An interview with Ersi Sotiropoulos & Karen Emmerich
Greek News Online offers an interview with Ersi Sotiropoulos and Karen Emmerich on the stories in Landscape with Dog (conducted while Ersi was a guest at the sixth International Poetry Festival in Granada, Nicaragua).
Greek News: What do you think is most significant about [the stories] as works of art? What is significant about Ersi as a Greek writer/international writer?
Karen Emmerich: It’s hard for me to think about Ersi’s work in those terms; I just think of her as a writer. She cares so deeply about language –and not just the Greek language. Yes, she can spend months writing and rewriting the same paragraph in Greek until it’s just right, just how she wants it. But she also cares just as deeply about her works as they move into other languages, of which she happens to speak many.
For me it sometimes seems like this impulse to think of writers as representatives of their language or literary tradition — Ersi as a literary ambassador of Greece, in a way — confines them to too small and constricting a box. For sure, Ersi’s writing is often wrapped up in the lived reality of Greece. But she also reads widely in many languages, travels widely, and is part of literary conversations that are happening across languages as well.
Tags: Ersi Sotiropoulos, interviews, Karen Emmerich, Landscape with Dog
