Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure on children, Moldova, and secrets.
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WILL FORRESTER: Monica, Liliana – thanks so much for speaking to me. Your latest collaboration, Kinderland, is a book about children in the absence of adults – about the social and economic conditions that cause this circumstance, and what this circumstance in turn causes. Could you start talk to me about writing and translating a child’s voice, in particular one which (because of the novel’s circumstances) is beyond its age.
LILIANA COROBCA: Before this novel, I wrote another – A Year in Paradise – in which Sonia, the main character, has not yet turned 17. She has failed university admission and ends up in the clutches of a trafficker who takes her to a brothel in a war zone on the edge of the world. It explored an aspect of migration in the post-Soviet space, perhaps the most cruel and unfair aspect: human trafficking. In Kinderland, the girl is younger, and it was easy for me to adopt her voice. In fact, the novel was initially an epistolary one, in which the mother’s voice was as strong as the children’s. The kids told their mother what was happening at home and the mother told them what she was doing in Italy. But, as I wrote, the mother drifted away, until I couldn’t feel her anymore. I didn’t feel the need to step into her skin. She became an episodic character; when she appears, it’s through the eyes and voices of the children.
I was hesitant when I started writing the book (it was published in Romanian 10 years ago), because I felt I couldn’t write about children if I didn’t have them around, couldn’t see them by my side, observe their reactions, understand them by always watching them. Then I said to myself: let’s take a risk. For the elder children, Cristina and Dan, I used my relationship with my brother – who is seven years younger than me, the same age gap as in the book; the third child, who moved me when he appeared between the lines, was my imaginary one, my fictional little boy.
MONICA CURE: When I began reading Kinderland, Cristina’s voice immediately seemed familiar to me. A similar situation exists in Romania as in Moldova – especially among children in rural areas. Even when parents don’t leave the country to find work, they often have long commutes to the city, and so children spend much of their time in the company of grandparents or other children. I’ve spoken with children who have even picked up certain mannerisms or ways of speaking from elderly people. Having so much freedom – if that’s what we want to call it – makes these children seem to be ‘in the know’ about what is happening around them. But it’s also because they have to be.
WF: One of Kinderland’s great virtues is its modulation between severity and play (and in finding the playful in the severe, the severe in the playful). Liliana – could you talk a little about that modulation? And Monica – could you talk about severity and play in your act of translation?
MC: I think that’s a great observation. For me, the scene that best embodies this is when the youngest brother, Marcel, uses his father’s coat to pretend he’s there – even if not in a positive way. The siblings have played dress up in their parents’ clothes before, but this time it’s more poignant. We as readers experience that modulation intensely, but the narrator seems to experience most of it in the same way. That heightens the contrast. In my translation, I wanted to convey that overall consistency of the narrator’s tone.
LC: To be alone and abandoned in a village is a tragedy. But I tried to accept the children’s perspective: on the one hand, I think that any victim tries to tame reality, to adapt by looking for solutions; on the other, children are always playing – they grow up playing. The tone of the book is a very pure, very innocent one. I remember that I had just finished some projects on censorship – hard and dry – the year I was writing it, and I was seeking to balance my concerns; as dark and hopeless as the anthology of documents on communist censorship was, the story of the abandoned children was bright and tender. I felt that I had to invent some sunny events, so that I could continue the sad story and so that the reader could move forward, too. I wasn’t a detached, cold author: I got involved and looked for a balance and a solution. We can’t survive without a bit of humour, especially in contexts like the novel’s, a borderline situation to which thousands of people – children – are subject today.
WF: Monica – when your translation of Liliana’s The Censor’s Notebook won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, much was made of it being your debut. Your second book-length translation is of Liliana’s words, too. I’d like to ask about your translatorial voice, and how you think, at the moment, it relates to Liliana’s authorial voice.
MC: I feel incredibly fortunate to have got to work on Kinderland after The Censor’s Notebook. Part of what I love about Liliana’s writing is the range, the varied (and important) topics she feels compelled to illuminate in her works. Though the voices of Liliana’s narrators are very different – a 12-year-old girl and a middle-aged communist censor – the sense of humour has something similar in it. I like that Kinderland was a new challenge, but that it also allowed me to build a kind of continuity of voice for Liliana’s works in English.
WF: Liliana – many of the Kinderland’s scenes start with words like ‘sometimes’, or ‘one time’, or ‘one summer’. These phrases reveal something about the horizons of time in the book – as though it is progressing, yes, but progressing to nowhere in particular; as though a given scene is repeated and repeatable. The physical plot on which the book takes place is circumscribed, too. This is of course about the bounded space and time of childhood, but it felt to me as though it was also about more than that. Could you talk about these ideas a little? And, perhaps relatedly, about what you think drives this story forward.
LC: The idea for the novel came from the story of a traumatised boy I met when visiting my home village in Moldova. His parents both worked abroad, returning for only a month in the summer. He had come to our home with his father, who left the child in the guest house. The child was so afraid that his beloved father would forget him at his strange house that he just looked straight at him, staring, hoping that his father would see him and not forget that he exists. The boy didn’t talk, didn’t play. This is where I started – although that little boy isn’t a character in the novel. My parents were teachers and they told me all kinds of stories about such children. The situation – children left at home, alone, without parents – is a real one. I realised it is was a generalised phenomenon and I wondered what our world would be like tomorrow, wondered if the family institution had changed. In my village, every family has a member who has left for money, at least one migrant. I realised that the most important event in the lives of these children is the arrival of their parents.
‘Waiting’ is the word around which the entire action of the novel revolves. It is the impulse that drives the scenes in the book forwards. The youngest child puts a chair at the gate and waits. They must do so for more than half a year. Children live with the memory of the moments in which they were normal children with parents. I was interested in how they children survive, and how they become dignified people.
WF: ‘A village all our own must exist somewhere, one with its own laws, with a way of life that’s inaccessible and hidden to others. Where life carries on beautifully, generously, compassionately, without meanness, longing, and waiting. A village of good children.’ These lines open a passage quite late in the book; when I reached them, they gave shape to a question I’d been dancing around. Secrets are so important to this book – to life, and to a child’s life, and to a community of children in a particular socio-political context. Could you both talk to me about the power – good and bad – of secrets? You’re very welcome to tell me a secret from your childhood, too, if you’d like…
LC: Maybe it’s not really a secret, because it’s in the book. I describe a scene that seems to belong to the domain of the fantastic – the meeting with the wild boar in the forest – but which is real: in 2010, when I had a scholarship in Stuttgart, I crossed paths with a wild boar in the forest of Akademie Schloss Solitude one evening. I don’t like secrets, really. But mysteries, yes. I believe that children need mysterious, magical experiences; spiritual power, imagination, little ‘secrets’ help these children. And this, although it might not seem like it, is very much related to my very atheistic childhood. We weren’t allowed to go to church, talk about God, read the Bible (a function of a childhood spent in the communist regime), and so we felt the need to invent something unseen, something great. Let’s live in pagan stories, invent our own religion. The power of secrets is a theme as huge as a novel; for the children of Kindereland, it is the power of hope, of patience, of survival.
MC: Absolutely. Secrets are powerful, especially when shared by a group. In the passage you quote, keeping things secret allows for the protection of a way of life worth protecting. Here, it would be the innocence of childhood. A secret that is hard to keep for long. But there are unintentional secrets as well. Something can become a kind of secret, especially for children, when there’s no one to listen to you. An entire inner world can become a secret, including what is causing you pain.
I have a very distinct memory from first grade, when it became a fad to look for four-leaf clovers outside during recess. I remember continuing to look for them into the summer when we moved to a new house. My secret search was related to all that I couldn’t yet put into words about cultural and physical displacement, about a sense of aloneness. So much of Kinderland’s power is in speaking this secret, letting us as adults, and now as English-language readers, in on the secret.
WF: Finally, do you think this is a book of memory or a book of imagination?
MC: If I had to choose between the two, I would choose imagination. because that is the consummate domain of children, and we see this story through Cristina’s eyes. Imagination is also what makes reality bearable and gives us hope that things will get better. That’s what I want for the children of Kinderland.
LC: I think that if I hadn’t been born in a small village, if I hadn’t gone through many of the small experiences I describe, I wouldn’t have been able to write such a book. How to milk a goat, how to put a plantain leaf on a wound, how to cook, how to take care of animals. The main characters are invented – they have no prototypes in reality – so it is a book of imagination. The main situations – the problem of migration, the state of the village, its life and spirit – are based on real data, so it is a book of memory. I cannot separate these two aspects.
When I was little, I could see from the stairs of our house three walnuts on the horizon, which, from a distance, looked blue. At one point, I went with my father to the horizon and saw those three walnuts. There, I felt the emotion described in the novel, attributed to the main character Cristina. And now, when I go home, I look at the horizon to see the three walnuts. They are still there, but Kinderland is not an autobiographical novel.
Liliana Corobca was born in the Republic of Moldova. She made her debut with the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for a debut awarded by the România literară magazine; the Prize for Prose Debut of the Republic of Moldova Writers’ Union and The Character in Inter war Romanian Novels (2003, translated into Italian and German). Her novels The Censor’s Notebook and most recently Kinderland were both translated into English by Monica Cure and are published by Seven Stories Press.
Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of Liliana Corobca’s The Censor’s Notebook won the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.
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