Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Lisa Schantl

July 30, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

“hello”

i say to my reflection.
at the level of spittelau i see it. my reflection.
recognize it, but not myself in it.

these are days on which i believe i’ve forgotten how to walk.

on the way back from heiligenstadt i put one foot in front of the
other, but it feels so ridiculous that i stop every few meters to watch
other people taking their steps.
—translated from Maë Schwinghammer's "Hello," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I remember that it was a gray and heavy winter day, packed with dust and gloom and the occasional flickering streetlamp, and I had the shared student apartment to myself. A few...

10 Questions for Katherine Vondy

July 22, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

At first just one or two people watched the bears. Then they shared the bears with some of their friends and the friends started watching the bears. The friends told other friends who told other friends, and friendly acquaintances, and even strangers. These people told other people. After a while, everybody was watching the bears.

The bears were not really there. Or actually they were, but only if “there” was Alaska. Not the city where all the bear-watching was happening, which was many of thousands of miles away. The people in the faraway city watched the bears via a webcam that live-streamed a salmon-filled river 24/7. Because there were so many salmon, there were also bears. The bears feasted on the salmon.
—...

10 Questions for David Lloyd

July 17, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Here, the bodies of children. They died at dusk.
Instead of bread, fed stones from the sling.
Kept from shelter until their bodies stiffened.
The sun failed to keep them warm.
And she, the greatest sun, could not love them,
because of the stones, because of the serpent.
—translated from Waldo Williams' "The Dead Children," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
When I was working on my first book, an anthology titled The Urgency of Identity: Contemporary English-Language Poetry from Wales (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press), I translated the “Hon” by Welsh-language poet T. H. Parry-Williams with my mother, Mair Lloyd, whose...

10 Questions for noam keim

July 15, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Late spring and early summer belongs to the delicate smell of lindens in bloom, covering the stench of violence and death in the city of Philadelphia. Every year, as the temperatures rise, so does the litany of guns at night, the refrain of a city intent on breaking your heart. Never enough branches and trunks to cover all the cries.

In the dramatic sun of a Philadelphia spring morning, I walk one mile east from my home to my office without the shade of a tree. My body hasn’t adjusted yet to the cruelty of their absence; I grew up under the cover of linden trees lining up our boulevards and populating the parks of my childhood. Trees I have always known as tilleul in my French home. In this new life, under the canopy of the...

(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Nicholas Wong

July 8, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Winter was standing behind him.
It imitated his shadow
And considered itself a tree.
It was getting skinny.
It felt cold.
You’re like a wooden coat hanger prepared to move home.
The hat and the four assembled seasons
Wouldn’t follow you.
They would remain in paper boxes, deep
In their sleep, dreamless and naked.
The cat would stay to guard the home.
—from "Coat Hanger," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
They should be poems from Sun Tzu-ping’s collection named 善遞饅頭. Our friendship started when Taipei City invited me to attend their amazing annual International Poetry Festival in 2018. But it wasn’t until...