Published by Newfound in October 2023, Elina Katrin’s debut poetry chapbook If My House Has a Voice renders the (un)belonging of immigration, the fluidity of the cross-cultural self, and the sensory core of memories in a vulnerable, mesh-like voice woven from three languages, emojis, and blank spaces. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Russian mother and a Syrian father, and currently living in Southern California, Katrin is profoundly aware of how living between cultures and languages both enriches and destabilizes the subject: in her work, multilingualism multiplies meaning, yet makes the mother tongue something which can be gradually forgotten, mixed with other languages, or, suddenly, spoken with an accent—somehow less authentically than before. Katrin’s poems—previously featured in Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, and Nimrod, among others—move across Syria, Russia, and the United States, recounting wounds both old and new, the love and pain of familial bonds, and moments of exhilarating rebellion and excruciating self-scrutiny. In this interview, I spoke with Elina about her experiences with immigration, her poetic techniques, food (and, more broadly, the sensory) as a medium for memories, translation, and her “personal English.”
Sofija Popovska (SP): Congratulations on your debut chapbook! It’s definitely one of those rare books that make reading them for the first time feel like a homecoming. Can you tell me a little about how it came to be?
Elina Katrin (EK): Thank you so much. The chapbook originally started as a full-length book, or rather, my MFA thesis. Though I technically graduated with a complete manuscript, I quickly realized that the full-length needed more work. However, many poems in my thesis felt done and interconnected, so I decided to put them together into a chapbook. When I started treating If My House Has a Voice as its own separate project, I included the title poem into the manuscript—the only one from the chapbook that I wrote before graduate school. As this project was coming together, I was thinking about the curiosities and complexities of language—its beauty, pliability, and failures. Language is what ultimately connects us, it’s the center of any relationship, no matter what shape or lack thereof that language takes. I wanted to explore that in If My House Has a Voice, so I’m delighted to hear this chapbook reads like a homecoming.
SP: One of the first things that struck me was how memory was mediated through the body in your poems: a scratched knee becomes the point where love and hurt, control and rebellion converge, and biting into pickled vegetables suggests bottled-up fears and frustrations. What inspired you to choose touch, smell, and taste as privileged modes of perception/ expression?
EK: It’s no secret that most of our memories are attached to sensory details. Songs remind us of certain people, and scents transport us back to different periods of our lives. When thinking of Syria or Russia, my life in those countries came back to me through scratched knees and pickled vegetables—little fragments of time and space that reminded me what it felt like to occupy the body of a girl or a teenager. I wanted to document, archive those memories on the page exactly as I experienced them. For this reason, many images rooted in touch, smell, taste, sight, and sound work on different levels—the literal one that describes the physical experience, and the emotional one that allows us to look into how the speaker was feeling or what she was thinking about during any sensory experience. This layering of perception hopefully gives readers the opportunity to fully be there with the speaker, experiencing moments in her life they might otherwise have no way of accessing.
SP: On your website, you say that “as a foodie, [your] mission is to find the most delicious donut in the United States.” The very first, eponymous, poem of If My House Has a Voice contains one of my favorite lines “If my house has a voice, it sounds like mama biting into a ripe tomato. . .” I think it’s safe to say that food has a programmatic meaning in your poetry. In fact, it even has the power to attenuate the estrangement inseparable from the immigrant experience, as it does in the lines: “Tavern at 2 a.m. and PB&Js for lunch. / America on my lips finally tastes homier.” Can you tell me more about the significance of food in your chapbook, as a means of experiencing, remembering, and beyond?
EK: Food is a culture connector, but I discovered that only a couple of years into my immigration. As I was exploring American culture by going on new culinary adventures, I found myself longing for my mother’s cooking—a feeling many immigrants relate to. When writing the chapbook, so much of which takes place across different countries, reaching for food that reminded me of my homes felt natural. I was thinking about crisp Russian apples or my grandmother’s specialty tea, so I put them on the page to feel closer to the flavors that felt beyond reach. Enjoying, sharing, missing food—all of these experiences are so tangible and convey specific memories only the sensory detail of taste is capable of.
Fun fact: it took me five years of living in the States to start liking peanut butter. But after that switch magically flipped. . . oh, I was eating a jar of peanut butter a week, frequently by the spoonful.
SP: Another standout feature of If My House Has a Voice is the fact that it’s trilingual. The three languages in it—English, Russian, and Arabic—are laden with meaning beyond etymology and semantics: they also carry the weight of childhood and family, and are both a source of strength and fraught with trauma. Can you tell me about the role of these languages and personal/ cultural traces they carry in your poetry?
EK: From Maureen Seaton, one of my first-ever mentors, I learned I could incorporate other languages into my writing, and this revelation became one of the most transformative things to ever happen to my poetry. Writing in English as a foreign language, I frequently think myself unable to feel English the same way I feel my native Russian. Russian comes out where English can’t reach—not because I don’t have the vocabulary, but because some words sound just right only in my first language. A good example of that is the last poem in the chapbook, “On Sunday Night I am Tired of Proving I Deserve Languages.” Having “valenki” and “Antonovka” in the first two lines of the poem helps set its tone; this piece is a self-portrait of sorts, where Russian traditional shoes and a specific variety of apples remain untranslated, honoring their original sound despite transliteration. Further instances of Russian are translated later on in the poem, such as “malenkiy nosik” and “mama, ya doma,” but both of those phrases are pieces of direct speech exchanged between the speaker and her mother. I made the choice to follow up these Russian phrases with their English translation as a way to let the reader into this treasured relationship, instead of fitting the relationship itself into the English mold.
Arabic—the language I once knew, then lost, and am now actively relearning—appears in moments the speaker is often most vulnerable, where English feels like an intruder. In “On the Other End of Translation,” the first Arabic words the speaker says to her grandfather are “I love you” and “I miss you lots,” but neither of these phrases is translated in the book. These words are supposed to be felt, not known. They speak of a kind of closeness recognizable only by people who aren’t fluent in the language of their ancestors and are forced to boil down their vocabulary to a special phrase or two that carry all the emotions and feelings words cannot reach.
This is why the chapbook could never exist solely in English; that would be inauthentic to the speaker, most of whose loved ones don’t know this language at all.
SP: During my relatively short time in the translation scene, I have already encountered many compelling arguments about the failings of the English language, especially when it comes to conveying flavor and nuance. Your personal English is, however, strikingly luscious and flavorful—poems like “Bloodline” have such an immediate somatic impact that they almost register as a physical sensation before they appear as words on a page. Did you consciously aim to stretch the expressive potential of English to the limit? If you did, are there any specific qualities you sought to enhance?
EK: I’m terribly flattered by your reading of my “personal English,” especially because I come across the failings of this language oh so frequently. Sometimes, the “stretching of English” comes intuitively, and upon revision, I make the conscious choice to keep the original phrasing instead of editing it. A good example of this is the fact that I occasionally misplace my articles (to this day!)—I unknowingly did that in “On the Other End of Translation” with “I’m at loss.” I kept that phrase instead of changing it to the grammatically correct “I’m at a loss” because the original version carried more feeling and truthfulness, directly showcasing how languages can fail us, how even fluency might not feel like enough.
Other times, I do consciously choose to enhance the English sound by creating layered meanings and experiences. In “Bloodline,” for instance, this appears in the use of the compound adjective “beaver-bearded”—we have the sonic alliteration, as well as all the texture and color a beaver can evoke, all blending together to describe a beard. I especially find a lot of possibilities for stretching meanings when it comes to bodily experiences: for instance, taking the sandals off the bloody feet is a textured event. It “sounds like velcro” but also feels like it, too, when the skin releases itself from blood that’s congealed on the shoes.
SP: In light of your success in intensifying the suggestive ability of the English language, it’s evident that being a speaker of multiple languages is a strength. However, there is a price to pay—one that you discuss in “Language Roundelay”—the confusing mixing-together of languages and accents, and the inability to fully ‘belong’ in one (linguistic) space due to the liminality inherent in having been born into two cultures. This issue of belonging is then recast in “We Meet Again, U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” where the subject is an immigrant rather than bicultural. As someone who grew up bilingual in North Macedonia and then moved to Germany where I took on the status of an immigrant, I was deeply touched by your exploration of different kinds of estrangement and belonging in your chapbook. Can you tell me more about the kinds of (un)belonging in your poems? How did the experiences of being born into a Russian-Syrian household and immigrating to the United States made their way into If My House Has a Voice? Did writing about them make you see any portion of them in a new light?
EK: I suspect many people like you and I—multilingual and multicultural immigrants—can relate to knowing different languages and feeling incomplete in all of them. This overwhelmingly isolating sensation has inspired the chapbook, really, and I was thinking about (un)belonging throughout the entire writing process. An example of (un)belonging that I frequently allude to in the book is the question of nationality vs. ethnicity. It’s comical how little “Russian blood” I have in me, with my maternal grandparents being from Azerbaijan and Lithuania, and my paternal family deeply rooted in Syria. And yet, I identify as a Russian, because that’s what my passport says, that’s the country that shaped my younger self.
Another form of (un)belonging—the idea of perception—stems from a similar place. Existing in America as a multicultural person yet not exactly looking like either of my cultures results in me being frequently perceived as an American white person, which in many ways has affected my experience as an immigrant in this country. And, of course, there is the type of (un)belonging that “Language Roundelay” addresses—the “half” identities. As a half-Syrian, half-“Russian” person, I’m unable to claim either culture as my whole without feeling like a fraud, like I’m betraying one for the other yet committing myself to neither.
These are just a few examples that made their way into my poems, some of which are in the chapbook, and others potentially appearing in my full-length. Despite all the in-betweenness, I know for sure that my cross-cultural upbringing and young adult immigration (especially being the only one from my family to immigrate) fueled the entirety of If My House Has a Voice. Documenting some of my life experiences in the chapbook has certainly helped me further make sense of my identity and ancestry, as well as inspired me to do more research into the studies surrounding multilingual upbringing in children as a whole.
SP: Speaking of remedying the shortcomings of language, I was awed by your ability to write the unspeakable by communicating, where speech fails, through non-verbal signs, such as blacked-out spaces and emojis. In “I Must Not See,” which you call a “self-erasure poem,” the blacked-out spaces which bar access to the description of injustice at a protest communicate the complicity of bystanders who look away to avoid dealing with the emotional impact of cruelty; this effect wouldn’t have been possible without the visual obstruction. Can you tell me more about your choice to include these symbols in your poems? What do these symbols mean in the context of If My House Has a Voice? Do you see this choice as a species of translation, in a broader sense?
EK: Erasure is most definitely a form of translation, and so are the emojis. In the context of the book, the latter is a bridge of communication between my younger sister and me, while the former—a way of making sense of the senseless. The first draft of “I Must Not See” was a full poem, with a different title, written during the time of massive protests across Russia. The original text was raw, honest, and direct. Yet upon the imminence of the chapbook’s publication, however, I got scared about the potential consequences this poem could have for my immediate family members, all of whom still live in St. Petersburg. I chose to black out most of the poem while still conveying the speaker’s beliefs and frustrations, though indirectly, as a form of quiet protest. “I Must Not See” illustrates that if my house has a voice, sometimes it can get censored, suppressed, and even (self)-erased.
SP: On the topic of translation, it is also loaded with both inspiration, such as in the lines “Take these words. Enhance their meaning. / Multiply. Multiply.” and loss (of words), such as when the speaker, trying to convey her thoughts in Arabic, “can’t scrape off the hardened glue / of Arabic from the tip of my tongue.” How have your experiences with translation shaped your work as a poet?
EK: Continuing with the thread of fear, translation is something I’ve been afraid of for many years! The most honest way translation has shaped my work as a poet is through incompleteness. Most of the time I read Russian poetry or fiction that’s been translated into English, I find it lacking in feeling, meaning, or something even less tangible. Attempting translation myself feels like a tremendous responsibility I tried only a handful of times. That’s how the chapbook’s epigraph came to be—I knew that the first project I ever publish must feature at least a few lines from one of my favorite poems of all time, Sergei Esenin’s “Blue fire has trashed about. . .” (at least that’s how I would translate its title!). All of this is to say—I believe translation to be a special kind of intimacy, the one that, when practiced, can help a poet touch language in new, surprising ways. Maybe that’s what I ought to do in order to finally feel English. . .
SP: Finally, are you working on anything new/ planning any new projects?
EK: I’m very close to finishing my full-length poetry manuscript, tentatively titled The Overwintered Fig. This book delves into female identity by centering the speaker’s relationship with all the bodies she inhabits—her ill, physical one, the immigrant body, and the bodies of the countries and people she belongs to. I’m really excited about this project and hope to see it out in the world in the near future! I’ve also been feeling really inspired to write prose lately and might be developing an idea for a novel. . . Stay tuned!
Elina Katrin is a Syrian-Russian immigrant and the author of the poetry chapbook If My House Has a Voice (Newfound, 2023). Her writing was selected as a semi-finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and has appeared in or is forthcoming from Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, So to Speak, Sundog Lit, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. She works and organizes with Mizna as a Community Engagement Coordinator and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She currently lives in Los Angeles, CA with a dream and her cardigan.
Sofija Popovska is a poet and translator currently living in Germany. She works as an Editor-at-Large for Asymptote Journal, and her other work can be found in Circumference Magazine, Poetry Daily, GROTTO Journal, and mercury firs, among others. Thaumatropes, a poetry chapbook she co-authored with Jonah Howell, was published in 2023 by Newcomer Press.
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