When a celebrated Brazilian author goes missing in Idra Novey’s spitfire debut, Ways To Disappear, her American translator Emma takes it upon herself to find a woman who may not want to be found. Joining her children in the search, the translator soon finds herself tangled in the author’s messy, escaped affairs. The resulting novel is, in equal parts, mystery, comedy, social commentary, and maybe another part hilarity. Keep reading to find out more about what makes the novel’s author tick:
Kati Heng: Of course, your novel gets me interested in translators, a hugely important part of the literary world readers often forget about. How did you get started as a translator? Is it something you want to continue to do as you (we hope) write more of your own novels?
Idra Novey: While living in Chile after college, I volunteered at a domestic violence shelter and set up an informal writing workshop with some of the women living there. As I got to know them, I started to think of poems by Adrienne Rich and June Jordan that I thought would resonate with them and began translating those poems into Spanish. I had translated a few poems in college but those translations I wrote for the workshop at that shelter were definitely what made me want to translate more seriously.
As for continuing to translate now, I can’t imagine not having part of my brain taken up with the intimate, beautiful work of translation. It keeps me innovating in my own writing. At the moment, I’m currently co-translating a book of poems by the Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian with Ahmad Nadalizadeh.
KH: I’m guessing most translators aren’t as mixed up in the lives of authors as Emma was in your novel. Typically, as a translator, how much do you actually interact with the authors you are translating?
IN: Well, it depends on whether they are alive or not, and also on my relationship to their work. I felt deeply mixed up in the life of Clarice Lispector while translating her novel, though she died many years before I was asked to translate her work. I felt such an intense connection to her that I obsessively read a volume of letters she wrote to the Brazilian novelist Fernando Sabino while I was translating her. What she wrote to Sabino about being a writer and mother left me with so many questions that I ended up composing a series of poem-letters to her, which eventually became a book called Clarice: The Visitor and the questions in those poems later fed into Ways to Disappear.
KH: I’m curious about the different brain muscles it takes to perform all the kinds of writing you do – translating, poetry, and fiction. Can you tell me a little about different habits/practices you have revolving around each?
IN: It doesn’t always work out this way, but I like to translate in the morning for twenty minutes or so before I start to write. It puts me in a more inventive state of mind as I get into my own work, and more aware of the kind of music that’s particular to the English language. I only translate writers who take risks I admire and as, for me, translation is the deepest kind of reading, I’d like to think I take more risks in my own writing when I’m working on a few translations as well.
KH: If you were ever going to run away from everyone and all responsibilities, where would you go and how would you spend your time?
IN: I would go to the moon. I wouldn’t want to stay there forever, but it would be nice to see it for myself, recite a few lines of Sappho on it, and then come back to earth. I was rereading Mary Ruefle’s essay “Poetry and the Moon” recently and I think she may be right that the first lyric poem was likely written at night with the moon as the only witness.
KH: I was especially interested in the tension between the siblings in this novel, Raquel and Marcus. Can you talk a little about the dynamic of between siblings when one disagrees/disapproves of the other’s choices? What were you hoping to explore with these characters?
IN: I didn’t set out to write about a sibling relationship in this novel but my sister is a pivotal person in my life and I think the sibling dynamic comes into almost everything I write. We lived through a period of intense uncertainty as children and are still very close. My sister lives five blocks away and we see each other as often as we can, although like Raquel and Marcus, we continually get into arguments and go about making major decisions in radically different ways.
KH: Finally, what do your bookshelves look like? How do you keep them organized? What books are beside your bed right now? What books never seem to stay on your shelves?
IN: I wish my bookshelves were organized according to some kind of system. Like everything else in my apartment, they are a mess. At the top of the stack next to my bed now is Matt de la Pena’s glorious children’s book Last Stop on Market Street, which I was reading to my children earlier this evening, and beneath that the recent issue of the literary journal A Public Space. The editor of A Public Space, Brigid Hughes, one of very few female editors of a prominent literary magazine in this country, is always up to something subversive and excellent. I always have an issue of A Public Space in my bedside stack. I also have Camille Rankine’s exquisite debut book of poems Incorrect Merciful Impulses. Anyone who hasn’t read it yet should race out in their slippers to any bookstore that sells poetry, even if the closet one is two states away, and get it immediately.
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