In that mysterious chasm of one’s own affinities and disposition that ties together bits of family history, places lived, as well as experiences and ideas exposed to, I might place a first reading of Huckleberry Finn as fundamental in my early understanding of and interest in form. Only a few pages in, I ran to my parents asking: how could a book be published with so many mistakes? This must surely be a proof copy of the manuscript that somehow ended up in our home?
To have them explain, the author intended the words to be spelled out just so to replicate the local diction and slang of its characters. It was his chosen form for the novel. Here, form subverted my expectations of how text should appear. A revelation, unsought-but-much-welcomed, for a kid who didn’t quite fit in, neither with “rebellious boys” nor “romantic girls.” Another path was possible.
Form was not and is not a single idealized model to strive towards or conform to but something distinct shaped by the proclivities of the artist-creator, given context (thus meaning) via their place in history and through their connections, including with institutions, individuals, regions inhabited, nature, and works of art.
—Nicholas Grosso
New York
March 2020
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: KAIJA STRAUMANIS
Hailing from the state of Minnesota, Kaija Straumanis is the Editorial Director of Open Letter Books. She is also a translator of Latvian and German literature and her photography has appeared in Scientific American MIND, among other publications.
Small and independent publishers all work in ways unique to themselves. Given that and the especially amorphous role of editor (or Editorial Director, in this case), what are your specific duties and responsibilities at Open Letter?
As the job title implies, my main duties revolve around the editorial process—acquiring manuscripts, editing them and working with the translators, correspondence with translators, authors and publishers, etc. But since Open Letter is such a small outfit, we all have responsibilities above and beyond our “titles.” I’m also the one who deals with contracts, permissions, some finances… Some days you’ll find me in the mail room packing up book orders; other days you’ll find me substitute-teaching for Chad [our publisher] when he’s out of town for a conference or trade show.
How does your work as a photographer and translator inform your work with Open Letter? How have you tried to shape or what shape have you attempted to give to Open Letter’s catalog?
Short of being another notch in my Creativity Belt, my photography work seems (to me, at least) to have little effect on my work with Open Letter. In the past I’ve helped take photos at events, or with some basic design elements and objects, but not so much anymore. Though my photography has given me a pretty solid collection of headshots to use when needed for a conference or similar.
My own work as a translator has been far more influential in my editing career. I largely try to edit in the way I would like to be edited: I ask lots and lots and lots of questions, sometimes questions within questions, if there is something in the translation that I don’t understand or that seems off to me. Sometimes it’s the case that the translator has only to explain to me what I’m missing, or how I’m misreading the sentence or paragraph, and then everything is clear and I’m happy. Other times it’s because the translator missed a word, or autocorrect played its dirty tricks. And other times still it’s because there’s a better way the text in question can be written, and we just have to find it. I really don’t like ravaging and ripping apart a paragraph if it’s not reading well to me—where the wording is awkward, I want the translator to be the one to go back and dig in and see what they can do to improve it. This is not only because I trust our translators, but because I trust the original text. What if I think I understand what the translator/author was going for, but instead change the meaning entirely, or sacrifice some stylistic nuance that was necessary to the reading experience? That would be the worst! And I would hate it if an editor took such liberties with a text I’d worked on without spit-balling with me about the issues first. That’s not to say that I don’t do any of my own thinking or changes where I see fit for the best for the book—I do plenty of that! I just think there are times where a translator should be allowed to go back, revisit a section of the text, and change it into something better that is theirs, not mine.
In terms of Open Letter’s catalog… I’ve never really thought about myself as having a hand in “shaping” our list—but I’m also not so precious as to say “the list has shaped me.” I’ve mostly just worked to continue building on the press’s foundational aesthetic (though OLB’s aesthetic trajectory is not easily categorizable), and to continue to publish books that people will be reading for the next 100 years and beyond, and books that we at OLB have just really, really fallen in love with. What I do want to shape is the number of countries and languages represented in our catalog and backlist! I’d like to get more Baltic literature on our shelves—a personal bias, naturally.
Working for a publisher dedicated to works in translation, how does this change or focus the job of editing a manuscript? Does it become the task of finetuning and making the language consistent? And does the method of editing a manuscript change with the approaches of different translators, i.e. if the translation is more strictly tied to the sequencing and cadence of the original?
As mentioned earlier, I ask a lot of questions of our translators (and authors, when I can) in order to understand the text as much as possible. That’s not a wildly different approach to editing in general, but you are working with three (author, translator, editor) sets of knowledge, experience, lexicon, instead of two. I think it’s important that each book be edited as its own entity, even when working with the same authors again and again. One of the things we are very conscious of at OLB is letting the book breathe, exist as it was meant to exist. If we were to take drastic measures and gloss the language of every book we were going to publish to make it as “approachable” and “readable” as possible, we would be doing a disservice to the author, likely to the translator, possibly the respective nation’s literature, and also to OLB’s own mission statement. Also, our jobs would get super boring.
That said, an important part of being a good editor is also being a good reader. You need to be able to get a feel for what the book/author is doing very early on, and be willing to go along for that ride. If there’s something off in the translation, you can hear it—be it turns of phrase, the register of the language, the voice of the narrator or characters, even a single word choice—even if you don’t quite yet know what the proper (or better) solution will be. Then you talk to the translator, who a) is, most times, the expert on the source language in this case and b) is the most acquainted with the text and the author’s intent. Then you go from there to improve the translation. The method of editing stays the same: work with the translator to make the English-language edition of the book the best it can be. The approach and process through which this is achieved is what varies.
TRANSLATOR: ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC
Ellen Elias-Bursac is the president of the American Literary Translators Association. She has been translating literature from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s and served as a translator on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which investigated crimes commited during the Yugoslav Wars.
What is your approach to translating creative works, from the strict maintaining of sequence of words and prosody to translation as the creation of an original work? And having now translated a number of works by Dubravka Ugrešić, does your approach to translation change when approaching her writing?
Though I have thought of myself for years as a translator who sticks close to an author’s wording, in fact my first commitment is to preserving sentence length, wherever possible, while I often fiddle with word and phrase order within sentences.
Dubravka Ugrešić is more serious about paragraph organization than she is about sentence length. Her essays and stories often link, contrast, offset, and challenge ideas and images, each of which is presented in a small cluster of paragraphs set apart from each other by blank spaces, with the first paragraph that follows the blank space starting without an indent. This is an essential feature of her writing which I regularly have to defend to her publishers.
I work to preserve the logic of images and metaphors if I can, though I find that sometimes, particularly in Dubravka Ugrešić’s writing, ironic use of English-language cliches adds punch to her voice.
Particularly in her essays, I have found the greatest challenge is conveying both her indignation and her humor. In the same passage she may be both bleak and cheery, poignant and tough as nails, endearing and bristling.
She has spent her lifetime as a writer mulling over certain themes, and one of the joys of following her writing for forty years has been seeing how these themes have evolved over time, matured, shifted, and deepened, and allowing the evolving nuances to be visible in the translation.
Your translations include works originally written in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. Given the history between these nations and your own history living and working in Zagreb as well as for the International Criminal Tribunal, how much does politics play in your selection of works for translation? And how, more generally, do you choose what to translate?
I started out translating the work of a number of different writers in Croatia because I was living in Zagreb then. Not long before the war I became interested by the writing of David Albahari, a Jewish writer in Belgrade who has an intriguing experimental approach to prose, and started what has become a lifelong involvement in translating his work. I did feel it was important to continue translating both Serbian and Croatian writers whose work I admired throughout the war, to avoid being pigeonholed as a translator of only one of these literatures.
Dubravka Ugrešić and I met in the 1980s as members of the same Zagreb cultural circle and at first I helped her out with an occasional short text. At that point Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim were translating her essays and novels. The first book of Ugrešić’s writing I translated was Nobody’s Home, which came out in 2008—the inaugural publication of Open Letter Books.
Both Albahari and Ugrešić are postmodern writers who have always been allergic to nationalism, and as that was my predilection as well, my support of their work was a way of pushing back against the shrinking horizons imposed by the wartime culture of the 1990s. I have translated fewer Bosnian writers, but am particularly fond of the wildly inventive stories of Karim Zaimović, a brilliant young writer who was killed near the end of the siege of Sarajevo, before he had the chance to turn his ludic radio shows into the graphic novels he dreamed of publishing.
As to how I choose what to translate, early on I shopped translations around myself until I found a publisher. But more recently authors have come to me when they’ve found a publisher, or the publishers themselves approach me. Recently I have been exploring ways to collaborate with other translators on projects, and I have found these collaborations refreshing and worthwhile.
With such a wide experience in translation from working on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [ICTY] to your work now as President of American Literary Translators Association [ALTA], how have your many positions shaped and informed your visions of the role of translation (in its many incarnations) in the world today?
My six years at the ICTY taught me to think about the position of power of translators—no matter what they are translating, be it literature or documentary evidence of war crimes—as they negotiate their way between whoever has hired them to translate and the voices of the witnesses (at the ICTY) or authors (in the world of publishing) they are conveying. Hence my choice of “working in a tug-of-war” as the title for the book I wrote about the way translation and interpreting shaped the trials at the ICTY. Translation was front and center at the ICTY in every interaction, discussed and disputed every day in the courtroom and we in the translation units were often called upon to defend our choices. The work we do at ALTA to advance our profession as literary translators is not so different. Our ALTA conference on the nuts and bolts of what we do every day as translators, on teaching translation, on translation into English as a second language, on publishing, all these topics are essentially examining our powers and responsibilities as literary translators. The role of translation today is to query languages, query the power relations in culture, query our own and others’ assumptions about writing, literature, voice, and therein lies our power as literary translators.
PUBLISHER: CHAD POST
Chad Post is the publisher of Open Letter Books, a literary translation press at the University of Rochester. In 2018, he was awarded the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.
Recently on the Three Percent website, you began The No Context Project, where publishers send you the electronic file of a future publication to then be uploaded onto your ebook reader with a standardized text and layout design and, after reading, you’ve committed to reviewing the manuscript based on four categories: Style, Translation, Structure, and Cultural Value. Essentially the project is to remove the publisher from the publication. A few books in, what insights into the art and craft of the publisher have you gleaned? Has it offered a better understanding of the average American, who (based on any surveys I’ve seen) is not a regular reader, particularly not of literature?
Oh, man. Well, because of the start of the new semester (I teach Monday through Thursday), and too many other projects, I had to put this on hold for a hot minute, but it was fascinating when I was working on it. My theory—which seemed to bear itself out over the two books I read—was that by not having any of the normal markers in place (preconceived ideas about the quality and merits of a text based on the surrounding metatextual clues—like the cover, the publisher’s reputation, the author’s cultural status, the number of books the translator has translated in the past, priming via jacket copy, etc.) my reading experience would be both more honest, while also be focused on trying to figure out if this is “good” according to the standards of literary society.
We all have a desire to belong to a group, and whether it’s being lumped in with the haters of a particular art work, or one of its early supporters, we tend to take the otherwise solitary activity of reading and place it within the context of the reactions from a larger group of readers. How frequently does a book get a pass from a bookseller or critic because a powerful author blurbed it? How often are great books overlooked because they’re published by one publisher instead of another? I’ve always been fascinated with behavioral economics and the science of decision making, and I saw this as an extension of that. (Unfortunately, aside from the core fans of Three Percent, I’m not sure who else is interested in these ideas. My long-ass blog posts are not Twitter friendly.)
Having started the Translation Database (now hosted by Publishers Weekly), what are the advantages of seeing publishing numbers separated from the spin? What metrics are helpful to the publishing community and to readers? What numbers not currently available do you think would be helpful to publishers? Is there a value to making readers more aware of the market and other such insider details of publishing?
There’s a lot to unpack here . . . First off, I do think that the numbers—separated from memory more than spin—are incredibly valuable for explaining what our literary situation actually is like. Recency bias and confirmation bias tend to taint most coverage of literature in translation. If you want to write a positive article on international literature, just refer to the Ferrante/Knausgaard explosion—clearly everyone is now interested in international literature! The numbers can expose potential flaws in our thinking, or, to put this in a slightly more nuanced way, they can help tweak the narrative.
Are translations growing in the U.S.? Sort of. The total number of fiction and poetry went down precipitously last year—something that most people wouldn’t expect because of the buzz around a handful of books and the National Book Award for Translation. What would be really interesting is to include sales figures, but that would be nearly impossible, since it would require constant updating, and no one really wants to share this . . .
I am working on a project that tries to blend some of the data crunching from the database, with sales and public perception, and interviews with translators to look at how readers receive literature in translation, but . . . well, we’ll see if the end product is actually worth anything!
Despite your Twitter bio, “The most insufferable man in publishing,” your work with the Three Percent website and podcast (co-hosted with Tom Roberge of Riffraff), the founding of the Best Translated Book Award, and the Two Month Review (co-hosted with writer Brian Wood), all seem to open publishing to more people and must prompt a collegial atmosphere, to some degree. Do you see avenues for more collaborative efforts between publishers? And between publishers and bookstores? Could such partnerships offset the hyper-consolidation and corporatization of publishing? What is your prognosis of the current state of publishing in the US?
Another long one to unpack! Let’s start with the fun bit: My Twitter bio is basically just a joke. (Although I DO earnestly love 6’7” left-handed relief pitchers . . . one in particular . . . hey, Andrew Miller, give me a call.) That “insufferable” line came in response to my denouncing the Nobel Prize being awarded to Peter Handke. And, well, it’s kind of a cool phrase?
I would love to be perceived as trying to make publishing more collegial and open—especially in relation to literature in translation. One potential reason our access to books in translation has dipped as of late is because the system behind the industry prefers competition over collaboration and almost enforces a (possibly false) zero-sum game situation. I can name three situations from the past month in which Open Letter was asked to outbid a fellow indie press on a book that that other press was extremely interested in. This happens all the time, and sure, it’s just business, but when your friend steals away a book you’ve been dying to do . . . It doesn’t always feel like we’re in this together. There’s a lack of transparency in this field—with sales, offers, the way books are treated by media and stores—which has started to set presses at odds with one another, competing over a very small slice of pie, instead of working together to increase the appreciation of and readership for valuable works of literature.
The situation between publishers like Open Letter and bookstores is healthy and a viable way to work around media conglomeration, but overall, I think books like ours will inevitably be a small portion of the sales for most bookstores. They need the hot, hip titles that sell fast and furiously in order to stay afloat. And given the unevenness of the playing field (see the treatment of American Dirt and how much marketing money was invested there vs. the treatment of any number of books by Mexican writers addressing similar themes), it’s unlikely that one of our books will become “hot & hip” on the level that will alter a bookstore’s typical buying patterns. Instead, it’s a long, slow game. Certain booksellers fall in love with one or more of our books, and start to stock them. Then we have a couple “hits” with sales in the 5,000-10,000 range, and the stores are more likely to take a “risk” on a future book we’re excited about and stock 5-10 copies instead of the usual 1-2. But this requires a few things to go right that aren’t entirely under our control . . . So we keep working with our bookselling friends and hoping that as Open Letter’s stature grows, their respect and our sales will follow a similar course. (A rising tide floats all boats?)
In terms of publishing overall, it clearly has a diversity problem, and I would argue it has a value problem as well. Sales have become the be-all, end-all for agents, editors, and many booksellers. Which makes sense—most of publishing is a business. But it also reduces the richness of a text and reading experience to a single metric—one that only captures popularity and people’s willingness to pay, not the intrinsic value found in a particular book. At the same time, these same people are railing against Amazon for gutting the value of bookstores and books as a whole, which is fair, although Amazon is getting more books into the hands of more people than was possible twenty-five years ago. It’s all muddled and complicated and there’s no right answer, but I hope all my work—with the Database, podcasts, Open Letter titles, Three Percent posts, other writings—can at least offer up another possible way for someone involved in the industry (in one aspect or another) to conceive of the overall value of their work.
AUTHOR: DUBRAVKA UGRESIC
The books of Dubravka Ugrešić walk the line between essay and fiction and have been translated into over twenty languages. Fox explores the power and limitations of storytelling woven together with the emblematic reference and folkloric symbol of the ever-elusive fox. In 2016 she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
The greatest intimacy (or maybe the most striking prose) in Fox, I found, appears not in the dialogues the narrator has with various individuals with whom she crosses paths, not even with the lover she finds in the small Croatian village, but instead in what might elsewhere be read as encyclopedic entries, the telling, framing, and recounting of histories, whether of figures that loom large in our imaginations like Vladimir Nabokov, are nearly forgotten (like Boris Pilnyak and Doivber Levin), or are otherwise unknown (like the former judge turned de-miner). This stands in stark contrast with the quote on your website, a brief passage on the future of literature:
Who knows, maybe one day there will no longer be Literature. Instead there will be literary web sites. Like those stars, still shining but long dead, the web sites will testify to the existence of past writers. There will be quotes, fragments of texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once. Instead of readers there will be cyber space travelers who will stumble upon the websites by chance and stop for a moment to gaze at them. How they will read them? Like hieroglyphs? As we read the instructions for a dishwasher today? Or like remnants of a strange communication that meant something in the past, and was called Literature?
And then, from A Balancing Art in Fox
… Writers today no longer burden their audience with a reading, they ‘perform.’ The audience, whose standards for reception have been honed by television and the internet, are more and more ignorant about literature, what they want is fast, unambiguous entertainment …
Do you fear that Literature is at risk because of the culture that has grown around it? Or the various new and developing mediums? How does good literature transcend time, place, and medium, if this is not too big of a question?
My life long “marriage” to literature (I studied literature, I taught literature, I translated literature, and so on and so forth) might give me a bit of authority in answering your questions. However, things are unpredictable: a couple of decades ago who would have believed that one day we would carry the whole library with us on a small light gadget called cell phone, or iPad?! Literature is not the queen of the art as it was just a couple of decades ago. In Eastern Europe, for instance, literature represented an exit light, it offered a consoling feeling of freedom, truth, inner emancipation… Literature lost its importance the moment it became a product like any other product. Powerful book industry and a powerful book market took over the evaluation arbitrage. Evaluation arbitrage had been for ages in the hands of university literary departments, “boring” academia, teachers of literature, scholars, dusty national canons built by (white) male participants, critics and others. Within the development of book industry, but also technology, the old system of evaluation was replaced by a more porous, “democratic” one. It often seems that readers took over and that publishing industry is just blindly following the tastes of readers, trying to satisfy diversities in age, color, traditions, geography, and so forth. Zillions of books for zillions of readers. It seems that not even publishers represent a valid value filter anymore, besides anybody can self-publish a book thanks to the new technological devices and be a one-man show: a writer, an editor, an agent, a critic, a publicity manager. Anybody can build his/her own fan base, introduce new evaluation rules… Literature is not anymore in the hands of traditional “authorities.” More than that, it seems that industry and market are “forcing” the remaining traditional authorities to reflect upon the new books, new trends, new authors and give their evaluative blessing. As a result, we have enormous book production, but we don’t have diverse literary schools any more, or trends, or articulated literary periods (the last one was postmodernism), we don’t have literary struggles, or polemics, we don’t have literary fights between “old” and “new,” “mainstream” and “experimental,” “good” and “bad.” The only thing we have is unstoppable huge production and a (false) feeling of an absolute freedom of literary choices.
However, thanks to mostly invisible literary activists and enthusiasts, scholars, students, literary professionals and literature lovers, thanks to the existence of “people who do remember” and who mostly act from an “dissident underground,” the idea and the concept of “good literature” are still alive, still survive and still manage to get promoted.
In his review of Fox, Peter Mitchell writes: “In some sense, all these essays (or episodes, or fables, or practical jokes) can be read as attempts to engage with Ugrešić’s one (wavering, provisional, frustrated) object of faith: language,” which I imagine, in part, is reflecting on the agonies of war, state violence, and the many other avenues for propaganda. Again, in A Balancing Art, you write:
The language of journalism could be viciously cynical (dehydrated migrants!), even as it claimed the opposite. Equally confusing was the language of pundits (sociologists, historians, political scientists). That language had tagged me, as well, with categories such as hyphenated identities, hybrid selves, and so forth. That language that followed the strictures of supposed political correctness and courtesy, language that took a stand, at least declaratively, in opposition to the language of outright fascism, had only, in fact, broadened the linguistic repertoire of discrimination.
All of which calls to mind, A.O. Scott’s review of The Image Book (direct by Jean-Luc Godard), a meditation on the history of cinema and the interaction between the artistic image, the journalistic image, and images made for popular consumption:
Depictions of combat and slaughter, excised from narrative or political context as they are here, also lose their moral and aesthetic bearings. The spectacles that thrill us and the documentary evidence that horrifies us are hard to tell apart. Are we looking at cruelty or heroism? Fact or fiction? Justice or barbarism? And if those distinctions collapse, what about the narrower—but to Godard, utterly vital—distinction between cinema as an art and the ubiquitous and disposable images that threaten to swallow it, and us?
When writing, how aware are you of the many way’s words are twisted, cherry-picked, and otherwise manipulated? Is there pressure to counteract such euphemisms and linguistic indirection? And given the breadth of literary history incorporated into Fox, do you feel compelled to establish a clear context in your work? Or to place your work within a particular literary tradition?
The writer who establishes clearly his/her context could be a manipulator as writers were and are, especially today, when it comes to “managing” their public writer’s persona, or intellectual profile. They like to garland themselves with the high quality proof tags such as Nabokov-like, Joyce-like. If writers themselves do not participate in building their public persona then their publisher would do that for them. Publishers, critics, reviewers, and readers as reviewers tend to connect the new literary product to the most popular or the most visible literary names of the moment. When it comes to women we all know: Virginia Woolf-like is out, Ferrante-like, Cusk-like, Rooney-like are in. When it comes to men: Nabokov-like is out, Knausgaard-like is in, Joyce-like is out, Murakami-like is in. I share here the details that are trivial and nobody really takes them seriously. However, does this affect the literary processes in so-called “serious” literature? It does. Every serious university literary department would employ a current literary star as a professor of creative writing or cultural studies, and every such professor would rather link him/herself to a current literary star than to an obscure writer from an obscure cultural territory. Besides, universities depend on students, and the majority of students would rather sign up for a course on a current global literary star than a course on “something incomprehensible” (“Something incomprehensible, something Slavic”—this is a wonderful comment I got myself from an anonymous reader).
Things are much more complicated, of course. The examples I gave are only the most obvious and thus the most trivial detail of the huge and dynamic cultural production we deal with as producers, followers, cultural observers, facilitators and consumers. We all need new answers and new coordinates: what the hell are we all participating in?
Let me try to squeeze in a question without so much preamble. Was the form of Fox inspired by essay films? The ones by Agnés Varda and Chris Marker came to my mind while reading, like La Pointe Courte and Sans Soliel, if not for theme than for structure. If such films did not inspire the structure, what did influence it?
The structure of Fox is not inspired by essay films, or at least not directly. Essay-novels are vital part of European novelistic tradition. Let’s say that such types of novels might be more “acceptable” within the European novelistic tradition, although today European publishers would rather publish simple novels with simple stories written in a simple language.” Btw Baba Yaga Laid An Egg, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and my early, little, “experimental” novel Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life have a similar structure.
In a conversation with Costanza Sciubba Caniglia, Managing Editor of Misinformation Review and my wife, she pointed out the introduction to Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, which cited her “primitive power” and the blurb on the front cover that noted her “ability to write as though no one had ever written before,” this despite a line on the very first page of the novel: “Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”
Here again we see language, as was mentioned earlier, fall into such familiar tropes where the non-North American/Western European white man are turned into something like Rousseau’s noble savage. This conversation felt like a perfect complement to the “dyslexia” described in Fox:
The specific “dyslexia” that readers—men and women alike—show when reading literary texts, each for his or her own reasons, has made this conquest impossible. In short, most “girls” still write romance novels, while notes from underground are reserved for “boys”; the rebellious confession is a male literary narrative because the rebel is invariably a man, he is our tragic hero. The story of a tragic heroine is read—with the “dyslexia” I mentioned—as the tale of a “madwoman.”
How do you navigate, counter, or lean into and subvert such categorizations? Is there a difference in your approach to such language in your everyday life and in your writing?
It is difficult to navigate against the categorizations of today’s global cultural market united and strengthened by digital media. Every market, including cultural ones, unites its consumers thanks to strategies of standardization. All big global chains offer exactly what their consumers expect. People like McDonalds because with McDonalds they feel “at home” anywhere in the whole world. With McDonalds they get exactly what they are expecting to get. No surprises, whether you are in North America, Europe, or Asia. Why do people like Starbucks? Exactly for the same reason: in Amsterdam’s Starbucks you feel like you are in New York’s Starbucks: the same choice of coffee. Big industries and media work on the standardization of the public taste. In literature we’ll immediately think of genres, like detective novels, or romances, or vampire novels, or YA literature. However, so-called serious literature is not immune and market does everything to incorporate serious literature into a mainstream, to make patterns of non-mainstream literature more acceptable, to suck them into mainstream, to standardize them in order to sell them.
With the many traumas that come with living in exile, on top of the troubles of living in the contemporary moment, the narrator identifies cities as her confidant, counselor, and mirror:
I saw myself reflected in cities as in a mirror. Using the cityscape—as if it were a gas meter—I gauged my condition. I held my inner map up to the city map. Taking the city’s pulse, I took my own. The maps of the subways and undergrounds I compared to my own circulatory system. Others had psychoanalysts, I had cities.
This follows a similar pattern to the narrator’s relationship with language. And along those lines, the two do often act in similar ways, even if only metaphorically: cities organize and articulate our ways of interacting and habits, as language organizes and articulates our perceptions and feelings. Walter Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:
Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit.
How have you seen cities as aiding and hindering your work as a writer? In this period of climate crisis, has your relationship with cities changed?
I have two novels that are placed in the cities. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is placed in Berlin and The Ministry of Pain in Amsterdam. Both towns are not chosen randomly, they are not just a place. Towns in my novels play a role of parallel text. Some towns are not just places but they are a “cultural texts,” a cultural palimpsest. Cities are like novels, with millions of interconnected characters, plots, stories, and histories. My novels talk to the places I’ve chosen, Berlin and Amsterdam. The town is a metaphor, a symbol, a living character, a parallel plot, a secret interlocutor… If you take a town as a text, not just a topography which could be replaced by any other topography, then the novel becomes a complicated and enriching relationship between two texts, the existing one and a newly created one.
ALICIA KENNEDY ON THE DEAD LADIES PROJECT BY JESSA CRISPIN
“Let’s say, for a moment, that the character of a city has an effect on its inhabitants, and that it sets the frequency on which it calls out to the migratory. People who are tuned a certain way will heed the call almost without knowing why. Thinking they’ve chosen this city, they’ll never know that the city chose them. “
In her travel memoir framed around the works of William James, Nora Barnacle, Claude Cahun, amongst others, Jessa Crispin is seeking a fresh start. Interweaving literary analysis, biography, and personal experience, the ouevres and lives of these artists guide Crispin and help her figure out how to live a life.
People forget that leaving is an option, that home isn’t necessarily one place. New York was the place I always believed was home, even as I left it more and more frequently, and even as I’d often find myself on my own couch saying, “I want to go home.” I never thought leaving was possible, until the need to do so swelled in me to such a boil that I would have lost my mind by staying. I imagined at least six months of travel, with likely interludes back on Long Island on my mother’s couch. It would be a fruitful time of writing, of self-discovery. The model in my mind was the one presented in Jessa Crispin’s memoir The Dead Ladies Project: Exile, Expats, & Ex-Countries. She too took off when it became obvious nothing in her life was right, when the whisper became a scream. Anyway, I left but then just settled right again. The book continues its influence over me, though—just in a different way than I’d imagined. It’s the voice I’m after.
Crispin, once the founder and editor of Bookslut, manages a very specific tone: well-read, but not snobbish; judgy, but vulnerable. It’s an honest voice, a conversational voice despite its learnedness, a voice that doesn’t have a home on the internet anymore, which is probably why the book remains such an antidote to my screen-burned eyes. It came out in 2015, and I bought it a couple of years later, during a year of intense travel that I hoped would cure me of an existential itch (all it did was drain my bank accounts and distract me, leading to the ultimate aforementioned boil). I enjoyed Crispin’s criticism and liked that I felt lightly indicted by her at times. She once wrote or tweeted—who can recall the difference anymore—that writers were afraid to take on various jobs, expecting to live off writing alone. That might have been why I spent ten-odd months bartending—that comment and desperate financial need.
With that first read, she gave me a model for traveling that I take quite seriously. I read the work of writers from the place where I’m going; I try to see the movies; I always listen to the songs. It’s a cultural immersion that helps the solitary mind orient itself. The only issues I run into tend to be linguistic. I tense up when I have to think in Spanish; I know no French at all. When Crispin writes that she is mortified when spoken to in German she can’t understand but enjoys being able to tune out conversation, I know precisely how she feels while also knowing it’s indefensible American crap. But anyone with a working-class chip on their shoulder who didn’t fuck off to study abroad because they had to keep working probably recognizes it as the justification of a person who’s intellectual enough to have read all these books but still can’t get over the hump of being monolingual. It feels like a curse. The mark of someone who will never reach the heights they know they could if they were born into a different family, even if those heights are a capitalist illusion.
And Crispin speaks of money, of class, of women who took husbands because it would be their only way to see the world with honesty that doesn’t always present itself in travel memoirs, because by design, travel is the realm of those with free time and ample cash. She recognizes privilege, as well, talking about how she’s been welcomed into Sweden and Switzerland because she is white and looks so deeply European. “When I travel through Europe, my face reads as Here,” she says. “Here is assumed. Then I open my mouth and out comes discordance and no one knows where to put me.”
All throughout the travels we follow in the book—both literally and through time, in her reading—we are also following her affair with a married man who’s mid-divorce by the end. She torments herself with this, a banal human weakness for romance and love, yet for me it always reads as such a B-plot. It is a throughline but it is not the point; the point is the reading, the feeling of being alien, the constant unease that comes with never knowing whether you’re supposed to be showing your passport to the official or if they need some other document or currency. An affair? Who cares. It is the background to an intellectual life, this fucking and loving. “I went out looking for a home, I found the world instead,” she writes.
And that’s what’s really radical here: Crispin, a heterosexual woman, makes the man beside the point of her quest. Like leaving what had long been assumed to be home, it’s one of those things we always forget is possible.
READING CONSTELLATIONS
Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War (Penguin Random House, parent company Bertelsmann)
Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Princeton University Press)
Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions)
Joseph Brodsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) (The New York Review of Books)
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (Vintage, parent company Bertelsmann)
Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project (The University of Chicago Press)
Masha Gessen, Never Remember (Columbia Global Reports)
Stephen Jay Gould, I Have Landed (Belknap Press, Harvard University Press)
Chris Marker, A Grin Without a Cat (Icarus Films); Sans Soleil (The Criterion Collection)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Letters to Véra (Vintage, parent company Bertelsmann)
Stacy Schiff, Véra (Penguin Random House, parent company Bertelsmann)
Jun’ichirö Tanizaki, Naomi (Vintage, parent company Bertelsmann); In Praise of Shadows (Leete’s Island Books)
Agnès Varda, La Pointe Courte (The Criterion Collection); The Beaches of Agnès (Curzon Artificial Eye)
