A Series of Still-Lives: Karen Emmerich on Ersi Sotiropoulos

(We've been discussing Greek author Ersi Sotiropoulos, whose story Rain at the Construction Site appears in the Center's forthcoming anthology of translated literature. Here we present an interview with Karen Emmerich, who translated Rain, as well as a collection of Sotiropoulos' stories that will be available later this year.)
Scott Esposito: In your introduction to Rain you note that Sotiropoulos started writing as a poet. Though she now works in prose, she's trying to maintain her poetic roots and strip her prose down until nothing but the absolutely essential remains. I'd like to ask two questions based on this. The first is: To help readers get a little context, what are some other authors that you think write in a similarly spare style?
Karen Emmerich: It's always hard to answer questions that call for comparisons between authors—it's so much easier to say who Ersi isn't like, to describe what she doesn't do. But for some reason two authors come to mind: Amy Hempel and Nadine Gordimer. And perhaps Grace Paley, in a way. Or Flannery O'Connor. There must be some men out there, too. J. M. Coetzee, perhaps. Thematically they may have nothing in common, but they all seem to share a certain spareness of language: every word counts, and every word belongs where it is. You read and you have this sense that if you dared shift even a word, the whole edifice of the prose might come tumbling down.
But Ersi's writing is so different from all of theirs. In these stories specifically, plot often seems incidental, secondary to language and to image. It isn't poetic language, in the usual understanding of that phrase. It's often very flat, very bare-bones. And the stories sometimes seem like a series of still-lives, freeze frames that show a life or a relationship—from the most involved to the most tenuous—captured at a particular moment, in a particular (sometimes disturbing or estranging, but often tender and fragile) configuration.
SE: The second question is: What kind of challenges does this pose to you as the translator? In prose that has been this carefully worked, do you feel like you can adequately bring across things like rhythm and sound?
KE: It's enormously challenging as a translator—you don't feel the kind of freedom you sometimes do, with fiction writers for whom plot drives a piece. You have an added sense of responsibility. Not necessarily to rhythm and sound, in this case, but to phrasing. If every word belongs where it is, what do you do when all the words go away and you have to find new ones to take their place?
SE: Sotiropoulos's story is a somewhat elliptical tale centering around an unfinished road. It combines a feeling of the unseen—things we have come to trust as facts are continually undercut by new details that make them feel false—with elements of missed connections: a wife who might miss her divorce proceedings, a father failing to connect with his daughter. The story seems to be about how we move forward and create meaning in our lives despite the fog of life. Are these themes and concerns that are present throughout
Sotiropoulos's work?
KE: They are, yes. But I think they're far more general than that—isn't that what all fiction is about, in some sense? Even the need to write fiction, and to read it, seems wrapped up in that dance of meaning and fog you're talking about: we write and we read in order to create meaning, to move forward through the fog of life, to bring the structure of narrative into a potentially chaotic world.
This is a gross generalization, of course. And in terms of Ersi's work specifically, while the tension between an overwhelming meaninglessness and small daily acts of meaning is certainly a strain that runs throughout her many novels and collections of short stories, I think it's a particularly strong component of the stories we've included in Landscape with Dog. So much in them goes unsaid; so much of the dialog carries the weight of those unspoken thoughts or emotions; so many of the relationships are painful, mismatched, utterly real.
Perhaps I would say that these stories celebrate, in a way, how relationships persist, in spite of everything: nothing is ever right, or complete, no connection is ever really true—and yet we continue to make them, imperfect as they are.
SE: Lastly, Rain will be available in a forthcoming collection of Sotiropoulos's work that pulls together stories from two of her collections. What did you and Sotiropoulos take into consideration as you were pulling together stories for this?
KE: Mostly it was a combination of choosing our respective favorites, thinking about what stories would work well in English, and trying to create a collection that could hang together as a whole, since we were pulling stories from two Greek collections published a decade apart (plus one story too recent to have been included in either). Those two collections are actually quite different in nature: the earlier stories are much more narrative and tend to be longer and more involved, but the same threads are still there. Throughout the process, we also relied heavily on the wonderful instincts of our editor at Clockroot, Hilary Plum. She's one of the best around, and has a keen eye for what works and doesn't, for how certain stories might either compliment one another or clash. The process of putting this volume together was enormously collaborative, actually. Believe it or not, in the final stages, Ersi's dentist helped with the ordering of the stories; it's apparently something of a secret talent, and Ersi always asks her opinion when putting collections together.