Scratched knees, pickled vegetables, and (un)belonging: A Conversation with Elina Katrin

August 1, 2024 | in Interviews | by Sofija Popovska

The most honest way translation has shaped my work as a poet is through incompleteness.

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. READ MORE…

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 19, 2023 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Sofija Popovska

Literary news from North Macedonia and the United States!

In this week of literary news, we hear from our editors-at-large reporting from North Macedonia and the United States! From the recent poetry collection of a prominant North Macedonian poet to a dazzling few days of multilingual poetry and revelry, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

In the last days of April, a new poetry collection by the prominent poet Katica Kulavkova, Na Vrv Na Jazikot (On the Tip of the Tongue), was published by Ars Lamina Press. The collection leans into an interrogation of the concepts of home and identity in the current day, a question that, in the Macedonian cultural context, is fraught with challenges and debates.

Katica Kulavkova (born December 21, 1951), whose work was featured in the Winter 2020 issue of Asymptote, is a poet, writer, and academic. She is a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a professor of theory and methodology of literature, hermeneutics, and creative writing. Her writing is deeply rooted in the interplay of the personal and collective; Kulavkova’s lyrical voice is informed by the negotiations between various aspects of being, as Macedonian, woman, mother, academic, artist, activist . . .

(M)other Tongue: Sign Language in Translation

March 1, 2018 | in Essays | by Aliya Gulamani

"I can only access conversation that is intended for me to access—and so all spoken conversation that I pick up is meaningful."

When I began to progressively lose my hearing at three years old, my mother fought for me to have access to both British Sign Language classes and speech therapy sessions, offering me a dual-language gateway. Through travel and education opportunities, I know phrases, sentences and expressions in other languages—both signed and spoken. But it is in English and BSL that I primarily express myself, code-switching when appropriate and, at times, combining the two together to speak SSE (Sign-supported English). This is sign language that follows English grammatical structure, as opposed to BSL structure. For those new to BSL, it can come as a surprise to discover that it is its own language, complete with its own rules, format and words—or rather signs—that have no direct equivalent in English.

And so, on a day-to-day basis, I communicate using my hands (signing), voice (speaking), and eyes (lip-reading), as a giver and a receiver. I enjoy the literal sound certain words make as they hold space in the air. Simultaneously, and without contradiction, I love the shape of language created by fingers, expressions and the body. People also underestimate the use of the whole body in sign language – though it is primarily through the hands that words are expressed; meaning, content and colour is amplified through other parts of the body, in particular, the face.