Posts filed under 'conversation'

Voices From Uber: An Interview with Maria Anna Mariani

March 23, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Maya Nguyen

I think that all confessions are driven by some common engine . . . but the time-space of Uber is particularly intimate and sealed.

Uber was once the most valued startup in the world and is used in over 700 cities. In Voci da Uber: Confessioni a motore (Voices From Uber: Motor Confessions), Mucchi Editore, 2019, Maria Anna Mariani performs the experiment of steering conversations with Uber drivers toward revealing intimate details of their lives—toward confession. These confessions are then written into a narrative. Her writing articulates the nuances of communication in the way that only the best of dramas can otherwise capture. This is perhaps the by-product of the oscillation between small talk and confession, where the positions of speaker and listener change so fast one only has time to recalibrate after the fact. I was drawn to the subtle tensions and evasions that contour the openings of contact, empathy, and understanding in such a dynamic terrain of communication. Here, Maria Anna Mariani talks about the process of writing the book and the unique space of Uber that allows for confession.

                                                                                                —Maya Nguen, March 2020

What is a repetition: JOHN 

Route: Streeterville-home
Time: 38 minutes
Traffic: tricky
Car: gray Hyundai Elantra
Average rating: 4.95

Select the material with an eye to variety and alternating themes, discard if there’s already a similar story and cut any nationality that appears twice. This is what I’d decided on when I began writing these pages. Structural constraint number one: avoid repetition. But now I have something to ask you: is a murdered brother a repetition? Which story about a murdered brother should I cut to avoid repeating myself? The one about Aisha or the one about John? Telling someone else’s story without permission, the story of a still breathing someone, is the supreme form of violence: we frequently debate the ethics of exploiting biography, and rightly so. But an even more treacherous problem, it seems to me now, is what to leave out: what I abandon to the unsaid as flawed—flawed because it retraces another life, in its ordinary but also extraordinary moments. What is a repetition?

Maya Nguen (MN): In John’s chapter, you write that you are “telling someone else’s story without permission,” even when that someone, John, wants to tell it. Yet, in Aisha’s chapter, she is reticent and you actively urge her on with your questions. Can you talk about your process in writing this book?

Maria Anna Mariani (MAM): Everything started during one of my rides. The driver and I were doing a bit of small talk, as you usually do when you get into an Uber. And then, all of a sudden, he revealed to me the most personal thing about himself. It was so personal and so haunting. For many days after the ride I found myself thinking about that interaction. What happens to communication when two strangers find themselves locked inside a moving capsule with no way out? How is it possible that the conversation can oscillate between its two antithetical poles: impersonal and stale small talk and the most intimate and daring confession? I wanted to find out. And so I decided to pay the utmost attention to the interactions during my subsequent rides and to retrace these conversations in my writing. But then something else happened. I started manipulating actual conversations in order to push them to their limits, already fashioning them into narratives. The writing got the upper hand. And it became a performance. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “A Cold Season” by Jin Yucheng

February 4, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Cleo Qian

The drizzle fell steadily, and in the night, the shallow bridge, the village houses, all faded in the distance, so I could see nothing clearly.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, novelist Jin Yucheng captures memories of Suzhou in this haunting excerpt from “A Cold Season.” Jin’s Proustian narrator evokes scenes which portend his sense of misplacement: buildings are ragged shades of decay; pedestrians roam silently like spirits; a young man appears pallid and skeletal as he laments his lost love, whose beauty is described as “bleak.” The only breaks in the town’s somber quiet are the omnipresent folksongs which seem to follow the narrator. Jin is a virtuoso of temporality and consciousness; here he slows down and speeds up the narrative via exquisite sensory detail. “Back then,” the narrator begins, though the recalled images of gloom are obfuscated by time and the town’s cold rain.

Back then, I could still sit by the bank all day, watching boats, looking at the town’s bridges. There were shops on both banks, the narrow streets boarded on top with awnings to protect them from the rain and sun. During the rainy season the buildings were ragged and gloomy, the color of mildew and decay. Pedestrians passed each other in a breathless, soundless silence, as intangible as spirits. It was a mournful scene. If you pushed open the window casements, inlaid with shell, you could hear the plaintive sound of girls singing folktales alongside the pluck of silken strings, filling the town with their poetry. Only in the pitch dark nights, by the lights from between the green plastered walls, could you see the fishing lights far off on the lake. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “At the Hotel” by Tripura

September 3, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Goutam Piduri

Soft, dark, infant-faces. Secret fox-faces. The faces of a tiger, who had just killed a buffalo and was stripping it to the bone.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features a befuddling slice-of-life translation from the Telugu Writer Tripura. The movement of the dialogue is through a flow of floating statements and people that occurs over an hour in the dining room of a hotel. As if the hotel itself is listening, snippets of conversation drop readers into mid-century southern India. The effects of modernism inform the layout of this story, and the semi-public space of the hotel demonstrates the use—and imposition—of English in speech, as well as the untranslatable cultural particulars of the Telugu. It is a statement to the density of subjectivity and the messiness of codes. Sparse narration and memorable voices place the reader well within the confines of a time of great change and exploration in this genre-bending piece. 

At the Hotel

Eight in the morning. The patter of rain above. Wet inside.

“My pop said he’d bury me if I did shit like this. Brainless.”
“That’s old people, ra. These old hags need to be shot by a firing squad, like Hitler
massacred the Jews.”
Empty cups in front, cigarettes at the ends of lips.

#

“Have you guys read Dharma Bums?”
“Leave it. These Beatniks are just rootless fellows. The Angry Young Men seem better.”
In the cups, coffee getting cold.

#

“Fucking idiot. Said there was no touching the file if I didn’t give him a tenner. And a kid, an upstart to boot. Got him to sign it after throwing the ten at his idiot face. What to do. Can’t die, no.”
“Idiots nowadays are like that only. Work’s done only if the money’s in their hands.”

Empty idli plates on the table. The first man’s pockets are searched for a beedi. READ MORE…

In Conversation with Yumiko Tsumura

May 19, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Ryan Mihaly

"...she values the translation of her poetry into English, as well as into other languages, to plant her poetry on the globe."

Yumiko Tsumura’s translations of poems by Kazuko Shiraishi, also known as “the Allen Ginsberg of Japan,” appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Recently Tsumura corresponded via e-mail with Interview Features Editor Ryan Mihaly.

Your first book of translations of Kazuko Shiraishi’s poems dates back to 2002. When did you first meet Kazuko, and how did you begin working with her?

I met Kazuko Shiraishi on September 30, 2000 in Tokyo. My co-translator, Samuel Grolmes, my late husband, and I had been working on a translation of Ryuichi Tamura’s poetry, ever since he was the first guest to the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa established by Paul Engle. I was working on my MFA in poetry and translation and Sam was an assistant director to Paul Engle, and we started translating Tamura’s poetry during his stay at the IWP.

Tamura’s “The World Without Words” was published [in] New Directions Annual 22. When our book Tamura Ryuichi Poems: 1946-1998 was published early September 2000, Shichosha, the publisher of modern poetry, held a symposium in Tokyo called “How to Surpass Tamura” on September 30, 2000. Kazuko Shiraishi was a great admirer of Tamura’s poetry and one of the panelists. During that meeting she came to ask Sam and me to translate her poetry. READ MORE…