another, it’s always a process of give and take. Not every language grants the flexibility that English does, and certainly, not every wordsmith plays with sentence structure as boldly as Wallace. This means you have to push the limits of your own language. You might choose to overlook a grammatical quirk with a sigh, all in favor of preserving the tone. You might opt to loosen a sentence slightly to maintain the flow, or on the contrary, you might embrace the text’s density, taking the risk of sacrificing some of its playfulness. You might feel you have to explain the certain reference or leave it to the reader to find out or miss. There is no comforting answer.

Of course you can talk in-depth about how and what to choose, which is essentially what we did in our email exchanges. Yet, in the deeper level, you must choose what can best convey that love, or rather, create a space for the love to thrive. You have to translate out of the part of yourself that loves the text, cherishes both languages and connects with the consciousness behind the text that made you feel less alone in the first place. It’s the kind of love I had forgotten, somehow deliberately, since Kouresh’s passing, only to rediscover it through this newfound community. It was through the process of translation, surrendering to the nameless Higher Power within Wallace’s words, that I recalled Kouresh as a fucking human being, not merely a concept or symbol of a failed notion. I could vividly picture him, bubbling up from depths: he always looked older than his age, with wispy gray hair, a bony face, a wide half-toothed smile that would appear if someone praised him, and a cigarette that was perpetually on the verge of falling. I recalled his calm demeanor, how he’d keep his eyes closed while intently listening to our stories, seemingly distant, only to snap them wide open when a truly great story came to its end. Those fleeting moments were the only times his eyes sparkled. And so did mine, meeting his.

In rediscovering those moments of genuine connection, I felt the relief of rediscovering a forgotten belief. Translation felt less like rock-climbing than mountaineering. The Higher Power gently guides you off the cliff, even if only for a while. You can lean on the structure of a magnum opus that won’t crumble, despite the fact that it’s a gift from a writer who, as Wallace’s sister Amy put it, “simply ran out of the strength to hope that tomorrow might be a little bit better.” But the words  will live on. They will enhance our capacity to understand—or at least make peace with—how others lived, felt, suffered, or even chose not to live. There will always be a new reader, a new language, a new translator, and subsequently, an ever-expanding community of readers who would find connections with consciousness beyond their own. They will consider the tiniest details, relate with other human beings in profound ways, and feel the sadness with greater depth. Perhaps, they would come to the realization that the act of reading—or translation, for that matter—a truly great work of fiction is more about connection than isolation. This, then, is why we translate.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

I.

When I found myself living in Sweden, learning the language well enough to read one of my all-time favorite poets, in the original Swedish, it set me on the path to translation and, ultimately, the task of tackling his complete works. In the three years I was there, I wrote poems that had a spareness and voice that felt very different from my other work. Was this my translating Tranströmer coming through, or the way learning a language necessitates the paring down of speech? Was it the stark Swedish landscape with its extremes of light, the sudden isolation from family and friends, what I was reading at the time, what was happening in the world or in my relationships?

I’m often asked how translating influences my own creative writing process. But, of course, influence is impossible to pin down. I’m curious why I’m rarely asked the reverse, how my creative writing process influences my translating. Wouldn’t it be reciprocal?

That question interests me. But where- and however these two crafts of mine meet feels outside of my awareness, maybe at the very edge of consciousness, that borderless place where inner and outer landscapes converge. The verb “meet” seems apt because it suggests a connection that precedes influence and yet has the potential to expand beyond influence to include an exchange. Which brings to mind the ecological concept of ecotone, a reference to the transition between two communities in nature, such as the edge between forest and open field, where there are no distinct boundaries, just overlap and melding, and where the richest diversity of life exists.

In my Afterword to Bright Scythe, when describing the depths of my immersion in Tranströmer’s work once I could read it in the original Swedish, I say: “Maybe it was the loneliness and strange reconfiguration of identity that came from living in an unfamiliar place, but I felt I was discovering a third language, at the intersection of the English and Swedish, that helped me locate myself in the context of my foreignness.” Too much time and distance have since passed, but I do remember feeling like I’d entered some new and impossible-to-articulate terrain.

Five years after moving back to the U. S. from Sweden, I returned for a visit. While walking around our old neighborhood and visiting my favorite haunts in Stockholm, I became aware that random lines of Tranströmer’s poetry were scrolling through my head—mostly in English. It was almost unconscious, but when I realized it was happening, it dawned on me that while I was living there and immersing myself in Tranströmer’s words, I was simultaneously struggling to find my place in his country.

Somewhere along the way, my immersion in Tranströmer and my search for a sense of place merged. As if the poetry became the place, and the place the poetry. I can’t separate this fusion of translation and place from my own writing because I was carrying that around in my head, too.

My own poems and the poems I translate feel like places to me, equally physical in their presence. Maybe this is because both my and Tranströmer’s writings are deeply influenced by the physical natural world. More often than not, both writing and translating are, for me, explorations through that world. Or maybe it’s because there’s a physical aspect to the writing process itself.

When translating, once I emerge from the rabbit hole of literal translation—puzzling over word order and choice, poetic strangeness, cultural or historical references, rhythm, tone, all the obsessive fiddling—I print the poem out and set it aside for a good long while, hoping to come back to it with a bit of amnesia, freed from all that cerebral baggage. I do the same with my own work. Then I pin the poem or translation on my bulletin board and stand there, eye-to-eye with it, pencil in one hand, fat eraser in the other, underlining, erasing, revising, reading it aloud line by line (for translations, alternating the Swedish with the English), over and over.

An ecotone is so rich and diverse because, in addition to hosting life from the overlapping communities, it hosts its own unique life. Was that new terrain of mine the translation itself?

II.

In Brian Henry’s “Translation: An Essay” (Blackbird, Fall, 2018), he says: “I need to be able to communicate with whomever I’m translating—for practical reasons, but also because, for me, the only way to overcome the ‘impossibility’ of translation is to approach it as an act of friendship, a living act.” Henry isn’t necessarily placing a higher value on this “living act,” but outlining why it’s central to his process as a translator. I’m intrigued by the opportunities and limitations such a process might present, but mainly compelled to reflect on my own experience with Tomas and Monica Tranströmer.

It’s important to note that in 1990 Tomas had a major stroke that resulted in right-sided paralysis and what had been described in everything I’d previously read as “difficulty speaking.” Also noteworthy is that I’m an RN. After my first visit with the Tranströmers, when I was still gaining proficiency in Swedish and well before I’d started translating Tomas, I wrote in my journal:

As Monica and I move back and forth between Swedish and English, it becomes clear that Tomas is aphasic. How did I not know about the degree of his “difficulty?” He understands perfectly, is obviously engaged in the conversation, but cannot articulate a response, except for the reply “Det är mycket bra” (“It’s very good”), which he repeats fairly often, with great facial expression, sometimes gesticulating with his left hand. 

A year or so later, our conversations turned to my translations of The Sorrow Gondola. Monica, who has always been Tomas’s main reader, said that both she and Tomas had read and “discussed” my translations. Having witnessed, on many occasions and for hours on end, how fluently she could interpret his expressions, gestures, and seemingly futile attempts at speech, I had confidence in the depths of those discussions. On their printed-out version of my translated manuscript, there were occasional words underlined in faint and slightly shaky pencil.

We went through the poems, one by one, sometimes merely talking about that poem’s occasion, where Monica would share a story, Tomas eagerly listening. If there was an underline, we’d discuss that word. By then, our conversations were purely in Swedish, so in Swedish I would explain my English word choice (using Swedish words other than the Swedish word used in the original text!).

We spent hours and days in conversation, with many distractions for lunch, strolls, or lapses into social chatter. At some point, it became clear that the process was as much about honing trust as honing the translations. In fact, we never discussed the last handful of poems in that short collection.

My point is that the relationship itself was a translated experience, based on a connection that stemmed from the body and worked outward through the poetry to a mutual trust. Was this level of friendship, which encompassed the literary and the deeply personal, enough, as it was for Brian Henry, “to overcome the ‘impossibility’ of translation?”

I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. But it does speak to the unique influences of my translation process and the larger notion that, as translators, we all bring something truly our own to the work. Eliot Weinberger assures us of this in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, when he says, “The transformations that take shape in print, that take the formal name of ‘translation,’ become their own beings, set out on their own wanderings.”

Of course, “overcoming the impossibility” isn’t just a translator’s struggle. It’s an artist’s struggle. Whether translating, writing, painting, or performing a dance or musical piece, perfect correspondence is rare. If Weinberger is suggesting there’s originality in each translated work, it would have to be borne, in part, from the myriad forces influencing the translator’s life. Maybe that new terrain of mine was less about the work itself and more about engendering creative possibilities, including how to think about life and living, language and connection.

Returning to the question of influence, when it comes to life experience and any kind of immersive creative work, isn’t it all influence? If so, surely at some point influence becomes confluence.

______________________________

The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer translated by Patty Crane is available via Copper Canyon Press.

We read the story of Cook Ding in elementary school. He is an expert at cutting up oxen. He sees crevices between an ox’s bones and joints and inserts the blade of his cleaver lightly. Hu-la, the meat falls apart like a lump of earth. Joy fills him as he cleans his cleaver, which still cuts like new after nineteen years of use. He follows the Dao, and what he does is wei wuwei, do without doing—effortless like non-doing.

In my youth, I was skeptical of Cook Ding’s joy. I couldn’t quite picture butchering without hearing the predawn shrieks from the slaughterhouse not far enough from our apartment. It was a bloody, messy business, a far cry from Cook Ding’s breezy effortlessness. People strove. I strove. Every school day seemed to be lived for the college entrance exam. Even the morning qigong practice with my parents was meant to help me concentrate better for higher scores.

I studied English in college, a useful major in the economically reforming China. After graduating, I moved to Shenzhen, the special economic zone, and wrote and translated for the English Page, which was inserted in the municipal newspaper and was known as the “necktie of the metropolis” (if Shenzhen was a western suit).  It was the mid-90s, and the city was deluged with all things West: midnight bars, rave parties, Big Macs, Guinness, Nirvana, marijuana. I strove to be worldly.

A few years of my restless working, consuming life, I felt a longing for elsewhere. I imagined a kind of disappearance, maybe in a remote town where I would be alone and finally meet myself. I would do nothing—just write and wander and learn what life was all about.

The thought translated into graduate study abroad, a more logical, and predictable, next step for ascendance. It was a plausible, even applaudable way of disappearing, a more complete one as well. In the last year of the last millennium, I found myself in a classroom in the heartland of America, wondering how the language I’d learned felt on my classmates’ tongue. I sat on a campus bench eating an apple. A squirrel looked at me sideways, didn’t seem to see me, only saw the apple, waiting for it to drop. For a fiction workshop, I translated a story I’d written in Shenzhen. The professor, who had come to America in his twenties like me, except from a different country decades earlier, suggested that I write an American story. I didn’t know what that meant, but wrote a story set in the studio I rented where the refrigerator made chattering sounds at night. I changed the Chinese names to Anglo-Saxon ones to make it American.

My first year of writing stories in English was far from wei wuwei. Words did not flow. They were squeezed out and then staggered on the page without conviction. In my second year, feeling no good at fiction, I switched to poetry, a more forgiving genre for non-native speakers, as it involves fewer words and has a higher tolerance for non-standard English. To mitigate the battle between the two languages, I wrote my first draft in Chinese and then translated it back and forth while revising. After several years of writing poetry like this, I tried fiction again. I wrote a novel in Chinese, about how social forces act upon two sisters, both of whom could have been me. I wrote quickly. Words I thought I’d forgotten or never possessed poured onto the page. On good days, I tasted wuwei. The perplexing, disorienting I disappeared. A coherence emerged that felt almost easeful.

Meanwhile, there was the business of making a living. After several temp jobs, and caring for a toddler, I returned to school for a PhD in the hope of getting a stable job. The ESL instructor decided I wasn’t fluent enough in English to teach Composition, even though I had taught a year of poetry during my MFA. Her class included a weekly tutorial where I sat in front of her desk, read passages out loud, and tried to make what came out of my mouth appear as unbroken lines on her computer screen—via some sort of software intended to rid non-native speakers of their accents. She was convinced that when English speakers spoke, their words were naturally linked. Frustrated by my broken lines, she asked, “Why do you want to write in English in America? Why not stay in China and write in Chinese?”

For one thing, she seemed to be speaking of striving. What I was doing, writing in a foreign language in a foreign land seemed reward-less, and therefore, self-defeating. We revere effortlessness. When we see a musician play as if their fingers were infallible or a swimmer swim as if water were their true element, we catch a glimpse of our own potential. But when efforts seem misguided or fruitlessly exerted, they are simply wasteful, like the way my instructor must have seen me—failing again and again to link the lines on her computer, and inevitably, failing to write well in a language that is not mine.

The summer after my first year as a PhD student, sitting under a century-old oak in the backyard of our rented house, I found myself scribbling in English in my notebook. The extensive use of English that year must have crowded out my Chinese, which until then had been the language I wrote freely in. A relief, since now I could skip the time-consuming self-translation when already there was hardly any time to write. It was also unsettling. I seemed to be losing my Chinese and I would never be able to write in English as if it were my native tongue. I would be stuttering, perpetually seeking the right word in my linguistic unbelonging.

I ended up teaching composition, completing my PhD, and getting a full-time job—as a fellow PhD candidate had predicted, except for not quite the right reasons: “You have a book, you’re Chinese, you’re a woman, of course you’ll get a job.” In an interdisciplinary course I co-taught with a history professor on East and West encounters, I learned for the first time about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the country’s first immigration law that barred the entry of Chinese laborers and denied citizenship to the Chinese who were already here. I learned that without the Chinese laborers, the transcontinental railroad across the Sierra could not have been built, and approximately 1,200 Chinese railroad workers died building it. I was struck by my ignorance. How could I have lived in this land for almost twenty years without knowing these basic historical facts?

In the summer of 2019, visiting my parents in Guangdong, I told my father I was reading about Chinese in the 19th century America. He reminded me that his great-grandfather had helped build the railroad. The information was somehow new to me. What I had known was vaguer: my ancestor had labored overseas for two decades before returning home to build the two-story house my father grew up in. The focus had been on the two-story house, not the detail of his labor. Maybe this was because the blood-and-sweat railroad work evoked no glory or promised no redemptive wuwei, and the bloody purges and expulsions made his return a choice he had no power to make. Maybe shame resided in what was left untold. The legacy that had been erased in America, for different reasons, was also erased in China.

I read all summer, delaying the writing. I kept telling myself I needed to learn more. But at the beginning of the fall semester, during my pre-tenure research leave, I began to write. At first, nothing but dull words appeared, but after an hour or so, I felt an easing in my head and words began to flow. I wrote every day. Some days, nothing shone. Some days, the novel seemed to be writing itself.

Early the following spring, my daughter came home and told me a classmate had done a little song and dance in front of her: “I am coronavirus from Japan, hanging out with Chinaman.” When a week later, her school switched to remote, I was relieved. I had been afraid she would be asked, “Do you eat bats?” or get beaten like other Asian and Asian American kids were experiencing across the country. In the past, the question for her was “Do you eat dogs and cats?” which, like the one my former ESL instructor had asked me, had no good answers.

One day, I ventured out for a walk. A man standing by the duck creek yelled in my direction. I couldn’t make out what he was yelling. It could have been a version of “Go back to China!”—the ubiquitous rant hurled at people who looked like me. A not-so-distant echo from the rallying call shouted by mobs a century and a half ago: “The Chinese must go!”

I wrote my fear and anguish and anger into the novel about my precursor immigrants who were all too familiar with such yelling. Some of my characters decide to go back to China. Some stay put, to claim their space at whatever cost.

I wrote and when it went well, I forgot I was writing in a language not native to me. It didn’t seem to matter which language I was writing in, or where I was. I was simply writing, without striving to write. I disappeared into the world of my making, a safe place to be. And I felt joy.

__________________________________

Ye Chun’s Straw Dogs of the Universe is available from Catapult.

“What language do you dream in?” When you are a multilingual person, there is always somebody who asks you this question. My answer is, “I do not know, it depends. Maybe my dreams come already translated.”

Don Antonio was the physician during my childhood in Ondarroa, my hometown in the Basque Country. Antonio was a rural doctor sent far away from Valladolid, Central Spain, to a tiny Basque-speaking fishing village. Antonio was tough. During consultations, he used to ask me questions and take notes. I did not answer him. My mother translated the conversation between the doctor and the patient. She was my first translator.

“Don Antonio will think you don’t understand,” my mother barked. “Your Spanish is quite good. Why don’t you talk to him?” The reason was that his rudeness scared me, and I took shelter in my mother tongue. I have to admit that visiting the doctor was not so bad after all. On our way home, Mom used to take me to the bookshop next to the doctor’s house and treat me to a book. That was our deal, “I will go to the doctor as long as you buy me a book.”

I was a shy boy, and books were my closest friends.

I loved books, especially translated literature. Reading was like talking to friends from all over the world, opening windows to other cultures. Of course, I liked writers from my community, but there were not so many books published in Basque at that time. I had to find outside what I could not get at home. There was a tiny good bookshop in my hometown. The bookseller, a middle-aged man who introduced worldwide music and literature into our lives, was responsible for my early interest in Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Italo Calvino, Anna Akhmatova, Natalia Ginzburg, Yehuda Amichai… They were all translated authors. Then I start to write, inspired by them. So, I can say that translations made me a writer.

My whole life I have been living between languages, going from one to another on the same day or even in the same conversation. We were Basque-Spanish bilingual children during school years, and now, living in New York, English is our third language. I live in New York and I create mostly in Basque. It is my mother tongue and I have developed my writing career in Basque. There is another reason too. It is the smallest language among those that I speak. I go for small things. I think writing in Basque is contributing to a culturally biodiverse planet, a multilingual one.

New York gives me a sense of shelter to write in Basque, provides me with the distance and the freedom that maybe I could not have had in my country. James Joyce wrote Ulysses in Paris. He wrote it in English in a French-speaking city. Would it have been the same book if it was written in Dublin?

I completed my last novel, Life Before Dolphins, in New York. For the first time I wrote both versions, Basque and Spanish, simultaneously. It is interesting how different each language can act. They act like fractals. Basque seems like drawing done by a butterfly wing. Spanish, on the other hand, is a chameleon’s circular and long tail Basque has the beauty of short sentences and accuracy. Spanish loves complicated sentences, its cadence lasts. Once I finished the two versions, I brought to each of them what I had learned while writing the other. Both versions, original and translation, are the master.

Nothing is lost in translation. Books flourish in translation. They reach new readers; even the quality of the original text itself improves. Translating is somehow a process of creating. It is not just an approach to finding the word, the expression in a different language. It has to capture the soul. Make the story work in a different culture.

Elizabeth Macklin translated my book of poems, Meanwhile Take My Hand, into English. She was working on an ending to the poem “River,” which says: “they could be an old woman’s hand / awaiting any other hand’s caressing.” The complicated part was that the order of the words was the opposite in Basque and English. It was impossible to translate the sentence in the same order. To me, it was essential to finish the poem with the word “zain” (awaiting), because it is the story of an aged woman who lives alone in the city. Elizabeth found the best solution, placing “caressing” at the end of the poem. Neither Spanish nor French could respect the order of the original. Just in Japanese, Nami Kaneko could place “zain” at the end of the poem. Japanese has the same order as Basque.

More recently, Megan McDowell suggested a new title for the novel she is currently translating. The original name was Izurdeen aurreko bizitza, which I literally translated as Past Life of Dolphins. She advocated instead for Life Before Dolphins. Her explanation was that in the Past Life of Dolphins, the animals are the subject, while Life Before Dolphins is more focused on the humans. I have to admit that the title sounds much better now, thanks to the translator’s wisdom. Translation improves the original.

When we moved to New York five years ago, my son was concerned because “English was occupying the room that once was Basque.” He was talking about his brain, and how he felt that he was forgetting his mother tongue. At the beginning, he translated from Basque to English. The structures of his sentences were exactly the same as they were in Basque, and if a word in English did not come to him, he would use a formula to make a Basque word sound English. Five years later, Basque words are made up from English words. Three languages flow fluently in him. There is room for three or more languages in the palace of his mind. That happens to him, and to everyone. So, let’s be open to languages.

The Cuban poet Carlos Pintado told me that he had listened carefully to the podcast that I publish weekly. It is recorded in Basque. He was surprised that he did not understand anything. He tried to decipher words as a thief tries to decode the combination of a safe moving the dial. If you manage to open the box of a new language, you will find a treasure inside.

I still don’t know the language of my dreams. But I do know that I dream of a world where languages live together, travel across borders.

Most translators of contemporary literature have at some point worked with an author who knows some English. And if an author knows some English, they’ll likely want to take a glance at what you’ve done with their prose. On occasion this can be helpful, when they save you from a mistranslated idiom, say, or clear up a particularly knotty passage; but most of the time, at least in my case, I find it to be a pain in the ass. Or maybe I’m just jaded by a couple bad experiences, when an author, overestimating their knowledge of English, started picking apart my sentences and bending them back toward the original Italian, rendering the text perhaps more literal but less faithful in tone and meaning. What happens, then, when the author reviewing your translation not only speaks English fluently but has already written a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories in the language?

Jhumpa Lahiri, as is well known by now, has been writing and publishing much of her work in Italian since 2015’s In altre parole, translated into English, under the title In Other Words, by Ann Goldstein. With her latest novel, 2018’s Dove mi trovo, published in English three years later as Whereabouts, Jhumpa did the translating herself, and it’s safe to say—based solely on the number of people who have asked me “Why didn’t Jhumpa translate the stories herself?”—that everyone assumed she’d go on doing just that. Why she didn’t is a question for her, not me, alas, and she does address it in an interview with Cressida Leyshon that accompanied the New Yorker’s publication of “P’s Parties,” one of the three (of nine) stories in Roman Stories that I translated.

So yes, there are nine stories in Roman Stories, six of which Jhumpa did the first pass translation of and three of which I took the first crack at: “P’s Parties,” “Well-Lit House,” and “Notes.” When each of us had completed our drafts, we swapped stories, marked them up, and passed them back for a final look. I wish I could tell you that we spent long hours on the phone debating the nuances of one crucial word, or that we cursed and moaned and took one another’s suggestions through gritted teeth, or that epiphanies shot off like embers from the hearth of our melded minds, but mostly we agreed, grateful to have another pair of eyes on our work.

Though this arrangement adds some pressure for the translator on the front end—I naturally felt a little more anxious than usual to deliver pages that were as clean and convincing as possible—it takes the pressure off in the later stages, when it’s time to set the words in stone. Those final decisions I could leave to a person not only perfectly capable of making them but who possesses the very voice I was aiming to capture. How could she be wrong?

Any yet, on the publication of “P’s Parties” in the New Yorker, you could still find people tweeting about how the prose style felt unlike her in some way, or even that her books written in English are for English-language readers and those written in Italian for Italian readers, as if there should be a partition. Alarmingly, what these readers are expressing here is not so uncommon: the fear of indirect contact. They can’t bear to think that their beloved author has passed through the filter of some other being. To read Jhumpa Lahiri in translation, they think—even a translation she’s involved in producing—is to get less of her. It’s part of the reason readers in the U.S. don’t like translation much in the first place—we distrust anything but direct contact and assume the middleman will cheat us in some way. If we’re not getting the real thing, why get it at all? And it’s why we often don’t credit or forget to credit translators, because when we do have a Great Literary Experience, like reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies as an undergrad, for example, it doesn’t even cross our mind that some second party—some guy named Stephen Mitchell—could have put us under such a spell. We resent that there’s an interpretive element to translation. And it’s the same resentment that lay at the root of my bad experiences with those Italian authors, who tried to superimpose my English onto their Italian—to make it more of a tracing than a drawing. But you can’t trace one language with another.

So what did this all mean when it was my turn to review Jhumpa’s translations? What could I possibly do? Even if her English veered from the original Italian, isn’t it her right to veer? How would I be able to tell the difference between a mistake and a willful departure? Aware of this dilemma, and of Jhumpa’s preference to stay true to the Italian, I took a maximalist approach, over-correcting and suggesting any solutions that seemed felicitous—always based on the original text—so that Jhumpa could consider all options and take or discard the changes as she saw fit. The result would be a text that combines the craft of two different translators, with their unique relationships to the English and Italian languages, and two different approaches to problem solving, into one fluent and unified manuscript. I hope that’s the case, for anyone who picks up Roman Stories—and I hope it feels like the real thing.

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Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz, is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

In 2016, Sergey Gandlevsky was arrested and detained by Moscow police after tearing down a poster of Stalin on the wall in the Lubyanka metro station. Lubyanka is the notorious neighborhood that housed the Soviet secret police. It is now home to Russian security services. “I tore it off the wall,” Gandlevsky said, when asked by a journalist, “because [Stalin] is a criminal.”

After being threatened with imprisonment for vandalism and petty hooliganism, Gandlevsky was released without charge. The Soviet Union has been dead for over thirty years, and Stalin’s crimes disavowed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s, but it is as if history is repeating itself in Russia. “Everything that’s happened to us will happen again,” as Gandlevsky once wrote in a poem, not knowing how it would come true.

Despite his detention, Gandlevsky has never been, strictly speaking, a political dissident. He has always been, first and foremost, a poet. But in an unfree society, to be a poet, Gandlevsky believed, required refusing to participate in a system he believed was morally bankrupt. At a bilingual reading with Gandlevsky, someone asked why I decided to study Russian language and poetry, I said that I heard Reagan call the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire,” and I thought Reagan was wrong—that a whole country could not be evil. Gandlevsky replied, “when I heard Reagan say that, I thought he was right.”

Sergey Gandlevsky was born in Moscow in 1952, one year before Stalin’s death. An integral figure in the Russian underground poetry scene in the 1970s and 1980s, Gandlevsky began writing poetry only for himself and his friends. In 1972, at Moscow State University, Gandlevsky co-founded Moscow Time, a poetry group which included fellow comrade-poets Alexander Soprovsky, Aleksey Tsvetkov, and Bakhyt Kenjeev, until Tsvetkov’s emigration in 1974. (Gandlevsky would later elegize all of these poet friends in verse.)

Critic Lena Trofimova recalls how Moscow Time’s “poetic fraternity opposed the official literary studio of the university, who had all the necessities of a comfortable but a conformist existence—good lodging, financial support, organized regulations of study.” When asked about Moscow Time’s aesthetic position, Gandlevsky laughed and said:

Since we are talking about three or four extremely funny young people who are always drunk, this very idea would have caused a surge of drunkenness and laughter. There were, of course, reasons of the most general, ideological order. We were all idealists. We believed that death is not the end. We did not believe that there is no purpose in life and that the Universe is a confluence of some molecular circumstances. We did not treat poetry as a mere human activity: one stitches boots and the other writes in rhyme. At the same time, after all, we were scoffers, so the priestly pose in its pure, symbolic form was not welcomed.

Unlike the Sixties Generation of Russian poets—most notably, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrey Vosnesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina—who embraced the role of the poet as public figure of political conscience and performed readings for thousands of people, the Seventies Generation saw the limits of poetry as public dissent. The trial of poet Joseph Brodsky in 1964, the show trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrey Sinyavsky in 1966, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended the Khrushchev Thaw.

With the ongoing reassertion of the Communist Party in the Brezhnev era, the elder generation of poets looked morally compromised to the rising generation. Gandlevsky himself had no love for what he saw as the “versified ideas of the middle intelligentsia” of Yevtushenko, and saw poetry as a means of privacy, a bulwark against a politics that had contaminated all aspects of Russian life.

By contrast to the attention-seeking political harangues of the Sixties poets, Gandlevsky and Moscow Time saw poetry as a personal matter. For them, as Gandlevsky writes in Trepanation of the Skull, “There was no one whose eyes had to be opened or who had to be made to understand [about the wickedness of the Soviet Union]. Everyone knew everything without that.”

In the 1970s and 80s, during the twilight years of Soviet empire, Gandlevsky worked odd jobs—night watchman, theater stagehand, museum docent, and train cargo guard—opting out of the system of relative privilege afforded to writers who played by the rules. As internal émigrés, poets who had opted out of the “official” path of Russian writers during the Soviet period, Gandlevsky and his generation forged new directions in Russian poetry—often by reasserting links to suppressed or forgotten Russian poets whose emphasis was on aesthetic freedom over political engagement.

Gandlevsky and other poets of the underground did not appear in Russian literary journals until the late 1980s. Since then, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Gandlevsky’s work has received nearly every major Russian literary prize; he has won the Little Booker Prize (1996), the Anti-Booker Prize (1996), Moscow Score prize (2009), and the Poet Prize (2010). A Russian critics’ poll in the 2000s named him the country’s most important living poet.

While Gandlevsky continues to write poetry, the poet-Soviet period rhymed with the poet’s expansion of his literary repertoire into drama, critical essays, memoirs, and novels. His work has been translated into numerous languages and has been included in nearly every major English translation anthology of Russian poetry since the early 1990s. The first volume of his selected poems translated into English, A Kindred Orphanhood, came out in 2003 from Zephyr Press, followed by two narrative prose works translated by Suzanne Fusso, Trepanation of the Skull (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014) and Illegible (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019).

If the affiliations of Seventies Generation provide a cultural context of the Soviet stagnation period, they don’t describe what’s distinctive about Gandlevsky’s verse. Gandlevsky writes in strict rhyme and meter, in what is known in Russian poetry as classical form. Gandlevsky once said that classical form was “given to me by birth…there really wasn’t any choice for me in this regard.” Gandlevsky’s employment of classical form was, in some sense, a return to a Russian poetic tradition that had been buried by Soviet imperatives.

Yet the classical verse tradition and its rhyme and meters remain a standard feature of Russian poetry, long after modernism staked new pathways in American and European poetry. Where Gandlevsky’s poetry distinguishes itself is in how the classical form and ordinary, degraded life collide, a convergence that Mikhail Aizenberg has called the “explosive mixture” of Gandlevsky’s verse. In the words of poet and critic Lev Loseff, what makes Gandlevsky’s work so pleasurable is that he transforms, with minimalist means, the squalid into music:

Gandlevsky turns the monotony and squalor of Soviet/post-Soviet life into lyrical poetry of the highest probe, and the means by which he achieves it are utterly minimalist. If one has a dream in his poem, it is a dream about fixing an old shed and not having matches to light a cigarette. His diction is almost as mumbling and cliché-ridden as a conversation in a crowded commuter train. His verse forms strictly adhere to the versification rules of a middle-school textbook: iambic pentameter or iambic hexameter for meditative poems, anapest for more sentimental lines. Yet, I repeat, nothing finds a more direct way to your heart than these flotsam and jetsam of the commonplace carried by regular iambic or anapestic waves.

Reminiscent of American confessional poetry, which seethed with fact under the hard artifice of form and allusion, Gandlevsky’s poetry works precisely through yoking oppositions—between form and content, between high concerns and daily indignities. The traditional themes of poetry—obsession with language, freedom, death, love—emerge against the backdrop of a depiction of a vulgar life scarred by alcoholism, debauchery, and ennui.

If there’s something that most outsiders get wrong about Russia and Russian literature, it’s that they presume Russians are obsessed with misery, suffering, and death. On the contrary, Russian poetry is a master class in enchantment, playfulness, and ecstasy. As I’ve written elsewhere, the music of Russian poetry is enchantingly joyful, even ecstatic. It is in their poetry that we can witness the pleasures of a people stereotyped by the West as morbid depressives. It is, indeed, what makes translating Russian poetry most challenging, and why readers of Russian poetry in translation tend to absorb only a vision of a grim and absurd reality but not what it sounds like to have such pure music collides with the grim or the absurd.

Translating this explosive cocktail is no easy task. For one, Russian poetry’s longstanding tradition of classical form and its adherence to meters is aided by features of the Russian language—its regularity of conjugations and declensions, its flexibility of word order, and its multisyllabic words offer the Russian poet a capacious and seemingly inexhaustible treasury of rhyme and meter in which to play. In contrast to most American poetry, which a century ago threw off formalism as if it were an outworn girdle, Russian poetry still enjoys the rigorously erotic pleasures of form’s confines. (There are, of course, glorious outlaws in both poetic traditions.)

While my initial attempts to translate Gandlevsky often leaned toward accuracy of meaning over fidelity to a poem’s music, Gandlevsky’s later work encouraged me to loosen up my technique and take greater risks for the purpose of song. After all, Gandlevsky was no Social Realist, but a bohemian, vodka-fueled, descendant of Pushkin. My translations, as a result, ride on a ghost of meter and rhyme, carrying the voice and vision of this distinctive Russian poet across the borders of English.

The tone of Gandlevsky’s poems combines humor with world-weariness, but the speakers of his poems are quite masculine. Gandlevsky’s poems occasionally perform a wounded bravado, a weary machismo. But just as the American confessional poets often play with the ruse of unmasking, Gandlevsky’s poems are not simple autobiographical confessions. Gandlevsky once said that though his poems “underline the biographical,” his memory “is cunning, not simple-hearted, and very selective.”

In a poem like “To land a job,” Gandlevsky masterfully combines classical form with a portrait of a rogue, which may or may not be Gandlevsky. Echoing the song “Bolshoi Karetny” by the gutter-voiced Vladimir Vysotsky and Sergei Esenin’s “Letter to My Mother,” the poem reads like A Portrait of the Artist as a Lumpenproletariat:

To land a job at the garage
And sing about a black gun.
And not once in ten years
Stop and visit your old mum.
En route from Gazli in the south
After a canister of sour booze
Screw some girlfriend in Kaluga
Leave her when she’s due.
Gaseteria lamb of Wednesdays,
Cod-pea soup on Thursdays.
To vow to a friend at lunch
To rough up a garage owner, then
Surmount the promising hill
Of a thirtieth birthday…

Is the poem a boast? A confession? A portrait of self-degradation? Or does it reside in the Venn center of all three? Dunja Popovic, in an examination of Gandlevsky’s work called A Generation That Has Squandered Its Men: The Late Soviet Crisis of Masculinity in the Poetry of Sergei Gandlevskii, argues that the poem begins in the glorification of masculine depradation, alcoholism, sexual conquest, violence, and criminality. Against the backdrop of conservative Soviet social mores that propped up the Soviet system, the speaker’s messy life could be read as a rebellion against conformism.

Yet as the poem unfolds, the stakes of his irresponsibility grow. He’s not only failing to visit his mother, he’s also drinking rotten liquor and getting a woman pregnant. But even inside this little ballad, he’s turning thirty, suddenly facing the grim landscape of a life of gaseteria lamb, illegal hauls, and treacherous somnolent drives:

At dawn
To drive for black market gravel
And sing the black pistol.
And if you can’t catch that gig, doze,
Your cheek on the steering wheel,
Remembering with gloom and woe
That Mahachkala brawl.

The poem leaves us with an ambiguous image, in which the driver is either sleeping at the wheel of a parked vehicle, or about to head into a fiery crash. Either way, his life is passing gloomily before his eyes, encapsulated in the flashbacks to brutal beatings.

The poem begins in the romance of a carefree male freedom and ends with a fatal narrowing into ruefully recalled violence. Still, the poem’s superabundance of music, its song-within-a-song, makes this portrait of a trucker barreling into the abyss seem more like a blues song or a quick Scorsese movie, inviting us into an intoxicating but ultimately nihilistic romance of a careless existence.

Though the poem’s lyric speaker could be Gandlevsky, I couldn’t help but observe that, in Gandlevsky’s head-spinning memoir, Trepanation of the Skull, a drinking buddy named Misha Chumak visits the poet from Gazli, along with his girlfriend and baby. In Russian poetry. the use of verbal infinitives invites us to read this poem as a dramatic monologue. But then, one could read any poem—and certainly any poem by Gandlevsky—as a dramatic monologue of a fictive self.

This poem aptly demonstrates some of the challenges in translating Gandlevsky. Gandlevsky forces a translator to scramble between retaining cultural particulars, at the risk of losing the American reader, and opting for some American equivalences, at the risk of effacing the original. Years ago, looking for an American equivalent of рыгаловкa, a Gandlevskian neologism combining the words “to belch” and “diner,” I found it while on a bus ride from Boston to New York. Somewhere around 125th Street, I looked up and saw Gaseteria. (Gasterias no longer exists, but it served its purpose.)

In my earlier translation of this poem, I translated the last lines in this way:

And if not lucky enough for this,
To drift off—cheek on the steering wheel—
Remembering gloomily
A brawl in the Caucasus.

The new version restores some of the rhyme throughout the poem and reasserts the place name of Mahachkala, and the assonance of “Mahachkala” and “brawl” approximates more closely the music of the Russian line.

Gandlevsky’s spiritual quest might evoke images of the Beats for the American reader, but for the Russian reader, one hears more keenly the sounds of and allusions to Russian literature. When reading Gandlevsky, a Russian might hear echoes of Pushkin’s measured lyric delight, Chekhov’s alternating atmospheres of gloom and grace, Blok’s foreboding symbolism, Mandelstam’s dark paranoiac urgency of the Voronezh years, Okudzhava’s melancholy songs of Old Arbat, Vysotsky’s gutteral visions, Nabokov’s plaintive nostalgia for his lost Russia, and Tolstoy’s argument with God.

Gandlevsky’s conversation—at times, his argument—with tradition is something that we may only vaguely discern, just ghostly demarcations. Still, Gandlevsky’s poetry does not politely invoke the great writers, but rather brings them alive to wrestle with their incomplete legacy.

*

Despite Gandlevsky’s late experimentalism, the poems maintain a continuity of comic melancholy. Elegiac colors have always tinctured his poems, but as his poems reach past midlife into old age, his backward glance to his childhood and youth sometimes feel bathed in nostalgia:

Bright ochre and rust delight these old eyes.
Between roofs, a cloud grows out of itself.
Wind gathers, drags leaves by their scruff,
Batters a fountain, a mag of expired styles.

The blue autumn light. I dig it like no one.
There’s snow on the roof, but fire in the oven.
What I would give to wait at the train
For a stylish black-coated twentyish woman.

What is more traditional than a poet singing the praises of autumn, the yellows and reds seen by the poet as ochre and rust? That paradox, of the artist’s colors and of metal turning rusty, captures Gandlevsky’s mixing of memory and desire, of beauty and ugliness, of love and dying. This autumn is not only a season, of course, but the poet’s struggle against aging, against expiring. Despite his graying hair—”snow on the roof”—the poet’s desire flares up in his chest. (The Russian expression for an older person engaging in midlife crisis behavior is, literally translated, “gray hair on the head, demon in the rib”).

Yet Gandlevsky remains quicksilver and self-mocking, irreverent both with the poetic tradition and with himself. As one poem goes:

I said farewell to the Falstaff of youth
And took my seat on the train.

In the rocky process of evolution,
I turned from playboy to lone wolf.

And nonetheless April
With its non-alcoholic drops
Still pounded my head like schnapps.

Should I hang a house for birds,
Aim for some laudable goal?
Or should I just aim and fire?

Long story short, I will not be consoled.

No matter the particular life that you face, you will say farewell to the Falstaff of youth, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t go away without a fight.

When I first met Gandlevsky, in 1993, he’d already reached midlife, craving a steady, tidy existence with Lena, his wife, and his young children Sasha and Grisha. He’d recently begun editing the journal Foreign Literature, which he continues to this day. We met outside the metro stop. Charlie, his Boxer, panted next to him, his tongue outside of his mouth.

We wandered through the streets of Moscow. Gandlevsky stopped short, and pointed to the roof of a crumbling monastery. It was here, some years ago, he said, he once shared a bottle of vodka with a drinking buddy. Today, those days are gone. His kids are grown and he’s a grandfather now. He quit smoking, and prefers burning time in his garden.

Thirty years ago, I chose to translate Gandlevsky because I believed he captured the spirit of his age more scrupulously, more intensely, than any other poet of his generation. His friend, the poet Aleksey Tsvetkov agreed, saying, “With the exception perhaps of Pushkin, I do not know another example of a poet merging with his time to such an extent that that time could be—and probably will have to be, at least in part—reconstructed based on his poems.”

But I have gone back to his work, again and again, not simply for its documentary or historical value, nor for its youthful insouciance or its critical sentimentalism. Generations come and go, as do brands and bands and slang, but what remains is the haunting music of the heart’s longing, affixed by mere words to a page.

Poetry is not a commodity but a way of being, a way of inhabiting an interior homeland. In contrast to the professional productiveness and frenzied graphomania of some poets, Gandlevsky works slowly, writing only a handful of poems every year. He still spends weeks, even months, composing a single poem, turning it over in his mind as he goes about his day, taking walks and working with the earth. When, after a particularly extensive two-hour recitation of his poems, I’d asked him how he’d memorized all of it. “I don’t memorize them,” he said. “That’s how I write them.”

For quite some time, rumors circulated that Gandlevsky was going to emigrate from Russia and move to Israel. Given the political turn of the country—or perhaps, turning back—it’s no wonder. When, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, Gandlevsky decided to move to the Republic of Georgia, where he writes now, in exile. In addition to fears about his family’s safety, he also shared another reason. “I am seventy years old,” he wrote to me, “almost my whole life has been dominated by people with whom I want nothing to do. Can I at least live the last years of my life—I don’t know how many of them I have left—by myself, in a country that has aroused my strong sympathy since my early youth!?”

He will, of course, remain Russian until the end. Wherever he is, he will be writing into freedom. And when he passes, the poems will be the testament to that invisible labor. To write is to make a home amid our political or spiritual or actual exile. “My homeland,” he said back in 1992, quoting another Russian writer, “is Russian poetry.”

The gift of reading Gandlevsky in translation is to visit a vision, amid war and exile, of a homeland made of words.

______________________________

“A Homeland Made of Words” by Philip Metres, from the introduction to Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Green Linden Press, 2023).

First Parable on Turbulence

I had a dream I got what I wanted: a baby, a silver necklace, and worldly success. That these gifts numbered three ensured this magic could be trusted. All I had to do in return for each was express gratitude. But each time, I failed that test. My voice clotted in my throat. The gifts turned like milk. The baby proved a weirdly heated rubber doll, the silver chain a hopeless tangle, and the performance of my play a mess of scenes that would not end.

I tripped from the dream into morning, struck with early April light. The clearest of lights. From there, I tried to relate my “nightmare” to my husband: a baby, a necklace, success. Amid such beneficence, what could explain my dread? It was the gratitude I could not pull from my throat like a golden thread.

The mandate for gratitude abounds in our current moment. Every throw pillow demands it, every coffee mug, every tee. For many, gratitude is a guiding star, allowing one to correctly orient past to future, to keep one’s preciously assembled raft moving forward toward some shore.

But not for me. I cannot coax it from my throat.

And so I remain at sea, in turbulence.

In Lovely Blue

The Blue Light, a newly translated memoir by the late Palestinian author Hussein Barghouthi, is both a thing of nervy beauty and a record of turbulence. Born in Ramallah, brought up between Palestine and Beirut, and educated in Europe and the US before returning to Palestine, the polymathic Barghouthi wrote in every genre, including poems, plays, songs, screenplays, and prose; to date, only two of his works may be read in translation. The Blue Light is brought from Arabic into English by Fady Joudah, the Palestinian American poet-doctor whose own poetry and translations of major Arabic-language authors have won wide recognition, including the Griffin Prize for international literature.

The Blue Light burns with a lyric immediacy and a wiry charge. Summarized plainly, the memoir relates a period Barghouthi spent as a graduate student of comparative literature in Seattle, during which time he thought he was going mad. After a youth spent in constant transit, “I was looking for an area with reasonable weather and some downtime to organize my chaos,” Barghouthi relates at the bottom of page one.

But, to evoke and invert the maxim from Casablanca, if you come to Seattle for the good weather, you’ve been misinformed. Just so, Barghouthi finds an inversion of his expectations during his sojourn in Seattle. His chaos will not become organized. Instead, he’s further inundated with turbulence. For nine months, he wanders in a dark wood around the university. Yet this nocturnal wood is thick with characters, from Bari the Turkish-military-brat-turned-Sufi to Don the can-collector-sage to Suzan, the hippie survivor who compulsively draws blue peacocks in white notebooks at the Blue Moon Tavern, the Grand Illusion Cinema, the Last Exit Café. He’s drawn to these joints by their names. Of the shady and the crazy, the dump and the dive, Barghouthi writes, “God surrounded me with the marginal world and all its gravitational pull….In this world of the margin, everyone transits.”

Not surprisingly for a figure who has spent his life in transit and who is surrounded by transients, Barghouthi comes to see place not as a key coordinate of reality but as a “ruse.” Amid a world of transience, what is real? For Barghouthi, the real is not secured in a place but pointed toward, via a suggestive aesthetic-cum-spiritual pattern he calls “the blue light.” A good comparatist, he derives his color theory from various sources—the Naqshbandi Sufi, Tibetan Buddhism, European art and literature, African American blues, the Quran, his own life. Such eclecticism is both a method and a sign that one is on the right path:

Blue is the color of the energy of creation within us. I remember how years ago I would shut my eyes and listen to Stravinsky, Beethoven, or Mozart. I used to imagine myself in a wadi in the mountains of my childhood. And the wadi was a bewildering dark blue, the rocks were dark blue and magical. Was that an awareness of suppressed creative energy or a longing for childhood? Or was it total estrangement?

This transit from the firm ground of declaration to an eddy of interrogatives is typical for The Blue Light, as it is for the blue light, confirming that the movement of both Barghouthi and his memoir is not just aesthetic but mystical, pushing outward from the self into the “bewildering dark blue” of “total estrangement.” The signature motion here is not (yet) toward unity but toward an ever-broadening question. It is not placatory but turbulent. “And maybe there is, also, blueness to my ill wishes,” he later confides.

Within a few pages, then, this book becomes less a memoir than a mystical inventory of color, a night-writing lit with blue. Of course, like a bower bird, Barghouthi keeps a catalog of blues: sky, sea, childhood-ice-cream-parlor awning, the pulsing vein in a proselytizer’s clenched jaw. This suggestive celestial hue receives its terrestrial counterpoint in green—“They buried my brother in Pistachio,” he relates in Joudah’s unnerving translation, referring to a cave with dirt of that color. When his mother claims “children don’t die, they become green birds in a paradise with flowing rivers,” the skeptical child-narrator decides to investigate:

On an empty, spacious and moonlit night, I went to Pistachio. I wanted to get my brother out of there. I imagined all of the children coming out in white shrouds—if they were even shrouded—and flowing in moonlight before they began to walk in gardens, in the shade of olive trees, in silence. Moon color is evidence of the wakeful power of the imagination that refashions the world….In Palestine, the color of memory is lunar. The moon is the only nightlight that clarifies to the peasants the features of objects.

In this luminous passage, the greenness of “Pistachio” is washed away by “moon color,” “lunar.” But what color is lunar? Do you know it when you see it? Is it ineffable? Is it of this world, the next, or somewhere in between? Perhaps “lunar” represents a color that has moved beyond anatomical human vision to an intensely mystical, and of course nocturnal, “nightlight.”

This passage is also suggestive of the political content and context that forms the grounds of this memoir, triangulating the mystical and the aesthetic with the specific historical fact of the militarized dispossession, displacement, and diaspora of Palestinians decade after decade on a relentless, turbulent tide. On first meeting his Sufi interlocutor Bari, Barghouthi notes, “his form was that of an ancient pastoral warrior: a well-knotted military boot ready for an emergency, a green winter US naval poncho, and a rough wild wooden stick with a bracelet tied to it, completely out of context.” Similarly, Barghouthi himself, wandering in the woods of Seattle, thinks of himself as

a secretive guard of myself on constant military alert. The near-endless rain, the tedious greenery was more a verdant hell than a fertile beauty, my skin that was used to sun and dryness became estranged. When early Arabs introduced the first palm tree to Europe, they called it “the stranger.” I was a stranger palm tree.

The militarized and the pastoral meet in these displaced youths’ experience of nature, which, though emblematized in both cases by the color green, is not set off from human affairs but inflected with human tones, history, violence, and vigilance. To exist this way is to be “completely out of context,” like the palm tree, “the stranger.” It is no wonder that Barghouthi elsewhere describes the birds of Palestine as “hysterical”: “They evade any sign that points to a bond between them and humans,” he asserts, their avian hysteria ironically belying their contiguity with human turbulence.

If to be “completely out of context” and “estranged” is the intolerable condition of those in diaspora; it is also the aspiration of the Sufi mystic—and of the visionary poet, as famously formulated by Rimbaud. When Joudah renders Barghouthi’s phrase as “total estrangement,” he creates for the Anglophone ear an unmissable rhyme with Rimbaud’s call for “dérèglement de tous les sens,” typically translated as “total derangement of the senses.” This allusion in turn conjures the great Syrian poet Adonis’s lecture “Rimbaud, Orientalist, Sufi.” For Adonis, Rimbaud may be read as Sufi because “when we abolish the action of the senses, we abolish what separates us from the profound essence of things.”

Joudah’s doubly allusive translation sheds (blue) light on the text’s formal doubling of derangement and estrangement, confirming that turbulence is something that the poet-mystic must move through—not just for aesthetic but for spiritual reasons. The largest figure of such turbulent blueness is of course the sea. The sea itself is not free from politics—Barghouthi reports not being able to visit the sea from his mountain home in Ramallah due to blockades of the sea routes. He recounts stealing past guards for his first encounter with the sea and later, in Beirut, stealing with his mother down to the military club pool after nightfall to wash his baby sister’s hair in the sea. On this nocturnal outing, “I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt at the same time as a wave submerged me to my waist.” Though this anecdote literally relates how his mother saved him from drowning, by repetition it becomes inverted. He feels the sea is chasing him, a spot in time recollected not in tranquility but in turbulence: “In a chase there is movement, energy, vigor, anger, freedom, drama, flare, madness.”

As the book rises toward its climax, this ultramarine tide begins to deliver Barghouthi to the first inklings of a new spiritual state—an intermediary level he identifies as barzakh:

In the Quran, a barzakh partitions two seas that God has destined never to meet. I felt as if ecstasy is fresh water in the heart….And there’s another sea, salty with fear, pain, regret, sorrow, revenge, jealously and other negative feeling. A barzakh sits between the positive and negative seas that meet only when the world becomes brackish, unclear, as when a waterfall delivers itself to a salty sea that dominates it. I call this mixing of the two waters in the heart: overflow.

This spiritual development entails a move away—or, at least, an intent to move away—from personal turbulence. But barzakh itself is not just one thing—it is mysterious, multiple, midway between the sensual world of humans and the purely abstract world of God. Adonis has described barzakh as the zone of the imagination, of the poet, “in which things are transformed, i.e., the site of images and revelations.” In this elevated-though-not-ultimate middle zone, the poet creates images that point mortals toward God. At the book’s close, it is the into the double sea of barzakh that the young man commits himself.

Second Parable on Turbulence

As our four-year-old son transforms from toddler to child, the weapons he raises against me go from intuitive, the chubby fist, to cultural, a cheap plastic flute reimagined as a gun. He stares down its invisible sights at me. When he’s in these moods, we take everything away from him and set him riding for the park.

This time, as he arrives, a peregrine falcon flies over, just a few feet above his head. It is one of a pair currently nesting on the broadcast tower of our beleaguered local news station, and it bears in its talons something dark, wet, impossibly long and thick for its wingspan. At first I think it is the leg of a dead thing, a deer, a foal, some kind of omen, but then I realize it is just a branch. As falcon and child ride away from each other, the epic force is not lost on my son.

“I am like that phoenix!” he exults as he rides away.

Phantom Pain Wings

Viewed from our current moment, that is, from its height, the career of Kim Hyesoon as a poet of global renown looks like a classic American-style success story: the supremely talented individual, the frictionless rise-and-rise. But that’s not her story. Kim Hyesoon released her first poetry collection into an intensely sexist literary culture and amid a notoriously turbulent year for Korean democracy: 1979. That year saw the assassination of the authoritarian leader Park Chung Hee, followed by a military coup by General Chun Doo-hwan and a curtailment of democracy that would last into the 1990s. A student protest movement in 1980 culminated in the May 18 massacre in Gwangju—opening an irreparable wound that continues to orient and destabilize Korean politics to this day.

Kim’s translator Don Mee Choi is herself a poet, visual artist, and winner of many major prizes, including a National Book Award for poetry and the MacArthur “genius” award. Choi, whose father worked as a war photographer and who left Korea as a child, has related the following two parables about the inception of Kim’s career. As a young woman, it was Kim Hyesoon’s job to bring manuscripts to the military censors for review. On one occasion, Kim was slapped by the police for refusing to reveal the name of a feminist literary translator. On another, the censor returned to her a manuscript completely blacked out except for the title and the playwright’s name. As Choi has proposed, “it is from this blackened zone that, I believe, Kim Hyesoon’s poetry emerges.”

The Gwangju massacre was itself psychically recapitulated in 2014 by the Sewol ferry disaster, in which 250 high school students and sixty others drowned. In its wake, Kim Hyesoon’s devastating book-length elegy, Autobiography of Death, was published. Translated into English by Choi (the eighth volume on which they collaborated), the work won them the 2018 Griffin Prize, the world’s most lucrative and visible prize for poetry. I am certain Kim would never wish to be thought of as a national poet, yet one could argue that in Autobiography of Death she has written a national epic—not of patriarchal milestones—battles, conquests, warriors, kings—but from the site of nation’s deepest wound, the wound at its midsection, the obliteration of its own children, which stops and deranges time.

But if one could construe Autobiography of Death as a sublime anti-epic, Kim’s newest work, Phantom Pain Wings, blows the dome of that thought to pieces. Pain Wings follows Autobiography the way Yeats’s shattered, shattering poem “Byzantium” follows his elegiac “Sailing to Byzantium,” which opens with its famous backward glance: “That is no country for old men.” In “Byzantium,” the emperor’s palace collapses, yet, through this ecstatic destruction, its marble floors are at last translated to that which their swirls could only evoke: “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”

Just so, in Phantom Pain Wings, both poet and poem are shattered as the dead and birds ventriloquize each other through the medium of the poet herself. As its very first lines acknowledge, “This book is not really a book / It’s an I-do-bird sequence.” Of course, as in all of Kim and Choi’s double oeuvre, this is a work of extreme virtuosity, or maybe even virtuosity-in-extremis—if virtuosity is the ability to endure such turbulent transmissions. “I-do-bird” distends the surface of both Kim’s poems and Choi’s translations. Like the Magnificat, Mary’s exultant time-place-and-status-deranging anthem whispered into the ear of her pregnant cousin, “I-do-bird” indicates directions of flight that are both sublime and bodily, physically inside and at the same time spatially or spiritually beyond:

Woman-is-dying-but-bird-is-getting-bigger-sequence

She says, The pain is killing me

When my hands are tied and my skirt rips like wings

I can finally fly

I was always able to fly like this

Suddenly she lifts her feet

Translation-of-a-certain-bird’s-chirping record

of I-do-bird-below-the-railing

sequence

In Kim Hyesoon’s cosmology, long articulated through essays such as “Hearing” and “Princess Abandoned,” pain is the signature of the feminine poet’s shamanic transit—not just to but through the subterranean zone of the dispossessed and the dead. Pain is a feminine experience, exacted by the mystical phenomenon of hearing by which the voices of the dead enter and leave the body of the poet. In Phantom Pain Wings, more than any other volume to date, this mystical pain is insistently physical, rendered an ecstatic orthography:

Therefore, I draw a line across my notebook

sscribbling

away

Bird never sspeaks to anyone first

Of course I’m the ssame way

My face will grow feathers

I’ll fly away

For the Anglophone reader, the double s’s in Choi’s rendering create a hypnotic, ensnaring effect: the reader feels her own bird feet looped in the sonic spell of I-do-bird. But Choi’s note at the end of the book tells us more: the hangul consonants equivalent to the double-s sound, ㅆ, visually resemble bird feet—“they are the birds’ webbed feet, poet and bird swaddled as one.” These paired consonants reappear later in the book in the poem “A Blizzard Warning,” and this time Choi chooses to leave them in the English translation for their concrete effect. This time the bird explodes from the textuality of a letter into the poet’s world, rendering the poet herself a white page, the better to bear its birdy footprints:

The flock of birds from your letter mashes my trees, my dense forest

Birds pluck off and eat all my early-sprouted sore nipples

I’ve become the whitest ruined field…

All the ~ㅆ word endings that have left before me are falling

They fall down like trousers, holding hands, in pairs, running through

the blizzard ㅆㅆ ㅆㅆ ㅆㅆ

Part ~ed

Di ~ed

Forgotte ~ed

The presence of Korean as the bird language poking through the English translation is more than just an audacious feat of artistry and translation on the part of Kim and Choi. By calling attention to the written-ness—the punctuation, orthography, and hangul consonants and vowels in which the poems are recorded—the bird language calls attention to Phantom Pain Wings as a specifically written vision, a convulsing interface between the mundane and superhuman worlds that splits to reveal more of itself—a ripped seam marked by pain. Birdsong here does not serve, as it does in most Western canonical poetry, to represent naturalized “language,” toward which, in our fallen state, we humans can only aspire. Instead, Kim’s birds, like the dead, will thrust themselves through our human instruments, through any hole, and regardless of the cost.

Bird Riders of the Barzakh

In her alert, alarming afterword to Phantom Pain Wings, Kim expresses almost physical revulsion to the popular expectation that poetry be a medium of empathy or source of consolation:

Startled, I get frightened. And, conversely, I become even more frightened when I’m asked who my poetry comforts. Therefore, when someone even utters the word comfort, I want to run and hide. I don’t think I’ve ever comforted anyone with my writing. Moreover, I think literature betrays the readers’ desire to be consoled. Perhaps literature crosses into a zone where consolation can’t intervene, evaporating any possibility of comfort.

After that typically effacing “perhaps,” Kim shows the full scale and difficult magnanimity of her vision. Poetry can’t be the medium of podcasty keywords like empathy and consolation because it is already engaged in vast, exacting acts of mediumship, opening cosmic zones through the painful aperture of the poet’s self. To illustrate this model, Kim mobilizes an image taken from Korean folk culture— Bird Rider, an infant ghost who chirps, who must be ventriloquized and translated by multiple shamans, who can throw her voice into animate and inanimate objects, who “can fly like a bird to the past and look down at the scene of the crime,” and who “speaks in the untranslatable fragmented language of the wounded.”

Bird Rider rides on turbulence; Bird Rider moves among orders, species, and states of matter; Bird Rider has an obligation to both the living and the dead that’s larger than consolation for either. In her mediumship, Bird Rider occupies an in-between zone that recalls the image of barzakh that occupies Barghouthi—a poet’s zone of making and variousness, a throng of images that point to a singular Ultimateness. Barghouthi and Kim both end their texts by envisioning their personal transformation into birds—not the wistful, subjunctive escape into nightingale form as ideated by Keats, for example, but a disfiguring process predicated on isolation and pain. Barghouthi declares—

I will pile mask after mask on my face. Under all of those masks I will ascend naked to the blue light, naked and alone. And from a distance I will know in my heart for sure that other birds are headed to the same ascension, birds that I will greet from afar as I kill every sorrow inside me that breaks my soul and complains of the journey’s loneliness, and I will dance. Give me, please. What? Another mask, a sixth mask.

Here the convivial Barghouthi, whose text has been flocked with comrades, flies alone and pecks his own breast, while Kim’s description unexpectedly picks up some of Barghouthi’s more habitual ecstasy. She writes,

It’s the movement of my body, sending the ghost of extremity to its original place, to its inherent existential place, to my whole body. Jumping up and down, the ecstasy of rhythm and the dance combining to my aid. As if wings are sprouting from my limbs. As if disobeying my existence. As if arriving at the ocean.

The ocean beyond the existence of self, where both these birds must ride—barzakh, perhaps.

Conclusive Parable on Turbulence, with Lines by KH (Italics Mine)

“I am like that phoenix!” my son exults as he rides away. His words are carried back to me on the wind of his own going.

But there is no phoenix. There is just the word phoenix. Yet it rises, and it stays with me like a speck in the edge of my vision for days, so that I turn my face, so that now in my mind’s eye it rises up above the boy with his burden, the bird on its bike, indicating an invisible wind that rips like a seam between bird and boy and spills out a garrot of arterial time, so that I feel it on my face, a suprahuman coordinate, that must be borne, distended, convulsive, abdomen, April, the belly of a day, and me all at the bottom of that spasming ocean of wind and soaring, light and time. Phoenix, is what, is what is, is what is going to rise and maybe (re)birth itself as its own likeness in a spasm of pain, an arterial garrot of simile, dolphin-torn, gong-tormented, like is the ligature, which breaks, lets in the sea, to shake, the sea of faith, so turbulent, that region, that relation that relentlessly regathers to break, again, to break with me in it, to break with me in its gut, I cannot thank it, for I am like it, in its riding, as it breaks and breaks. If I am like it, how do I thank it? If I can’t thank it, how can I pray?

Hit me

Hit me

The bird has already flown away

What you have hit is

just a void wearing an outfit

It’s bright inside my outfit!

__________________________________

“On Turbulence” by Joyelle McSweeney appears in the latest issue of Image Journal.