Interview: Alina Stefanescu
"I don’t know how else to describe it except to say that I grieved immensely for a land that was never Romania."
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature.
You can find her on her site and on Twitter.
Stefanescu’s responses to the Nameless Questionnaire can be found at the bottom of the interview.
This conversation took place in January 2022, with minor corrections made in June. It has been edited with fidelity for the reader.
I want to jump right in with Dor, your latest collection of poetry.
Okay.
You explain this on the first page of the book, but for the people who might be reading this interview before reading the book: What does dor mean?
Dor is a Romanian word that most people translate as “longing.” It's close to the Portuguese saudade. But it's a happy longing. I think of it as being like blues. Blues are sad, they start off blue, but the song is actually happy. There’s a joy that comes out of making blues. Everybody is riffing on this feeling in this space. Dor is a longing for something that you do not have.
We had an interesting panel recently with some Romanian groups about whether the word is translatable. A lot of Romanians want to argue that it is not translatable. And that's the blood-and-soil argument for translation. There are others of us who would like to see this word translated in every creative way possible, as a way of challenging American capitalist sensibilities, which focus on the "one true" translation.
Your poems are steeped in reflections on Romania, and on the past—not just the past of a child who would be easy to associate with yourself, of course, but also that of your near ancestors. Your parents, for instance, come through in several poems. What does Romania, the country, mean to you? And, if this can be distinguished: what does being Romanian mean?
I think of myself, of Romania, in many ways, as a homeland in my head.
I'm not much of a belonger. And that might be because I grew up never feeling a part of things—I always felt somehow in between this home, full of silence but also Romanian and warm; and the patriotic Alabama milieu. Growing up in Alabama in the 1980s and 90s, there were rigid constrictions on what was acceptable for a female to read. If you liked to read literary fiction or writing in translation, you were on the lower end of the totem pole in terms of popularity.
But the book [Dor] and the way I approach Romanianness are heavily influenced by Svetlana Boym’s theories of nostalgia. She articulates this idea of “reflective” versus “restorative” nostalgia, the latter being the nostalgia that nationalists use, when referring to the Golden Age that will be created again. So if you have a statue, and it’s falling to ruin, restorative nostalgia wants to rebuild the statue just like it was. Creative, speculative nostalgia looks at the statue and says, “What if we added a moustache? What is we took the broken legs and made them into a chariot for stuffed animals?” Creative nostalgia re-visions, it has an incredible amount of hope in it. And I do think of nostalgia, and dor, and longing as creative. I think of them as countercultural. I think of them as challenges to our American sensibility of accomplishment, of success being defined by a resume.
Longing is never over. Dor has this wonderful, pointless quality. It’s like loitering. It is an intellectual sauntering. It’s just agreeing, for a minute, to feel something, to fondle something that was in your head. To me, that’s a little bit radical. And speaking of silence…
I love the idea of longing as loitering. It brings this supposedly untranslatable feeling into the realm of accessible sensation. It becomes translatable in the sense that all people already have this habit, they know it intimately within themselves.
You're absolutely right. And I would argue that dor should be translated precisely because, if the word exists, we’re more likely to recognize what it signifies, to feel it. You know, I look at my son, and he could be sad. But the word that we use when we socialize males is often anger. And if he isn't allowed, when he's young, to own the sadness, to say, “I just feel melancholy, I'm just down,” he won't inhabit that emotion. He loses the ability to inhabit it.
Boym talks about “co-creation”: you co-create with your ghosts and with the past when you’re being nostalgic. I think that translation is co-creation as well. When I’m translating a Romanian poet, I’m not trying to give you the literal. I can’t give you exactly what they said, that’s impossible. What I can give you is my obsessive relationship with their words. And that’s the only kind of fidelity I can promise; that’s faithfulness in translation. This is different from the faithfulness demanded by nation states. They want allegiance: which side are you on? The American or the Romanian? I’m not on a side. It’s the same with the genre of literature. Am I a poet? Am I a fiction writer? Am I an essayist? I’m none of them; I’m all of them.
Your book certainly does a lot of work to accomplish that. Inhabiting that middle space. And so to exhaust that first question that I asked: if I know have a sense of what being Romanian means to you, I’m still wondering what Romania itself—the state, its history—might mean to you, if it does at all.
It does. I've studied its histories my whole life; all of the fairy tales I was told as a kid were Romanian ones; all of the rituals we had in my house were Romanian rituals. And when I go to Romania, when I take the time to visit, I love being there. I've often thought about moving back there. There's something about the mess that is Romania. It’s funny, when everyone was going to Europe back in the day, my friends were like, “Oh, I don’t want to go to Bucharest. It’s dirty. I’m gonna go to Prague, or to Budapest, because Budapest is clean!” And I think to myself it is clean all right. Look at how Orbán has cleaned Budapest of every minority that he possibly could find.
I’m attracted to impurity. And I would say that purity is my enemy—in life, in constructions of identity, and in language. Romania is not pure to me, and the history there is haunting. There are so many stories that need to be told; the silences in Romania on the Shoah and the Roma are deafening. I mean, many of Romania’s greatest writers were Jewish. And my dialogue with Romania includes writers like Mihail Sebastian, who changed my life. When the fascists rose to power, what Sebastian said to them was, “You want to take away my rights? My family has been here longer than yours. So who are you to tell me I’m not Romanian?” Those questions are ongoing; they linger still.
My paternal grandfather was from a Romanian Jewish family. But that was never something I felt particularly connected to. I sort of entered it through a backdoor when, in college, I started reading Paul Celan. He seems to loom large for you in Dor as well. Could you speak to his significance to your work?
In fact, I’m writing about him now. I’ve been trying to work on this long essay about Bachmann and Celan, his friends and Romania and his connection to the Surrealists in Paris. But my love for Celan begins in how he touches me when I read him, and in his own hunger for other poets, his hunger for Osip Mandelstam, whom Celan translated; but also in the tragedy of leaving. Of leaving and not doing what [Emil] Cioran did, right? Cioran left and started writing in French, and he denied everything he had done in Romania. Celan lost everything, and yet he tried to write in German, a language that refused him. It refused him even though it was his mother’s language. That’s another crucial thing about Romania for me: it has and has always had large minority populations. Chernivtsi, when Celan left, had a thriving Jewish community. It is now part of Ukraine.
Celan is a touchstone for me. He breaks my heart for refusing catharsis. I love him for saying, to witness gives us nothing. Everyone is still dead, see? But he writes poetry anyway. And I love him for his use of ellipsis, for the silences that he brought in. He was just so hurt by this world, so rejected in every single space that he entered. And I think the loss of his mother is the overriding moment in his life, and the reason he chose her language for his poetry. His father didn’t care at all about German; in fact he told Celan to forget it. But she wanted that.
You know, that Romanian space is Balkan to me. It contains not only Celan, but people like Herta Müller, who was part of the German minority in Romania. There’s something cosmopolitan, to use a loaded word that remains a dog-whistle for the Far Right, in the complex hybridities. I heard somewhere that Jewish Romanians used to say that things were better under the Habsburgs. The whole idea of a “Romanian” nation-state didn’t quite suit what it really was.
That reminds me of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. He wants to make note, for posterity, that some vital cosmopolitan energy was lost, or siphoned off, with the fall of the Habsburg empire.
That's exactly what happened. Look at Vienna, right, in the time of Mihail Sebastian. The Jewish community was divided: the shtetl Jews wanted to remain rooted in their more religious Judaism; but the secular Jews were more interested in hybridity. That’s where the notion of cosmopolitanism comes from, that word we use now to describe humans who are conversant in many languages. And that’s become an interesting and difficult conversation, especially right now. I feel like the American literary community is so focused on a notion of identity that is very narrow, and almost anti-universalist. And when I think of the anti-universalist position I think of those, like Sebastian, who were harmed by it. Have you read his journals?
I haven’t, but it’s the first thing I’ll do when we end this conversation.
He watched the nationalists take over Romania. Those were his friends. He was writing as he watched his fellow intellectuals fall for this. And he endured it all only to die. He survived the war, he survived the pogroms, he survived the trains. And then he got hit by a car crossing the street. All along, he was having the essential conversations with his other remaining Jewish friends. Do we leave? Do we go with the Zionists? Zionism was what was being brought up as a solution. But he continued to argue, “They can’t kick me out. This is my home.” So, he was left there. He was alone when the Germans came, when his apartment was taken away, when he had to publish his plays under another name.
That one would continue writing under such extreme duress has always stunned me. I think often of Celan’s “Meridian” speech. He receives the prestigious Büchner Prize; he, a German-speaking Romanian Jew, stands up before an audience of German literati and explains that poetry is an event. It is a thing that happens in the world. I suppose this is his rejoinder to the Auden line in my questionnaire, that poetry makes nothing happen. Celan, not unlike Auden, says that it is itself an event.
Yes. And at the same time, the idea of the interlocutor is incredibly important to him. An event is between interlocutors. The message in the bottle is what Mandelstam gave to Celan, when he was translating Mandelstam. It’s a moment between two people. You see this in his correspondence with Ingeborg Bachmann: they discuss this “island,” or this place where they will one day meet. He held this space in his mind where humans are free. But it was never a real place. It doesn’t stand at the end of some teleology. Which is not to say it’s hopeless. There’s hope in that he wrote it; but I don’t think he believed anything "good" would come of it.
I would love to talk about a specific poem of yours from Dor, “Ovid as a Bruise.” These are the opening lines: “To lose a country is to let go of the known / for the dread zone on a map.” The theme of exile, which is already astonishingly complex across the collection, gets another turn in this poem. Ovid, of course, was in exile from Rome. But the place where he was banished, Tomis [the historical name for Constanța], is an ancient city that has for a long time been part of Romania. Estrangement is piled upon estrangement until one returns, again, to the root of one’s belonging. How are you thinking through exile in this poem?
I remember going to see Ovid in Constanța, which was a big Roman colony, Tomis, because of its port. There’s a statue there of Ovid, in exile, looking back towards his homeland. I have several pictures of myself sitting under Ovid; I wanted to hang out with him, as both a monument and a writer. All he wanted to do was go back. But he couldn’t, because the Emperor didn’t want him back. There are competing theories about why this was, but what fascinates me is his longing. And I think of it alongside my parents’ longing—to leave Ceaușescu's dictatorship.
That’s the other side of this. My mom was a physician. Ceaușescu had passed several laws against abortion. And so, in order to practice medicine, she was going to have to go into workplaces unannounced and perform surprise vaginal exams to see if women were pregnant. As someone who had been through abortions, who had lost friends through abortions, and who was a physician and knew that you would go to jail if you performed one or received one, she had real fears. And my parents did not see the situation getting better at all. They could not imagine it. Maybe imagining is the most radical thing we can do….
There was an Ovidian moment in 1989, when the wall came down. It was all over the TV, and I remember my parents' confusion, the chaotic undertow of those months.. Finally, they could call Romania. Suddenly you could talk on the phone without the call dropping. They were standing in front of the TV with CNN playing in the background, images of Romania flashing across the screen, claiming a lot people had died, and that nobody knew much. It was, for lack of a better word, an "author-less revolution," a screened event, a modern coup staged by Party reformists. And my parents were standing there holding each other and weeping and speaking Romanian and saying, “We should go back. What are we doing here? Why are we here?” I was in seventh or eighth grade. I was like, “No, we can’t go back! Where are we gonna go?” But they took us out of school and rented a car in Germany, and we drove through all the borders to get to Romania. We sat in customs lines—I remember I had Madonna and George Michael on a bootleg cassette—I would listen while we went through the world where the Wall had fallen. It changed my life. And after that, my parents’ gaze toward Romania changed, and being in the US was more complicated.
The complexity of what you’ve described is, I should say, perfectly and poignantly captured in your book. Your poems use and also go beyond the trope of the figure in exile. This figure is so troped in literature, and yet it’s also simply the case that, for many of the great writers-in-exile, so much of the power of their work emerges from this impossible distance that, with all their mental and emotional might, they’re trying in some way to bridge. You have Ovid. Thucydides was also in exile when he wrote The History of the Peloponnesian War. And you have the self-imposed exiles of Joyce, Beckett, Stein and the rest. Do you feel yourself to be, in some sense, in exile?
I don’t know if that’s the right word. I would say if I am in exile from something, it’s from the Romanian Republic of Alabama, where everything happened in Romanian, where everything was Romanian, where Romanians came in and out. Where it was intimate—intimate in a way that is just absolutely grotesque to many Americans, with their ideas of personal space, of propriety, of what a mother’s place is. My parents divorced when I was in college, they both remarried Americans, and the Romanian language became persona non grata in the house. That was incredibly difficult. I don’t know how else to describe it except to say that I grieved immensely for a land that was never Romania.
Hearing Romanian makes me so happy: when someone speaks to me, when someone says my name in Romanian, with the correct pronunciation, my name which means “to caress.” And when I speak Romanian, I’m different. I’m softer, I use my hands more, I’m less defensive. There’s a relationship in my body to the language that feels child-like
I have the same experience. Whole personalities get wrapped up in the manner of articulating, the connotation of the words spoken, the culture of gesticulation. You do feel like a slightly different person, though in a pleasant way, because it’s still you.
Curse words are especially good in Romanian, especially since kids don’t really understand it. Romanian cursing has a flow or a lull to it, whereas in English the curse words are more abrupt, there are a lot of fricatives. In Romanian, it’s almost like, “Here, let me rub you with this awful curse that damns your whole family”—it’s very graphic, and yes, very misogynistic, in many ways. It’s a different mode of relating to another person.
The other day, you told me that you “hate Dor now,” that it is a “terrible book.” Why?
You know, when you write a book, there’s about a year before it gets published. You’re writing other stuff, you’re in a whole different space—and epistemologically different space. The parts of knowledge and existence that fascinate you are different. When I wrote Dor, it was the longing that interested me. Now I’m just in a different space.
I’m cruel to the things I write. I’m a brutal critic of Alina Stefanescu. If you show me a poem of mine that’s been published in a book, the problem is I can’t fiddle with it anymore. I would keep changing every poem in this book if I could. I’m not good at leaving things alone, or loving them as they are. I’m very hard on myself, too. It’s the way I am. I'm not interested in hating myself for it anymore.
So you’ll never look back at an old poem, or an old collection of poems or stories, and think, “I did it better then than I could do it now”?
Never, never. Everything that I’m doing or reading or thinking at present, I’m entirely fascinated by and sunk into. And it’s difficult for me to evaluate the person who wasn’t, or the work of the person who wasn’t. Writing is always dialogic for me. It’s a process of learning—from other writers, from silences. It continues into ongoingness.
How is what you're writing now, or the atmosphere that you're inhabiting now, different from that which informed and is contained in Dor?
The current poetry manuscripts are twofold. One is focused on music theory—on a few interesting musicians and on tempo markings and the role that tempo markings play as instructions. I’m playing on how we poets instruct in our poems. That was influenced a lot by Tomaž Šalamun, by the use of self-implication in his poems, the way he invokes his own name when talking about what he would call, I think, “the dirty Balkan stuff.” (I was told by an American that I wasn’t supposed to use the word “balkanization” because it was offensive, and I very gently told him, “You’re not from there. Those of us who use that word have our reasons. I’m sorry if it offends your sensibilities, but we’re going to keep using it.”)
The second one is more focused on a really dark period in my life, the dark pandemic, called Byline, Be Sky. Some people had all these meditative and beautiful thoughts that came out of the pandemic. That wasn't so much the case for me.
And then I have an essay collection and a novel going on simultaneously. The novel is about Alexander Scriabin, in a way. And the essays are about writing and the writers I love.
I love the title of the second manuscript you mentioned, Byline, Be Sky.
Yes, in addition to the darkness, the liturgical intensity of that darkness, it’s also about the idea of the byline—on Twitter, say, and how important it is for everyone to have their byline up there. I went through this little phase when I thought, “I don’t want one. I don’t want to invoke the big powerful names. I don’t want to be anyone’s brand.” I resist the team shirt. I don’t think that each of these journals would be happy with everything I write, and so why define myself by them? Why not take the sky for my byline instead?
Sonically, it’s an excellent title. You know, there are a handful of videos online in which one can hear you recite your poems.
Oh no. [Laughs.]
So I listened to those. What I found was that, when read aloud, several poems struck me differently—more powerfully, in some cases—than they did on the page. That’s not to say that they are all less powerful on the page; rather that the different experiences of receiving the poems cast them under different aspects. Some of these poems, I’d say, seem to reveal themselves to be built for the voice. Do you think about that? Do you write towards orality?
I don't know. I would say music is a huge part of my life. I would say that my son, who's a pianist, whatever he's playing or working on affects me. In Dor, for example, he was practicing Bach’s fugues, and that inadvertently changes the line of the poems I was writing. Some people have a relaxed relationship to music. I am not one of those people. If I walk into a room and a song is intense, that’s what I feel. And I’m the same way with art. I think I come across as gregarious—and I am, to an extent—but I’m very cerebral, too. I’m not good at always being present in the ways that others expect.
I think I hear the music in poems. And I do look for the music in poems, sometimes. I think it’s interesting that you said that. It’s not as chosen or deliberate as you suggest, although it is an explicit, formal decision in some of the recent work on the composers. But it isn’t a formal decision that I make generally, though I do think intonation is important and one of the most challenging things to bring across in a poem.
I have a couple more questions for you. You've lived in Alabama for a very long time. And it certainly has a central place in your work, alongside Romania. Have you found your poetic community in Alabama?
As much as I can have a poetic community, yes. I have some very close friends in Birmingham, who are my partners in crime and in good, and the Magic City Poetry Festival puts on some incredible work that focuses on the Birmingham community. These are small, small collectives that grew into bigger spaces. There is a PEN America branch there that I co-chair with Ashley M. Jones, and that’s a huge gift in my life.
If you want to study Black poetics, too, Birmingham is a place to come. This is where so much is happening. And those voices, the slam readings, the many events—these too change and educate my lines in a lot of ways. The community is definitely here, as much as it can be for someone like me who often wants to be alone in a room.
Are you still longing? If so, what for?
I am always longing in some way. Longing drives me to poetry. Being or feeling complete is not needing anything. Pleasure can give you that sensation once in a while. But whatever it is about us that is human is missing something, and longing is a space where that whatever-is-missing becomes a creative opportunity. I miss my mother. I wouldn’t say I long for so much as that I just miss her. I deeply, deeply covet the presence of her body in my life and her voice on the phone. I miss my family in Romania. And I miss Romania. It’s hard to live between spaces. Longing is a little bit thicker, less expressible, I guess, than missing.
Well, that distinction comprises, in essence, the richness of Dor—however terrible the book seems to you now.
[Laughs.] It did bring out some family secrets. No one had ever talked publicly about the fact that my grandfather euthanized my grandmother, who is also my namesake. My mother was so angry at him, maybe it was easier to defect after that. People asked, “How could you leave behind your baby knowing you may never see her again?” Well, something in her broke.
I’m named after that grandmother, who died, and now my niece, Lydia, is named after my mom, who died when my sister was pregnant with her. People talk about retirement, but I know I’m going to die young. I don’t have the American sense of my longevity. That’s not what happens in my family. So you have to do it all now. And you have to live fast. Do it all, but also burn the hours loitering, longing, creating a temporality which infuses the text. Don’t try to impress people; those impressions are ephemeral. Write what you can't resist.
The Nameless Questionnaire
Each of The Unnamable’s guests is asked to respond to a questionnaire. Here are Alina Stefanescu’s answers.
1. A novel, a poem, and a short story you’d teach in a college seminar
Bernadette Mayer's "Incandescent War Poem Sonnet"
Forget the novel and skip straight to Svetlana Boym's The Off-Modern
Forget the short story and skip straight to Marguerite Duras’s book, Me & Other Writing
2. The title of that seminar
“You Will Never Be Likable: Literary Aesthetics of Inappropriations”
3. The great work no one has read
Robert Musil's Thought Flights (translated by Genese Grill)
4. The terrible work everyone has read
Women Are From Mars, Men Are From Venus by whatever that cowboy’s name was
5. Three books you’d send your enemy on a desert island
How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
Eros & Magic in the Renaissance by Ion P. Coulianu
6. The doorstopper that should really be used as a doorstopper
My skull. This thing I can't believe we aren't allowed to leave to our children.
7. Who do you read in order to write
Everyone, including billboards and ad campaigns, but also Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Yourcenar lately. This lately may have expired by the time we chat.
8. “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Agree?
Poetry makes itself, which is something—and so the debate over what “something” means cannot leave out the speech acts and language created by the discussion itself.
9. What can be found on your cutting room floor?
My nous.
Ben Libman is a writer in Montréal and the Bay Area. You can find him at his site.