Claudia Durastanti

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[0:00] Music.

[0:23] Hello and welcome to Anti Methods with me Lochlin Blue and me Jamie Batchen.

Hey this is the first time listing to this podcast it's part of a series where we talk to fellow writers about their process and technique.

[0:36] So we're we're into the 50s now aren't we? We're into this of 52nd half century. I think it's.

Episode 51.

[0:54] Italian writer although as you will hear she spent some of her upbringing growing up in New York.

[1:02] And we spoke to her when she was staying at a flat in Berlin on a sort of a writing.

Song.

Travel.

She's as well as the writer. She's also translator so that also fed into her work and and.

She's got a very interesting attitude to finding a way of describing the the kind of unique light of each place.

And that she doesn't feel connected to it until she's worked out.

[1:51] Phrase that describes the light. I think she's she was still in search of Berlins when we spoke to her. Maybe she's found it now. There

By the time you listen to this podcast it hit me and catch you later forever I think it was the evening light in a in a taxi riding in Berlin yeah

Hey.

[2:17] It was great to speak to Claudia and.

[2:23] So I guess we got an interesting angle to go as being that you're in Berlin specifically to do some writing at the moment

So

[2:39] Okay so I've been planning this new novel for 3 years so far but I managed to write like five pages so that's my process at the moment and so I have this very convoluted trip

Back into the third person after using the first person so

Right now, what's happening is that I spent a couple of hours in the morning trying to fit in. This third person. So, I'm in the early stages of it but it

This is happening after a long long time spent thinking about the novels so

Right now I not really sure what the process is gonna be because I never worked this way really I usually think in right at the same time

After strangers right now which was a such a peculiar book for money our reasons hybrid you know unknown on charting territory for me

It's really tricky to go back thinking to a problem novel format but that's what I wanna do I

Think the amount of time I spend writing it's still not enough compared to where I wanna go so I hope this month here helps me a little bit with that.

In that in that period of planning for the last year is it is have you other than the five pages of of the novel that you've got have you been writing notes or have you got

In a notebooks filled with.

[4:08] You now have to translate it on the page. Like when you've when you've come to Berlin have you brought files and things on your computer that that you're gonna work from or it's just a case of a blank page and what's in your your head.

No, that's interesting. Definitely fragments notes. Very short short notes. And maps. I brought with me

In a way. So I have paper maps. I'm working. Do you know you stereotypical that's what I brought with me.

TV shows, crime TV shows when you're trying to put all the posts together. So,

Please now it's like on a coastline with fingers you know so with characters and stuff like that I don't have enough space to have a close line so hi there I used to have a room a wall but I'll learn

Because the structure.

Of the novels should be a sort of battle ship so I need to figure out where you know the ex and A's letters and numbers are matching in and so that's what I brought with me. I literally moved battleship.

Labels in a way and so I this is not my flat so I need to find a way to have it space wise visible

So this is.

[5:20] A little bit different compared to how are you see work before.

I guess there's lots of different ways that that can work in terms of what I mean you mention you've maps

Two diveraged on representation of of something but in terms of the the notes that I can imagine there's lots of different ways you could

Arrangers on the wall are lots of different ways you could

Format. You know, it says, do you have any process so far in that you find yourself writing.

[6:03] Characteristics or is it is it more around the themes of the novel or how how'd you go about breaking down something as with as much depth as a novel into into.

Fragments. Oh, I had a lot of notes.

About since I'm very bad with plot I tried to do my best effort to plan secrets but that's least interesting part for me so in every like peace of the

Puzzle of the battleship I try to have in each page vote something about character something about landscape

The year and and then what happens but what was interesting to know is that I was going along and thinking this would happen here and this happens here I managed to to switch into move down and to rearrange it

But then when I do that I

I'm not always satisfied so each box or each page has sort of lines where I delete stuff and I moved them. So this is why

To kind of physical representation of it. It's helping me because it's helping me thinking about brighter death.

Affect cars consequence or time really is helping to think.

[7:20] More about spacially where is the character at that time so this is what I've been doing so far so translating the notes I had in each little box all of these containers and then moving them around.

I'm just gonna ask if the maps and where your setting at is this of physical space you've actually been to or are using the maps to kind of

Plan your way around some of your not familiar with.

[7:43] No so I always write about a places I laugh a long time ago so my early novels were all set in New York Brooklyn New Jersey and I haven't

They've been living. Curtain and consistently in New York since I was 6 years old.

Dan I wrote a novel in Yelps Grocer Rome when I was living in the UK after 8 years that I had a mid living room to me in a way to have access to.

[8:08] Since to me writing about space geographies and landscapes way more intimate than writing about.

Family and love of fear is horror physical relationships so to me face is very sensitive and dedicated and so I need a wide stretch of time

Where you kind of have glimpses and glitches and memories about it but they're not consistent and they don't.

[8:29] Form a sort of unified scenario in a way it's so it's a little bit when landscape

Switches into being a dreamscape in a way. No, it loses a little bit of the borders and materialities

Are there. So, I've been living in Southern Italy, most of my life. I briefly wrote about it in Strangers I know but I never really addressed that space in that with novelistic

Thinking. So, what I have in the book is a unity across almost a century and a half of the new book. It's

The only constant in the book is the area in Bazilika where I grew up in but I haven't been

Living there consistently and I've been visiting there for three, 4 years. So,

As you imagine is of intense process of

But I am not researching it being there if that makes any sense and I'm also resisting travelling back to visit my mother for example which would be conventionally good for the book I think because Jen has you know this very sense for six experience of being there with liar and the sound of it but I think in this.

[9:44] Early stage of writing I don't might approach since it's not an historical novel but it's based you know it it starts in the midst of the 19th century and usually I thought

Oh I'm gonna read as much as I can about that time

Then I'm gonna leave her for a while and then I'm gonna start writing what I'm doing is the opposite I write and then I tried to verify if

What I'm thinking or imagining has some sort of connection to history or what happened so for example the knowledge a little bit about oil

And I didn't know if actually they were digging oil at the time. I wrote scenes about it. I think about it and then I went after Montana Health to see if that will anise it. Oh, I got lucky. But then this is quite messy because

If it didn't make any sense I would be forced to delete the scene.

If that makes any sense.

Keeping an acronym in if it served a kind of metaphorical purpose or.

[10:55] So that's a sensitive spot for me.

There was an Italian director that adapted Martin Eden

And so by Jack London so the film is called Martin Eden he translated he moved it from a Southern California to Naples and Geneva.

And the timeline is very sketchy in the sense that you see cars you see signs.

You see what our clothes that could span from the fastest thera to

50s or to the 80s and usually when we see these kind of anapronism or blurry timelines it that happens often

Dystopia or utopia but it's hard to see it you know.

[11:47] In different sort of projects and what I wanted to do when I actually have I have the Mexican for example of revolution in Italy or counter revolution in the 70s in the early part of the novel which is set in the mid

Of the 19th century and then I have very old

Fashioned backboard talking in the last part which is said in the future so I'm trying to see if I can convey the sense of bleaches in the macronism not

Through characters or not through timelines but with our understanding of our language evolves over time and I think that's what's fascinating to me. So I don't want any

Level of accuracy there

Or what was really happening material wise I'm more embarrassed in a way I I feel that if I want to put a factory in there at that time

I have to make it sure that there's a river

But I don't know I'm I'm trying this out since it's very very new I never I don't come.

[13:01] From the canal rating since I was always obsessed with you know.

Ambiance interior

I don't care about it in terms of plot or I don't care about in terms of language but I do feel I need to be more careful when it comes actually to.

Big objects like oil or factories or stuff like that.

[13:34] So I've been reading you know books about

Feel all about how bomb set off and even if they don't end up with the book I feel like I should you know if I'm so obsessed with this kind of dynamic I should know a little bit about it

Like daily rap balance when you're working with the real world.

But adding in to the speculative fictional elements you wanna have some balance if you if you go fully.

[14:04] Having the right mix of real reality in there is is

Important.

Wouldn't go back to have the actual experience of being there but are you sort of looking on Google Maps or email is there a river there and going online to verify that or are you.

Writing everything first and it's only once you've got a few pages down that you then go and check. So that that seems

As a writer it seems a lot risky

Damn we're gonna have to delete all that.

What's so funny about this I recently interviewed for an Italian literary supplement Jennifer Egan and she came back with the book

I don't know if come back because it's not a sequel but it's a book that evolves around her early novel of I visit from the Boot and Squad.

Send characters in a different span of time and she said that she didn't reread.

A visit from the goon scratch. She worked from scratch on what she remembered of the characters and then she went.

[15:23] Full on finished novel she goes back to reading the

She got a lot of things wrong

At that moment I felt a really a pangolf pain you know

And then I started thinking what's interesting about this sort of sacrificed pages and I think.

In the way I'm working right now there is the sort of leftovers so if I get something wrong then I delete it it cannot.

[16:10] Be there any longer but some

Part of the energy of it was something still stay in a way so it is a process of

Exploring stuff

You know, I would have to to go back. So, it's the first time perhaps of me. I was always

Writer in the sense that I I used to think about pages even in my sleep and then get up in the morning and write and they would come fully formed. So, I was also bragging when I started writing books. Oh,

I don't

A lot of editing, you know, my my books, my Stuart stories, everything is fully formed. I make my editors happy because I know exactly what I want and this is the first time

This is the

When you were asking about maps I did definitely there is a river there I've been there a lot of times since I was a little girl but my memories of it almost turned it into this sort of mythical

River that was way more stronger and

Power for a little longer.

[17:25] Five, 6 years ago, I was this very modest, you know, tiny rivers like when you go back to see the holdouts, you grow up in, now that it's it's a castle, and then the more you visit it, and the more shrinks that happens to me when I go to Brooklyn all the time, and so the palace are the mansion that my grandparents lived in, now it's

Basically a shared in the yard so that happened with the river really

And so my memory of it is one thing the reality of it is another thing but since I'm writing about that same course or stream of water

Even compare to my memories or the reality of it. It turns into another river if that makes any sense.

And with the the fact this is your fifth novel and you're doing this in quite a different way you know waking up in the morning with the page fully fund

His cause that is that an intentional decision to work in a different way to see what the results are or is that because this novel wasn't quite realizing itself in that

That way.

[18:25] I think because.

Fictional short stories and and novels and then I wrote this book Strangers I know that was kind of blending different

Genres. And somehow, even if I, as I said before, I was unturted territory. I came to it. What a very assurative voice that was fully formed in a way. So, maybe it was

A lot of years in the making I I've been thinking unconsciously about that book for

10 15 years also because I didn't wanna write about my family openly so perhaps the resistance I applied to writing in that book it

Build a sort of compression within me that when I started writing it I was very secure about the tone and what I wanted to do after that book I think when I say a game changer to me I was really afraid.

That it would completely.

It's like when you lose yourself in the woods you have to be very careful with first person narration and away because if you don't plant how is the little feeble that you didn't put the bread crumbs

Behind you, you're not gonna be able to find your way back home.

[19:42] Put these breadcrumbs and and see oh I'm gonna fall into this first person but I am gonna find my way back out so it was very painful for me and away to realize do I trust third person

Narration I I come from that I come in Italy also we have

A past tense cold pasta demoto sorry delete it every form for writing is third person in this past tense which is a classic form I come from that and then it felt almost like

It's not that I didn't trust it I completely forgot about how to use it

So this is why perhaps with this book the method I'm saying changing is not so much because I wanna do it this way

But it's because I don't.

Know how to do certain things anymore. So, it's almost about learning.

[20:36] Fascinating because it helps me to get rid of certain habits I have in writing.

Draft it's only five pages but I have different drafts of these five pages the first draft I had a tone that was my usual tone the sort of hypothetical thinking the character is there but it constantly thinks oh what if I did this what if I was there at this kind of

Melancolic Bean but it didn't match because I wanted the opening to be way more pickarasque adventurers and explosive and so

I think oh this is me trying to wear my same clothes while I am travelling into a different world and so I tried undress from that tone and try a tone that is a little more goofier for me

For me because it's new and I and so I am not approaching this by any way with a precise voice and I'm not approaching it

Weather.

[21:38] Cautious way of saying oh I'm gonna do things differently in a way it's personally because I'm forced to do it this way and there it has as I said.

[21:48] It's a it's limits but it has its own benefits. I have writer friends that are intentionally committing.

To writing a different book all the time. That's their kind of project. I always felt I was going to be.

Stuck and the same lost American neighborhood in all of my writing that I would be always about AA woman, a girl, an older one, but it

Always around me if you think might

Other novels in Italy one is called a claw but let her

The second book is called Cleopatra Go to prison the third one and then characters called Caterina so I've been

Working even when I was so lazy that I can even come up with names that were different from Claudia.

Mention myself because the book is based on this kind of

Elizabeth.

There's no seed in this book. There's no character names.

[23:03] Yeah. Did you find that the the it's sort of.

[23:11] Put things up in the wall and.

You've sort of redraft those five pages again and then go back.

[23:26] Put new rearrange everything on the wall again and and redraft it so you you kind of going through those steps to try and find the voice that will take you onto page.

Page six.

Go. I'm back and forth almost with this feedback and release system. I don't know if this is another technical thing I should know about but I pretend they know about it. That's what it feels to me. That I put a sound out in the room, the room has

Thanks to the properties are sort of feedback and then I I got it back and strangers I know I mentioned that kind of album Lucier I am sitting in the room experiment so he's

Rick,

And Dan he puts the tape again in the taping machine he pronounces the sentence again but it has in the feedback the noise of the first time he says it any goes on recording over recording over recording until it becomes a different complete kind of sound.

So when you ask that I was thinking that to me going back and forth from the page or the representation of the novel I have with these maps is constantly you know a process of

Pages and then that's it. And an or in order to move forward.

[24:44] I need to accumulate a good bulk of, you know, good bulk, five pages.

Move on for a letter a little segment in the you know in the tape and.

Hey Facebook delete slow and as you can imagine.

[25:10] It has interesting consequences. Do you envisage then that you'd move you know once you're happy with pages one to five. You'd move on in

Do the same process for pages five to 10 or would you once you've got the voice set for those first

You're right all the way to the end.

No I think it's gonna be more this kind of thing working in short bolts until it gets right and then that and then I presume that and I'm already seeing this.

[25:39] That the other segment or chunk of it is gonna be go back and forth go back and forth until it sets it right and then it goes I don't see it.

I understand why you're asking but I don't see it. You get the first note right in the NFL long. Which is something I always thought which is interesting.

I always felt that if I had the.

It's not happening. No. And more and more. I am interested. I write about music. Music has been very important for me and a sort of compositional process but if I have to make an

A comparison with the fully formed page often it was like you know at 3 minute or 2 minute

Punk song which is really knows what it wants to do

It sounds very grindy out the way I say it but it's more symphonic writing perhaps when you think about symphonies you have different parts of it and then often you work.

[26:44] There's ears between one part and the other part and there's a lot of going back and forth until it all comes together. When this is completely new.

[26:53] Music.

[27:18] From what you've said that space and geography obviously.

Hey.

To the taking new notes that are going for a walk.

[27:40] Hey the new city for a period it is is that change are you sort of spending in the morning rearranging in the wall writing event staff and then spend the afternoon walking the streets and taking more notes that feed into that or.

Have you do you kind of compartmentalize the writing and that process and that just stays in the room and then.

Is irrelevant to to the president writing list? Yes, I was always travel writer, I think in disguise, and the sense that often.

Urban.

The movements you know travelling, writing trains, visiting different cities and countries and plans that was very I lived in Europe when I lived in UK I was moving back and forth.

Past couple of years had to change the way a bit

That

And so I think I am not writing about the pandemic by any means I think the only traces of the pandemic in my writing are in my translations I work as a translater as well.

[28:53] And so I have no notes about what was I going through in the past 2 years and a half

But if you read my translations of let's say animal farm by Orwell in English into Italian.

There's some words I choose in the phrasing of the Italian translation that are come from

The media discourse around the pandemic so the decrease between the it was medicine of all of that kind of

Political bureaucratic talking about the pandemic. So, I find it fascinating that my personal notes, my journals are into translations by going back to your question.

Send I've always wrote about a different about time as I said I had this kind of.

Very a huge part of my writing was absorbed about the question of time loss, memory, with the pandemic, I started

Completely thinking about another dimension which was space really because it was you know I was confined and all of a sudden about that time disappeared and my main percupation was movement space.

And so I think that's what shifted my interest with this new book in really thinking about the

Slow transformation of space in a way but all of a sudden I was missing my sources because being travel writer in the skies.

[30:17] Like discipline was born you had all of these

Professors that were writing about foreign tribes from their desk.

Think about a place and then you it's also let's say

Hey I was really thinking about fake out of biographies or hybrid out of biographies with strangers I know it almost felt I was thinking about

Fake travel journals right now in terms of what do I remember of this place I no longer have access to it I don't have longer access to certain walks I don't

Longer I've access to this physical exploration of the world. So, what am I gonna do? How is it gonna change?

For me the writing and one thing i must say i miss.

[31:18] Old out here of course I'll be taking lots and visiting stuff like that but one thing.

I I noticed I missed while traveling last or being outside less it was that my objectives became poorer.

So, in a way, I felt I lost a texture. So, I traveled in the past few months. I was so happy. I went to LA to to promote the book.

And I remember that I felt a lot that the air around me was both made of milk and ashes which is something.

[31:52] It's no sense perhaps to no one except me but the milk and ashes image brought me back to a sort of landscape in Southern Illinois that I'm writing about so

That kind of perception I had in Los Angeles ended up in the novel.

Translated into another space. So, that's actually what I miss, what I look for, and why it is important for me.

[32:14] To to

It makes writing way way more physical like damages you would use. We even more than sound. I would think it's more about.

Text share and how you you just breathe if that makes any sense yes yeah I think it's an important

To some experiences.

Until I don't have a definition for the light of the cities. So, when I was writing about London, Stranger say now, I remember for me.

[33:01] The color of the it was a sort of infrared lilac. I remember that. I when I travel to New York I have a very strong perception of the light. They are

Then delayed me as like a long a lunk full of

Flood that has a hard time and coughing out blood which I know it sounds gross.

But to me it's almost until I have.

[33:42] Sort of landscape. I don't know the place. I realized I'm very light sensitive. Do you have like a notebook that you carry with you when you when you're in LA and or like a what point did the milk and ashes metaphor explain to my the use of immediately jot it down or.

Pull out your phone and write an error do you just make a mental note tomorrow when I get my desk I'm gonna write milk and ashes on.

[34:04] The computer or how does that process a capturing the idea and retaining it work?

[34:18] 200 water bottles but I never carry with me. I have a collection of that. You know, there's a cemetery.

Almost all blank

Ugly in a way as a format is that kind of yellowy thing that is trying to make make

Yellow notebooks. So, I put it there and then I translate it in on my computer. So, it's really too machine's talking in my handwriting

But I do have a this is interesting. Notes I take on the phone. The notebooks when they're not blank and I carry them with me. I realize that when I'm outside it encourages me to ride longer stretches of text

So last summer I was travelling and I wrote a short story

In a train ride of 40 minutes so it feels almost a depage I remember when I was setting in college that everybody thought that the computer would lead writing on a computer would lead to

Massive novels. No, everybody was going to write USA because you didn't have, you know, you wouldn't care about the delete function. It wasn't last week. It was very naive. Did you think that because.

[35:37] What really writing notes and computers as really made the fragmented form

To explode. So, what we thought was going to happen that we were going to have this, you know, huge stream of conscious is novel, things to the computer, didn't happen, and I realized that when I'm on paper

I do this long hands like really really long

It's almost an extension of my body I could easily type and type in because now that's easier for me to

Use a pen it's easier to use a phone eh and it's keeping me short forms like really short flashes of intuition compared to writing my hand.

Even if it's more difficult to ride by hand.

[36:27] But then she says that she writes different drafts of the signal longhand and then she burns them

I don't know if this is true but I think it's a cool story. She burns them in a fire in her garden and then she goes to the computer

And then I don't I don't

Tamia was interesting the fact that she would write everything and she's not you know from a generation of Philip Rod and Dundello would I understand they would write him a tight machine or by hand but it it's interesting to me to see

That this.

Computer, phone writing, didn't go into the direction we all expected 20 years ago. And how are you technically writing the the five pages that you're working on at the moment? So I.

Yes so it's not that I have on my phone then this map that I ride by hand on the wall and I switch and then I have the computer part so

The ecosystem has made up these three elements

Yep. Do you kind of categorize when you're taking a like milk and ash?

[37:44] They might be part of this novel. They might be something.

When you come in 5 years diary writing a novel about your time in Berlin.

[37:58] Do any categorization from the north so is it just

Pic the bits that with striking in the morning and pick them up in the wall.

Like milk and ashes then I have a name of a bar then I have my bank Pasco in the same

And then I don't know why instead of writing on the same note I switch them but I don't categorize them so if I go back through time now I have five 6 years of.

Notes I do find.

[38:35] Lines or notes that ended up in strangers I know or ended up in this novel but they are not categorized as literary notes they are in the.

And blended with every life everyday life observations in vanalities and numbers and stuff and so I love I used to love but I do sometimes still try to do it right writers.

[39:00] Diaries notebooks and journals. So, I was going back to Santa's notebooks and sometimes you would feel

Weird that out because it's not proper journal taking she would for example have

Long list of words she feels fascinated by thy time and so it's mysterious to you would read this long section of adjectives awards and with no comments and then

It's just a list of words randomly then it's what happened to her today then it's a short chunk about a book she bought

Too bright and she had to review then there's something nasty about someone else and that's it and so I feel that sometimes when we look to know to now our phones we do have that we have the word that we pin down because we are so

Impressed by it but then we have the bar we went to then we have the kind of you know I need to remember that this I checked in in this

Place for this reason. Stuff like that. The appointment with the dentist. And so it's interesting to me because I think that's what actually what happens when you read our notes but somehow writers like her would already.

[40:05] Working into this iPhone I'm saying iPhone like phone for me. Like in the 60s. Yeah. I translate it a bit that is very dear for me. It's Elizabeth Hardwick, sleepless nights.

If you read that book most of the time you're wondering what's going on or what's happening because party feels unfinished letters to friends.

Notes to the self there is a lot of addresses in the book

And so it's not a proper memoir but there is the addresses of the house she has lived in and people who knew her when they read the book they said oh she

Drew kind of a precise topography even though she never mentions herself. She makes everything elusive. We know that the husband is right below us. She never mentions him.

[40:49] But it was interesting that she placed herself in space through the precise address of the houses

She lived in going through the book you would find materials like random materials that make no sense there that are almost like shopping lists you know like eggs and milk and stuff like that and

I, as a translator, I felt at last sometimes because I want, I never wanna talk to writers. I translate. I wanna do my own thing and it's good when they're dead.

What was going on here I know what was happening because there's it's such a

Mysterious piece of work and so if somebody I'm 50 years goes through our you know.

Notes on the phone. It would be interesting in terms of archaeological work. It was gonna be

Difficult to to separate weather that up in a novel what what you know about daily life or what's a mix between this two things

Yes. So, there's a lot of talking about I have friends who are involved in digitalizing the.

Emails Daniel letters you know writers they're so obsession but with you would have to do it.

[42:02] Emails and emails I I do think that texts like phone texting is way more relevant to that purpose but phone notes also

Yeah I think if there is a whole hidden world there for I mean some people I guess don't use notes but most people have have these even if they're not

Writing they're not writing there is that sort of hidden world of of notes.

Just the the bar you went to and I think most people would put some ideas down in there. It's.

Ben. I guess that the riders taken that step further to create a world. Don't you think it's the satisfying when people are writing

Consciously notes with the purpose of publishing them. I I think there were a couple of experiments there to publish and novel that was not through the phone. And

Over there it gets a gas a little tricky because you're already taking them with a sort of.

Editing within so I thought those can experiment so we're not talking I think that could get quite quite gimmicky yes exactly yeah yeah

Yeah there's AA fascinating world that didn't I mean I guess people always had people could always take notes in private and keep them in a drawing.

In the house but it they you bit with your phones and the ease of greatly is gonna say you know the billions of people on the planet all have this.

[43:24] World of notes hidden hidden away kind of.

[43:27] Which is the you know the text message interactions of your WhatsApp whatever that's it's not hidden in the zoo because you actually conversing with someone whereas.

No it's an it's it's hidden from everyone else.

Really obviously very different different processes. Do you sort of have different places in your head when you're sitting down to translate or send down to right? I mean you you mentioned you.

You like to.

To write in in an airport over when you're travelling with the same reply to translation

Do you think oh great that's 3 hours I can sit and write work in the novel or do you think oh I've also got that translation project that could be 3 hours to sit in.

Work a lot or is there a translation just.

[44:22] You did that just happens when you sit down at your desk to work in the the novels more fitting in around gaps no so I'm the most boring.

Translator at the desk that it exists because all of my airplane translation is terrible.

I remembered you to of course time.

You need to have reference texts you really need to sit down there and this happen also a book of numbers by Joshua Cohen which is also.

I was touring for the book that was.

[45:10] Shortlisted in a prize I always had to be in buses like it was you know kind of a tour life intensively but I had to submit.

[45:18] The book to the publisher. So, I was just reading a cars even which was a nightmare. You know, as a car was writing, I had all the rather writers that we know, chilling, and say, what are you doing? I was like,

Supposed to go to a holiday where my friends but I didn't finish on time.

[45:37] So this panicky stolen hours of translation are a mess and I still can retrace any translations which is funny.

Where I was at that time and how come the rhythm is kind of fucked up.

Be my flat not even a hotel room not even anywhere else you know I have a very now academic approach I'm boring approach to translation because

It's true that is also rewriting and it can benefit you know about I always have this romantic idea of thinking oh another

Approved she was you know an island here she was there and there how does you know the

Travelling influence to translation but I I doesn't feel it works for me so I need to be in the.

Smallest room possible to translate if that makes any sense. Should he not the smallest room possible?

So over here with this writing residency I'm not gonna be translating at all.

Always an Italian non-fiction in English which feels a little.

[46:56] Predictable in a way when I'm not perfectly bilingual and the sense that my English I never studied in school.

[47:05] So it comes from family interactions in Tennessee travelling but it's not by the books so I always feel an impostor when I write in English and this is why I didn't translate strangers I know into the English because I would never.

Have submitted the text I would follow the temptation to override it to edit it to.

[47:27] To me being travelling across languages makes you feel like a spy almost always worried that somebody's gonna come up to you at one point say oh.

We know you're a foreign agent here, you know?

I'm trying to learn to think that the writing that comes out of it it's way more interesting if you read my now fiction in English you can tell there is some impurities that come from the Italian in my Italian pros.

Since the beginning when I first published.

In Italy my first novel they said oh this is a translation of a dead author a man I remember that was the same they said it.

Man American man and badly translated it into Italian so my first

Critics.

That was.

Which could be perfectly in disguise and thought of as an Italian book.

And so now that I'm doing yup I write short stories slowly and increasingly in English but it's it it's a fascinating process because I'm always worried and also.

Interested in doing when when is it gonna be.

[48:50] All English short story or it feels it never lands properly into that language if that makes any sense. Do you feel any of that in in Italian as well? I mean you grew up in your earliest years and.

You didn't grow up in it in Italy. You were in in Brooklyn. Is that right? So you you came to Italy. Wait where you like fluent in it.

Italian from from Barth I wrote was there a switch at some age when you were a young child that you suddenly had to start learning it

Italian. Does that still? Do you still have a sense of it? I'm not fluent in the Italian in some way or.

Articles.

[49:36] In Italian and then the cheap editor but complain and say that this doesn't sound right and somebody else would say oh but she's half American but I love to see

When I was six.

And then that was the first time when I said oh but I am also the daughter of a deaf woman who was never flee.

Fluent in Italian later in English and she speaks in a rubbish all your way.

So my syntax in Italian was deeply informed by my earlier.

I was born yes in Brooklyn but most of the people in my family were Italian migrants not educated.

That never spoke Italian Facebook dialect and they spoke Americans land.

So they were an orthodox. It was a black market of language. It was always always this sort of defiant and minor language.

So I I came from Italian dialect American slang and then you know.

[50:39] Not sign language but the language of that so when I moved to Italy and I was enrolled in Public School.

What happened to me was happens typically to a lot of children of migration that they try to learn.

The official language of the country they move in the best way possible so I made as a challenge for myself to start to write into read into Italian.

Perfectly in a way which meant by the books and I'll delete it I tried to delete.

All the traces of my mother's tongue which was like literally my mother's

This is why you'll feel so surprising as I would you know graduate from college start working I would ride and then my novel comes out and people says oh she stole her from an American author

Or where does she come from? You know, this is not right in Italian. I said, I put all of my efforts to

Right and good Italian what's happening to me like what's betraying me almost like it wasn't in Obama.

And that was a game changer in the sense that I really resented this for my first books.

But because I felt it was a common of you know not knowing to write not knowing how to use language well or literary wise and then I understood that this kind of impurities and not landing fully in the language.

What was made at you know it's cyphered that language in my own way and so what's happening right now.

[52:08] Is something that I never used to do I was really I don't know about you

Disgusted by word please or puns or anything that made language play with itself. I I was not that kind of writer at all. I embrader at all. It would

Really disturbing and now I realized that I come up with a new novel and bentwards.

And I have so much fun with it.

That I can make up my own words in it. I will never do that in English though. Not yet. The do you have puns in Italian? Or is that something that you avoid?

[52:51] Cuz I've heard lots of people with other languages say that they don't really have it. And I think that's to other languages credits.

Fascinated by the Italian Shade of Alice Smith which no last cycle of but his mum pun

And so it is like a big detective game in that case because you don't have an equivalent it's just sounds bad if you come

With something made up in Italian that doesn't exist so you really have to try to make the English prom keep it that way and try to make it sound

Fun which is really really hard

Fun and the source language. So, imagine trying to make fun something in the landing language that you don't really get in the first one, you know? That's interesting when you're originally and you're fully

So when in English.

And they would assume that since you know when was you understand it but I think even for you the English language is so full of you know

Things that don't make sense is full of mysteries. I often translate lately. Irish authors and I understand English but I don't understand what's going on in their heads. You know, so it's the first rating

When the Italian publisher or reader or journalist keeps asking you as a translator.

[54:20] Not even the author knows it probably.

Unrealistic expectation that everything has to make sense to me.

[54:38] Yeah it can it could be a very cheap trick with a with a

Push to the forefront and the.

Cheap and it can keep everything else but then at the same time I think there is something there's something about language it is speaking English obviously there's maybe more scope than other than no other languages but the.

[55:11] The idea of of words having multiple meanings and those meanings that shortcuts and links between those words. I mean that is what makes language.

It gives it a texture and a sheep that's different from other ways of describing the world is

Like in the inner scientific naming structure of the world. Are you sorry to say this is this is an electron or this is

Whatever an each word.

Has to have a definition that relates to one thing and one thing only otherwise the whole structure doesn't make sense. Whereas implicit in the way language is set up.

[55:47] You're gonna you're gonna have words that have multiple meanings or multiple meanings with different different words you have choices to make whereas the which you don't.

In other ways you're describing the world and that that seems that seems intrinsic to the what you're doing when you're putting words

One after each other on the page but where the magic of that lies is is is you can't have to do it more subtly than doing your look

I've made a pardon look at me cos that it chiefens everything else. Yes totally because as we said before when you turn Nelson to novels and do it with this edit.

Thinking you're not.

Come now with that kind not shop value but you know your your pretty confident and assertive that is gonna have that reaction in a way and that's what's gonna keep.

Where has when you find accidents between words or when you buy accident or mistake on leash.

Potential that's fascinating to me so what did translation of the title.

[56:47] Funny funny things were happening so the finish translator of the book was not no Swedish sorry

Was not immediately happy with the tradition of the title because in Italian it's less than.

When I was moved into the English because of canoe the stranger the outside there we had to come up with another title and it became.

A very I love the title but it's problematic because in your Italian it doesn't have the eye.

Even if it's a narration in third person I'm talking about another character so strangers I know puts the eye in the tile

So it changes even the genre of the book I think in English it's way more.

Little rain on fiction and men work compared to the Italian title which is more biggest but anyway so it becomes strangers I know.

When it's translated into Swedish they don't move from the Italian title cuz I think they have seen issue with no lithrum jack on you.

And they take it from the English so I become strangers I know but can then and Sweden.

[57:54] In the Swedish language is an interesting word because it's knowing but it's also known by touch.

And so she said I was not satisfied about the title but since it speaks about body talk about deafness about multisensorial on the stand in the language in the world I find that.

No one can then in Sweden has this kind of textile property to it that is not in the English is not into Italian so it's a layer that Alicia's

A potential that was already there or at least I like to think that it was already there. So, that's what to me as intriguing and being.

A rioter that is very influenced by translation. So, when I ride, I think about these things.

Constantly more than I would think oh I'm gonna use a funny word or I'm gonna make two words blend together thinking that is gonna have you know this kind of.

Exciting in.

[58:52] Yeah I think there's there's a set of words that are next to each other that are there's relations but they only they only become a parent after a certain amount of of consideration or moving things around and oh yeah that.

Has another resonance here that I was the residents there before or was it created by the work it's hard.

Sorry to not let you talk you there if the Swedish cat can.

[59:19] Can it? Would you when you were saying that it it's brings my mind like kitten in in English like.

[59:26] Obviously relating to family which I guess has been has another resonance and that I don't know in in Swedish there is a word that has a similar similar meaning or not but the way that words that is stuck on top of each other or.

Next to each other. There's there's a sort of.

[59:43] Special relationship in some way but it's not one that can ever make sense cos it's always.

There was switching and this this word is at one moment is right next to another and they're

More or less the same in the next stitch on the other side of the universe and eh in a different different worker.

How my mind works? You said that about Kennon. He said Kim I was thinking about.

Shakespeare once said there's no kind and kind in Kim there's no kind in Kim which is very it's a nightmare to just say in Italian

But then when you think about kind and kin I thought about stranger than kindness by Nick Cape and the original title of the book does a stranger

So hey Facebook please can you tell me where talking and thank you.

[1:00:36] Music.

[1:00:43] Turkey desk. We hope you enjoyed this episode and you can find more in the program notes. Or on our website

You can find me and my writing at Lockland Bloom. Com or I'm on Twitter.

My writing is at Jamie Batchen. Com. I'm on Twitter at Jamie Batchen and I'm on Instagram at Jamie underscore Batchum.

[1:01:08] If you could remember to like and subscribe the podcast wherever you find it and if you are mined to give us a review

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