2 and 2

A Conversation with Alex Epstein from Words without Borders on Vimeo.

As a continuation of yesterday’s post: today an interview with Alex Epstein, author of Blue Has No South, conducted by A’Dora Phillips.

A’DORA: Is Hebrew your mother tongue?

ALEX: I was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel with my family when I was eight, without knowing a word in Hebrew. So, I don’t really have a mother tongue—in order to write in Hebrew I had during the years, in a way, to forget my Russian.  I guess that Hebrew “adopted” me—I write in Hebrew, I “live” in Hebrew, I dream in Hebrew, but since it’s not my first language, it’s more an adoptive tongue than a mother tongue.

Your stories are wonderfully complex—in their wide range of reference, their tone, their blend of genres and mix of registers.  I imagine that for both you as writer and Becka as translator this must have raised even more concern than usual about what might be lost in translation?

This is exactly why I am so grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Becka: she always tried to find the best solution possible to keep the “lost in translation” effect to a minimum. She is a poet, and consequently has a sharp eye for the single word, for the meaning of a single word in a very short prose piece.

It was important to me and to Becka to try to maintain the same poetics that my stories have in Hebrew: for example, the relationship between the story and the margins surrounding it, the white page.

Can you say a little about your involvement in the translation process?

I read all the translations, and provided some comments during the process. But the most important thing to say here is that eventually I was just a reader, and writers are not the best readers of their work, of course: the final decision is always made by the translator. On a few occasions Becka asked me to make alterations to the original, so that the story would work in English in the same way it does in Hebrew.

Becka mentioned that the English version of Blue Has No South is not an exact representation of the original.  Why did you make the decision not to include some stories and to add others?

We decided to make the book a better representation of my short work, and so a few of the longer stories were left out and replaced by newer short-short ones. But even with these changes, more than one hundred stories appear in both the Hebrew and English versions of the text, so ultimately they are very much alike.

Beyond the changes you made to the collection, how does the English translation of Blue Has No South “feel” to you?  Some writers, for instance, say they have no relationship to their work when it appears in another language and others say that it gives them a fresh perspective on their writing.  Any thoughts about this?

I do feel that it’s definitely my book, and part of what makes it feel that way is the process, seeing one version of the translation of a single story, and then seeing a new version, and yet again: that is exactly how I write, draft after draft after draft, so the shortest story can take months to write (and now, to translate).

Do you live full-time in Israel?  And, big question—one that ultimately may not be answerable—how would you characterize the current climate of Hebrew-language literature?

I do live in Israel, in Tel Aviv. Israeli contemporary literature is very hard to characterize—one thing that’s obvious, though, is that we have a lot of exciting voices, in different styles, exploring different themes. As everywhere, in the last years we have seen a shift from the short form towards the novel. But it seems that I am going in the opposite direction.

Today and tomorrow we’ll be posting intern A’Dora Phillips’ interviews with Becka Mara McKay and Alex Epstein on Blue Has No South. Read on!—Hilary

Thirty-eight year old Alex Epstein is a well-known writer in Israel. He began publishing his work when in his early twenties and now has three novels and several short-story collections to his name. He was invited to participate in PEN’s 2010 World Voices Festival, attended the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2007, and presently Schusterman Visiting-Artist-in-Residence at the University of Denver. But despite his reputation, only now, with the publication of Blue Has No South, is his work available to English-language readers.

Epstein’s stories in Blue Has No South are short—some as brief as a single line or a paragraph, none more than a handful of pages. But beyond their brevity, it is hard to tidily sum up or summarily to characterize his work, which is both funny and poignant; which draws its references from classical mythology, history, religion, even science fiction; which is sometimes realistic and sometimes more fantastical or allegorical. The potent compression of the pieces make one think of poetry, but in an interview, Epstein maintains that his are stories, fictions, not poems or essays: “I call it fiction because when I write I am always concerned with the combination of narrative, characters and idea… I always try to relate not only to the story I am telling but also to the story that is not written, that exists only on the margins surrounding the page.”

Interview with translator Becka McKay

A’DORA: How did you come across Alex Epstein’s work?

BECKA: I met Alex through his participation the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program—I was in my last semester of coursework for my PhD in comparative literature at Iowa.

Why were you drawn to translate Blue Has No South?

Alex’s voice is a unique mixture of playful and poignant—his stories make the reader think, offering no easy answers. Upon reading a few of the stories in original Hebrew of Blue Has No South I really wanted to know what they would sound like in English. And practically speaking, I was beginning to write my dissertation at the time and I was drawn to the fact that the stories were so short that I could find a way to balance my progress on both projects.

Do you translate solely from Hebrew into English?

I do.

What are the qualities of Hebrew and English, respectively, that presented challenges to you, particularly as regards this work?

Alex’s work presents a challenging mix of registers—a single story can range from an everyday Hebrew to a high, almost Biblical language. Hebrew also expands by about 30 percent when it moves into English—by, for example, using contractions—and it was very important to me to try to preserve the compactness of the language as much as possible—succinctness is clearly an important element of many of these stories. In general I also tried to be true to a “sentence count” rather than (as is often tempting) cutting a very long and tangled sentence in two.

Did you find that you had to privilege one or two qualities of Alex’s work over others as you worked? If so, what did you feel was most important to preserve?

I wanted to preserve Alex’s voice above all else, but that is probably not a satisfactory answer to the question, since his “voice” is composed of different qualities depending on the story. In some stories it could be that the register-mixing makes it a uniquely “Alex Epstein” story, while in another it could be the subject matter, the length, the plot…

What makes Hebrew so much more compact than English?

In part it’s because Hebrew uses prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. For example, the words “the” and “and” are never standalone words—they are always a single letter prefixed to a word. Personal pronouns, such as “you” and “I” are often merely a letter or two attached to the end of a word. The following five-word phrase in English, “everything is because of you,” can be rendered in only two words in Hebrew.

How about the challenges presented by more ephemeral issues involved in the act of translation? For instance, Epstein’s work is steeped in (among other things) Eastern European and Jewish issues of heritage and culture. Are some of the references in his work more generally familiar to the Israeli reader than the American reader?

This, of course, is the key issue: how to translate those things beyond language—cultural references, literary allusions, etc. I find that in Alex’s work, a sense of displacement or unfamiliarity is already part of the original, meaning that the extra-textual references often seem to come (in a good way) out of nowhere, and this seems to work to my advantage in translation. I also feel that when something is very, very well written, no matter how “local” it may seem in the original, it manages to transcend that aspect of itself in translation. I think Alex’s work falls into that category.

I was struck by the punctuation in Blue Has No South. In a number of stories, we see an abundance of punctuation not frequently used in English.  Is punctuation generally used more abundantly and expressively in Hebrew? Or do Alex’s punctuation choices stand out as being uniquely his?

I think that Alex uses punctuation uniquely, and I don’t think of this as Hebrew/English issue as much as an Alex issue.

Can you say a little about your working process during the course of your translation?

Alex and I work pretty closely—he reads my drafts and comments on them and answers my questions. I feel very lucky in that he trusts my judgment and my ear—we’ve never had an argument or a disagreement about a translation that I can remember.

There is obviously a fairly wide variation in the length of the pieces, and I’m wondering if it was harder to translate the shorter pieces than the longer ones, or vice versa?

The English version of Blue Has No South is not an exact representation of the original—Alex chose not to include some stories from the original that he no longer likes or that he felt wouldn’t work in English, and he also included some new stories.

Are there any translators or thoughts about translation that are especially relevant to you as you work—in general as a translator as well as more particularly on Alex’s piece?

I really wish I had some kind of brilliant answer for this question. But in the end I have to take on every story as its own set of problems and challenges, and hope that I can render something that works in English while still being a kind of lens through which the reader can glimpse the original.

I know that you yourself are an author. Can you say a little about how being a writer and being a translator intersect?

As a poet, I find that being able to set aside my own work and use the same tools—for example, making choices, ransacking my own vocabulary, listening for the music in the language—in service of someone else’s work to be a kind of wonderful escape. I also think that being a translator has taught me to be a better reader in general, and that includes being a better reader of my own work.

First, for those of you who are local: on Sunday, May 2, at 7 pm, Alex Epstein and Becka McKay will read from Blue Has No South at one of the Valley’s great independent bookstores, Schoen Books.  Afterward we’ll have a Q and A about translation, the short-short story in world literature, and whatever comes up. Please join us!

Alex has been at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York all this week. See him Friday at the “Short Stories: Past, Present, and Future” panel with Preston L. Allen, Aleksander Hemon, Yiyun Li, and Martin Solares, moderated by Deborah Treisman.

What virtues and challenges are unique to the short story? How flexible is the form? And why is it that, even now—after Poe, Chekhov, Hemingway, O’Connor, Nabokov, and Munro—the short story often gets less respect, in terms of prizes and critical esteem, than the novel? Join acclaimed practitioners of the form from Bosnia, Israel, China, Mexico, and the United States, for a conversation with The New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, about the past, present, and future of the short story.

On Friday evening, he’ll be part of the festival’s famous translation slam, which I wish we could make it to…

For those of you in Boston: on Saturday, May 1, Alex and Becka will read as part of the Bay State Underground’s reading series, at 236 Bay State Road (the basement of the AGNI offices) at 6 pm.

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On Monday, Alex participated in Guernica magazine’s panel “The Diversity Test: Gender and Literature in Translation,” with Lorraine Adams, Esther Allen, and Norman Rush, moderated by Claire Messud.  Watch the panel online here. Many thanks to Guernica for hosting this event and making it available on the web.

You can also find a new interview with Alex, “Almost Blue: Israel’s New Borges,” and excerpt from Blue Has No South up at Forward.  And another interview here at the Jewish Week.

PEN also has an interview with Alex up here—

Alta Ifland: You were eight years old when you came to Israel from Russia, so I would like to ask you a question about the relationship between mother tongue and writing.  Paul Celan and Czeslaw Milosz… have said that a true poet can only write in his/her mother tongue.  What do you think of this?  What language do you consider to be your mother-tongue?  (Some writers, like George Steiner, claim that they don’t have a (single) mother-tongue).

Alex Epstein: I don’t have a mother tongue—in order to write in Hebrew I had, in a way, to forget my Russian.  It was one of the triggers that made an author out of me…   I guess that Hebrew “adopted” me—I write in Hebrew, I “live” in Hebrew, I dream in Hebrew, but since it’s not my first language, it’s more an “adoptive” tongue than a mother tongue.

Then there’s “Ten Approximations” from Blue Has No South up online, from PEN America 12: Correspondences.

A rich array of offerings—Alex and Becka are proving hard to keep up with! Western Massachusetts dwellers, we hope to see you Sunday.

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.

Translation is an act of collaboration. The final result is not just the hard labor of a cloistered translator, surrounded by brick wall and one small window that barely lets in light.  What goes on between writer and translator is a tricky relationship that involves a balancing of words, as well as interpretations and re-imaginings of those very same words.  And when the writer’s dead, that relationship gets even trickier.

Clockroot has been lucky enough to have Karen Emmerich translate the late Margarite Karapanou’s book Rien ne va plus. This book is complicated, the kind of novel that teaches the brain how to read it.  Intellectually thrilling, emotionally tumultuous, trying to imagine it in another language seems somewhat unreal.

Could you talk about your relationship to Karapanou’s work?

KE: I started reading Karapanou when I was in college, as a freshman or sophomore, with very bad Greek. Someone had recommended her to me because her language is fairly simple, and she tends to write in short sections—so for the beginning reader of Greek, her work is a good place to start. You can take a section a day, puzzle it out with a dictionary, and feel like you’ve achieved something by the end. So in a sense, Karapanou was really one of the people who taught me Greek.  I started with Rien ne va plus, and it just entranced me. I read everything of hers that we had in the library at Princeton, but it was always Rien that I kept returning to. Almost fifteen years later, I still find it fascinating, but I think there’s something about the book that can be incredibly powerful for a young person—and particularly a young woman—still trying to figure out this whole business of human relationships, and where the mental and emotional coincides with the real. At some point I decided to start translating the novel. I was helped along the way by Dimitri Gondicas, who heads the Hellenic Studies Program at Princeton. He’s one of the busiest people I know, but was enormously generous with his time. We would meet and sit down and read through the novel line by line, and he would point out any mistakes or misunderstandings. When I look back on it now, it’s just incredible, that he would have done that for me, and for her.

But I think Karapanou is the kind of writer who inspires generosity in others; people felt things for her even when they had never met her. I certainly did.

Many years have passed since then, and the translation went through too many drafts to count before it was published. When I started reworking it for publication a few years ago, everything had to be rethought anew—I had changed so much, as had my thinking about translation. So I guess in a way, this was also a book that taught me to translate. I later embarked on an earlier novel by Karapanou, as well, The Sleepwalker, which you’ll be publishing next year—and while I love that one, too, my relationship to Rien still feels special.

The back of the novel features that wonderful quote by the author: “Every time I want to write, I want to write love stories. But as soon as I pick up the pen I’m overcome by horror.”  This sentiment provides a sort of tonal infrastructure to this book.  As a translator, how did this tone affect– or complicate– your rendering of the novel?

KE: I guess I would say that there’s this kind of brutal emotional honesty to the book. There are all kinds of things that many readers might see as clichéd language, or clichéd scenes. There are parts of the book that are, for that reason, sort of embarrassing to read. The prose feels so exposed—and my impulse as someone responsible for bringing that prose over into English is to swaddle it a bit, give it some protection. Of course it’s an impulse I fought, especially after Karapanou’s death. The novel has come to seem to me a kind of document of her, as well.

I was recently at a talk given by Foteini Tsalicoglou, a close friend of Karapanou’s who edited a volume of letters to Karapanou from her mother, the writer Margarita Lyberaki. Tsalicoglou said something during that talk about Karapanou’s ability to make clichés come alive. She told a little anecdote about doing a reading with Karapanou for the book Perhaps, which the two of them co-authored, and at one point Karapanou turned to the audience and told them all, “I love you.” Just like that, simply, not in any affected way, with a kind of childlike sincerity that felt real, and was real, and moved everyone but maybe made them sort of uncomfortable at the same time.

For me, that’s the real essence of this book: the way it discomfits you, the way it makes you feel things you might not always want to feel. The reality of the emotions, even if the story itself is always put under erasure.

“Part Two” of the novel acts as a sort of interlude. It almost seems to define the concept of “rien ne va plus,” as this abstract space where anything can happen. Could you talk about how you came to see this section in relation to the rest of the novel?

KE: I think anyone else’s guess as to that second section is as good as mine—I’ve always found it puzzling. It’s definitely a meditation on creation, particularly literary creation, on the relationship of truth to fiction, perhaps on the inevitable fictionalization of all fact, on how any relation of an event is always going to involve some amount of interpretation.

Finally, could you say something on the duality of Rien Ne Va Plus?  Obviously a novel where the narrator tells two versions of the same dissolution gives the reader plenty to think and talk about. As immersed as you are in the material, though, what insight can you give us on the shape and structure of this piece?

KE: I’m not sure how much insight I can give—I may actually be too immersed in the material to see exactly what’s going on. The narrator gives two versions of what is ostensibly the same story: her relationship and marriage to a man named Alkiviades (a name that might have looked more familiar had I chosen to translate it as Alcibiades). In the first, much shorter version, Alki is something of a monster, and treats her pretty despicably. In the second version, she’s the one who treats him badly, running off to live with another man in the U.S. right after he proposes, things like that. At the end of the book—and I apologize if I seem to be ruining the ending, here, but I really don’t think I am—we’re told by the narrator that the first version was just a novel she wrote, her fictionalization of their life in which the roles were reversed, and life thus transmuted into art.

On the surface, that seems like a fine way of explaining the doubling in the book. But it’s just too easy, and there are too many holes. First of all, the “novel” of the first part is really only thirty or so pages long. Does that really count as a novel? And if we’re supposed to take the second version as the “truth,” what are we supposed to do with passages like the one describing the narrator’s stay in Connecticut, when a huge rainstorm creates an epic flood in which neighboring houses are washed from their foundations and go floating by like ships at sail? In other words, the retelling is full of things that are explicitly marked as fictional. The first version never departs from anything that could actually have happened, while the second version is far more fanciful. It also draws on all kinds of stereotypes, too. There’s one scene where the narrator spends days on end watching movies in bed—romances, thrillers, porn. Well, her narration also incorporates set scenes that seem at times to be lifted from those kinds of genre films: the visit to the psychiatrist’s office, the thriller-like dreams involving her aborted baby. Nothing in that second version of the story can really be trusted. And of course at the end of the novel we slip into a third-person narration of events; the narrator actually disappears into the text itself.

I guess what I’m getting at is, the book is far more complicated than it might seem on a first read. The line between fiction and reality is constantly being blurred, even within the world of the text itself.

—Miranda

As a follow-up to my earlier post, the Center for the Art of Translation’s interview with Karen Emmerich about translating Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is now up, check it (and the great blog) out. A favorite passage:

[Karen Emmerich:] … In these stories specifically, plot often seems incidental, secondary to language and to image. It isn’t poetic language, in the usual understanding of that phrase. It’s often very flat, very bare-bones. And the stories sometimes seem like a series of still-lives, freeze frames that show a life or a relationship—from the most involved to the most tenuous—captured at a particular moment, in a particular (sometimes disturbing or estranging, but often tender and fragile) configuration.

SE: … What kind of challenges does this pose to you as the translator? In prose that has been this carefully worked, do you feel like you can adequately bring across things like rhythm and sound?

KE: It’s enormously challenging as a translator—you don’t feel the kind of freedom you sometimes do, with fiction writers for whom plot drives a piece. You have an added sense of responsibility. Not necessarily to rhythm and sound, in this case, but to phrasing. If every word belongs where it is, what do you do when all the words go away and you have to find new ones to take their place?

Among the many riches in Issue 16 of the Quarterly Conversation is a wonderful interview with Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou, whose I’d Like came out this fall from Dalkey Archive, in translation by Karen Emmerich. (I’ve not yet read I’d Like, unfortunately, but it’s so high on my list, and this interview makes me even more anxious to start—)

The interview, conducted by George Fragopoulos (GF, below) and attended also by Karen (KE), reflects on non-linearity in fiction; on the necessity of leaving one’s “home” to write (a feeling that is foreign to me, and fascinating, and which I’ve heard our own Ersi Sotiropoulos reflect on as well: “I have to leave Greece to be there,” she once said at a reading); on emotional vs. intellectual approaches to projects; and much else (I love the line “Sometimes the book asks for certain things that you have to offer”).  I wanted to note in particular Michalopoulou’s discussion of the influence of Margarita Karapanou:

GF: But I’d Like also has a grotesque or violent side to it, and they made a lot more sense to me when you mentioned Karapanou in that interview with Monica, and how she was a precursor for you. Can you speak a little about Karapanou’s influence on your work, especially because a lot of English readers know very little about her?

KE: But they will! Kassandra and the Wolf is being republished, along with two earlier novels in fall 2009 and spring 2010.

AM: Well, what can I say about Karapanou? She’s a major influence although I know I can’t write like her. And this is the best influence because I knew I could never imitate her. It was so intense and so real, and never imitating anything else. Her work was so original. And it was such an original voice and reading her diaries, which just came out, and reading her entries from thirteen years old, you could already see her voice. You could listen to this voice and see it was already there. What I admire in her is her originality. But of course, it was a very sad life story, and when I say to myself that you are not as original as some other writers you admire it all goes along with a whole other private history. But I feel that nobody has talked about childhood the way she did, really, in Kassandra. If she wasn’t Greek, but was American or German, I feel everybody would know her. Everybody could recognize themselves in her writings about childhood. And she was not at all your typical Greek author; she read widely in American and French literature and was always an outsider in a sense.

KE: And if you think of many Greek writers, it is incredibly common to be moving between languages, to be moving between places, so she is typically Greek in the sense that she is coming form the “outside” or writing as she does in The Sleepwalker. She is writing about the island of Hydra in The Sleepwalker, magnified a thousand-fold and turned into this surreal, weird place by combining foreign and Greek elements and composing characters who are shadow puppets in a way. And this is what stuck me about I’d Like. Not in terms of style or structure but in terms of characters it is your most Greek book in that it takes place only in Greek and there is nobody in it that is not Greek.

And then, just to point out again the fact of the riches of other literatures we must trust others to discover, to bring back for us, our debt always to translators for everything: a discussion of one of Michalopoulou’s characters reading Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (and Stephen Mitchell’s translations of Rilke into English)—

—Hilary