New England Review

Behind the Byline

Lindsay Starck

It takes a courageous runner to brave the race.

NER author Lindsay Starck (pictured left, walking the icy shore of Lake Superior) talks to NER editorial panel member Evgeniya Dame, sharing the story behind “Baikal” (NER 41.1) and its roots in the annual winter marathon across the largest and deepest lake in the world.

Evgeniya Dame: When I first read “Baikal” I couldn’t believe that its premise—a race across the frozen Lake Baikal in Siberia—was real. And yet it is! Could you talk more about the real-life marathon and how you went about the process of fictionalizing it?

Lindsay Starck: Yes! It feels so unbelievable. I remember reading the first few paragraphs of a news story about the marathon when I was standing in line at a coffee shop. I was so hypnotized by the video header, which showed a line of tiny runners trekking across an endless expanse of ice, that the barista had to call my name repeatedly. I’d never heard of this race, which has taken place annually since 2005 (when conditions permit) across the largest and deepest lake in the world. Baikal contains nearly a quarter of the earth’s fresh water, which is exceptionally clear; it’s ringed by mountains and is home to distinctive flora and fauna such as the famous Baikal seal; and it’s full of geothermic springs that bubble up, even in the winter, to melt holes in the ice. It takes a courageous runner to brave the race, and as I prepared to write this piece I sought out stories of those who had attempted it. I studied photos, videos, and written accounts, which is where I learned, for example, about the “hummocks” (ice rubble) that spackle the surface, the tents on the course, the hovercraft rescue-missions, and the perception of the lake as a living being.  

ED: Have you ever run a marathon? What helped you get in the mind of a runner?

LS: I am a runner, but not a marathoner. My father, however, has run thirty marathons; he tends to collect them as one would collect vintage coins or passport stamps. So I’ve been in the crowds, waving homemade signs and cheering the runners as they plod past mile fifteen, twenty-three, etc. I’ve attended the pasta dinners held in heated tents on the eve of the race, and I’ve been close enough at the finish line to see the faces of the runners as they take those final steps. I’m always astounded at their fortitude, but also worried about the toll that the race can take on their bodies!

ED: Visually, your story looks very distinct on the page: paragraphs interspersed with short questions. When I read the story, I immediately fell into the rhythm that those questions created. How did this structure arise?

LS: As someone who does not possess the fortitude or willpower necessary to run across Lake Baikal, I had questions for my character: namely, “How?” and “Why?” From the beginning, I was interrogating her. As I wrote more, it became clear that the central relationship of the piece had been shaped by unspoken questions. When I read that the founder of the race had described Baikal as “alive” and “breathing,” I wondered if the narrator could be the lake itself. I’ve long admired the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is written as a catechistic call-and-response, and also John Edgar Wideman’s “Stories,” which is a flash fiction piece composed of “question after question after question.” Finally, one of my favorite remarks about literature is Anton Chekhov’s observation that the artist’s task is not to answer questions but to pose the questions correctly. 

ED: I love the way “Baikal” engages the environmental themes while making them serve the story and the character. Are you often drawn to these themes in your writing? 

LS: Yes! Especially recently. It was late March when I came across the article about the marathon, which meant that soon the ice would be breaking up on the lakes near where I live . . .  And as I walked across the parking lot to my car, I imagined a woman running across the lake while the ice cracked open behind her, racing against time the way that we’re all racing against climate change. My stories are centered on relationships, but to me those relationships are most interesting—and truest—when set against the backdrop of a specific environmental, political, or cultural moment. I recently published a short story about the last remaining Pinta Island tortoise on the Galapagos Islands, and I’m in the process of sending out two pieces that are also climate-themed: one about a future water shortage in California, and one about a guy who leads tours for people who want to see species on the brink of extinction. 

ED: There is a beautiful passage in your story that describes the main character’s reaction as her husband reads poetry to her. “Sometimes, as she tilted over the towering precipice of sleep, her temple throbbing and her skin burning, she’d think she heard something between the lines: something the poet was reaching for but couldn’t find the words to say. The poem behind the poem.” This concept—the poem behind the poem— sounds fascinating. Is this a common notion?

LS: That’s a great question! I don’t believe the phrase itself is all that common, but to me the idea feels central to the work of countless writers. I’ve long been interested in the use of literary constraints—from sonnets or pantoums in poetry to specific word counts in flash fiction to the question-answer format you see here—in part because language itself is a constraint that writers strive to transcend. We always want to say more than what we can actually get onto the page; with every word we type, we lose the possibility of infinite alternatives. As Italo Calvino wrote, “The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” That’s what I had in mind when writing this passage: the poem on the page is the ghost of the poem you were trying to write. And the idea seemed to work well with the image of the marathon’s finish line, which feels tantalizingly close but also unreachable even from the start.

ED: I guess literary constraints are restrictive and freeing at once. I remember reading a Rick Moody interview in which he spoke about his love for them. He said limitations make him feel “energized.” Is there a literary constraint you’re thinking of trying next?

LS: I agree with Rick Moody! The novel that I’m working on actually began with a constraint: there are a number of first-person narrators, and I wanted each narrator to be addressing someone else in the novel, rather than simply addressing the reader. Over the course of several revisions, I’ve had to let go of that original idea; but, like any good constraint, it propelled me through my draft and taught me a lot about the characters and their connections to one another, so it definitely served a purpose. 

ED: Could you share a book or two that you’ve been reading during these strenuous times?

LS: I’ve found solace in Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a gorgeous ode to the natural world which does a wonderful job reminding humans of how brief and inconsequential our lives are when compared to, say, the lifespan of a sequoia. I know that may not sound particularly comforting, but it helps me to remember that even though this pandemic feels like it’s lasting forever, it’s really only a blip. (The novel is also an important reminder that the pandemic is only one of many crises the world is currently facing.) 

I’m also trying to memorize more poems, as I find something meditative and peaceful and rhythmic in this act of complete attention. I’m grateful for the chance to inhabit someone else’s language and vision for a while. Some recent pieces I’ve memorized have been Jamaal May’s “There Are Birds Here,” W. S. Merwin’s “To the New Year,” and Naomi Shihab Nye’s “What Changes.” 

ED: Thank you!

Lindsay Starck was born in Wisconsin and raised in the Milwaukee Public Library. Her first novel, Noah’s Wife, was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 2016. Her writing has recently appeared in Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Cincinnati Review. She teaches and writes in Minneapolis, where she swims in the lakes and skis in the streets. She lives with her husband and a geriatric golden retriever. 

Evgeniya Dame studied English in Samara, Russia, before coming to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Joyland, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction and interviews have appeared in Electric Literature and New England Review online. She is the recipient of a Monson Arts Residency Fellowship, Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship for Maine Writers, and the Young P. Dawkins III prize for best MFA thesis at the University of New Hampshire. 

Behind the Byline

Michael R. Katz

Michael R. Katz in Pskov, Russia

Translator and NER contributor Michael Katz talks with NER editorial panelist Evgeniya Dame about his translation process, his time spent abroad in Leningrad during the early 1970s, and the most underrated Russian writers. Katz’s translation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story, “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Auntie,” can be found in NER 39.4.

Evgeniya Dame: I was very excited when I saw the New England Review published Nikolai Gogol’s short story in your translation. It’s not often that his name comes up in Western publications. What do you think is the reason?

Michael Katz: I think it’s just that he is much less well-known than Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Gogol is harder to translate, his language is difficult, there’s no doubt about that. I’m in the middle of translating his story “Portret” (“The Portrait”) and I’m having difficulty with the language. It’s complicated, the syntax is involved, he has endless subordinate clauses, his vocabulary is very broad, compared to Dostoyevsky’s. I’m enjoying it, but it’s difficult.

ED: Does your translation method change depending on the author, or, in this case, on the difficulty of style?

MK: My method doesn’t vary from author to author. I read the text carefully, do a rough draft; edit the draft; send it to a native speaker colleague, who makes suggestions and corrections; then I edit it again to produce a final draft.

ED: What drew you to Gogol in the first place?

MK: After years of working on Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (and some Turgenev) I needed a break – and Gogol is funny! He’s Russia’s humorist. He may be the only Russian humorist, certainly the best one of the 19th century. In the 20th century he has to compete with people like Zoshchenko, but for the 19th century he’s the humorist. I’m enjoying a break from the religious and philosophical depths of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

ED: I had read Gogol in school, including “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Auntie,” but I did not remember that the story is unfinished. That came as a complete surprise! And then of course I thought of the famous ending of The Government Inspector where the author literally freezes his characters in the final scene, which – in a way – leaves the play without an ending. Are unfinished stories common for Gogol?

MK: Well, I don’t believe that “Shponka” is really unfinished. I think that’s part of the artistic device of the story. You get the frame with Rudy Panko, the beekeeper, where he talks about writing the story down on paper which his wife later uses to bake pirozhki. It’s part of the humor. And I see the theme of the story as Shponka’s morbid fear of intimacy, in particular of women, and even more in particular of marriage. When the courtship between Shponka and Storchenko’s daughter breaks down, because they have nothing to talk about, except the flies and summer, I think that really is the crisis of the story. Then Shponka goes home, falls asleep and sees this phantasmagorical dream, which is for my money the best part of the story – that last couple of paragraphs. And there really is nowhere to go after that for Gogol. There isn’t going to be a marriage. The story ends with Auntie thinking of some new scheme, but it’ll fail in the same way that any arranged marriage fails. The same thing with Revisor (The Government Inspector). In the last scene, when Khlestakov’s deception is suddenly revealed, that is the culmination of the story, so the play ends there. There is nowhere to go for this play.

ED: I have tracked down a few other translations of this story. Looking through them, I noted that you are the only translator who points out that the Aunt thinks in Ukrainian but speaks in Russian. Why do you think previous translations omitted this fact? Why was it important for you to point out?

MK: First, there is no way to translate it. You either have to leave it in Ukrainian or you translate it into English, along with the Russian that you’re translating into English. It’s a curious fact. Gogol was born in Ukraine. He starts as a Ukrainian writer. He has absorbed Ukrainian folk tales and images, but later on he switches to Russian and he’s trying to break out from this mold of Ukrainian folk stories. He wants to become part of Russian literature, so he writes in Russian, but he uses Ukrainian characters because they are exotic for the Russian audience. It’s a way of adding local color when he ascribes some Ukrainian phrases to Auntie. I also think it’s funny that she speaks in Russian but thinks in Ukrainian. It shows her closeness to the people.

ED: Your academic career took you to many outstanding schools, including the University of Leningrad. How did the time spent there influence you as a scholar and a translator?

MK: I was there in 1970-1971, as part of the US-USSR official cultural exchange agreement. Soviet students, largely in natural sciences, engineering, and technical subjects, were studying at MIT and Caltech. In exchange, the United States sent over historians, political scientists, economists, linguists, and literary critics. I was one of some thirty American graduate students sent to Russia that year and my contingent chose to be in Leningrad. I was working on the poetry of Vasily Zhukovsky, his literary ballads. I spent a year in Leningrad, working at the Institute of Russian Literature (the Pushkin House), and at the Russian Language Institute. They had a wonderful index dictionary of the Russian language from the 18th century, which I used. Later, in Moscow, I found a dictionary of Zhukovksy’s Russian and I studied the style and language of his ballads. I wrote a thesis, defended it, and then switched from poetry to prose. That was my last work on a poet. Then I wrote a book about dreams in Russian literature, including Shponka’s dream. I began translating in 1980 and since then translated about 16 Russian novels and now collections of short stories into English.

ED: You must have many stories from that time…

MK: Plenty of stories! My advisor was actually Ukrainian, Georgy Panteleimonovich Mahogonenko. The great challenge for me was learning how to say his name. He called me Mike and I had to call him Georgy Panteleimonovich. He would come up to me, shake my hand and say, “Zdravstvuy, Mike.” (Hello Mike.) And I would have to stand up and say, “Zdravstvuyte, Georgy Panteleimonovich.” (Hello Georgy Panteleimonovich.) I had to say that before he left to greet somebody else! My great accomplishment of the year was being able to say the whole thing before he let go of my hand.

ED: What are some of the overlooked Russian authors that you wish were better known in the U.S.?

MK: I think Turgenev is underrated. People know only Fathers and Children, they don’t know any of his other novels, especially Rudin, his first novel. It is quite good and very instructive about the education of women in the middle of the 19th century. Goncharov is probably the most underrated and his Oblomov is a gem. It’s rarely included in syllabi. I’ve taught it only once and students loved it, but it’s long and usually not regarded in the same way as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Then, of course, Pushkin. He’s hard to translate, so everybody knows about Pushkin, but nobody reads him. He should be known better than he is.

ED: You’ve taught Russian literature for many years. Some of your students already come with a deep interest in those works, others are just starting to read Russian classics. What do you think a person needs in order to understand Russian literature and be able to connect with it?

MK: One of the things that strikes me about Russian literature is how brief the “golden age” was. Pushkin is born in 1799 and Chekhov dies in 1904. In that hundred-year span so much first quality, genuinely wonderful writing was produced. American students have difficulty understanding where that all comes from. Middle ages produced a couple of interesting things, the 18th century is kind of dull, but all of a sudden Pushkin bursts onto the scene and is followed by Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. There are some wonderful things in the Soviet period, but for me the glory of Russia remains the 19th century. The incredible burst of creativity is unique. No other culture experienced that intensity in such a short time. I think that curiosity and appreciation of that intensity is what is needed in order to understand the Russian literature.

♦

Michael Katz is the C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has published translations of over fifteen Russian novels, including works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chernyshevsky.

Evgeniya Dame studied English at the State Pedagogical University in Samara, Russia before coming to the U.S. on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire. Her MFA thesis received the Young P. Dawkins III award, and her work has appeared in Electric Literature and is forthcoming in The Southern Review. She is a recipient of the Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship for Maine writers. After returning to Russia to teach at Moscow State University for several years, she currently lives in Maine with her husband.

Behind the Byline

Cady Vishniac

NER author Cady Vishniac

Cady Vishniac, author of “The Jakub Feinmans of the World” (NER 39.2), and NER editorial panelist Evgeniya Dame share an earnest talk on suffering, helplessness, Yiddish literature, and that sinking feeling we all get in response to the bad things out there—both in fiction and in the facts of our everyday lives.

 

Evgeniya Dame: Much of “The Jakub Feinmans of the World” revolves around the hardships of women: raising a child alone, facing strict abortion laws. The protagonist, however, is a man, Aleksy, who is caught between his sister and his girlfriend, sympathetic to their quite different opinions and, ultimately, at a loss how to help them. Did you always envision this story having a male protagonist? If not, what made you choose Aleksy?

Cady Vishniac: I absolutely always intended to tell this story from a man’s point of view. I usually don’t. Come to think of it, this might be my only published story from a male POV. There was a part of me that just wanted to prove I could get into a male character’s head.

Aside from that, I didn’t set out to write a story about the reactions of either women or Jews to their own suffering. It’s been a very dark couple of years, and the thing that goes on in my head is not always a focus on my own suffering; it’s the complete ripping of my heart when children are shot by cops or deliberately lost and tortured in ICE facilities. It’s that a foreign government is violating the human rights of Palestinians supposedly on my behalf. It’s the knowledge that trans people are dying. There’s a special rage and helplessness that comes with the fact that I can’t, you know, predict where the next child will be shot and throw myself in the way. I can’t singlehandedly abolish ICE. I don’t vote in Israel and none of my protests mean shit to its anti-Democratic prime minister, who is actually quite public in his contempt for American Jews. I’m probably not strong enough, physically, to waltz onto the scene to stop the murder of a trans person. And so on.

I can help with some of these issues, obviously, by volunteering my services or going to a demonstration or even voting, maybe sending Bibi Netanyahu another petition to ignore, but no one person, especially a grad student with a bad hip, can ever do enough against the latest worldwide slide into fascism.

What is this rage and helplessness? What does it do to us? How can we do better, but not in a performative way that burdens the true victims in these situations? Neither I, nor Aleksy can answer that question, yet. We’re just exploring. I think the only way out is through.

ED: I wondered what your story says about heroes. Doctor Feinman is a hero of tragic times, the man who opposed Nazis and rescued Jews from the Warszava ghetto. Still, he fails to live up to Aleksy’s expectations, or rather he can’t help Aleksy, who needs to be a hero in times when friends and enemies are hard to define. What are your thoughts on heroes and heroism?

CV: We all need to struggle to be heroes in times like these. It’s hard to contemplate heroism when you have a daughter to raise and an ex who would not necessarily make the best dad in case anything ever happened to you. It’s hard to be a hero when you’re just keeping afloat.

But there is, of course, the real Doctor Feinman about whom Hannah Krall wrote her book: Marek Edelman. He was pretty conscious of being just some guy. Radical left—much further to the left than the majority of people who consider themselves part of the #resistance, or whatever, today, not to be too pointed about that. Actually, let’s keep being pointed: he’d be bemoaned by DNC leaders today for having the temerity to fight Nazis.

There really is a book about Doctor Edelman’s ghetto uprising, and he’s left us plenty of documentation so we can safely say he pictured himself not as special, but present—and maybe morally obligated to shoot some Nazis. He was deliberately not heroic and deliberately antagonistic to the idea of heroism all his life. We should all be this. We should all struggle to be heroes until the idea of heroism is rendered mute, because such behavior is normalized.

Maybe, the best thing for the world would be for this thing we call heroism to die, and be replaced by an unwavering dedication to decency.

ED: Łódź appears a palimpsest of historic periods where contemporary reign of the conservative party Prawo i Sprawiedliwóść overlies earlier, hungrier times and years under Nazi regime. A setting so rich in history can be daunting for a fiction writer. How did you find balance between the real place and the Łódź your characters inhabit?

CV: Well, we come back here to the rage and helplessness, really the depression of Orwell’s vision of the future, “a boot stomping on a human face—forever.” The bad stuff can get to feel cyclical. A great wheel of bullshit, if you will.

We have a character suffering with that depression, someone struggling to deal with the great wheel, and he’s haunted. He has to be. And that haunting is what makes the future feel like every stage of the past. Aleksy’s character and interiority as this depressed person with a fear of recurring evil is what makes it all hang together. He’s not seeing the city he lives in with fresh eyes. He’s seeing tomorrow, his childhood, his mother’s childhood, his grandmother’s. My thought was that if I can make him that way, then I can just go along for the ride, living all time at once with him in a Łódź where everything is always happening.

ED: I just have to ask about the evil eye! I loved the way you describe Wiesława as “conflating the New Testament and folklore in her worldview” when it comes to a belief like that, which is something I witnessed many times growing up in Russia. What is the evil eye for you—a simple superstition, a sign of spirituality, or something else?

CV: I take the evil eye pretty seriously. I have my great-grandfather’s hamsa hanging on the inside of my doorknob and it seems to help.

It’s not that I believe the neighbors are cursing me, although they can be really rude about the shared washing machines. It’s not that I feel important enough to have some all-powerful force after me. Maybe it’s a simple superstition, except that a superstition can never be that simple. They’re a bulwark against the void, a way of enacting control. If I know the evil eye is out there, well, that sucks, but at least I have a realistic idea of what I’m facing and how to fix it. Maybe the fix is a spiritual one, and if I’m spiritually pure, acting in the way that I think my G-d would want me to, then I become someone who can handle the evil eye.

It’s a force for me, not a person. I don’t believe in cursing people. But I’ll tell you this: this guy harassed me in my MFA (which woman writer doesn’t have this story), and some friends of mine cursed him over Facebook, like burning sage on a mirror. That’s their version of the hamsa, I guess. It was one hundred percent magic that I will always be grateful for.

ED: Could you speak about your work as Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center? How has knowledge of Yiddish and the practice of translation affected your writing style?

CV: When we think of Yiddish literature, a lot of people immediately go to Sholem-Aleichem, or whatever bits and reinterpretations of Sholem-Aleichem’s work we get in the US, including, obviously, Fiddler on the Roof. I have read quite a bit of this sort of deliberately folksy stuff in translation and cut my teeth on the Yiddish, and that was a great thing for the rigid fiction writer I was in that moment. I stopped caring about sentence order! I learned to love a good digression! I began to understand folk culture as something we currently invent and will continue to invent, something that helps us engage with the world. This careful invention of folklore is the bread and butter of what academics tend to consider the early greats of Yiddish fiction.

ED: Are you currently reading any authors writing in Yiddish? Who would you recommend?

CV: This isn’t reading, but Michael Yashinsky just produced a Yiddish-Language Fiddler on the Roof, and I’m very impressed with him. There have been a few Yiddish plays in New York in the past several years, including Asch’s God of Vengeance, and musicians like Daniel Kahn are enormously popular. YouTube series like Yid-life Crisis, podcasts like Vaybertaytsh. An episode of Arrested Development and the Broad City one about pegging all translated to Yiddish—”Hostu, oder hostu nisht, gepegt?” So I’d be doing everybody a disservice if I didn’t mention the huge body of great art coming from people of all ages, not just translation, poetry, prose. Eve Jochnowitz and Rochel Schaechter have a Yiddish cooking show whose recipes I have followed. Menashe, a contemporary Yiddish movie, premiered at Sundance.

The Forverts, which was publishing Yiddish fiction in their newspaper just under a century before I was born, continues to do so. Right now they’re serializing a novel by Noah Barrera, Der Nekhtiker Tegnik (The Grave Whisperer), and it’s wonderful. This is what I’m reading at the moment, and I would highly recommend it. I should add that the website is a good learning tool for intermediate readers as well, since it’s designed to allow readers to highlight words and get a definition. So it’s good for many levels of Yiddish readers.

And for those who would like to read Yiddish fiction by a living author but don’t speak the language, Boris Sandler’s work has actually been translated into English recently in the book Red Shoes for Rachel.

 

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Cady Vishniac is a Big Ten Academic Alliance Traveling Scholar in Jewish studies at the University of Michigan and a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Most recently, her work has appeared in Glimmer Train and Salamander, where she won the 2017 Fiction Contest.

Evgeniya Dame studied English at Samara State Pedagogical University before coming to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire. Her MFA thesis received the Young P. Dawkins III award, and her work has appeared most recently in Electric Literature. After returning to Russia to teach at Lomonosov Moscow State University for several years, she’s currently completing an MA in Language and Linguistics at UNH. Evgeniya lives in Maine with her husband.

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