New England Review

Behind the Byline

Rohan Chhetri

NER Poet Rohan Chhetri sits on a white bench with beard, blue jacket, and yellow flowers
NER Poet Rohan Chhetri

My experience with long-distance trains in India began when I moved to Bombay for college at the age of eighteen. It was a three-day-long journey.”

NER staff reader Leena Soman Navani interviews Rohan Chhetri, whose poems “Indian Railway Canticle” and “Bordersong” appear in NER 40.4.

Leena Soman Navani: Traveling by rail in India is such a particular experience, and is a prominent part of India’s story as depicted in literature and film. What’s your experience and how did you go about fashioning your memories into this specific poem? What aspects felt most urgent to capture and how did this dovetail with your craft?

Rohan Chhetri: The rail journey is definitely an enduring symbol that fuels a lot of Indian narratives in art and cinema. For this very reason, I resisted writing this poem for a long time for fear of reducing it, not so much for the white gaze but against my own specific experience of it, which is personal and connected to a certain time in my life. Trains appear a lot in my work, but here I wanted to write a sustained poem from the inside of the journey itself. To accommodate the dizzying variables of the long-distance train journey in India, I had to generate a rhythm, guide it with music and craft, and ride it relying on that momentum to take me somewhere. 

My experience with long-distance trains in India began when I moved to Bombay for college at the age of eighteen. It was a three-day-long journey, from the railway station near my border-town home in Bengal to Bombay, spanning over five state lines. The poem for the most part describes this particular airy and blue segment of time I spent on the train three days and two nights at a time, several times a year, and what I observed. After a while I realized these “segments” had started blending into something continuous like a long spot of time, so every time I took the journey it felt like I was resuming something familiar. This poem is a composite of this experience largely, and other inter-city train journeys from my hometown. 

LSN: I was especially moved by how the form resembles the “boxiness” of a train and the laddering of tracks articulated in the first line. The alternating indented lines help create a rhythm, the canticle of a train’s movement and the poem’s title. Can you touch on form? Did the poem always look like this or did this structure come about in revision? Also can you talk about the word choice “Canticle” in the title?

RC: I wanted to mimic the particularly incessant music of the trains and the rhythm of the tracks. I needed the tone to be cantatory, to be guided by a kind of “controlled association” so that it would allow me to access disparate memories. The task of curation is narrative. I left the task of culling, and choosing what to include, to the rhythm and music determined by the syntax of the very first line, which isn’t a sentence as much as a fragment. Stanley Kunitz says this beautiful thing about the original rhythm of the poem that not only belongs to the “subject matter” of the poem, but to your “interior world.” Accessing that rhythm, he says, leads to a “quantum leap of energy,” a rhythm you can ride on and rely on to “carry you somewhere strange.” The indented lines made sense in the way journey narratives work where one thing happens and then another and another, and I wanted that movement to be jagged, and in terms of shape literally look like the “ladder tracks.”

LSN: There’s such a sense of controlled duality in “Canticle”: the firm but quick turn in the pacing of the farmer, the herd of elephants crossing the tracks vs. the way we slow down to observe the beauty of the woman in the niqab for several layered lines. Likewise, what’s happening aboard the train with the speaker vs. what the speaker observes outside the train—landscape, weather, history, and the present colliding. Harmony and cacophony, knowing and not knowing. How is the poem’s I metabolizing these moments? How did you come to manage these robust tensions?

RC: The pacing of the poem itself is determined precisely by the halting, belated, laboring pace of the trains in India. As I said above, I wanted to bring into the poem the experience from inside of that “boxiness.” But in the non-AC compartments that I traveled in, there is also a certain permeability to the elements that keeps you alert, vulnerable, and at the same time gives you access to life and spectacle in all its wide-ranging variety, possibility, and strangeness. So there is definitely that “duality” of being boxed in and at the same time being permeable. Of what the speaker “sees” from the window of the train, and the “felt” outside, the immediate weather and landscape, and the “inferred” social and the political landscape, all of it in tension with what is happening aboard the train compartment itself with the speaker inside it. And there is a point where all of these collide as the speaker watches the woman in the niqab on the train platform and at the same time watches the men in the compartment watching her through the window, and here the outside and the inside from the poem’s vantage point collides too, pulling in a centripetal swirl the past and the present, the political and the historical. 

At this point, the poem itself collapses into a sort of false ending, attempts once more to regain its momentum, but history rears its head in the name of the stations, because, well, once you see it history is unavoidable. The poem veers into further imagistic disparities that  finally taper into an image of conjoining in the “couple making love,” and then an image of severance with the “leper” and the “untouchable” radiating “horror,” ending finally in the speaker’s homecoming.

LSN: Whereas “Canticle” is dominated by sight (though there are plenty of other sensory details), the language of “Bordersong” prioritizes scents that travel downwind. There’s something more haunted and haunting about this, perhaps knowing the origin of scents but not always seeing them, and their ability to travel and linger. Yet both poems also hinge on the importance of sound, from the titles to the use of repetition/refrain. How do time and sensory detail operate together in “Bordersong,” and perhaps differently from “Canticle”?

RC: In “Bordersong” I wanted the olfactory mode to be a medium through which I could tell the (his)story of a place, a community. The anaphoric repetition and the subsequent variation to that pattern pointedly implies the structure of “song.” 

There was a year between the writing of “Canticle” and “Bordersong,” but around the time I started working on “Canticle,” I started becoming interested in infusing heavier music and patterning into my narrative poems. Some texts I was reading at the time, like Briggflatts, and some of Pound’s Cantos, and Cathay, were significant in causing me to turn that way. 

In terms of sensory detail and time, I was trying to use olfactory details as a kind of formal constraint  to piece together the images from a politically turmoil-ridden decade during my childhood, and to encompass some of the varied geographical and cultural complexities of living in a bordertown. Hence the poem begins with the warm smell of the bakery, takes the reader through an array of smells from the burning flesh masked in the cloying incense from the cremation grounds, the smell of tea leaves in their first flush, the fragrance of talcum and attar from the brothels across the border, to finally the smell of rag smoke from a silent torch rally.

LSN: “Bordersong” turns on (the aftermath of) a vivid, violent image, and the poem’s speaker is part of a communal voice rather than an individual I which seems to highlight the impact of conflict on communities. The poem is peopled, but the people are blurred together as groups, with the exception of the Rimpoche, the two Liberation Front Leaders, and the young martyr who are singled out. How did the voice and the different characters come about for you?

RC: Unlike in “Canticle,” I wanted the poem to speak through the town’s collective and communal voice. I use this voice in another poem that just came out from Southern Humanities Review called “Lamentation for a Failed Revolution,” where the antiphonal section modeled on Greek lament traditions uses a similar choral voice, albeit a solely female one. “Bordersong” is populated by types rather than singular identifiable characters (except the Rimpoche referring to Guru Padmasambha, the legendary eighth-century Buddhist teacher), right from the young boys visiting the brothels across the border to the young martyrs they (possibly) become in the end, to the women silently marching in the rain, and the beheaded liberation front leaders. There is also a constant intermingling of two “states.” This border-crossing is played out through shared mythology, history, religion, including the border between the animal and the human world with the elephants foraging in the fields at night.

LSN: Are both of these poems part of your forthcoming collection? How do they speak to the book’s larger themes and concerns?

RC:  Yes, “The Indian Railway Canticle” and “Bordersong” both appear in my forthcoming collection from Tupelo Press/HarperCollins. The latter is part of the “Locus Amoenus” section in the book. “Locus Amoenus” means “pleasant place” in Latin, and is a trope identified in Homer, and Ovid, and later in Renaissance poetry; it denotes an idyllic place of pleasure and safety. Ovid frequently inverts this trope, turning the idyllic and charming place into a setting for unspeakable violence. I wanted to envision the bordertown in an Ovidian sense of abundant beauty which is always under the shadow of violence—not just as a marginal place ravaged by political turmoil as the “center” and the media see the region. 

LSN: Which aspects of craft come to you more intuitively and which do you have to work harder for? Is it different for each poem or is there a pattern to your process of drafting and revision?

RC: In general, narrative comes easier to me, although these two poems are an exception to that rule, as the rhythm and music were built into the composition. Music takes a while sometimes and in my most narrative poems comes through revision. But the forthcoming book is also formally restless and has equal parts traditional lyric poems, fractured sonnet crowns, hybrid forms, prose poems, and straight narrative poems. Formally the book traces my own growth as a poet since my first book.

Rohan Chhetri is a Nepali Indian poet based in Houston. He is the author of Slow Startle (Emerging Poets Prize, 2015) and a chapbook of poems, Jurassic Desire (Per Diem Poetry Prize, 2017). His second book of poems (Kundiman Poetry Prize 2018) is forthcoming in 2021 from Tupelo Press in the US, and HarperCollins in India. His poems have appeared in New England Review, TriQuarterly, Vinyl, Prelude, Literary Hub, Poetry Society of America, & has been translated into French for Europe Revue and Terre à ciel.

Leena Soman Navani writes poetry, fiction, and criticism, and her writing has been featured with Ploughshares and Kenyon Review among other publications. For her work across genres, she’s received support from the National Book Critics Circle, Catapult, Brooklyn Poets, BOAAT, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Visible Poetry Project, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she earned her MFA. Twitter: lsoman

Behind the Byline

Elizabeth Austen

NER author Elizabeth Austen speaks into a mic

Who has authority to speak, and what gives them that authority?

Poet Elizabeth Austen discusses “How to Interrogate an Archangel” and “Calling Out the Names” (NER 40.4) with NER staff reader Jessica Gigot, in which she reveals that “I still want language with the force of a spell, the power to change everything—for spoken language to bring coherence to an incoherent world.”

Jessica Gigot: Your poem “How to Interrogate an Archangel” begins with a determination to find answers from a “spiritually / disheveled higher being.” You later write, “Remember information is secondary / to your purpose. The voice matters most.” What do you mean by this and how do you feel it influences the resolution of the poem? 

Elizabeth Austen: If I remember right, generating this poem involved a line borrowed from Ladan Osman (cut in subsequent revisions), a requirement to include all 15 words on a list, and about 18 minutes to write a first draft. When I’m lucky, something uncensored surfaces while my directive mind is occupied working in all the “given” words within the time limit.

Though I wasn’t conscious of it in the generative phase, the question at the crux of the poem is: Who has authority to speak, and what gives them that authority?

Angels and archangels were entirely real to me as a child, and until my late teens I believed in the authority of the Church. I’m always a little startled when I realize how much the images and ideas of my Catholic upbringing still foment (ferment?) in my subconscious. In this case, in retrospect, I see that the poem expresses that old desire for there to be Someone Wise Who Is in Charge, alongside a deep suspicion of those hierarchically endowed figureheads.

I still want language with the force of a spell, the power to change everything—for spoken language to bring coherence to an incoherent world. By the section with “your own human hands,” (I hope) I’m raising a question about how we might recognize and express the limited, but real, power that we do have.

JG: In “Calling Out the Names,” you honor origins. “Sand remembers shell” and “Honey remembers hive, bee and blossom.” The line “Grain in the loaf remembers field” particularly stood out to me and speaks to the beautiful and brutal power of transformation—loss and gain, grief and healing. Why is it important to remember and to call out the names, as you have titled this poem, and how does that implicate the “you” addressed at the end of the poem?

EA: I wrote “Calling Out the Names” for a very specific audience, and a particular occasion. It was commissioned by Seattle Children’s Hospital, for the annual memorial service for children who have died. Families come back year after year to participate in this communal ritual of remembrance. At one point in the service, everyone is invited to speak the name of the child they are grieving.

(I’ve worked at Seattle Children’s for more than 20 years, and for the past decade I’ve also provided poetry/reflective writing sessions for the staff, as a means of self-care.)

I haven’t experienced the profound loss of a child; in fact, I’m not even a parent, but I wanted to say yes to that request. I knew that I wanted to write a poem that could rise to the level of ceremony, that would have an incantatory quality, readying the space for the calling out of the names.

Every parent I’ve spoken with who has lost a child has said, in one way or another, how important it is to hear their child’s name spoken aloud by others, and to know that their child is not forgotten. One mom, in particular, spoke about the death of her child after years of chronic illness. Her description of making her son Jeff’s bed for the last time ignited the series of images that shape the poem.

In some ways, this was the least “willed” of any occasional poem I’ve written. Though of course it went through many revisions, the final version is essentially how the poem arrived. It’s mysterious how these things happen.

I’ve learned in the couple of years since I wrote it that the poem resonates with many kinds of loss. Sometimes I’ll include it at the end of a reading, and invite the audience to call out the names of their missing beloveds, and I call out the names of mine. For those of us who are not part of an organized religion, opportunities to share our mourning, and our remembrance, are so few.

JG: Are these poems part of a new collection of poetry for you? Can you tell us more about this body of work?

EA: Yes, for several years I’ve been working on a new collection of poems. Today I think it’s nearly finished, but ask me tomorrow and you’re likely to get a different answer.

At the core, these poems reflect an ongoing obsession with questions of agency and authority: who gets to speak, whose voice carries weight, whose actions matter, and why? My intention is to consider these questions in the context of marriage, family, country, environment.

But these newer poems are frequently angrier and more overtly political than I’ve let myself be in poems before, and so they pose new craft problems—it’s harder to find the necessary revision distance, for one thing.  

It’s also, in many ways, a more frankly spiritual collection of poems, concerned with questions about what prayer might be, and what might constitute a response.

I just looked up from my computer and my eye landed on one of the seven Post-it notes on the mullion: “the finishing is the part that makes the artist. —Claire Dederer.” Yep: working on the finishing.

JG: You are a former Washington State Poet Laureate (2014–2016) and you have taught and shared poetry in several institutions in Seattle, including Children’s Hospital and as a poetry correspondent for KUOW radio. How have these experiences informed your work and/or inspired new work?

The through line connecting all those roles is poetry as a spoken art, and an innate desire to invite people into the pleasure and depth of poems—I just get a huge amount of joy bringing poems (my own, and others’) to life for an audience. This is especially thrilling when the audience is initially skeptical about poetry, or about the possibility that poems could speak directly to their lives. Of course, I don’t always win them over, but when I’ve managed to write or choose a poem that connects, and to speak it in a way that pierces through resistance—well, that’s what sustains me.

And of course the great joy in my 19 years at KUOW was bringing other poets’ voices to new audiences, and getting to interview a huge variety of poets, from W. S. Merwin and Tim Seibles and Jane Hirshfield to first-time authors.

JG: We are living through a lot of political and environmental uncertainty right now. What role does poetry play for you in unsettling times?

EA: Oh, my answer to this question varies daily. I’ve always needed the space poems hold for ambiguity, for multiple meanings; I’ve always craved the kind of intimacy and connection across time, geography, and experience that a good poem can give me as a reader. Now I need those things more urgently, and want to provide them to others, when I can—either through what I write, or, more often, by sharing others’ poems.

Do you know Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, the anthology James Crews edited? I keep buying it to give to my non-poet friends. It feels like a necessary counter-voice. And I keep recommending Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slow Down. Her warm, kind voice, her choice of poems, and her concise, intimate introductions to the poems feel like a kind of rudder to drop into the day.

JG: What is your writing routine? Do you have a writing group that you work with to develop new poems?

EA: For the past several years, I’ve written regularly with two talented, accomplished, and generous poets: Kathleen Flenniken and Susan Rich. I meet with each separately, once a month. We use short, timed constraints, often involving a piece of visual art or a borrowed first line or end words, vocabulary banks, etc. That structure—and their friendship—pulled me through a period of intense doubt about poetry itself, and my ability to write it. And yes, it was one of those writing sessions that generated the first draft of “How to Interrogate an Archangel.”

Elizabeth Austen is a former Washington State poet laureate, and author of Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011) and two chapbooks. For the past decade, she’s led poetry and reflective writing sessions for clinicians in a variety of healthcare settings. “Calling Out the Names” was commissioned by Seattle Children’s Hospital for the annual memorial service for children who have died.

Jessica Gigot is a poet, farmer, teacher, and musician. She has lived in the Skagit Valley for over 15 years and is deeply connected to the artistic and agricultural communities that coexist in this region. Her first book of poems, Flood Patterns, was published by Antrim House Books in 2015 and her writing appears in several publications, including Orion, Taproot, Gastronomica, The Hopper, Pilgrimage, About Place Journal, and Poetry Northwest.

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Behind the Byline

Rosalie Moffett

Black and white photo of NER poet Rosalie Moffett

Rosalie Moffett’s poem “Petty Theft” (NER 40.4) sparks a conversation with NER staff reader Quinn Lewis, who is struck by both the beauty and the grief in Moffett’s work. Moffett, who grew up in a canyon in rural Washington, believes poems can grant a reader re-entry into their life, and talks about what she reads that gives her that “I wish I could do that” reaction.

Quinn Lewis: One of the things that struck me most in your poem “Petty Theft” is the presence of beauty. Beauty is often a tricky subject, and I love the decision to pair “beauty” with the verb “scavenge.” Can you say a little about the role beauty plays in your writing and in your life? 

Rosalie Moffett: You’re right, the word beauty in a poem seems a bit like a person in a play admitting out loud that they are an actor. 

I suppose that sometimes in poems I feel like beauty’s PR officer, trying to point out to everyone Look how hard Beauty is working. Look at it keeping its appointments literally everywhere. But of course, in a strip mall parking lot in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Beauty needs a good PR person. 

When I talk to my students about what a poem can do, I talk about how it can grant someone re-entry into their life—i.e., a reader, post-poem, is newly able to step back into what they have been seeing or feeling or thinking with an intensified awareness. Poems, I tell them, are anti-numb. And, of course, we are prone to numbness. In so many mind-boggling ways, the contemporary landscape of events demands numbness. To remain feeling, to maintain a connection to self, to the natural world, and to keep the sea of newstwitterhorror from washing over you requires this intensified awareness. The poem is a still corner in which to contend with a crystalline image, unexpected music, an utterance—to have a moment with the kind of beauty that turns up your dials.  

So now I am perhaps way beyond your question, except to say that with a particular awareness, with the dials cranked, one is much more equipped to scavenge for what keeps us feeling human.

QL: You mention both the strip mall and the natural world. Images of nature and our (over)developed landscapes intersect in your poem. What particular environments have you lived in, passed through, read about, etc., that have influenced or found their way into your poetry? Is environment central to your work?

RM: The natural world is enormously important to me. I grew up in a canyon in rural Eastern Washington, with two biologists for parents. I spent a lot of time outside by myself. That landscape and its attendant particularities (caddis fly larvae, thistles, wolf spiders, hawks, etc.) show up frequently in my work, as well as the Snake River. The canyon had, once, a town, which went underwater when the river was dammed. The idea of that disappeared place has been a troubling wonder for me for a long time. I think it’s (excessively, repetitively) clear in my work that my urge is to look at the features of the landscape and wonder what interior it’s fostering or reflecting. 

So, the strip mall. Of course, there’s no ignoring it. Fostering, reflecting. Of course, it’s got its own magnificence, its own comforts. Nothing is easier than to say the strip mall is ugly and the natural world is beautiful—so that can’t be right. (Even though, yes, raze the strip mall.) Or, at least, there’s something more interesting to say. I mean, what is it to experience your own, precise grief as you stand between Office Max and a Ruby Tuesday? (Versus standing on some remote rock beach.) Since I moved to Evansville this fall to teach at USI, I have been driving every day on the Lloyd Expressway. And it’s such a beautiful word: expressway! It’s creeping into my consciousness, and bringing its (ugly, decidedly) billboards with it. It’s crammed in there with the caddis flies and the rattlesnakes, so of course it’s showing up in my poems. 

I’m probably straining at your question’s seams, but “the outside” is central in the sense that I don’t know how to keep it out of my poems. 

QL: Grief is certainly in the webbing of this poem, as well as those in your book Nervous System. Anticipated grief, the anticipated or imagined future life—are spun gorgeously together. Who do you look to (poets, artists, thinkers) for their explorations of grief and longing?

RM: My answer for that is Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, which she wrote after her brother’s death, as well as Ed Hirsch’s Gabriel, a book-length elegy for his son. The former for its gutting stillness and simplicity. The latter for its grappling, its casting about for a way to think in that aftermath. 

One poem that is so joyful, so wonderful, and so totally underpinned by grief that it took my breath away is “Hammond B3 Organ” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from the New Yorker. In one of my poetry workshops, we spend two weeks reading poems on “joy” and two weeks on “sorrow” but the two are—it becomes clear—often inseparable. I’m interested in what our need is for both, or our inability to have one without the other. 

QL: Are there any modes or “trouble subjects” for you that make writing especially difficult? When you read others’ work, like “Hammond B3 Organ” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, are there feelings or subjects that make you think, “Damn, I wish I could do that?”

RM: Oh, there are loads of things that I find difficult to address. Politics. Racism. Whiteness. Gun violence. I’m trying to make inroads into those subjects and the further I get from the sort of sovereign territory of my own interior and into the fraught public space, the harder it gets. (I tried to get into a poem from the fact that the president called the people who brought the articles of impeachment scumbags and all I got from it was a string of my own, italicized epithets, if this gives you an idea.) 

I think the times I most have that “I wish I could do that” reaction is with poems that get the complexity of love right. Romantic love is another tough one, I think, and I’ve more or less steered clear of it (as a subject for poetry) and yet, damn, when it’s surprising, and weird, and has a bit of trepidation, it can be superb. I teach my intro students Mary Szybist’s “In Tennessee I Found a Firefly,” which is dark and wonderful. Just a few days ago I read Keith Leonard’s poem “Spratchet” (on Twitter, but it’s in the new Ploughshares) and, yes, it’s got its light, its delight, but something too, unsettling . . . It’s hard to figure out just how to do that. 

QL: Among the wolf spiders and landscape of the Snake River, one of your obsessions or flood subjects is the mother figure. What are you working on now, and what obsessions from your previous collections, Nervous System and June in Eden, have carried over into the new poems and/or project(s)? What new obsessions, if any, have arisen?

RM: I recently took stock of my poems since Nervous System and realized how many were obsessively revolving around the processes of the mind and the imagination, around the strange facsimile of the outer world we build for ourselves on the inside. Memory I am still interested in, but what I am trying to explore now is how to conceive of the future—which is where these juggernaut public forces, climate change, violence, injustice, etc. come to bear in the poems. We are asked in America to imagine, even to prophesy, the future in so many odd, impossible ways. I mean, consider how many ill-equipped people (myself very much included) are doing risk-assessment analyses in order to choose insurance plans? Or how many people (young or otherwise) are wagering the future’s odds against art, against literacy and against—here it is again—beauty? 

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2019), winner of the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of June in Eden (Ohio State University Press, 2017). She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, the “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, and scholarships from the Tin House writing workshop and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Believer, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

Quinn Lewis, a staff reader for NER, has published her poetry in Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and Best New Poets. She was a 2018 Claudia Emerson Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has received residencies from Hawthornden Castle and Willapa Bay AiR. She takes care of a horse in rural Pennsylvania.

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Behind the Byline

Fiona Sze-Lorrain & Christina Cook

Greta Knutson by Man Ray 1935

The fall 2019 issue of NER features “The Black Virgin,” a strange and haunting story by Greta Knutson, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Christina Cook. We wanted to know a little more about the author behind this dark tale, and how it came to be translated now, more than thirty years after the author’s death. Here’s a brief Q&A between editor Carolyn Kuebler and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain.

CK: Your bio note for Greta Knutson says that she was born in Sweden but moved to Paris as a young woman, in 1920, and made connections with artists and writers, dadaists and surrealists. She’s described as a prolific painter and writer, though her writing wasn’t published until after she died of suicide in 1983. 

What first captivated you about Greta Knutson: her paintings, her biography, or her writing? 

A: All of the above.

Q: How did this translation project come to be?

A: I first came across Greta Knutson through her paintings and poems about twenty years ago, when as an undergraduate, I was researching French expatriate writers and artists from the twenties and thirties. The fact that Knutson was a multigenre and trilingual artist who led a low-key life spoke immediately to me.  

After my studies, I returned to France and worked as a musician and tutor.  By turns of coincidence, on my way to one of my students, I would often pass by Knutson’s and Tzara’s former residence in Montmartre, which was designed by Austrian-Czech Modernist architect Adolf Loos. This renewed my interest in the couple’s literary work, and triggered me to study them seriously.  

In 2005, I reread Knutson and started to study her work keenly. Most of my sources have been in French and Swedish. My colleague Christina Cook came on board soon after I decided to work on Knutson’s translations. Like Knutson, Cook has Swedish heritage, and she shares my interest in twentieth-century French poetry (she is a published poet and translates contemporary French poetry). This has been a passion project of many years for us.  

Until today, Greta Knutson remains little known not just in the Anglophone world: in France she, too, seems largely forgotten. Je ne sais pas pourquoi, I don’t know why.

Q: Do you know why her writing wasn’t published during her lifetime?

A: Possibly because Knutson was both a discreet and highly independent woman, brought up in a noble family . . . We do not have the impression that she needed to exist in the limelight as an artist, nor had the urge to make public her identity as a writer. In that sense, she seemed a true artist: her work came first, and it was the process of artmaking, and life above all, that might matter most to her. Of course, it is likely that she was overshadowed by the male writers and artists in her circle, including her ex-husband Tristan Tzara, her ex-lover René Char, and friends such as Albert Camus, André Breton, and Alberto Giacometti. Sexism isn’t something new.

To be precise, however, Greta Knutson’s literary writings, art criticism, and translations did appear during her lifetime in various journals and publications, including Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, Le Nouveau Commerce, Obliques, and Non-Lieu. A book in German of her writings—Knutson herself translated her texts, or rewrote some, into German—was published in 1980, even though her volume of collected texts in French was only published posthumously in 1985.

Q: Her paintings are said to reflect Surrealism and post-Cubist tendencies, but her writing—or this story at least—is very earthy, told from a child’s perspective. It’s almost like a tale from an earlier time, rather than a story by a wealthy, worldly expatriate in twentieth-century Paris. Do you know what year the story was written?

A: The story was possibly written in the seventies, when Greta Knutson was already in her seventies.

Q: The story takes place in the “karst.” This term wasn’t familiar to me, but apparently it’s a landscape characterized by eroded limestone, with lots of caves and underground funning water, such as you’d find in Kentucky, or the Kwangsi area of China, or the Causses of France. Do you know if this landscape figured into Knutson’s life? Why would she write about this area? 

A: For many years—during and after the Second World War—Knutson sojourned in southern France; she lived on a farm in Vaucluse in Provence, in the villages of Gordes and Maubec in Luberon, for instance. She had also stayed in Aix.

Q: How does “The Black Virgin” fit into her writing in general, including the poetry if you’re familiar with it, and why did you and Christina choose to translate this story in particular?

A: “The Black Virgin” is probably our favorite story of Greta Knutson. It is a dark tale—an early twentieth-century Bildungsroman where transgressions fueled by erotic drive, maternity, violence, and possession are set against the stifling social conventions and religious politics of a typical southern French village. The fact that it was told in the first person by a young girl, even though Knutson was already in her seventies when she wrote the story, heightens the covertness and tension of non-dit that stays immune to time, and the tragedy of circumstantial alienation that a reader isn’t quite prepared for until very late into the plotline.  

Q: Can you tell us a little about her paintings? Did she have more success with them in her lifetime?

A: Greta Knutson’s first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1929. A retrospective of her paintings, drawings, and sculptures was just on view at the Norrköpings Konstmuseum in Norrköping, Sweden earlier this year, from March 23 to September 1. 

Q: I hope there are more Knutson translations on the horizon for you two and look forward to seeing what comes next!

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, translator, editor, and zheng harpist who writes and translates in English, French, Chinese, and occasionally Spanish. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Ruined Elegance (Princeton University Press, 2016). Her latest translation is Ye Lijun’s My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019). She serves as the 2019–20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. She lives in Paris.

Christina Cook is the author of A Strange Insomnia (Aldrich Press, 2016), Ricochet (Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, 2016), and Lake Effect (Finishing Line Press), for which she received the 2012 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her poems have been anthologized in Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets and Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place. Her poems, translations, essays, and book reviews have appeared in New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and more. She is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing and Rhetoric Program at Penn State University.

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