Inès Cagnati’s award-winning Free Day is a potent and imagistic work that speaks powerfully on isolation, self-actualization, and freedom through the interior monologue of a young girl—we at Asymptote were incredibly proud to present it as our December 2019 Book Club selection. During a time in which much about our ideas of self is under scrutiny, Free Day is a fearless psychological exploration. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon speaks to translator Liesl Schillinger on bringing Cagnati’s distinct roughness and rhythm into English, neologisms, and her “reservoir of lived memory”.
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Andreea Scridon (AS): Inès Cagnati is not a name that has been frequently circulated in the Anglophone sphere up until now. Could you tell us what drew you to her as a writer, and why you thought her work would appeal to English-speaking readers?
Liesl Schillinger (LS): It was my editor at NYRB who brought Inès Cagnati to my attention; like you, I hadn’t known of her before. But as soon as I started reading Free Day, I became aware of her strong, glowing (sometimes searing) individual voice. Her writing struck me as brusque, incantatory, and strangely lyrical in places. Entirely original. Originality always compels me; and not only was her voice original, so was her subject. The experience of Italian immigrants in southern France during the postwar period was entirely new to me. In the past, I’d thought about immigration mostly in terms of how the country that received the newcomers treated them; I’d given less thought to how they treated each other. This book opened my eyes. Cagnati continually expressed emotionally gripping truths that disturbed and moved my heart and conscience. I read another of her books, Génie la Folle (Genius the Fool—“Genius” was the nickname of the narrator’s unfortunate mother) and found it more haunting still. Wanting to know more about Cagnati, I went online, and was surprised to discover next to no biographical information, but I learned that every one of the books she wrote won a French literary prize. I felt it was time to shine a light on this forgotten writer and her experience—particularly at a moment when we, as Americans, ought to be reflecting on the refugee crisis at our southern border, and thinking about the men, women, and children who are suffering there.
AS: Galla, the protagonist of Free Day, narrates her story in a highly particular way when it comes to syntax. How closely did you stick to or depart from the original, and what was your translation process generally like?
LS: Translating Galla’s idiom was extremely challenging; she was writing in French; but her first language—like Cagnati’s—was Italian. That guided and narrowed the breadth of her expression, which, I think, focused and concentrated the authenticity of her voice. Her narration, the inner thoughts she revealed, seemed to me more devoid of pretense than any I’d encountered before. Galla’s language was evocative, but it wasn’t arrogant, it was never moulded in a finicky, self-conscious way. My task, as I saw it, was to relay her words, her cadence, without making the language smoother than it was. My translation shouldn’t prettify it, I thought. Cagnati’s images, her set pieces, her intentionally repetitive reflections and refrains, have a force and strength that are magnified by their rough grain. They seem to me like natural granite outcroppings, beautiful in their realness, organic to their surroundings, defying carving. I felt I should not “sand” this writing style; if I could convey it simply, unadornedly, it would carry the reader into Galla’s external and internal landscape.
AS: You’ve translated a wide range of books so far (Every Day, Every Hour by Natasa Dragnic, The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils, and now Free Day by Inès Cagnati). What motivated you to dedicate your time to each of these titles? Is there a common denominator to be identified among them?
LS: Actually, in the last year, I’ve translated three other marvelous books: a German novel, Stella, by Takis Würger—set in wartime Berlin, about a naïve Swiss painter who falls for a notorious Jewish chanteuse and Nazi collaborator; The Psychology of Stupidity—a vast collection of (mostly) French essays on the philosophical and sociological fallout of the post-truth world; and Garden of Monsters by Lorenza Pieri—a gripping and fascinating saga about a rural family in Italy in the 1980s, grappling with the gentrification of the Maremma, Tuscany’s wine-horse-and-beach region, at a time when the visionary French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle was erecting her monumental, fanciful Tarot Garden on their landscape. These books, like the others I’ve translated, could not be more different from each other. What compels me in every case is the power of the writer’s language, images, and ideas. My goal as a translator is to find distinct visions and voices from overseas that can, and should, be brought to the attention of English readers. Particularly in America, where we’re separated from much of the world by vast oceans, I think it can be hard to truly register the lives, priorities, and emotions of people across the ocean as real. Absorbing the insights of the narrators and authors of these books—whether they be French, German, Italian, Bosnian, or Swiss—helps American readers see the inhabitants of those countries as more alive, and more tangible, I hope.
AS: As well as being a literary translator, you’re a respected journalist in your own right. In what ways (if any) have both paths intersected with and/or complemented each other throughout your career?
LS: I would say, as I tell my students, that all communication is translation. My father (now retired) was a Russian professor at midwestern colleges, and when I was ten, my mother got him to allow me to study French at Purdue University, in Indiana, before or after my grade school classes. After two years, they sent me to live in the French countryside for a month, with a farming family, where I did the haying with them, gathered eggs, rode on the Mobylette with my French “siblings” to the nearby village for Haribo candy, and played tennis on the courts of the wealthier local families. That experience knitted together for me the interconnection of geography, language, and identity. When I went back to Europe, two years later, to France and Germany, I was fourteen, old enough for kids my age to chaff me about President Reagan’s ICBMs in Europe! By then I was already writing for my high school newspaper. When I published my first piece at The New Yorker, in 1991 (about the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev while he was in Sochi) I understood that I was writing as an American, and that writers in other countries would bring a different set of attitudes, experience, and preconceptions to their writing. This sense that my perception is necessarily tied to my geography and to my language has always made me weigh my words; thinking about how readers in other lands would receive them. It’s also made me want to travel, to increase my firsthand knowledge of life in other countries. I worked in Moscow in 1993, at a Russian magazine, and the insight I gained from those months can never be erased. I’ve spent time in many other countries, too; and even if I don’t write travel pieces about them, the impressions I gain abroad are added to the reservoir of lived memory I try to bring to everything I write. The slogan of the foreign languages department at Purdue moved me when I was ten, and it still does today: “Learn another language; know another world.”
AS: What was the journey of writing Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century like? I’m equally curious about how you came up with the concept and how you saw it through to completion.
LS: The Wordbirds origin story is funny, and a little random. In 2009, deep in the blogging revolution, I had a friend who was obsessed with social media, and continually mocked my “old media” habits (I wrote mostly for the Times Book Review). He said I would be dust if I didn’t start blogging. At the time, I thought that was ridiculous. But he took me to the South by Southwest Interactive conference that March, where new media rabble-rousers and old media stalwarts bumped heads. After attending a session where petrified midwestern editors panicked about how Twitter was imperiling their jobs, and even more arrestingly, after going to a talk at which furious bloggers outgunned a well-meaning panel of New York editors, live-Tweeting their scorn throughout the event, I decided my friend was right. Back home in New York, as he watched an asinine episode of Family Guy in which Peter Griffith becomes obsessed with the absurd 1960s song, “The Bird Is the Word” (I think its actual title is “Surfin’ Bird”), I fled to my study. Over the next hour, I spontaneously created a blog on Tumblr. I decided to devote it to neologisms for the new century. I’ve always loved wordplay—two classic books in my family, as I grew up, were “The Meaning of Liff,” a humorous British book that assigned fake meanings to the actually existing names of British towns (“Abinger” for example, is a person who does all of the dishes except for the crud-encrusted pots and pans); and “Mots d’Heures, Gousses, Rames” (if you say it out loud in a French accent, it sounds like “Mother Goose Rhymes”), a collection of nursery rhymes rejiggered into French homophones, each line footnoted with tongue-in-cheek faux-serious scholarly explications.) I wanted to do something like that, so I racked my brain and invented two coinages: “Cancellelation,” which is the joy you feel when something gets canceled that you hadn’t wanted to do anyway, and “Blunderschedule”—like when you miss a concert because you’d written down the wrong date on your calendar. Because the “Bird Is the Word“ song was still playing on Family Guy, I thought, why don’t I nab a picture from online to illustrate each word, so the blog is more fun to look at? I’ll call them “wordbirds.” So that’s what I did. Eventually, I found the brilliant artist Elizabeth Zechel, whose style falls somewhere between Audubon and a New Yorker cover cartoonist, to draw original illustrations for the words I’d minted, nearly every bird a different species (for variety), depicted in some way that clarified the meaning of the new word. Because . . . I actually wanted these words and their definitions to stick. Or at least, most of them. My goal hadn’t been to come up with funny meanings for nonsensical words, as in the Liff book, I wanted as many as possible of the coinages to stick. I tried to create words that the language actually needed; to capture connections that hadn’t been corralled that way before. Really, that’s what I try to do in all my writing, teaching, and translating.
Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer, and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Her articles, reviews, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. She has translated novels from the French, the German, and the Italian for Penguin Classics, Viking, New York Review Books, Grove/Atlantic, and Europa, and is the author of Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century. In 2017 she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.
Andreea Iulia Scridon is a Romanian-American writer and translator. She studied Comparative Literature at King’s College London and is currently studying Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. She is an assistant editor at Asymptote Journal and The Oxford Review of Books.
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