Author Interviews

Some time ago I discovered the "Wired for Books" website which contains an audio archive of interviews with various writers conducted by Don Swaim (http://wiredforbooks.org/mp3/). I downloaded nearly all of the interviews, a few dozen hours of material. They are informal, conducted in the 70s and 80s, fodder for a much briefer radio news broadcast, from which Swaim would cut and snip, parsing the question and answer format for a bit of reportage that left undisclosed his own often humorous, idiosyncratic personality.

Today at work, I listened to three somewhat awkward interviews with the late Alice Adams (whose stuff I have never read), a conversation in the mid-80s with Allen Ginsberg, two interviews with the Israeli writer Amos Oz, and a talk with Amy Tan. (The Adrienne Rich interview was cut short after three minutes -- the mp3 file apparently didn't fully download.) As a perceptive person might see, I started with the "A's".

Adams, a prolific short story writer for The New Yorker, spoke of her various troubles with rejection in the industry, which prompted Swaim to speak of Rick Bass, the short story and nature writer, who he says claims to have written a thousand short stories before one was finally accepted for publication. I find this extremely difficult to believe. Maybe he was into flash fiction? Adams found this incredible as well, but recommended trying for the best publications first, as she did, and working your way down. (Things may have changed in publishing in the twenty years since she gave this word of advice.) Also of interest -- she mentioned she taught a creative writing class, attended by Harriet Doer, who was in her late 60s and working on her first novel while in the class (Stones of Ibarra). She later published it at the age of 74, and it won the National Book Award.

Ginsberg was eloquent, political, passionate. Smaim did not know who Moloch, the pagan god whom Ginsberg references in the second part of Howl. So the late Beat poet told him that the Israelites were forbidden to offer their children to the god Moloch; they were not allowed o make them to "pass through the fire". He related this to what parents do to their children in our civilized, industrialized, war-profiterring countries. He also read the first few lines of Howl, a rendering that brought life to it which I haven't quite heard so well before. He said that the poem was meant in some sense to be a literary translation of the jazz sax riffs rendered by Lester Young, which brings me to a less abstract form of translation...

Amoz Oz was interesting in his theory of translation because he writes all of his work originally in Hebrew. He then works with American translators on the English renditions. His arguement was that he did not desire a too-literal translation of his work, especially idiomatically, since that would break up the normalcy of the dialogue. he demands of his translators, he said, that they "be unfaithful to be loyal". He said that it was like playing a violin concerto on he piano, which can be done beautifully as long as one doesn't try to make the piano sound like a violin, a vulgarity. Oz was also of interest in that he grew up in a conservative home, rebelled as a young teenager by joining a kibbutz (a type of socialist and originally agrarian commune -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz). As a writer as of the interview, he still lived in the kibbutz with his family, where he was allowed to spend a lot of his time writing, but also still waited and served tables during some meals, could be found driving a tractor as well. The kibbutz basically subsidized his writing during his early years. After he found fame and more money through translation in English and other languages, he still gave all his money and royalties to the community; he signed his checks over to the "smiling accountant". However, should he ever need anything, such as a month off to rent a motel room somewhere and write, he could merely go to the "frowning accountant" to make a request, and a check would be unquestioningly written to him.

Amy Tan, whom I have also never read, but with whom I am familiar as a member of the rock and roll band, "The Rock Bottom Remainders" (along with Stephen King, Roy Blount Jr, Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, and other mass market literary figures) spoke of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, which began as a series of short stories. She reports that the telling of her own personal experience, her subjective and honest rendering through fictional characters, unveiled universal truths about the nature of motherhood. Jewish woman would say, "your mother wasn't Chinese! She was Jewish!" And Irish, African, American, Russian, Greek woman, the same. She was surprised by this, she said, since she was writing something very particular about her own unique experience.