Confronting the silence: An Interview with Monica Cure
I first met Monica Cure in the fall of 2023, a few months after she won the Oxford-Weidenfeld prize for her translation of The Censor’s Notebook and just before her second novel translation, Kinderland, was to be published. What I expected to be a short advice session over coffee turned into a rich conversation about our shared identities as Romanian-Americans and the complexities of straddling both cultures as writers. It was evident during our meeting that Monica’s love for translation was born out of a desire to both promote Romanian culture abroad and to help heal a national trauma back home.
I recently spoke with Monica again in Bucharest about her next translated novel, Too Great A Sky, to be released October 8, 2024. The book is her third translation of Moldovan author Liliana Corobca and follows Ana, a Romanian woman, as she recounts the story of her deportation from Bucovina, Romania (now Bukovyna, Ukraine) to Kazakhstan to her granddaughter. Weaving past and present, poems and prayer, the novel is an exercise in how hope persists and how historical memory is preserved and transformed through generations. Together, we discussed how translation can aid recovery and restoration and her hopes for future translated Romanian literature.
In addition to translating, Monica is a poet, dialogue specialist, two-time Fulbright grant award winner, and the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press).
I’d like to start at the beginning, with the title. You were originally going to call this novel “The Journey's End,” which is a more literal translation of the novel’s Romanian title “Capătul Drumului.” Why, then, did you decide on “Too Great a Sky?’
I noticed that, in English, that's a very bland title compared to the story that's happening. As we were brainstorming, one of the options was to have the title be a phrase from the book, and it actually is a phrase that I translated in the book—“too great a sky.” So immediately, that was my instinct. For me, the title represents both the beauty that's present in the book—there's something about this gorgeously large sky that the novel opens up with—but at the same time, it's also very oppressive. There's a weight to it. It's a burden that is also felt, which is also very much part of the novel. And it's that huge theme of the role of suffering in our lives, where there's so much beauty that can come out of suffering when we go through it, but it's, of course, never something that you choose or that is wanted. But nevertheless, there's a beauty to it.
This book is fiction, and in your introduction you say that the fact that it is fiction is a source of power. What opportunity do you think that fiction gives us to be able to explore these themes, and why do you choose to translate fiction over nonfiction?
I think that when something is written in a sort of traditional historical style, it's perhaps more analytical, with a sort of critical mind. You can say, “Okay, is this biased? Did this happen in this way?” There are lots of historical questions which are important to address, but it doesn't necessarily make you feel emotionally invested or closer to the thing, the human event that actually happened. So I think fiction is especially powerful in the way that it helps us be drawn in emotionally to this event, to this issue. And I think that's especially important when it's an issue that is far removed from you culturally.
One character I found compelling in this book, who only comes in really at the end, is Ana's mother in law's neighbor who confesses that she is to blame for many of the horrible things that happened to them (such as the deportation of Ana’s mother in law and the death of Ana’s daughter). All of the spiritual teachings of this book seemed to culminate in this moment when Ana ultimately chooses forgiveness. Did that feel important to you? Is that something that draws you to Liliana’s work?
Absolutely. Here, I think that the whole book takes us through this process of one becoming aware. So, if this historical incident is not something that you knew about, now you know about it. You're kind of taken through this process of suffering emotionally so you become emotionally invested in the story and what happened. But then, that third part of transformation and healing I think absolutely this book is also focused on that. And forgiveness is a crucial step in the journey to ultimately restoration and the new future. And I think that without that sense, there would absolutely be something missing. It would still be an excellent novel, but I think for me it wouldn't be perhaps my favorite novel I translated. It has that sort of real sense of forgiveness, that real sense of redemption, it's never didactic, it's never facile. It's complex, and we only reach this part at the end, when we really have seen how much she suffered, and we really identify with her, that that forgiveness is even believable and that we actually understand what that means for her.
This story is about remembering things that happened, but it is also a story about forgetting and how people forget, either for survival or out of shame. In your introduction, you said that you felt this “burden of accuracy of bearing witness.” Did the fact that there is mass amnesia around some of this history pose a challenge to you? Did that feel burdensome?
Yeah, I do in the sense that I think that Liliana felt it too, which is part of what compelled her to write the story. I think that for her, as well as for myself, there was a sense that this story hasn't been told enough. This story hasn't entered into, first of all, Romanian consciousness to the point where it's just now a burden that we carry collectively. When there's something that has happened collectively but isn't remembered collectively, I think that certain individuals feel that burden more strongly, and that by telling these stories it's a relief for you personally, but it's also just ethically right that not one person or few people or a handful of people should have to carry this collective burden.
What is it like for you, personally as a Romanian-American, translating these kinds of stories? Does your identity influence what books and kinds of stories you choose to translate?
For me, being able to read these stories fills in a lot of gaps. Many times, it's not because anyone in my family or the Romanians that I grew up with in Detroit are withholding that information, but something that particularly writers can do is make a whole world come alive, a whole time period come alive. And so for me then, it gives me this context that I wouldn't have had otherwise and I get to continue some of these conversations where I get to ask better questions. So a work of fiction isn't purporting to tell you everything, but it does help you sometimes have a framework to be even able to ask certain questions. I think for me, that has been very valuable, both in reading these books, but also living in Romania.
And this is where it is helpful for me, being an insider from the outside, an outsider, inside, whatever way you want to look at it, because I'm coming in with these fresh eyes. So first of all, I'm just kind of also learning the facts the way that an English speaker would learn the facts of literally what happened. I do understand that even for myself, I have to emotionally connect to whatever this thing is that happens. But then I think the silence, the Romanian silence on these issues, then it's easier for me, also as an outsider to see, and it's the silence that makes me understand the magnitude, the impact, potential emotions around these issues.
Have you noticed any gaps in the Romanian writing that is translated? Are there certain things that you want to see more of in translated Romanian literature?
There’s not quite yet an understanding about how much amazing Romanian literature there is and how well it could actually do in an English speaking market. I think the more people have access to these stories and the more people read these stories, the more interest there actually will be in Romanian literature. So it's kind of this cyclical thing that myself and others are trying to break so that we're able to move forward and create more interest.
I think that a huge gap in what has been translated so far, and for obvious reasons, are older writers, more established writers, writers who have already won lots of prizes. But I would like to lower the age, it doesn't have to be just one kind of writing. Themes of how hard it is economically for a young person today, how difficult romantic relationships are in our changing culture and world, people often getting exploited at work—I think that's important to be able to see those themes from an international perspective and to understand that it's not just a problem that's unique to the States.
There’s one writer’s work that I'm especially interested in because it sort of reflects my interest as a young person looking at the legacy of history. What can you know now? You didn't live through that era. How do you even formulate that in your own mind? How do you imagine the time that you hadn't lived in, where your sources are faulty, right? So, how do you imagine that? I mean, that's still an important issue, even for young people because we don't know what happened in the past. They're still missing crucial information about the way things are now.
You are working on a poetry collection called “Country of Leaving,” which seems similar in theme to Too Great A Sky. Does translation ever influence your poetry, and does your poetry influence your translation?
I think both of them stem from my life here. I think moving here, deciding to stay here, has been what makes my translations especially good. It gives me the context, the linguistic skills to be able to translate Romanian literature very well. And then, of course for this collection, it was the inspiration as well as just different things that I've learned. So maybe the best example of that is my poem “Water News,” which is this whole poem that started from a conversation I was having with a friend in which she made some reference to something I didn't understand. She went on to tell me something I'd never heard before—that during communism, every single day, there was a moment where on the radio they announced the levels of the Danube River in different cities all along the Danube from the western side to the eastern Black Sea. And so it just fascinated me and I knew there was a poem in it. I didn’t know what the poem would be about, but I knew there was a poem in it.
I remember going back on a visit to my parents and asking them about this and they were like “oh yeah!” and they started having these memories and I thought it was so wild because it was something they had never processed. It was just this weird thing that would happen but clearly had emotional valences for them because it was during this really hard time and it was something that collectively everybody experienced. But they just never would have thought to tell me about it because they didn’t know the significance of that.
So, as I was writing this poem, the significance for me and this way that stories can create and bring out a significance that maybe isn’t factually what it was about came out. And then in the most moving way later, a friend here who lived for a while in Bucharest was telling me that she was at a Romanian wedding and while making small talk with someone told him that I’d written a poem about this radio thing. And she said that his demeanor instantly changed because it was also something that he hadn’t processed or thought through and he just thought it was wild that someone had written an entire poem about it. So for me, that’s kind of the whole experience of writing this book of both discovery and processing and it’s rooted in that same impulse of recovery and restoration. So, with this book, I think that a lot of readers are going to have that experience even if their families or themselves have gone through different sorts of historical traumas. I think that is something that people, if they're ready for it, will be able to find and receive.
I thought it would be remiss to not mention the ongoing war in Ukraine and how Ukrainians are again being displaced from the region/s depicted in this book. Was that in the back of your mind while translating the novel?
Yes, absolutely that was in the back of my mind. Liliana wrote this well before this current historical moment so it wasn’t in her mind, but as I was translating it, understanding the historical context and what people in Ukraine, both Ukrainians and Romanians, suffered from Russia (in another form at that point, from the USSR), is really important context to understand what’s happening now and what that’s triggering for people. Obviously in the novel we have less of the viewpoint of Russians themselves. What we do have are Russian dissidents who themselves were exiled to Kazakhstan and there are actually positive characters which I thought were important to keep in mind as well. So, I think for me that was oddly therapeutic too because the war, while it continues to go on, it’s always here in Bucharest. A few Ukrainians have chosen to stay in Romania because it’s closer to Ukraine or just because it was easier to reach, so it’s always there. To be able to emotionally participate in the history of that region, I can’t explain it, I probably have to process it a bit more, but there was something about it that was comforting.
Interviewed by Irina Costache