Enter, Explore, and Understand

I could enter, explore, and understand someone’s mind and imagination which I then could make available to another:

Catherine Graham interviews the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize Shortlist writer Ani Gjika

Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born writer, a literary translator, and the author of Bread on Running Waters (2013), a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize.

Luljeta Lleshanaku. Ani Gjika, trans. Negative Space. New Directions Publishing. $25.50, 112 pp., ISBN: 9780811227520

Catherine Graham: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize for Negative Space (Bloodaxe Books / New Directions), poems by Luljeta Lleshanaku that you translated from Albanian to English. Can you tell us a bit about the journey behind this book? What drew you to Lleshanaku’s work?

Ani Gjika: Thank you! It was a wonderful surprise when I heard that we had been shortlisted. What first drew me to Lleshanaku’s work was her way of seeing through a particular subject she writes about, and how she uses imagery to build the world of her narrative. Initially, I remember noticing mostly beauty in the language, but in time, I began to see more suffering. Yet with Luljeta’s work, that suffering is not spoken of directly — it lifts off the page, off those images and inhabits you, and I was drawn to that. Maybe this has something to do with the tone and the voice of the poems — they are not loud, in your face poems about what a whole generation has lost or who should be blamed for it. She has managed to expose people’s losses and how they “are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” to quote James Baldwin, in a very matter of fact way while she simultaneously remains present in her verse. The reader, and that whole generation, are held throughout the book.

CG: Did your work as translator impact the writing of your first poetry collection, Bread Running on Water, and/or your current work? I’m wondering how the two art forms interact for you. Can you talk about that?

AG: I came to translation much later than I came to poetry and had written all the poems in my first book before I discovered Lleshanaku’s work. But the more I translated her poems and other texts, the more I felt that I was using my imagination and sensitivity toward language in the same way I do when I’m revising my own writing. Maybe because English is not my first language, I find both translation and revision to be a similar process. Through both, I’m trying to arrive at meaning in a language I’ve adopted. Both are extremely hard, fun, and satisfying. I wrote very little while translating Lleshanaku. That is probably in part because I translated two collections of her poems while teaching full-time at an intensive language school and sometimes taught additional classes at other schools. For the longest time, I’ve had no time to tend to my own writing, but the past couple of summers I’ve been writing a memoir and I believe I wouldn’t have arrived here had I not been a translator. The patience I’ve learned through the process of translation and my curiosity about and attentiveness to language and meaning-making have been instrumental in how I’ve approached writing about the past. 

CG: During my conversation with Lleshanaku she spoke about the translator being invisible, the highest compliment, I would think. What is it like to be “invisible” in the work? How did you achieve this? 

AG: I agree, it is a compliment when people praise a translator’s invisibility — a flawless translation, one that renders the original language seamlessly in the target language. In that sense the translator’s work is invisible, because it’s like reading a foreign author but in your own mother tongue and you understand her perfectly. I am grateful to Lleshanaku and other people who’ve been kind to say that my translation sounds like it were written directly in English. But I don’t think that my translation of Negative Space is flawless, or that it is possible for me as a translator to be invisible. English is still a second language for me and although there may not be grammatical mistakes in the translation, there are instances of strangeness in the syntax. Some of this strangeness is done intentionally because I always want to preserve the original author’s DNA — what makes a Lleshanaku poem are her completely original ways of seeing both language and the world — but some is done unintentionally, because I am a writer. I wouldn’t have arrived at lines like “they whistle melodies bookended by hiccups,” “men who whither in their voices,” or “a baleen of darkness sieving out new human destinies” for example, if it weren’t for the fact that as a second language speaker, and as a writer, I see possibilities in the English language I may not have if I weren’t both of those things.

CG: What were some of the joys and challenges when translating Lleshanaku’s poetry? 

AG: Joys — that soon so many other people would get to read work I already loved; that Lleshanaku gave me a lot of freedom with my process and trusted me completely. Challenges — would her voice and tone come through?

CG: You grew up in Albania, live in America, and write in English. Any thoughts on what it’s like to write poetry in English? Do you ever write in Albanian? 

AG: I don’t write in Albanian. That is mainly because I am immersed 24/7 in the English language and this has been the case since 1996. I think in English and teach several classes every day in English. From early on, when I immigrated to the U.S., writing in English was a choice I made. Of course, I wanted to be read by the people who lived around me. But also, English became a language I trusted my thoughts in because Albanian, to me, up until when I was 18, had been a language of secrets, harassments, and lies.

CG: There are several long poems in the collection: “Homo Antarcticus”, “Water and Carbon” and “Negative Space”.  Were there any differences when translating the longer versus shorter poems? Or was it more about capturing voice?

AG: “Negative Space” was the first or second poem from the book that I translated. It is one of my favourites in the book and in the process I discovered why I love translating — I could enter, explore, and understand someone’s mind and imagination which I then could make available to another. Her thoughts had a different frequency. The longer poems took longer, except one of them, because I was on a deadline. I sat down and translated “Water and Carbon” in one day. I would translate part 1 and send it to Luljeta to check what she thought. Then part 2-4, and 6-8 and so on. We were both glued to the computer and sent e-mails back and forth that day until it was all done and it was midnight in Albania. I would not recommend it, because I didn’t have enough time to be with both languages to hear the author in each. I was mostly concerned with what would Luljeta think, would she like it or not. I wasn’t fully present in the translation of this one poem. But the poem is definitely a strong poem in English because Luljeta was there through the translation of it section by section, and I had the privilege to work so closely with her on a poem that is of great significance to the book.

CG: What were some highlights of your Griffin experience during your time in Toronto? 

AG: It meant so much to me that I was able to bring a very good friend of mine to the reading and ceremony, Canadian poet and translator Jessica Moore. I got to know Jessica four years before the Griffin nomination when I was at Banff International Literary Translation Centre workshopping and translating poems from this very book. I was inspired and moved by the work of the other poets I met like Eve Joseph, Raymond Antrobus, and Nicole Brossard whose poetry I had not read until those weeks after receiving the news of the Griffin awards. They were as kind, wise, and present in person as on the page. Also, meeting Scott Griffin — in fact, I sat right next to him during the awards ceremony, but was overcome by the meaning of that whole night that I hardly spoke two words with him. Ultimately, it was a great blessing that Lleshanaku could be there.

CG: What’s next for Ani Gjika?

AG: I’m currently a Pauline Scheer fellow at Grub Street’s Memoir Incubator program while simultaneously teaching four classes a day. I wish for time and space to get my book out into the world.

Catherine Graham is an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction. Among her six poetry collections The Celery Forest was shortlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, named a CBC Best Book of the Year and appears on their Ultimate Canadian Poetry List. Michael Longley praised it as “a work of great fortitude and invention, full of jewel-like moments and dark gnomic utterance.” Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and CAA Award for Poetry and her debut novel Quarry won an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for fiction, “The Very Best!” Book Awards for Best Fiction and was a finalist for the Fred Kerner Book Award and Sarton Women’s Book Award for Contemporary Fiction. She received an Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and was also winner of the Toronto International Festival of Authors Poetry NOW competition. While living in Northern Ireland, Graham completed an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies around the world and she’s appeared on CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers. Æther: an out-of-body lyric will appear in 2020 with Wolsak and Wynn, Buckrider Books. Visit her at www.catherinegraham.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @catgrahampoet.