Our penultimate Book Club selection for this year was Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland, an exquisitely lyrical narration of childhood amidst the instabilities of poverty, underlined by an unexpectedly penetrating look into economic migration in eastern Europe. Told in the mesmerizing voice of Cristina, whose mind slips flowingly from magic to sorrow, from urgency to tenderness, the novel traces the known and unknown forces that shape our lives, during that most delicate and mutable of times: youth. In the following interview, Corobca and translator Monica Cure discuss the political context of this work, as well as their exceptionally close and collaborative partnership.
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Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): I wanted to ask about any autographical aspects of this novel. Liliana, are there moments here that were drawn from your own memory—or are there aspects of your experience that you wanted to include in Kinderland, but didn’t?
Liliana Corobca (LC): I’ve written nine novels, and none of them can be considered autobiographical. My first book translated into English, The Censor’s Notebook, was based on my research experience, which surrounds institutional censorship under communism. I had read about such a document (the notebook of a censor) in the archives, but I never found it, so I imagined it.
Therefore, there’s no single character with which I can identify and say: this is me. Cristina, the girl in Kinderland, is imaginary. Still, there are very special and concrete biographical elements—even if they verge more on the mystical. Kinderland is a novel about migration, a very common phenomenon in Romania and Moldova. I was born in a Moldovan village like the one in the book, and my parents were teachers who worked with children such as those in the book. They told me of many situations and stories which I used and adapted, and I also drew on my relationship with my own younger brother to write the relationship of the siblings.
Actually, I hesitated to write this novel because I have no children, and I was sure that if I wanted to write such a book, I would’ve needed to bring up children, to follow them, to observe them, and to study their reactions. But instead, I just imagined, drawing on my own experience. There are moments in the book that stem from my little village, which was by the biggest forest in Moldova; my father and I walked there a lot, and such memories are incorporated into the novel. Another source is related to the mystical experience of children. I was born in an atheist country where it was forbidden to have a Bible or to go to church, so I don’t have those more customary experiences of spirituality, but I think human beings are naturally mystical, so those scenes or passages of magic or mysticism in the book are my own. They are of my impulse.
MCS: It’s interesting that you hesitated to write about children, because Cristina’s voice is so strong and so full of childhood innocence. How did you do it?
LC: That’s a hard question because I don’t really know, but what I remember initially is that the idea was for Kinderland to be an epistolary novel, in which the mother’s voice must be as strong as the children’s. After some pages, however, I lost the mother. The mother of the novel is only some episodic person recalled by the children, who write to her and talk about her. I began with Cristina and felt so deeply about her, and I retreated into her skin to write the novel.
MCS: Monica, did your own experience of migration impact the way you translated the novel?
Monica Cure (MC): Migration, in regards to Romania, has always been of interest to me because of my own family’s experience. We left in the 80s during Communism, as refugees, so it was a very different experience—and it took some time for me to understand that “refugee,” as a legal status, is in some ways a privilege.
I’ve gotten two Fulbrights to come live in Romania, and my first came when the country was not yet part of the EU. It was a very formative experience for me, and when I came again, I saw how much had changed—partly because of joining the EU. It actually increased the rate of migration within Romania. Being part of the EU allowed so many wonderful things, opened up so many opportunities for people, but it also definitely created circumstances in which Romania then had the highest rate of migration of any country in the world, other than Syria.
What Liliana writes about in Kinderland, of the Republic of Moldova, was also true of Romania, especially in in the rural areas, and I got to see a lot of that firsthand. So the voice that Liliana created of Cristina was something I really did recognize from children that I’ve met, and it’s a heartbreaking phenomenon where children really are left alone the way that Liliana describes. I’m so grateful to her for writing this book, as I don’t think there’s anything quite like it.
MCS: Given that Kinderland was published ten years ago, has the situation changed at all? Does the translation coming out now reflect a different context in Romania and in Moldova?
MC: For the Republic of Moldova, migration to Siberia is obviously no longer happening, so the destinations have changed. And for those living in Romania, I think the situation is also slowly changing, in that many Romanians are now coming back from being abroad. It’s still not to the extent that many people hope for, but the fact that people do come back is actually really wonderful, and it leads to a sense of hope and possibility—though some of the challenges definitely still exist. This applies especially to rural areas, which is key in Romania.
LC: This novel is about a Moldovan reality, but it was published in Romania, and the readers here read it as a Romanian reality. Actually, one of the first translations of this book was into German, and in a meeting with the German public, they had asked me exactly how many children are abandoned in Moldova or in Romania. In my research, it was about 10,000. They then asked how many children were without both parents, or how many lived with one parent, and I told them that in my village, for example, there were no children who did not have a migrant in the family.
As I wrote Kinderland, I had hoped that it would be a historical text, documenting the reality of 2000 or 2010, but the situation remains a problem to this day. When I meet teachers or parents who have read this book, they mention how nostalgic it is for them, and they express regret for their children in Moldova or in Romania. I don’t know why this problem persists, but immigration has not minimized in either county; people still want to leave.
MCS: I’d like to ask you both about your work in academia. Liliana, you mentioned censorship during the Soviet times; did that background make an impact on the writing of Kinderland?
LC: Actually, I wrote Kinderland three or four years before I wrote The Censor’s Notebook, but before that I had worked on several academic projects regarding censorship—which for me, as a writer, was such a hard and castrating experience that I feel the need to balance it. So, I see Kinderland as a reaction to the study of censorship.
For me, I had been afraid that I could no longer write because it was so overwhelming to stay in the archives and to edit those documents about censorship—it was not poetry, not spiritual, but a very dry experience. And after that I needed something pure, something innocent. That was Kinderland. A catharsis after the censorship project, something antonymous.
MCS: And Monica, did translating Kinderland also help you recover from academia?
MC: I would say that’s a part of it, for sure! I did translate The Censor’s Notebook first, so the order is different for me, but translating The Censor’s Notebook was actually a beautiful experience, because I realized that my own academic training allowed me to instantly understand more about the text, which is very complex in terms of the mechanisms of censorship and what was happening during Communism. So, the research that I did, with that sort of analytical mindset turned out to be very important, and it made me a better translator for The Censor’s Notebook.
Then, when it came to Kinderland, maybe I did have a little bit more of the experience—as Liliana was saying—of relief. There’s a little bit of the Communist history in the text, specific to Moldova being a part of the Soviet Union, so my own studies were helpful in that respect, but it was also very much a departure from the factual rigor.
MCS: Are either of you working on anything new at the moment?
MC: Yes—we are! And I say “we,” because Liliana has been incredibly helpful. I’ve just finished translating another one of her novels, whose provisional title in English is The Journey’s End, and we’ve probably worked most closely together on this one. We’ve addressed certain questions together, and even changed some names together! I’m very excited about it, and it’s slated to be published in the fall.
I’m also working on a collection of my own poems, some of which resonate with the theme of migration, called The Country of Leaving.
LC: I actually co-ordinated a couple of big projects. First, there are these texts: Panorama of Communism in Soviet Moldova, Panorama of Communism in Romania, and Panorama of Post-communism in Romania, which are about Romanian and Moldova in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods—the last thirty years. Each has around forty themes and fifty specialists, and it was a big responsibility and a very good project to undertake during the pandemic. The second is a novel titled Maestrul și Makarenko.
I’ve also had some new experiences in my own life, and as I consider myself an experimental writer and interested in writing with new methods, I would like an original novel to come out of them.
MC: Liliana’s panorama projects are really monumental, comprehensive views of Romania and Moldova under Communism, in all different aspects: the arts, childcare, demographics. . . Really, it’s an incredible labour of love that Liliana has been working on in tandem with her creative work.
MCS: It sounds like a wonderful project, and it seems like, Liliana, you write primarily from historical happenings, or from what you observe in the world around you. Now, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which happened nearly two years ago, the situation has shifted quite rapidly in Romania and Moldova, with both countries taking a significant influx of Ukrainian refugees. Is that something that you see yourself drawing on for your writing?
MC: Actually, I’ll say that this third novel, The Journey’s End—it’s about the past, but what I appreciate about Liliana as a writer is that she’ll go after issues that people aren’t really talking about, whether they’re of the past or the present. The novel is about the Soviet deportation of Romanians from Bukovina—the part of Bukovina that is in Ukraine— during World War IIto Kazakhstan. And you know, she wrote it long before this most recent invasion, then all of a sudden it’s completely topical again, even though it’s historical, because of the way that these things repeat. In all of Liliana’s writing, she’s always looking for that essential truth—that thing that we need to understand about a certain situation.
LC: I think in my novels, I’ve always wanted to approach the subject with more clarity, for a larger category of readers. I’ve also lived half of my life in Moldova and another half in Romania, and as a Moldovan and as a Romanian, I’m interested in explaining my feelings and my experience—regarding identity and its conflicts.
Regarding the present situation, the fact is that nobody wants to die for a territory, this abstract notion. I can’t explain what I will write, but I’m interested in the individual hour, the individual day—even within historical moments.
MCS: I’m also curious about the title of Kinderland—how did that come about?
LC: Well you know the chocolate—Kinder chocolate. I hadn’t known, in my little village, that kinder means child. We thought of it only as the chocolate egg. So from this kind of joke, I got Kinderland. The original title was actually “Motherland”—the land of the mothers. But as I mentioned, I lost the mother, and this title was no longer good.
MCS. One of our readers had a question regarding the names of the children in the novel: Cristina, Dan, and Marcel. They’re names that are easy to understand in English—implying that the parents gave them these names so the children could live easily outside of Moldova. How did you choose those names?
LC: I thought a lot about the names I wanted to give the children. Cristina was a new, prevalent name in the post-Soviet times, and I had wanted to present a very normal girl: not too beautiful, not too intelligent, just one girl without any special talents or particularities. And we had a lot of Cristinas in our village. Daniel was another one; it’s not a Russian name, and with my grandmother and my parents, there were Katerinas and Anastasias, very Slavic names. But in the post-Soviet era, Daniel and Marcel became usual names in the villages, and they weren’t special. I want to draw attention to the fact that these aren’t exceptional names.
MC: I love this question and hearing your answer, Liliana. I didn’t think about the fact—but of course they’re new names: Cristina coming from Christian, and Daniel also being a Biblical name. Very common in Romania, but of course not during the Soviet times. So it reflects on the specific historical moment, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
MCS: Another reader wants to know about your collaboration during the translation—how has that relationship grown during these three translations?
LC: Monica is not my only translator, but of all my translators, she is the one I can really call a friend. Because Monica lives now in Bucharest and we can meet, we can go to the theatre or to restaurants and have conversations—usually we don’t have such opportunities with translators. Also, I liked her questions—about humour, about poetry or prose, about censorship. It’s a great collaboration.
MC: It’s been so fun getting to know Liliana personally since working on The Censor’s Notebook. I had started translating that on my own as we didn’t know each other before then, and I think what’s been fun since meeting her and getting to know her is that I can hear her voice though some of the characters—even though they’re not necessarily her. So even though the narrator of The Censor’s Notebook is so different from Cristina, there are certain things and a certain sense of humour running though them.
LC: And sometimes Monica would just say what I have in my head, or what I mean to say. I don’t always have something special in mind while I’m writing, so it’s only after the book’s been published that I can feel and say and think what I actually wanted to express with a sentence or a situation. And I tell these things to Monica so that she would understand them while she works on the book, but it was surprising because in her style of translating, as she works with such detail, she would’ve understood already.
Carol Khoury (CK): Going back to the notion of censorship and the author-translator relationship: Liliana, when you’re writing, do you keep in mind the global audience? Do you censor yourself to consider the book’s translation? And Monica, as a translator, do you ever experience any censorship from the editors?
LC: Well, censorship is not a very lovely subject, and when I wrote The Censor’s Notebook, I wasn’t even sure that I would have an audience in Romania, let alone any other country. When Monica said that she would, I felt sorry towards her, because I had invented words and very complicated situations, which would be difficult to translate. As a writer, I don’t think it’s good to think too much about the audience; I’m very preoccupied by my structures and my situations, and my first audience is myself. I’m my public and my reader, so I don’t think of translation. I know it’s a possibility, but it would be too much for me to be occupied with it. I have the responsibility to go to the end with a good book.
My subjects have been very delicate ones, and I never thought they would be interesting to the public—even though they are interesting! But people are afraid of censorship, of this style, so I’m not very popular in Romania. But I have enough power to move forward without considering success or even publication.
Kinderland was very successful in Moldova, in Romania, and in other countries where it was translated. It has gone through several editions in Germany and was dramatized in Slovenia.
MC: I can say also that Maestrul și Makarenko, which was published after we worked together, is for a very local audience—speaking to her academic circle. I found it very interesting, but I knew that it wouldn’t be for a large audience because of her specific interests and what she wanted to communicate. She writes what she needs to, and it’s wonderful.
In terms of my relationship with editors, because censorship was the subject, I was more cautious than usual when working with the editor—but funnily enough, the editor was more cautious as well, because nobody wants to be seen as a censor! I’m lucky to have always had the most wonderful editors—whose work I so appreciate. It’s so good to have a reader who can see what holes might be there unintentionally, and I’ve always enjoyed the back-and-forth.
Liliana Corobca is a writer and researcher of communist censorship in Romania. She was born in the Republic of Moldova and is the author of the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the “Prometheus” Prize for debut fiction. She is also the author of the novels The Censor’s Notebook (Seven Stories Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, A Year in Paradise (2005), Kinderland (2013), and The Old Maids’ Empire (2015). She has received grants and artists’ residencies in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland.
Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she is the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of The Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.
Michelle Chan Schmidt is a writer and editor from Hong Kong. She edits fiction for Asymptote. Her creative writing, essays, and translations have been published or are forthcoming in La Piccioletta Barca, The Oxonian Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and Asymptote. A selection is available here.
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