New England Review

Behind the Byline

Justin Balog

NER poetry reader Liza Watkins talks with poet Justin Balog about abstraction and intimacy, the responsibility of poetry (if any!), his two poems in NER 43.1, and his artistic influences.

Liza Watkins: I’m curious about your writing process. Near the end of “Observation on Discovery,” a poem that moves between images of an art installation and those of domestic life on a Catalonian boulevard, the speaker observes that “The narrowness between buildings makes the perfect telescope.” When you set out to write, is there generally something you already know you’re trying to see more clearly within the confined space of a poem, or do you proceed with a more exploratory frame?

Justin Balog: Yes, this is such a lovely first question, thank you! Whenever I’m thinking about the writing process I’m reminded of the framework that Louise Glück laid out in her essay “Education of the Poet”—essentially, there are those writers whose initial stages of writing are indebted to witness and there are those that rely on sketch, which is to say the non-anecdotal. I think, surely for most of us, that the idea can lie somewhere in between, that perhaps we are compelled by some experience and, in the way I think about it, the emotive intricacies and nuances can become more alive through sketch.

The contextual factors of this particular poem stem from a set of annoying mishaps—in the beginning days of my first-ever trip abroad, the airline I flew with permanently lost my luggage and then the next day, my and a friend’s Airbnb key was stolen. It’s now a great and funny story, but in the moment there were a lot of uncertainties and annoyances, so I would describe the impetus here as beginning in experience. But, in my process of writing, I like to let association, what we might label here as a type of “sketch,” allow for the opportunity of moments of unexpected insight (here, the art exhibit or the streets of Barcelona as you mention in your example). It’s these links in association that found, what I would view, a (re)discovery of smallness in the line that you’ve quoted from the poem. In my work, I like to think about scale and I view the craft of writing as a funnel (a telescope, we could say, might be its own type of funnel as well!). I think about abstraction (emotion, an idea, or something esoteric in nature) as existing at the large end of the funnel, and, through the stem, we translate those abstractions through some type of experience, memory, or lived virtue, and then in the small end, finally, to intimacy, self-knowing, learning, or a moment of transcendence (this idea of the funnel can be extrapolated too to images, in this case, how one section of the universe is made small by the walls of buildings). In short, I would say it’s a little bit of both—I know that there are ideas I try to see more clearly in experience, but that it is moments of association and living that allow for the exploratory, the sketches, to unfold.    

LW: I like this notion of the writing process as a funnel from abstraction to intimacy, with what you are calling “lived virtue” translating from the large opening to the stem. And I can see your interest in scale in operation in “Abstract,” which contrasts the small scale of the houseplant with the unfathomably large frame of global warming. In beautiful and enigmatic lines, the speaker states, “If I could, I wouldn’t say anything / to Greenland and its disappearing ice,” but of course the poem does say something. Could you share your thoughts about the responsibility of a poem to get a specific message across or prompt a particular thought process? I’m also curious how this might relate to the formal choice to include significant moments of silence throughout “Abstract.”  

JB: This is a complicated but important question, I’ll try my best to answer. The responsibility of action for poetry exists, I think, on different levels. At the very top, you have what Heaney might have described as a “lyric action”; a responsibility meant to achieve some sort of outward affect. The consequences in this type of responsibility is frequently dire; it’s an extreme and dangerous form of a type of responsibility, a type of political protest. At the other end we have another type of witness, what I would call an emotive vicariousness; internally, we must feel and be compelled toward consequence before we are spurned to act. I did an interview with Jane Hirshfield nearly two years ago now and asked a derivation of this similar question about her poems, coincidentally, that also tackled the climate crisis. She used a term, which I think is useful here, about responsibility, specifically centered around climate change, that a poem is a “vessel of felt response.” There are a lot of different types of poetic responsibility, but those are at least some of my brief thoughts about the responsibility of a poem to achieve a particular message more broadly.

Obviously, the first type of responsibility is not what is happening here. I’m happy that you think “Abstract” says something. This was a poem that I wrote back at the beginning of the pandemic under a weight of existentialisms that, in different ways and for different reasons for different people, became incredibly even more cumbersome during those first months of COVID; everything from health to the economic, racial, environmental, and political grief of what was happening.

I think this might be where the formal choice of silence that you’ve identified comes from. It felt right to have the poem pause almost out of sheer enormity for the situation. The reason that I say it makes me happy that you think the poem says something is because I guess you can say something out of sheer hopelessness, but in a way, I think, that very hopelessness can eschew any type of future “responsibility” as we might call it here. The responsibility of action is a difficult question because, at least for me, in this instance, it wasn’t an expectation I held for the work. What I’m trying to say is that the responsibility here, at the time I wrote this, was entirely self-centered, only just a manifestation and a prompting of my particular thought process during that period of time. Responsibility can take on its own forms, outside of intent or private sphere. It’s often attributed to Yeats, but an epigraph in his 1916 collection Responsibilities reads “In dreams begins responsibility.” We could quibble and muse about the mysteriousness of that epigraph until the end of time but responsibility, at least, has the tendency to evolve from within. 

LW: Thanks so much for entertaining what was rather a monumental question, but one I’m always interested in exploring with other writers. I love the idea of quiet poems being generated out of a hopeless time, and how the emotive vicariousness of the work, as you say, can open a space of personal intent, however unconscious. And I am so glad to know about the epigraph “in dreams begins responsibility,” which makes me think of a gorgeous line from “Observation on Discovery,” “my heart / felt weightless as a toolbox.” In fact, in both poems in this NER issue you explore aspects of being tethered versus being weightless or free. When you write do you work with a collection in mind, or are you less project oriented?  

JB: It’s always so enlightening to hear others connect the dots the work lays out, these things always have such a way of remaining elusive to ourselves. One of the many privileges of my MFA experience was that I had a fellowship year to refine and work solely on the collection that I had turned in as my thesis project. It’s now been about two years since my fellowship ended and I wrote these poems under the umbrella of that collection, as I have been doing with everything I’ve written since. I go back and forth, I think as most of us do, on whether I should throw the whole thing out and try again or continue to work on it and see what other insights and perspective time has to offer (I am leaning toward eventually doing the former, but that changes depending on the time of day). Projects always demand an aesthetic focus, and that focus can be helpful for guiding us, but that demand sometimes has a way of narrowing possibility and vision, at least for me. I think that I’m slowly learning the importance of that balance, but for now I think I’ll keep (hopefully not hopelessly) revisiting the collection until I feel I have no more darts left to throw at the wall.

LW: I’m glad you’re still throwing darts at the wall! Have there been particular poets or visual artists that seem to be in conversation with your work or that you’ve found inspiring for this collection as currently conceived? “Observation on Discovery”engages in a kind of ekphrasis, and I’m curious whether this is a regular part of your writing process. 

JB: So I have to admit, I’m not terribly involved in the arts world outside of writing (although I wish I was!). I come from a more science-y educational background and the visual arts are something that has remained out of grasp for me but that I’ve always had a deep respect for. I try to get to museums or exhibits every once and awhile to make up for my very pedestrian knowledge of the arts, but I’m not much better for my attempts. To go back to the previous point about the experiential in the writing process, the particular art exhibit referenced in the poem is from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona—it was literally a hanging bedframe and I thought it was sort of nice to pair that with the clothes strung out to dry over balconies and alleys (I have a picture of it, but I can’t seem to find the name of the artist to credit them for the work). That being said, if there is ever a piece of art, or anything of influence, that I see and think it could work nicely in a poem I do draw a fair amount of inspiration from it. I love to think about the associations between objects, ideas, facts, etc.

In terms of particular poets that I feel have guided my sensibility and aesthetics, hands down, Kathleen Graber’s work has by far been the most influential for me (I think her collection Eternal City is one of the best collections of poems I’ve ever read). Another big influence of mine is the work of Lucie Brock-Broido. I think both of their work has been vital in the way that I understand associative logic in poems and how that can be brought out through lyric. Some other favorites of mine who have informed my own sensibilities are Arthur Sze, Anne Carson, Catherine Barnett, Alberto Rios, and Hannah Sullivan—I of course could go on, but I’ll limit myself to only a couple! 

LW: I’ve actually been wondering whether the installation in “Observation on Discovery” could be the one from the cover and titular poem in Fanny Howe’s Come and See. It’s a piece called Third World Extra Virgin Dreams 1997 by Dr. Suzann Victor. Fanny Howe is another master of associative logic, and it would be interesting if you both chose the same image to work with in a poem. 

JB: Yes no kidding! That would have been such a fun coincidence, but sadly it is not the same one (although I guess there is a common theme among floating bedframes and poems it seems!). 

LW: Ah, well I’m sorry I can’t be helpful in identifying the artist, but I’ll be on the lookout for more installation-inspired poems about the place we dream. Speaking of dreams, I understand you’re just finishing a master’s program in education. Congratulations! When you’re not busy reading and writing, what captures your interest or helps you unwind? 

JB: Yes that is right, I’ll be finishing up my second masters here at the end of the month, which I’m very happy and excited about! I was just in a year-long program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education; it all went by so quickly, I feel like I blinked and it’s all over now. When I’m not busy with school, reading or writing, it sounds cliché, but I love spending time with my friends or traveling. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of really great people in my life, they are a big source of energy for me and spending time with them helps me recharge and unwind (obviously this has been made extremely difficult the past two years). Outside of that I’m also a huge sports fan, me and all of my family are from Chicago and have been raised to love everything (Chicago) sports, although my main sport is soccer so I’m very excited for the World Cup coming up here in the fall. I also love to unwind with absolutely, mind-numbing dating shows—I don’t watch much TV or anything, but I get unhealthily invested in The Bachelor and, more recently, The Ultimatum on Netflix, they are my guilty pleasures. I try to carve out as much space for different interests, because I don’t think writing would really ever happen for me if I didn’t do plenty of living too!

Liza Watkins is a poet and social worker from Louisiana. Her current work reflects ongoing research in Gulf Coast communities and wildlife refuges. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston, where she was a teaching fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Paris Review and Massachusetts Review. Liza lives in New York City.

Behind the Byline

Rob Franklin

NER fiction editor Ernest McLeod speaks with writer Rob Franklin—whose story “Phoenix” appears in NER 43.1—about restraint, intimacy in the internet age, and queer kinship.

Ernest McLeod: “Phoenix” opens with the story’s narrator, David, recalling how much a particular writer meant to him: “He was my writer. The writer whose verse I could recite on loop, by memory, whose words were literally etched into my skin.” When a friend gives David the writer’s book, he “stayed up all night that night reading with the sort of urgency one only musters at sixteen, when life still appears to bloom for you alone.” These lines tap into the special way art or artists can speak to us when we’re young and trying to discover our place. It led me to reflect on my own formative artistic influences. Were there writers or other artists who really rocked your youthful world and did you have any of them in mind while writing “Phoenix”?  

Rob Franklin: There were definitely a bunch of inspirations for the character Roland, mainly my favorite gay writers. Both ones who loomed large in my adolescence, like Richard Siken and Edmund White, and ones, like ​​David Wojnarowicz and Hervé Guibert, whom I first read more recently and to whom I felt an immediate (and perhaps unearned) kinship. 

I was also thinking a lot about parasocial relationships and fandom in the internet age. There’s a poet, my generation, whose work I first encountered on Tumblr, years ago when I was a freshman in college — he had this project where he invited strangers to answer a series of questions about sex over email, then replied with answers of his own. A kind of experiment in intimacy and the internet. It’s funny because he’s now a friend of mine, but I’ve still never told him that I was a participant, that we corresponded many years before meeting. 

EM: David, at loose ends just after the quarter-century mark of his life, learns from social media that his writer has had a “minor stroke.” He ends up responding to a Facebook request for volunteer visitors to help Roland (the writer) in his recovery. Impulsively, David buys a one-way ticket from New York to Phoenix, where Roland lives, and settles into a cheap Airbnb. Phoenix gives the story its title and provides such an interesting and unexpected setting for the story. David muses that Phoenix resembles a strip mall or “to be less generous but perhaps more accurate, the parking lot of a strip mall” and notes how the “sun glared with a punishing, almost biblical intensity.” How did you arrive at Phoenix and how do you see it functioning as the story’s backdrop? 

RF: I’ve actually never been to Phoenix, or Arizona at all, so much of that landscape imagery came from Google Street View. I was drawn, just imagistically, to a desertous, barren landscape. Also because the speaker, David, has a sort of snide New York smugness about the rest of the country, it felt fun to filter that landscape through his consciousness. To frame it as a wasteland. 

But once I’d set it there, and added that to my doc as the work-in-progress title, I did start to think more about the double-meaning of Phoenix—the mythic bird that rises from its ashes. It seemed suited to a story about stealing from your heroes, about youth and aging, illness and death. So the title ended up inspiring the final scene in which David walks away with the stolen manuscript. 

EM: One of the things I appreciated about “Phoenix” on first read was its restraint. David and Roland are guarded with each other and, as a narrator, David withholds as much as he reveals. I felt that this restraint gave the story a mysterious, almost coded quality, leaving a lot between the lines. I know during the editing process we talked a little about David’s motivations and a balance in the narrative between opacity and transparency. Can you talk about the balance of stated and unstated, as it relates to “Phoenix” and/or to your writing in general?  

RF: That was a tricky balance to strike, as I don’t think David’s motivations are entirely legible even to him. For instance, there’s clearly something a bit sinister about his relationship to the writer and how he capitalizes on the man’s poor health to get close to him—but I think David would defend his intentions throughout most if not all of the story. I’m very drawn to characters like that, for whom there’s a gap between their self-perception and their actions. Characters who act on strange impulses and only figure out their motivations, bit by bit, in the aftermath. 

EM: David feels such an intimate kinship with Roland’s writing, yet within the intimacy of Roland’s house, there’s a real distance between them. David also has to confront the divide between Roland’s work, which is suspended in time, and Roland himself, who is physically diminished by time. I’m fascinated by these paradoxes within the writer/reader relationship. What inspired you to explore these themes and, since it’s Facebook that brings David and Roland together, how do you think social media influences how we relate to our artistic idols? 

RF: It’s an age-old paradox, right—the (often vast) distance between the artist and their work. Definitely one I’ve witnessed in real life, though not with quite the intensity or disappointment of David. But I think it’s only worse now that so many of our relationships, real and imagined, are mediated by technology. Virtual access of the kind David has to Roland gives this illusion not just of proximity but ownership. He feels owed something, precisely because he’s cathected his identity onto this writer he loves, a projection of his own desire for depth, and he can’t quite square that with the man he encounters in Arizona. It creates a dissonance, which, by the end, he can only process as rage.  

EM: Throughout the story, David compares his own life to Roland’s—or, Roland’s as it’s presented on the page many years earlier. We learn that Roland’s output was limited and centered on “his lover—the one who’d died, the one he’d written about in ways that still broke my heart and against which all my small loves had been measured.” Some of my favorite passages in the story reference Roland’s work, through David’s perceptions. They’re quite minimal, yet I think the story’s success hinges on them. Was it a challenge to capture the historical and emotional weight of Roland’s work (on David) in a few lines, and what were you striving for tonally in these passages?

RF: Absolutely, it was one of the primary challenges in writing the story—to communicate what would have been so weighty and impactful about Roland’s work without having it on the page. I think about that a lot with films and books that hinge on the audience’s belief in the strength of a particular performance or piece of art without actually showing it. It doesn’t always work. In this story, I tried to communicate something of Roland’s style by filtering it through the psyche of a speaker who considers himself a student, a “devotee.” So what matters, more than the actual work, is David’s perception of it. Tonally, I wanted to use those sparse lines and sections to communicate a grandness or depth in scope. The hold something can have on you simply for its having been your first. 

There’s a moment, late in the story, after David finds the unpublished manuscript and takes it to read in bed, that I thought of as a fugue-like collapse of that articulation of style, where it becomes felt more than understood, and David’s voice can merge with his hero’s. 

EM: You’re an emerging writer who has published poetry and short fiction. I believe you’re working on a novel? How was it navigating the leap from shorter pieces to a long project? 

RF: Yes, I am! Right now, I’m editing a manuscript for a novel, which is at a very high-level about race, class, and addiction. I think that with poetry, short fiction, and now this longer project, I’m often circling themes of intimacy and identity formation—how young people seek out experiences with which to define themselves and often hurt others in the process. What I’m working on now is no exception, though I do think it’s a stylistic leap. There’s a more essayistic bent to much of the prose that just emerged as I was thinking and writing about the nature of narrative: what stories we tell about ourselves, what stories our bodies tell without permission. 

Ernest McLeod is a writer and artist living in Middlebury and Montréal. He has served on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a longtime NER reader before becoming fiction editor in 2018. He is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His writing and photography have appeared in The Sun, Men on Men 7: Best New Gay Fiction, Salon, F-Stop, JPG, File, as well as in numerous Vermont publications.

Behind the Byline

Mark Harman

NER staff reader Simone Kraus speaks with author Mark Harman about self-translation and re-translation, Kafka, and his essay “Borges Translates Joyce Who Translates Himself,” which appears in NER 43.1.

Simone Kraus: I want to begin by asking you what inspired you to explore Borges’s ambivalent relationship with Joyce? Suzanne Jill Levine, in her essay “Notes to Borges’s Notes on Joyce,” writes that “Borges was always seeking himself in the writers he read, loved or loved to hate—a Narcissus perpetually leaning over the mirror of letters.” Would you agree? 

Mark Harman: Why choose Borges and Joyce? Well, as with so much else in life, it was by happenstance. From a stay in Buenos Aires, where I was visiting my brother and his Irish-Argentinian wife, I got some insight into Argentinian culture. One can’t spend long in Buenos Aires without running into traces of Borges. I became particularly interested in his affinity with Irish writers, and especially that “love-hate” relationship of his with Joyce. As I read more of and about Borges, I sensed paradoxical parallels between the ways in which he and Joyce practiced the craft of translation. I grew further intrigued on noticing what Borges did—in his partial translation of the final “Penelope” chapter of Ulysses—with a gorse-covered headland on the outskirts of Dublin, not only because I happen to have grown up on that windswept hill, but also because a sense of place has long been a characteristic feature of Irish literature and lore.

SK: In your essay “Borges Translates Joyce Who Translates Himself” you address a topic which, I think, has been largely ignored, or rather neglected, by critics: self-translation. Prominent self-translators were/are Samuel Beckett, Nancy Huston, Milan Kundera, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Vladimir Nabokov. In your piece you, as a translator, look at the self-translator James Joyce. At the same time, you look at Joyce through the eyes of the translator Borges. It is a triangular approach. And within that triangle one can see more triangles. In his 1925 review of Ulysses, Borges writes: “Joyce expands and reforms the English language; his translator is obligated to take similar license.” You comment on this by saying “All the more so, one might add, when the writer and the translator are one and the same person. For, unlike most of us translators, who render the work of others, Joyce is free to do as he likes. Indeed, if any other translator rendered ‘ALP’ [“Anna Livia Plurabelle” from Finnegans Wake] as freely as does Joyce, he would be accused as Umberto Eco pointed out, of taking “intolerable license.” How much freedom do self-translators have? 

MH: They enjoy unlimited freedom. Writers are free to change and adapt their work as they see fit, and the same principle surely applies to those who translate their own work. Joyce takes full advantage of that freedom in translating a short section of Finnegans Wake, a work that draws on words and phrases from over sixty languages. Although any adequate translation of the Wake would need to challenge conventional notions of translation, few translators would be willing to match Joyce’s audacity in relocating Anna Livia, a personification of the river Liffey, to Rome.

SK: In 1998, you published the essay “H. and K.: A Translator’s Story.” It is a very personal piece. Against the backdrop of Kafka’s world, you describe what it was like to grow up in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. And you discuss the complicated relationship with your father. Translating Kafka’s novel The Castle was a turning point in your life, because it gave you a sense of closure. In your essay you write that translating the novel “was like an axe for the frozen sea within me: in impersonating Kafka in English I drew on my own father-obsessed Irish upbringing and in the process distanced myself from it.” Is it Kafka who was responsible for getting you into translation? 

MH: Well, Simone, I’d say yes and no. Yes, because reading Kafka had that “axe for the frozen sea” effect on me. Not immediately, though. When I first read The Castle as an undergraduate at University College Dublin I identified strongly with K., the main character. Like him, I was then a compulsive over-interpreter and had an almost Kafka-like obsession with my father, whom we called H., hence the title of the essay you mention. It was only years later, in graduate school in New Haven, that I was able to see K. in a different light. Subtle clues in the novel, which I had missed on a first reading, indicate that K. is completely mis-guided and therefore not a suitable role model for anyone. So, Kafka clearly was a formative influence, though not the initial impulse for taking up translation. For that I have to thank the Swiss writer Robert Walser, whom Kafka incidentally loved to read aloud. Reading Walser’s stories in German in the early eighties, I felt that anglophone readers needed to be exposed to more of his writing than was available in English at the time. So I translated a number of his short stories, which subsequently appeared in Robert Walser Rediscovered (UPNE).

But I continued to engage with Kafka as a reader, teacher, and scholar. It wasn’t, however, until the early nineties that by another fortunate happenstance a colleague, Cecile Zorach, alerted me to a piece in the New York Times which mentioned that Schocken Books was holding a contest for new translations of Kafka. I submitted a sample translation of a section of The Trial, and, although I was not selected that time, I was subsequently asked to submit a sample of The Castle, which I was then commissioned to translate. One of the things I most enjoyed while translating that novel was the opportunity to read drafts of the translation aloud chapter by chapter to a group of friends at the home of two colleagues, Lina Bernstein and David Kramer. Kafka himself loved to read his work aloud to family and friends in sessions which were often interrupted by laughter. I felt it was essential to do likewise since live “performances” of Kafka’s texts release qualities that are not so easily perceptible on a silent reading, especially his fine use of irony and dry sense of—often gallows—humor.

At the moment, I am putting finishing touches to a selection of Kafka’s stories which I have translated and annotated for a book under contract with Harvard University Press. Wearing both hats, as translator and commentator, has been something of a challenge, since the English versions I am commenting on happen to be ones that I myself have translated. Which brings up a variant on the old chicken and egg question: Which has priority, the translation on the page or the note in its margins? That question becomes significant whenever I touch on differences between English and German usage. Then I have to ask myself: is there any way I can modify the translation so that the need for such a note disappears? That in turn brings on, in addition to what Kafka famously called “commentators’ despair,” a bad case of “translator’s despair.”

SK: Regarding the translator’s role, has your perspective changed over the years? As I pointed out above, you once compared your task of translating The Castle to the act of impersonating Kafka in English. In another essay—”Digging the Pit of Babel: Retranslating Franz Kafka’s Castle“—you see yourself as Kafka’s medium. This is particularly interesting, because “medium” can mean many things, including the image of a person who is in contact with the spirits of the dead or who communicates between the dead and the living. A medium can also be the material or form used by an artist or writer. How do you define the job of a translator now?

MH: I don’t think my perspective on translation has changed. As you know, we translators play multiple roles at the same time, as impersonator, mime, medium, and ghostwriter. Those are rough analogies rather than precisely defined terms, since translation is a continuous balancing act. It is also, as a hoary dictate suggests, an “as if” craft: “Write as if the original author wrote in English” (or in whatever the target language happens to be). The notion of the translator as medium came to me as I was working on The Castle: having scarcely noticed that I had been up all night, I looked out the window and saw that it was dawn. That’s when I muttered to myself: “Was Kafka going mad when he wrote this or am I going mad translating it?”

SK: In an interview with World Literature Today, Michelle Woods—who wrote about you in her book Kafka Translated—reflects on the aspect of retranslation. She says that translators are, of course, very aware of their predecessors’ work, but from conversations with other translators she got the impression that they kept other translations out of mind while re-translating. What is your experience? Should a new translation be an improved version of earlier translations? Or is a new translation like a palimpsest? 

MH: Like many translators, I get absorbed in my own process and in what I am trying to achieve. First, I identify recurring stylistic traits in a writer’s work, and then I try to craft a prose style that echoes the style of the original. Once I have a reasonably satisfactory draft, I sometimes find it useful, when stumped, to make spot checks to see what solutions other translators have found. At times I will adopt someone else’s solution, at other times the simple act of comparing different choices stimulates me to come up with a further solution.

Generally, I don’t like to comment on other versions of a book I have translated, since, as W. H. Auden once remarked in a review of new Thomas Mann translations, that is a task which “can only be congenial to the malicious.” I did so in the case of The Castle because, although I had been commissioned by Schocken Books, now a division of Penguin Random House, to translate that novel, one of the anonymous reviewers to whom the publishers sent the manuscript argued, or so I was told, that there was no need for a new version because the first translations by Edna and Willa Muir—the latter evidently did most of the work—were still more than adequate. 

So, the manuscript sat abandoned in a drawer at the publishers while I sat frustrated at home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Not wanting a few years work to go down the drain, I wrote a piece for New Literary History outlining the case for issuing new translations of Kafka’s work, and of The Castle in particular. The argument revolved partly around the fact that Malcolm Pasley’s German critical edition of that novel was in itself sufficiently different from Max Brod’s to warrant a new translation. While praising the Muirs for their pioneering Kafka translations, I listed a number of criticisms of their version of The Castle that critics and scholars had been voicing for several decades. Although classic original works do not age, translations almost invariably do. That is true even of those rare translations that, like the Muirs’, achieve canonical status. I sent copies of the piece to editors on the upper floors of Random House. After a while, I received a call from the then editorial director at Schocken, who told me that my efforts “had not gone unnoticed” and that the book was being scheduled for publication.

SK: Thank you so much for your time, Mark.

Simone Kraus is an experienced translator living in Germany and the Czech Republic. She is the author of Prag in der amerikanischen Literatur: Cynthia Ozick und Philip Roth (Peter Lang, 2016), a book focusing on the literary representation of Prague in the works of Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth. Simone’s work has also appeared in literary magazines, including literaturkritik.de and New England Review.

Behind the Byline

Alyssa Pelish

NER fiction reader Mary Tharin speaks with Alyssa Pelish, whose story “Paleontology” appears in NER 43.1, about excavations, the unknowability of others, and embodied characters.

Mary Tharin: “Paleontology” begins with the painstaking excavation of the largest dinosaur ever uncovered. When I re-read those first paragraphs, it struck me that writers are constantly engaging in their own excavations, uncovering memories and distilling experiences to use in their fiction. Was that on your mind when you started this story?

Alyssa Pelish: I like that observation! That connection, though, wasn’t so much on my mind when I started the story. I had visited the dinosaur wing of the American Museum of Natural History, and I was taken by those signs that continually advise museum goers of the limits of paleontology: what we can’t in fact know about these creatures despite all the careful excavation. That continual admission seemed haunting to me—beautiful and haunting. And it made me think of the limits to what one can ever know about anyone else’s experience.

But then, of course, those museum signs no doubt also attracted my attention because I do spend so much time in that mode of excavation you describe.

MT: The story explores the limits of these excavations: the fact that we can never fully know others, or even ourselves. The narrator is vexed by these limits, and as a reader I sympathized with her. It made me wonder, though, what is behind our need to know so much about each other? What’s so frightening about the alternative?

AP: It’s a really good question. A misguided quest for intimacy? Fear of solipsism?

Miscommunication surfaces in various ways throughout the stories I write. For me, I think this recurring theme stems in part from an old, old fear of being misunderstood—and maybe working to understand others became a way of reassuring myself that I, too, could be understood, that some kind of connection could be forged.

There are, no doubt, other explanations.

I’ve been both fascinated and horrified by stories whose narrators show either an utter lack of regard for someone else’s interiority or a dangerous obsession with it. I’m thinking here of Humbert Humbert’s “safely solipsizing” Lolita, as well as Proust’s narrator’s obsession with what Albertine does when he’s not there, what he can never know about her. In either instance, the other person remains entirely unknowable. (That single, passing moment when it occurs to Humbert that he doesn’t know a thing about Lolita’s mind, that within this girl he calls Lolita there might be “a garden and a twilight”—but that he is incapable of knowing them.)

In a more heartening direction, the way the so-called problem of other minds gets handled in To the Lighthouse is soothing to me. Lily Briscoe first imagines that there exist, “in the chambers of the mind and heart” of Mrs. Ramsey, “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions,” which, if deciphered, could teach her everything she longs to know about this woman. But then Lily realizes that such information is not actually what she’s longing for: what she desires is “nothing that could be written in any language known to men”; what she desires, really, is “intimacy itself.” She recognizes that what she’s longing for is not is not an exhaustive inventory of the contents of another person’s mind. What she’s longing for is a sense of connection. It’s an idea that gets developed later in the novel, when we see how Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey understand each other not because of a strong intellectual connection but because of their shared intimacy. In that scene between them, hardly any verbal language is necessary. “She had not said it: yet he knew.”

That’s not where my narrator ends up. She’s not there yet. She’s made the mistake of thinking that knowing what her son is thinking (finding the inscribed tablets in the chambers of his mind) is the only way toward intimacy with him.

There’s a moment in that classic Thomas Nagel essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat,” that I find similarly soothing. Nagel concludes that, just because our means of apprehending the world won’t ever allow us to understand the subjective experience of being a bat doesn’t mean that bats (or any other creatures) don’t have experiences as rich as those of our own. This observation strikes me as a way of granting others a quiet dignity. There’s a garden within them, a twilight, that can just exist without our quantifying it. Maybe that’s closer to where my narrator ends up.

MT: The narrator of your story is a playwright and her husband is an actor. Is theater important to you? Has it influenced your writing?

AP: Hmmm. I’ve lived in New York for the past eleven years and have a good friend with a theater background, so I’ve certainly watched more theater and thought more about it than in any other period of my life. So, it’s there. But I don’t think of it as a big influence on my writing.

Theater emerged in this story because the narrator privileges talking as a means of knowing other people. It made sense for her to be a playwright who creates dialogues that, when performed, amount to a kind of wish fulfillment. The other elements of theater in this story then readily grew out of that: the self-excavation the Method allows, the skepticism about the correspondence between interiority and behavior that acting implies, and so on. I suppose that, in some ways, I’m interested in writing fiction as a kind of performance, as a means of inhabiting other roles while never being able to completely leave my own perspective behind.

There’s also the fact that, as a writer and reader, I love encountering a character’s interiority on the page. Where a character’s mind goes when they’re doing something in the physical world: the memories and free associations and reflections that arise, the way their particular perspective colors what they’re noticing in that physical world. Theater, of course, doesn’t allow such ready access to a character’s interiority. But that constraint has made me think more about how my characters are embodied, especially when and how to locate them in the physical space of a dialogue. So, for instance, instead of always using speech tags (she said, he asked), I like to experiment with attaching a line of dialogue to a relevant physical description (a facial expression, an action, a tone of voice) of the character or of the space. Thinking of my characters as embodied—as a particular body in a particular space—also becomes part of figuring out what they’ll do or think or feel next.

MT: The “Method” is presented in the story as a way for actors to tap into the essence of emotion. It struck me that this could be useful for writers of fiction as well. Did you have experience with the Method before writing this story? Is it a tool you yourself have used to deepen your storytelling?

AP: I actually knew very little about the Method before I began working on this story. But as I researched it, it did occur to me that it’s not unlike what I do when searching for a way to describe a given character’s perceptions and emotional reactions. Of course I want to be careful not to lend my own emotional and sensory memories to a character where it’s not relevant. But once I’ve figured out how a character should react, I definitely do some excavation of my own. So, no, I’ve never used the Method in any formal way, but writing this story made me more aware of the (lower case) methods I do use.

MT: The story contains snippets of plays that explore how words can be used to establish connection, but can also be meaningless or difficult to find. In the narrator’s play, Talking Board, two sisters use a Ouija board to confront difficult questions; while in The Bald Soprano, absurd dialogue is used to highlight the emptiness of small talk. The narrator seems to feel that words are tools essential to the project of uncovering truth and meaning, while her husband and son put less value and expectation on words. Did you aim to present both sides? Do you, ultimately, lean in one direction?

AP: I’m not sure that I present both sides equally: we see everything from the narrator’s perspective, and she’s so tethered to knowing the world through verbal language that, even when she’s made to reconsider that approach, she only comes to accept what she can’t know—not to consider what might be illuminating about other ways of knowing. It’s possible that comes next for her, but I was most interested in telling the story of her grappling with the limits of what she can know.

Mary Tharin is a fiction reader for NER. Her short stories have appeared in Sixfold, Five on the Fifth, and Collective Realms, among others. A native of California, she now lives in Italy where she teaches English.

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