Photo of Elsa Drucaroff courtesy of Bernadino Ávila
Slava Faybysh talks to Elsa Drucaroff about her story “Lili in Her Forest” (translated by Faybysh) from NER 44.2, the varieties of dictatorships in Argentina, writing in a hybrid adult/child voice, and the dearth of “informal household words” for female genitalia.
Slava Faybysh: “Lili in Her Forest” is about a four-year-old girl growing up during one of the dictatorships of the 1960s, and one of the lessons she learns is that keeping silent is a form of power. I was recently reading Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, in which she discusses one of the 1970s dictatorships in Argentina.
Writing about the interrogations and torture, Klein wrote, “many prisoners report that their torturers were far less interested in the information, which they usually already possessed, than in achieving the act of betrayal itself. The point of the exercise was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of themselves that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation.”
As a male reader of this story, I wonder, how much is Lili’s lesson about silence and power specifically directed to young girls, and how much is applicable to anyone faced with a “hostile power,” such as a parent, teacher, nanny, or a military dictatorship?
Elsa Drucaroff: I agree that Lili discovers the power of a secret, the power of privacy, keeping silent. In Argentina, the torturers used a verb, a very strong verb, which was quebrar—to break—to break the prisoner. About my story, while it’s true that it takes place during a military dictatorship, it was one of those before the dictatorship of 1976. There were six coups in my country between the 1930s and the 1970s. While there was also torture during the ’60s, it wasn’t to the same extent as during the last dictatorship, in 1976.
I think that here, the topic of silence and secrecy and being master of your silence and the private sphere of your body has more to do with the topic of women and gender than, say, radical class struggle. My story does have a political aspect, but it’s not quite how you put it.
I’ll start off by saying that silence in childhood is a very commonplace thing. We ask our children, why did you do this or that thing that was so bad, or what do you think about such-and-such, and they don’t answer. They just look at us. They don’t answer because they don’t have an answer. They don’t know why they did that naughty thing, or why they behaved so impulsively. They don’t have a degree in psychology. So there’s a part of Lili’s silence that is just the plain silence of a child. The maids (called “the employees” in the story) asked, why didn’t you tell us we forgot to put your underpants on you? In part, she doesn’t answer because she doesn’t have an answer. So I’m not sure if her silence is really a conscious act of resistance, even if, in fact, it functions in the real world as a form of resistance against the power of grownups.
In Lili’s case, I think there’s a sort of healthy not-knowing, in which there is a strength, a power, a truth and authenticity that propels the girl’s decision not to let anyone know her secret. But she can’t intellectualize it or explain it. On the other hand, at the end of the story, the discovery—what I call the checkpoint—is that she does in effect understand, as you say, the power of her silence, her resistance. I would say that that is political, but it’s more an intuition, not a clear articulation of an idea.
So, what does this have to do with living in a dictatorship? She lived in a country where there was torture, although not to the same extent as a decade later. But I think it is somewhat of a stretch to read something bigger into Lili’s lesson. That’s my opinion, but I also know that once a story is written it belongs to readers more than to the writer herself.
SF: One of the things I love about this story is its hybrid voice. To me, it’s partly the child speaking, but it’s also partly the child as an adult looking back on her life at this time. At times it feels like the adult version of the narrator is speaking to the child in sort of a child’s voice but as an adult, and other times the adult slips into a more adult, even sociological voice. I’ve seen this sort of “hybridity” in some of your other works as well. Can you speak to that?
ED: That’s a stimulating question. You’re seeing something in my style that I had a hard time seeing myself. And yes, it’s exactly right. In this case, when I was writing “Lili in Her Forest,” I set out to create that hybridity. I wanted to tell the story from Lili’s perspective, but through the eyes of a grownup who could interpret things that Lili herself did not understand.
And it’s true, that hybridity also appears in other ways in my other works. In my historical novels that take place in the nineteenth century, about the War of Independence in Argentina—these are action and adventure novels—there’s a sort of transposition of genres, the thriller and spy genres into the historical novel. Suddenly there’s this narrative voice that seeps into the text, and I take a step back from the action to talk almost like a dry historian, no? I mean, there’s a historiographic quality to this voice, and it says, I don’t know—on July 2, 1811, the army attacked such-and-such place—this voice is a departure to a different register. Evidently this is an integral part of my style, and you’re making me think, because in the case of Lili, I wanted to do something that was between an adult and a child, and there is this fusion.
Maybe it also has to do with my dual role as an academic critic and as a narrator/inventor of stories, and my sort of passion for encounters between distinct voices—the interplay, the contrasts, the mutual enrichment.
Your question, though, don’t you think it’s clearly a translator’s question? There’s a gaze implicit in the question of the person who has had to work with the text. Because it was an observation that surprised me at first, and it made me think.
SF: It’s funny. When I translated this story, this hybridity of voice stuck out immediately. To my mind, it was unquestionable and, frankly, quite a conspicuous aspect of the story. But after my first draft when we discussed this topic, your response made me doubt myself. You seemed to be saying, yes, that’s an interesting observation, I’ll have to ponder that some more, rather than, bullseye! that was exactly what I was going for when I sat down to write this. I thought, how could this feature of the story, which seemed to loom so large, not have been conscious and intentional?
As you said, once the text is on paper, it takes on a life of its own, and the process of translation gives it yet another life. I wonder: if I did something consciously in the translation that was more subconscious at the time of writing, does that make the translation closer or further from your original intention?
I’m also wondering, what influences did you draw on for this story?
ED: I wasn’t thinking about it while I was writing the story, but your question about hybridity got me thinking, and I realized there’s a story that I love by Silvina Ocampo that I’ve read a million times, and which I reread while I was writing “Lili in Her Forest.” It’s an incredible story called “The Mortal Sin,” which plays with a similar hybridity, although not in the same way. The protagonist is also a little girl. It also deals with sexual initiation, except that in Silvina Ocampo’s story, it’s something terrible. Meanwhile, there’s something bright and happy about “Lili in Her Forest.” Lili discovers her power and her pleasure. She intuits a subversive power and potential for resistance in her orgasms.
Silvina Ocampo’s story, on the other hand, is a story of abuse. There’s a girl in it (who must be around Lili’s age) and there’s a second-person narrator. The whole story is written that way. It says, “What you did,” “what happened to you,” etc. It’s very atypical. And there’s this very painful dialogue between child and adult (the adult in the story never actually uses the word abuse though).
Ocampo’s story also features masturbation, but she never uses the word directly. It’s a story told in euphemisms, in contrast to my story. It tells the story of a child abused by a family servant, in an aristocratic and very wealthy family, in this enormous mansion where the girl is left alone with the majordomo. What it does have in common with my story, though, is that hybridity of voice. And I’m just realizing this now as I’m answering this question. That story was somehow in my consciousness when I was writing.
SF: The first time I read your story I was taken by surprise when I discovered the subject matter. As a late bloomer myself, I was honestly not even aware that children that age masturbate (I had to Google it). I also definitely struggled with how to translate the words for female genitalia. Rather than using the words vulva and labia, a previous version of the translation used the word loins, which, aside from not being gender-specific, is a euphemistic sounding word that refers to the general area. But you specifically wanted the more scientific/medical/technical-sounding words.
ED: There are, and always have been, nice-sounding, informal household words to talk about male genitalia, at least in Spanish. We have the word pito in Argentina—it’s used a lot for little boys, los varoncitos, los hombrecitos—and the word pito is not vulgar, it’s not a dirty word, but at the same time it’s a nonscientific word for the penis. Because of the patriarchy, at least in Spanish, as far as I know, particularly in Argentina, there was no such equivalent for female genitalia.
When I was a little girl, people said to me—this is really funny—they called it la cola (the tail). Everything down below was la cola, to the point where people said la colita de adelante (little tail in front) and la colita de atrás (little tail in back). I have a brother who is four years older than me. He had a pito and a cola. We girls had an amorphous thing with no name that people called cola, colita. To a certain extent, even today, there is no informal word to talk about female genitalia. I have two grandchildren, two four-year-old girls, and their mother wants to use some sort of word, so she taught them vulva. My little granddaughter said to me, “Babeh, me arde la vulva” (Babeh, my vulva is burning). Four years old. And her mother taught her vulva because there simply wasn’t another word.
I also might say conchita to my stepdaughter, the diminutive of concha (meaning seashell, but also the vulgar equivalent of pussy/cunt). This word is very crude. We had to use it because there was nothing else. We simply softened the blow by making it diminutive. My stepdaughter hears this word as a descriptive word rather than a dirty word. But that was because of our intonation, because it was couched in the loving language of our family. But this doesn’t translate to literature.
SF: Argentina went through at least three coups in your lifetime. In the US, we recently had a coup attempt, but luckily it failed (some say that was because the rightist vice president at the time did not support it). Do you have any words of advice for how to survive a dictatorship?
ED: There are dictatorships and then there are dictatorships. Each dictatorship in my country was very different. Actually, it’s more apt to say that the one that was truly qualitatively different from the others was the 1976–1983 dictatorship. As far as advice goes, I don’t really have any. For a dictatorship like the last one, the bloodiest and most horrific one in Argentine memory, I guess the central bit of advice would be: don’t do anything at all that the powers-that-be don’t want you to do. But, believe me, that’s not the kind of advice I like to give. If you want I can give you advice on how to survive two rounds of hyperinflation, or what we call corralitos, where all your bank accounts are frozen.
SF: Well, hopefully it won’t come to that anytime soon. Thanks so much for speaking to me. Working on this text was definitely challenging, so it was great to have a partner I could consult with, especially when it came to some of the thornier issues.
Elsa Drucaroff was born and raised in Buenos Aires. She holds a PhD in social sciences and is a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where she has taught for several decades. Drucaroff is the author of four novels and numerous short stories and essays. “Lili in Her Forest” is from her 2019 short story collection, Checkpoint. Her work has been translated into Polish and Serbo-Croatian, and her first full-length English-language translation will be coming out next year.
Slava Faybysh was born in Ukraine and immigrated to the United States as a child. He translates from Spanish and Russian, both of which he studied at Oberlin College. His translation of Elsa Drucaroff ’s historical thriller Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case is set to be published by Corylus Books in 2024. Other translations of his have appeared in Asymptote Journal, Latin American Literature Today, and Another Chicago Magazine, among others.