After The Censor’s Notebook, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for debut translation, and Kinderland, about a village of children abandoned by parents working abroad, Too Great a Sky is Moldovan author Liliana Corobca’s third novel to be translated into English by Romanian-American translator and writer Monica Cure. Beginning with a harrowing deportation by train from Bucovina, Romania to the steppes of Kazakhstan, the story chronicles a girl and a people who are forced to find their way amid unspeakable conditions and political change. I spoke with Liliana and Monica about working between academic research and fiction; navigating culture and language across borders both contemporary and historic; and the ways in which faith, optimism, and humor are instrumental to survival.
Regan Mies (RM): Too Great a Sky opens with its narrator Ana telling her story to her great-granddaughter, beginning when she’s eleven and facing Soviet deportation from Bucovina. What was it like to write in the voice of a much older woman recalling experiences from her youth and adolescence?
Liliana Corobca (LC): My novel is based on the real testimonies of people from Bucovina deported to Siberia, and these were from survivors who were very old. My main character is not a real person, but because someone like her would have been deported in 1941, it wouldn’t be realistic to imagine a survivor as a young woman or child today. But my novel is also about memory, about remembering the experiences of past and childhood. During the journey on the train, Ana was a child—that’s why I move between ages. We have an old woman who tells the story, but we also have a young girl who feels the experience of deportation.
RM: In her translator’s note, Monica writes that you had previously edited over eighty of these oral testimonies of Soviet deportation during World War Two. What did the journey look like between working with those texts in an academic capacity and deciding to write this novel?
LC: At the time when I was editing the documents, I thought that documentation would be enough, and then I moved on. I decided not to write a novel. Almost ten years passed after that, but when I was working with those testimonies, I discovered certain themes. They said, like the refrain of a song, “We survived because we believed in God.” I was educated in a communist society, which wasn’t religious at all. For me, it was complicated to write from inside the skin of a believer. These people who believed so profoundly and seriously in God had a very religious way of speaking. Even if they weren’t mentioning God by name, he was still present in their stories. I was impressed that, in the worst conditions, their hope and faith allowed them to survive. I began to read religious literature, and I learned to pray. I also began reading orthodox prayer books. Even though it wasn’t very usual to read the same prayers over and over again every day, it was through that practice that I learned to say my own prayers, which was what I needed to be able to write this story in their voices.
Another theme I found in their stories was the regret that people who died during the deportation had to be thrown off of the train. They didn’t have a cross to mark their graves, and they were forgotten about. I started dreaming about these crosses, crosses of light-colored wood, some closer, some farther in the distance, and a kind of fog. At first the images scared me, but I felt it was a sign I should actually write about these stories. My novel could be a way of giving these people their memorial, their cross, through what I had written.
RM: This reminds me of a point in the story where Ana describes that when she and her fellow deportees were unable to bury the deceased physically, they had to “bury their dead with words.”
I was amazed to discover—amid hymns, prayers, and religious rites—that there were still so many more ways by which words helped deportees to survive and retain hope. Too Great a Sky brims with riddles, folk songs, and fables, told by the characters to one another when things are at their most difficult. Many of these texts appear in full within the novel. I’m wondering whether you knew from the beginning that you wanted to include these actual texts alongside Ana’s narrative.
LC: No. As I began to write about the train journey, I thought that the train would be enough. But I was also curious about everyday life in their destination, Kazakhstan, as a deportee, which was difficult to reconstruct. I had to describe the nature, tradition, and language of the Kazakh people. Additionally, before the Romanian people arrived in Kazakhstan, there were other deported peoples from other cultures and traditions. There were waves of deportations, and these peoples were almost stratified just by the different times they had been deported.
In my library, I have some historic anthologies of short stories for children; this resulted in a challenge for Monica, because I used some words from what I believed was Kazakh, but they weren’t identifiable in the actual language. At the time of the novel, our Romanian language in Moldova was actually written with the Cyrillic alphabet, and the anthology in my library was also in Cyrillic. It’s difficult to find that now. A part of historical Moldova is now in Romania, another part of Bucovina is in Ukraine, and another part called Bessarabia is now in Moldova. In the novel, I had the occasion to present these different epochs and different territories in one novel—through their folk stories and tales. My main character, for example, experiences a childhood in Bucovina, then in Kazakhstan, then she works in Siberia, and then she returns to Soviet Moldova, which becomes post-Soviet Republic of Moldova.
RM: Monica, this is the third novel of Liliana’s you’ve translated. What aspects of the translation process—like the Cyrillic Romanian Liliana mentions—were surprising, new, or challenging this time around?
Monica Cure (MC): Definitely looking up all the different cultures and references, which abound in the novel. So many different peoples were deported to Kazakhstan; it’s not just the Kazakh language we were working with, which would have been hard enough. I wrote in the translator’s note about my process of doing some cultural research alongside Liliana, and kind of redoing it with her, because there was a cultural and historic coherence in the story, and I wanted it to be as accurate as it could be. And that’s the thing––it was difficult to maintain coherence through so many different political changes that happened. Things get called differently now, whether geographically or culturally. A novel like Censor’s Notebook, though also very difficult, was nonetheless set in one country and one historical period, which I was familiar with through my own readings and my own research. With Too Great a Sky, it was like having to do all this research at once. Luckily I wasn’t alone; Liliana and I were doing it together.
LC: I don’t think I ever said, but the name of one of my great-grandmothers was Kalmysh, and the Kalmysh are a people from Kalmykia—and that’s why I introduced in my novel a little fragment of a story about the Kalmysh people. That was a republic in Russia, and I have a dream to one day visit.
MC: I had no idea you had a great-grandmother from Kalmykia.
LC: I have no proof, I just know her name is Kalmysh. In the Second World War, the Kalmysh people were against Soviet troops, punished, and also deported. For a period of time, the Kalmyk Republic was abolished.
MC: This makes me want to ask you a question, Liliana. Was writing this novel also you looking at your own family history rather than just the history of Bucovina?
LC: People always ask me if I’m from Bucovina, and if not, why I wrote about it. I have good connections with Bucovinian writers, who say they don’t have any prose authors there, only poets and cultural journalists. I decided to write a novel about Bucovina because there’s nobody there to do it. In Moldova, we also had deportees. None of my direct relatives were deported, but there were individuals deported from my village and church. In English, you say “exile,” but we have a multitude of forms of deportation. To us, exile and deportation are different things.
MC: Liliana and I have had conversations about how, in English, we don’t have something like “auto-exile,” except maybe if people leave the country during draft time. Mostly America is not a place you leave unless you’re forced to go. Exile is something that happens in other countries. Or you’re deported if you don’t come here legally. There’s a different nuance to the word, whereas in Romanian, there’s a whole range of ways you might have to leave a country.
RM: There’s so much tragedy and violence in these stories of deportation and exile, so I wanted to be sure to give space to the humor, hope, and generosity that appear in Ana’s voice and in many of the situations she faces. Was it challenging to balance this levity? Are there any scenes in particular that are favorites of yours?
LC: I’ve written nine novels in total, and all have been very difficult and dramatic. But from the first until now, I include drama alongside humor and hope. It’s a part of my particular psychology, because I think optimism is a solution to our very deep trauma—at least one aspect of a solution. Another is that people who believe in God are very luminous. They have a lightness to them, and they see meaning in what others might see as punishment. In the novel, I basically write that losing hope is a sin. That idea isn’t my own; it’s what I found in the oral histories of the deportees. If you didn’t view life that way, you just wouldn’t survive.
I’ve always been interested in what people do to survive in extreme situations. In my other novels, I’ve written about women who are trafficked, children who have been abandoned. In all these situations, that approach to life is needed to survive. I consider humor to be medicine, and we all need to take this medicine for our physical and mental health.
MC: I completely understood where Liliana was coming from. My family and I were refugees for political and religious reasons, and this had been our way of surviving as well. This perspective on how one survives in extreme situations was so natural to me. I completely resonated with it. What has really drawn me to Liliana’s writing is this confluence of attitudes. As far as a favorite part, it’s so difficult to decide because there are just so many parts that are funny. I love Ana’s relationship with her cat. For me, that’s hilarious.
RM: I agree! I wanted to ask about all the animals, actually, because while the natural world in the novel is so harsh and deadly, characters are constantly building connections with animals. There’s Kot, Ana’s cat. But there’s also the family of bears who show up in the village, to whom the deportees feed jam. There’s a tragic moment where a dog mourns his master’s death before the family receives the news. Do you have a connection to animals yourself, Liliana? Or is this an aspect of the story you drew from those original testimonies?
LC: No, it wasn’t in the testimonies. It was from my life. I was born in a small village, and I’ve had animals around me all my life. Now, I live in a town without any animals, and when I write, I bring in all the animals from my childhood, from my happiest moments, to be with me. Animals, like humor, are in all my novels. All my cats have been immortalized in one novel or another. Our cats never had long lives, because people put out poison for rats, and the cats eat the rats, so they die very young. Whenever I visit my parents back home, my mom makes sure we have a cat so there’s always one around for me. A relationship to animals was important for the deportees as well, a kind of normalcy. It’s good for mental health, and that was also how they were able to survive in the face of all these difficulties.
I don’t have any animals now because I travel a lot, and it’s not good for animals to stay home alone. But one day, I think I’ll have a big cat, and he’ll stay on my sofa, and I’ll talk to him. I think that animals make us more human. But the part about the bears—there actually might have been something about deportees being afraid of bears, because they’d come up to the door; of course, I developed the story into what it is from there. And my dad actually worked in Kazakhstan, so I would ask him to tell me stories about what it’s like there.
RM: I feel like each of Liliana’s works encapsulates and preserves a distinct moment in Romanian and Moldovan history, which might not always be so familiar to a wider audience. To what extent do you consider yourself a historian versus a novelist?
LC: As a researcher, I can preserve history through academic study. For a novel, I must have a strong and sentimental connection. I become obsessed with certain images and feel that if I can write them into a novel, I’ll finally be free from them. I think the most important thing is to understand the history and the story and the image, and my skills as a researcher allow me to construct the context for these scenes. I currently work at an institute for researching into the communist history of the government. When I’m doing research for the institute, I decide to use it for my own purposes, too. I have written on many topics that could fit either into an academic treatise or a novel, and if I hadn’t worked there, I might have chosen other themes to write about. Novels can uncover truths about untold experiences I feel are under-researched, even academically, which I enjoy.
MC: I made the move from academia into the literary world, which is where I’m spending my time as a writer and a translator, and I think that it is through stories that we are able to pass on certain truths that we can’t just with academic studies. They’re important, and as Liliana says, they provide the basis of historical facts. But for the emotional truths to get passed on to the next generation and make an impact, it’s stories that really matter. I feel incredibly privileged, as a Romanian-American translator, to be able to read Liliana’s novels, for which she has done the difficult work of recuperating these important historic stories––work that can feel difficult as someone who didn’t grow up in Romanian culture. For me, to be able to translate them so they can be passed on even further is an incredible privilege.
RM: At the end of a previous conversation with Asymptote, you were both asked about future projects and mentioned Too Great a Sky before that was even its title. I’m wondering again now what you might be working on next, either individually or together.
LC: First, I’ll add something about the name of the novel in English. The name of the novel in Romanian is The End of the Journey, and Too Great a Sky is the proposal of my wonderful translator.
MC: From the very beginning, there’s this image of the sky, and Too Great a Sky comes from a sentence in the first pages.
LC: It was much more adequate. Better than the original. The editorial team said it was the best name for the novel, so I’m very grateful to Monica.
MC: It came from the book! It was both of us together.
LC: About future projects, I have other novels I’ve already written, but Monica keeps asking about the novel I’m currently writing, which also has a historical basis and will include a lot of research––but it also has a very personal element. It’s about Romanian and Moldovan identity and how history has influenced whether or not they share an identity, especially after two hundred years of Russian occupation and control. How does that affect current Romanian and Moldovan identities, whether they’re the same, different? How do these things fit together?
MC: I’m very, very interested in this question because, until I moved to Romania, I had no idea that Moldova really used to be part of Romania. When I went there––and I’ve only been to Moldova once, which we need to change––it was shocking to hear Romanian spoken everywhere on the street, to hear teenagers humming Romanian pop songs. Another country existed where Romanian is spoken, like, why did I not know this? Why did I not grow up hearing about this? I’m realizing that at the root of these questions, there are so many questions about history I’m interested in, about the ways in which colonialism works, the ways in which history is complicated, and the ways in which identity is constructed collectively.
Right now, I’m working on a translation of another Moldovan writer. I’m very excited to play a role in a mini-movement that will hopefully grow even bigger, because there’s so much more amazing Romanian literature, both from Romania and Moldova, that needs to get into the hands of English-language readers.
Liliana Corobca is a writer and researcher. Her first novel was Negrissimo, which received the Prometheus Award from the magazine Romania literară and an award from the Writers’ Union of the Republic of Moldova. She has also published eight other novels, some of which have won awards and been translated into several languages, including Kinderland, The Censor’s Notebook (awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2023), and Too Great A Sky, which have been translated into English by Monica Cure and published by Seven Stories Press. Her study on literary censorship during the communism regime in Romania was nominated for prizes from the magazine Observator Cultural and the PEN Romania Prize. She has also published the bilingual monologue in three acts, “Censorship for beginners / Die Zensur. Für Anfänger,” and other volumes of documents about exile, censorship, and deportations.
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’s 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 was awarded with the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.
Regan Mies lives in New York. Her reviews, interviews, and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, New Books in German, No Man’s Land, and elsewhere.
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