In a field of snow, it’s a legitimate option to see the tracks made by the myth but never the myth itself. There’s nothing there.
No mysterious creature to ravage the livestock, assign paw prints to the barn doors, or claw marks to the black walnut trees.
The ghost that sings of lost love from across the lake? That sound can be explained by barometric pressure, the north wind, numbers on spreadsheets that bear no resemblance to the voices of the drowned.
There’s no mandate that requires you to inquire about the fate of [redacted] or the nature of [deleted].
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-16 17:49:002022-02-16 17:49:00“My Favorite Tin Foil Hat,” by Matthew Olzmann
Julie Swarstad Johnson: In your prefatory note to Gone to Earth, you describe the experience of writing a poem as “what the ancients called the muse, what Wanda Coleman called ‘zoning,’ a term [that] signals the opening to another zone or state of being.” Once the poem is finished, the poet becomes one of its readers and encounters it in a new way. As you came back to these early poems, fifty years on, did you become a reader of these poems in a different sense, given the greater separation across time? Had you returned to these poems in any significant way prior to this time?
Eleanor Wilner: At the time I wrote these, I think I read them with amazement at the work of imagination, and as guides, sometimes admonitions—a way forward through troubled times. And yes, altered by all these years, I read them now with different eyes, disinterested really, as if I were (and perhaps am) a different person, no longer with a personal stake in them. Yet, like old friends I hadn’t seen in years, I felt glad to see them; they had served me well.
To your second question: no, I had not returned to reread these poems in all the years since I wrote them. Perhaps because they did the work they were meant to, and so could be left behind.
A few of them, however, seemed fundamental to the work of poetic imagination and had remained in memory, not word-for-word but in their imagistic action. But when I unearthed them for this book, I discovered that those I remembered as illuminating and key to the process that followed, memory had simplified, made more emblematic—removing some of the ambiguities, the cross currents and complexity. In short, time and distance tended to exaggerate the positive, life-serving side of what transpired in the poems, which, in the long run, turned out to be true to their effect. And why shouldn’t hindsight create its own version of what mattered most?
Angela Hirons: You mentioned in an email that you see the translation process as a ‘collaborative’ one. Can you talk a little bit more about this? Is that a collaboration between yourself and the author, or more widely between yourself, the author, the editor and copy editor?
Abigail Wender: I think the collaboration is first with the text itself. What is its context and history? and more specifically what are the patterns and threads in the text? The Bureau of Past Management has so many intentional repetitions of words and syntactical chunks (as usual, forever and ever, in the past, essentially, and so on) – initially I just tried to notice these and understand what the patterns were.
I was lucky enough to work with Iris Hanika on the translation’s early drafts, which was a collaboration of another kind. The difficult, satiric chapter titled ‘Past Management’ would have been extremely hard for me to translate without our conversations about what the book meant to her and why she’d written it. The emotional engine of that chapter is fury; I’m not sure I understood that. Iris and I had so many conversations about the differences between German and English words, the nuances and references; it was helpful, of course, and also deeply fascinating to discuss the work with her.
The final manuscript was also a collaboration with the editor (Katy Derbyshire) and copy editor (yourself). I’ve worked as an editor and a copy editor and am grateful for the chance to have those discussions and corrections. It’s very easy to get something in mind and not see where you’ve made a mistake as a translator. Both you and Katy helped make the translation a better book.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-11 17:35:302022-02-11 17:35:30“Still Life with Watermelon Seeds, Mannequin, Dead Mouse,” by Sarah Audsley (Poetry ’19)
CW: What was it like to write an homage to The Brothers Karamazov? I noticed that women characters had a more well-developed presence in The Family Chao. And the perspectives of family members of a Chinese-American family who own a Chinese restaurant in Wisconsin allow readers to notice, firsthand, micro- and macroaggressions white individuals and mass media inflict on the Chaos and other Asian characters.
LSC: I did consult Margot Livesey’s essay on homages in The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. She shared that while writing The Flight of Gemma Hardy, an homage to Jane Eyre, she had to put Jane Eyre aside for years. One of the first serious steps I took was to reread The Brothers Karamazov and take notes on the entire novel, but then I had to put it (and the notes) aside. It’s such a tremendous book; it could have scared me off from working on my own novel for years. In that vacuum I was able to gather the confidence to try to do what I was interested in doing. Pretty quickly, after I started drafting, I realized my book was going to be its own thing, get its own energy from itself. For one, the characters of Katherine, Brenda, and Alice each developed her own concerns that set them apart from their Dostoyevskian prototypes. The setting, subject matter, and characters were also obviously entirely different: an immigrant, restaurant family in the Midwest. As I became interested in their concerns as a family, I was able to bring my project into its own.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-10 17:39:002022-02-10 17:39:00An interview with Lan Samantha Chang
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-09 17:31:002022-02-09 17:31:00“On the Patio,” by Jill Klein (Poetry ’16)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-08 17:25:002022-02-08 17:25:00“The Sower,” by Kristen Staby Rembold (Poetry ’06)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-07 17:21:002022-02-07 17:21:00“Triumphs and Laments,” by Daniel Tobin
2010 poetry alum Laura Van Prooyen was recently featured on the podcast “Poetry For All.” Hear Laura read her poem “Elegy for My Mother’s Mind” at the link below.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-04 17:17:002022-02-04 17:17:00Laura Van Prooyen (Poetry ’10) on “Poetry For All”
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-03 17:09:452022-02-03 17:09:45“Spoila,” by Joseph J. Capista (Poetry ’16)
