In our Book Club selection for the month of April, A Perfect Cemetery, Federico Falco’s writings do not tell so much as unfold, gently and masterfully, to elucidate the relationships between the human, the non-human, and the spaces in which such meetings take place. In precise and rich evocations, Falco plumbs the rich vocabularies and intrigues of landscape to lend delicacy, sensuality, and vividity to his prose, bringing his protagonists to life with a knowing rootedness. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Assistant Editor Shawn Hoo, Falco and translator Jennifer Croft share their thoughts on the cinematic aspects of A Perfect Cemetery, the relationships between the body and the land, and the pervading theme of isolation.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!
Shawn Hoo (SH): I thought we could begin with the question of place. I read this book in Singapore, a dense city, and noted how A Perfect Cemetery has a distinct sense of place; Federico, you conjure a landscape of sierras, rivers, and forests across disparate short stories that belong to this very single novelistic world. In an interview with The Paris Review, Jennifer, you emphasize the importance of translators visiting the country they are translating from. How does your sense of place affect your approach to these stories?
Federico Falco (FF): Landscape transforms us and makes us different people; the people who live in big cities have one kind of experience of life and the people who live in different landscapes have another. There is an Argentinian writer, Juan José Saer—one of my favorites—who says that the poor who live in cities near the ocean, they have a heaviness; they become used to strange, different people arriving and leaving all the time. And the people who live in the mountains always think that there’s another place beyond the mountains. They can change their point of view because they can see things from a different point of view. The people who live in the plains here in Argentina, the Pampas, they see the same landscape all the time. They can walk ten kilometers, and the whole scene shifts ten kilometers.
So when I write, I try to think about where the character lives, where they grew up, what they need, where they differ, what was new for them—if they grew up in the plains and now live in the mountains. I used to live in the city, now I’m living in the mountains, and there are some things that you can feel in the body. Your body starts to change. The air is different. The muscles change because you’re climbing all the time. The way you relate to people in the city is really different from the way you relate to people here in the mountains. If I meet a stranger here in the street, I say hello, which I never do in the city.
Jennifer Croft (JC): I really loved listening to Fede talk about place. Obviously, translating these stories influenced me as well, and I have been thinking a lot about place in fiction. Right now, I’m working on a book of creative nonfiction called Notes on Postcards, and part of the question of this text is: why does it matter where we are when we’re communicating with someone? Or why does it matter where we are in general? I started thinking about this question in 2020, when all of my travel plans were cancelled. I felt really cut off from all of the places that I care about—first and foremost among those is Buenos Aires. I feel very panicked that I’m not allowed to enter Argentina right now because of my US passport. I’m currently in upstate New York at a writing residency called Yaddo, and I’ve had a hard time working on my project, but thanks to these conversations with Fede over the last week or so, I’ve been relaxing into it.
I like comparing my obsession with places to Fede’s, because mine is less about landscape and more about cities and cultures. Even though culture is such an extremely fluid thing, it is much more about how one feels in the context of other human beings. I’m more of a flaneur kind of writer, and it’s great for me to be able to incorporate these landscapes into my thinking too.
SH: I think what lockdown has given us is this minimized sense of space. We make do with the places that we have with us right now. Do you think these two years have changed the way you approach writing or translation? Do you think you can only engage with the place that you’re in, or are their other more secondhand ways of accessing these other places?
JC: I love the idea of secondhand ways of accessing places, because that’s definitely something I’m doing now by reading another language that I associate very strongly with one particular place. Initially, writers were responding to the pandemic in a particular way that was nonetheless shared by a lot of them, which had to do with fragmentation—not having the attention span to write a traditional novel. I knew a lot of people who, about a year ago, were writing a fragmentary book, more like Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. But I don’t know if that is going to be a real change. I think for me, where I am definitely matters. Normally I live in Los Angeles in a very noisy neighborhood, where it is really hard for me to focus on reading a traditional novel, whereas here, it’s perfectly fine. And I’m really enjoying doing that.
FF: I don’t know if this pandemic has changed me. I think we need more time to see what will happen. But I’m very interested in this secondhand way to get to places, because for me writing is always a way to stay in another place. When I was writing these short stories, I was still in Buenos Aires, and I was missing my place in Córdoba a lot—the place where I grew up, in the mountains where I usually go on holiday. So my way to find the landscapes that I missed in the middle of the city was to try to write about them. I started to think about big places or tried to remember how it is to live in a big house, where you feel the cold in the morning, because you don’t have a heating system, that kind of thing. The imagination is a key part in the pandemic.
SH: Isolation is a central theme in these stories: the king of the hares from the first story escapes to the meadows, and Old Wutrich insists on returning to the pine forest. Of course, these sentiments have always been there, but especially so in this moment of quarantine. This book was published in Spanish five years ago, so I’m curious about the difference in reception. For me, the isolation element was big, and I’m not sure if it is due to the pandemic. Could you speak about the different ways this book was received in its original and now?
FF: Isolation and loneliness are topics that always interested me. I’m always looking for that kind of character who must negotiate between being with others and being alone. They seek to be alone to enjoy themselves or because they feel that they cannot be themselves around others. But I think that now it’s something relatable for all readers. In 2016, when it appeared in Spanish, readers found the characters more strange; people didn’t relate with that kind of topic. Some readers looked at the characters like cool people who live in the country—people they’d never meet in real life. What’s happening now is that we are all a bit like these characters—all thinking about missing people or finding out that we don’t miss the people, we don’t miss communities.
SH: Jennifer, were these strange characters to you when you first read them?
JC: They were not strange characters. I felt like I was each of these characters very clearly. I did find it funny how a few people I know who have read the book said, “Oh my god, I wonder how he created these really bizarre characters who are completely insane,” and I had no idea what anyone was talking about. These characters are perfectly normal as far as I’m concerned. I totally identify with them. What unites these stories is the ways in which desire can be frustrated. Someone wants to resist someone else’s desire or vice versa. That is a particular feeling of isolation, whether or not the characters are actually in isolation.
SH: Characters like the king of the hares, Mr. Bagiardelli, or Mabel are not used to acting on their desires. For them, any sexual connection is ambivalent. But there’s one character in this collection whom I find quite different and that is Silvi. Her descriptions of desire are rapturous, there’s this line where she says, “And his scent, his scent,”—she’s talking about the Mormon boy—“that bright, fragrant aroma, the smell of moss, of stone in shade, of a crystal-clear stream.” Do you see Silvi as a different kind of character—maybe her adolescence has something to do with it?
FF: I want to say a lot of things, but I don’t know exactly how to say it in English. Silvi is one of my favorite characters. I really love her. If I had one intention when I was writing Silvi, it was to write someone who fights for her desire, who is not afraid of her desire. The others are more—Jennifer, please help me—the others are more resignado por la vida.
JC: Resigned to life or to whatever they’re being told.
FF: For example, in Mabel, I was imagining a character who has desires, but life has put a foot on her and she is afraid of what’s going to happen to her or is afraid to be disappointed again and again. I was thinking that she has a harder cascara, protection . . .
JC: Shell.
FF: Shell, a hard shell. Silvi, on the contrary, is raw. She fights for herself. I think a lot about this kind of thing with characters; in what point of their life are they, what is their relationship with desire, what is their relationship with their hopes, do they have hopes? How truthful are they in regard to their desires? The king of the hares fights for his desire and his desire is to be alone. But sometimes you need courage to say: what I want is to be alone in the mountains and lose everything—lose my wife, my girlfriend, my town. Silvi is the most joyful, because her life is like a war. She fights for what she wants.
SH: Jennifer, you have an afterword in this collection, and I was drawn to your use of cinema as a metaphor for translation. You wrote that, while Federico wrote the screenplay—the book—you were, “the director of these sweeping films.” They are sweeping films, and I was wondering what your directorial visions were as you translated these stories? What kinds of interpretive choices were you actively making to achieve that vision?
JC: That’s a great and difficult question. To begin, I don’t know why exactly, but translators always give or are asked to give a metaphor for translation. I feel like I have been asked to give it so many times that I’ve internalized the question. It isn’t, of course, any of that. Translation isn’t any of those things in the same way that writing isn’t anything other than writing. But for me, it really depends on the text what it is most like. In the past, I’ve compared translation to swimming, which I don’t actually know how to do. My most recent comparison is translation as a kind of fungus that destroys the original and, by consuming it, enables this whole other ecosystem to regenerate and survive, which is vaguely based on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator.”
I could see an organic metaphor working well for this work too, but I was gravitating towards the cinema metaphor because these stories do read like films to me anyway. Since it’s not actually an image—and even if it were—you would have to think about what kinds of images would resonate with different people, if you were making a film to be consumed internationally. Fede and I did talk about how to translate certain vegetation, for instance, so that the picture of the landscape would make sense. There were some questions about plants that don’t really have names in English. There’s one instance in particular where I ended up calling a plant Queen Anne’s lace, which is a beautiful weed that I was familiar with from my childhood, instead of what it really was. We talked about how the landscape is meaningful through language.
Where I was really thinking about myself as a director was more in conversation. Normally as a translator, I’m very free. I try to recreate the original feeling that I had as a reader without adhering necessarily word for word to the text. I didn’t really change his stories very much, but the dialogue is where I did. He created these magnificent characters who have these hopes and desires and who are in these very specific stages in their lives, as he just said, and I felt that I came to know them so well that I was able to just release them in the scene and allow them to speak for themselves. I don’t want to exaggerate; I still conveyed the same information that he did in the original, but I did allow them to talk the way that they would talk if they were in my English language film.
SH: I can see how it reads like film, especially the middle three stories, which are these expansive forty-page long stories that have the stamina of cinema. Federico, what do you think about this cinematic quality to your writing? These middle three stories are bookended by two smaller stories. The last one, “The River,” was especially powerful for me. It was written in vignette-like fragments, and stood out because the previous three stories were much larger. In assembling this collection, were you thinking of displaying the range and flexibility of the short story genre?
FF: Yes. First, I have worked in cinema and video for several years. I also studied cinema and feel really comfortable with that style. In my twenties I decided not to continue in film and to start writing, because I felt that with words I could make all the things that were more difficult or expensive in film—things that implied working with a large group of people. In that time, Argentina was in an economic crisis.
The short story as a genre is very formal. It is defined by its structure. I always thought about what else a short story could be beyond the usual. What would happen if I mixed short stories and poetry? What would happen if I made it longer, letting it grow organically from its own character, its own conflicts, like a fungus? Jennifer used the metaphor of the fungus and I really like it. With “Forest Life,” I was thinking about Japanese floral arrangements, which don’t use symmetry. They’re asymmetric. Another image in my mind while in the middle of writing these three long stories was, I’m going to need to say this in Spanish: Para mí a veces los cuentos son como pueblos vistos desde arriba, desde el aire, desde un avión. Y en Argentina tenemos una población en cuadriculas, en manzanas, donde los pueblos son todos iguales. Visto desde arriba, es una cuadricula cartisa, perfecta. Donde siempre frente a la plaza hay una policía, una iglesia, un banco, y lo que yo quería es que estos fueran pueblos de montaña que no tuvieran esa extensión siempre igual, sino que se fueran expandiendo sobre la montaña siguiendo los cursos de las laderas y de los ríos, y que crecieran orgánicamente de acuerdo al paisaje en el cual se posaban.
JC: Fede says that instead of looking at a town from above and seeing identical block after identical block, with all the same structural elements—like the little police station, and the church, and the bank—these stories tried to follow a more organic formation that tends to happen in the mountains. The town has to expand according to certain naturally defined limits, rather than creating its own. According to where the river runs, there might be a more meandering boundary, or it may have to climb the beginning of the slopes. That’s what he’s doing in these longer stories, allowing them to take their own shape.
FF: When I fly over Córdoba, I can see the shape of the little town from the plane in the night by its lights.
SH: I like the juxtaposition between following the larger-than-human limits that you can’t change. I’m interested in how you think about this in regard to your career as a writer. What are some of the lines or rivers that you’ve been following and limits you’ve encountered?
FF: I usually don’t think so much about my career, maybe because I’m from Argentina. Here, being a writer isn’t really something you do. I never do projects thinking, “I’m going to write a novel,” or “I’m going to write a short story.” I usually start from little ideas, or some technical experiment, like how to make the short story longer. But I think writing is a way to find what I want. For me, it’s very difficult to know what my desire is. Writing is a way to understand myself and my desire and what interests me. I’m always trying to find what I want, what I like, and then the forms appear. If it’s going to be a poem, great. If it’s a short story, great. I like to mix genres, between poetry and reflection, for example, or bring elements from cinema to the writing to make something new.
Federico Falco (General Cabrera, Córdoba, Argentina, 1977) is the author of four collections of short stories, a book of poems, and the novel Cielos de Córdoba (Córdoba Skies). He holds a BA in Communications from Blas Pascal University in Argentina and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. In 2010, Granta selected him as one of the Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists, and in 2017 the story “Silvi and the Her Dark Night” was a finalist for the García Márquez Short Story Prize. Falco is currently the director of Chai Editora, dedicated to publishing short stories by contemporary Argentinian authors. His forthcoming novel, Los Llanos (The Plains) was recently finalist of the Herralde Prize (2020). He lives in Buenos Aires and A Perfect Cemetery is his first book to appear in English.
Jennifer Croft won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is the author of Serpientes y escaleras and Notes on Postcards, and holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review Daily, The Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, BOMB, n+1, Guernica, the Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.
Shawn Hoo’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in journals including Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Queer Southeast Asia, OF ZOOS, and Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, as well as anthologies such as A Luxury and EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices (both Math Paper Press, 2021). He graduated from Yale-NUS College with a BA(Hons) in Literature and was a Teaching Assistant Trainee (English Literature) at the National University of Singapore. He is assistant editor at Asymptote, and can be contacted via his email here.