10 Questions for Patty Crane

- By Edward Clifford

In a burst of concentration, I succeeded in catching the hen and stood with
it in my hands. Strangely, it didn't really feel alive:stiff, dry, an old white
feather-riddled woman's hat that shrieked out truths from 1912. Thunder
hung in the air. A scent rose up from the fence boards, like when you open
a photo album so dated you no longer know who the people are.
—from "Upright" by Tomas Tranströmer, Translated by Patty Crane, Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
The first poem I translated was Tranströmer’s The Station from his collection THE WILD MARKET SQUARE (1983). This was during my three-year period living in Sweden, when I’d gained sufficient fluency to read his work in the original. I was taken by the understated power of the poem, interested in the choices made by other English translators, and compelled to see how close I could come to honoring my own reading of it. In The Station, the ordinary scene of a train at the platform becomes a metaphor for the mystery that surrounds our daily existence—a mystery that, in Tranströmer’s hands, briefly feels as accessible as it does out of reach.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
To the extent I can tease apart the influence of other writers from the many other variables simultaneously at play, I’d have to point to Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Valentine, and Tomas Tranströmer—poets whose writing I’ve read closely and keep coming back to because it strikes a chord, captures my imagination, gives me pause, and inspires me to think differently about my own work. When it doesn’t stop me in my tracks, it sends me scrambling for my notebook.

What other professions have you worked in?
I’ve been a registered nurse for nearly forty years, having worked in a variety of roles and settings, from hospitals to in-home respite care to employee wellness, and much in between. I’m no longer employed as an RN, but I keep my license active. In addition to being a poet and translator, I’m currently the president of a small, community-building nonprofit. Over the years, I’ve had numerous jobs, starting very early in my life, including as a gas station attendant, hotel chambermaid, bus-girl, dishwasher, prep and pastry cook, swim instructor, and volunteer EMT.

What did you want to be when you were young?
An astronaut; then a marine biologist; then a nurse. I also wanted to write a book, though that was a vague ambition. Books weren’t a big part of my childhood—we had very few in our house—and yet I felt the power in them. When I was very young, I loved to do pretend handwriting, especially in cursive. I often made tiny ‘books’ of cut, lined paper with stapled margins and filled them with loopy-lettered nonsense. The book I imagined writing ‘when I grew up’ was specific in one way only: blocks of text would be centered on each page. I’d like to think that was poetry, but can’t honestly say. While I actually did become a nurse, maybe, in a way, by being a poet and translator, I became that astronaut, too.

What drew you to write a translation of this piece in particular?
I’m in the process of translating Tranströmer’s complete poetic works, so tackling Upright (NIGHT VISION, 1970) was inevitable. Still, of his many prose poems, this is among my favorites. First, if you’ve ever held a chicken, you’ll recognize the truth and wry humor of the description of the hen. But I mainly love the poem because of the way it speaks to the simplicity of truth, which is a balancing act, like riding in an unsteady canoe. Your pockets have to be empty, you have to tip your head slightly to the right to offset the weight of your heart, and there’s no room for rhetoric. It’s a gentle hopeful protest that feels timeless. To my mind, it’s certainly relevant now.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I live in the only house on a nearly two-mile stretch of dirt road, surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods and open fields rich with native wildlife. My tiny studio, a short walk from the house, overlooks an active beaver pond. The pond itself was once a field, but, as nature’s architect-engineers, beavers created a whole new world that hosts a wide range of life, from crayfish to dragonflies to bullfrogs, great blue herons, otters, moose, and much more. This place informs how I live, work, and make sense of the world. It’s a daily reminder of the interconnectedness of all life, as well as how vital diversity is for the health of our planet and its inhabitants. It’s very real, and yet often feels imagined. In part because, while it’s always there, always the same, it also changes by the day, and from moment to moment. But it can seem especially unreal when set against the daily reality of how we humans treat the earth and each other.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
The ever-shifting soundscape of creatures going about their lives: the steady trill of spring peepers, incessant calls of red-winged blackbirds, splashing otters, the resonant baritone of a bullfrog chorus, a beaver’s warning tail thwacks, geese braying as they lift off or land, the wails of mating porcupines. Ravens, barred owls. Flies, bees, wasps. It’s a form of silence, in the inner sense of that word. The more I listen, the deeper my hearing goes. A moose silently appears in the pond like a black hole of sound, so I know to look up even though I don’t know why. And that steady tick-tick-tick isn’t the sound of water dripping from the studio’s eaves, but an ant climbing the south window, gaining a few vertical inches before falling back onto the wooden sill (tick) and doing it over and over and over (tick-tick-tick…). Then there are the elements: wind and rain through leaves and grasses, the ricocheting reports of ice forming in the pond, soft thuds of snow or the shattering crystal of ice-tubes falling from trees. I tune in and out, at times drawn consciously into the listening, and at times letting it fade into the background.  

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
My main ritual, if you could call it that, is the roughly ¼-mile walk to my studio: down our long gravel driveway, across the dirt road and through the field that leads to the beaver pond. My worries and distractions seem to shed with each step, or else I simply accommodate them. I take note of everything as I walk toward the writing, just trying to be open enough to let the mind’s reigns go when I sit down at my desk.