Loss is a Way of Knowing: In Conversation with Clara Burghelea

“The Flavor of the Other,” by Clara Burghelea, Dos Madres Press, © 2020

Clara Burghelea is the author of two poetry collections: The Flavor of The Other (Dos Madres Press 2020) and Praise the Unburied (Chaffinch Press 2021). Her first poetry collection in translation, The Clear Sky, was published this year with Dos Madres Press. Her poems and translations appeared in Gulf Coast Literary Journal, Delos, Mantis, The Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. She is Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation.

Find Clara's reviews at: https://ezratranslation.com/

Clara's books are here: https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/flavor-of-the-other-by-clara-burghelea/ 

https://neighborbookstx.com/products/praise-the-unburied 

https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/the-clear-sky-by-stefan-manasia/

Clara Burghelea’s debut poetry collection The Flavor of the Other is a reckoning with grief and memory, experienced and reconciled through the senses. It’s a powerful collection which questions the role of self and the body, using the physicality of language to heal and create new life. In the following interview, Burghelea discusses the origins of this collection, her work with language, the process of othering, and how her own experiences brought the book into being. Join me as we consider the conception, growth, and birth of this collection, as well as the relevancy of orange rinds.

Lydia Renfro: Clara, reading your first collection was an absolute delight, a profound sensory experience, but also powerfully heuristic. Thank you for sharing your poetry with us and for talking about it with me now. Let’s begin with the structure of this collection and how you’ve decided to hold these poems together. Place is largely central to these poems, the speaker moving between a Romania of old and a New York of present. I know you to be quite the nomad; what links these two places for you and how did they become centered so profoundly in your work?

Clara Burghelea: Lydia, thank you so much for this opportunity. Indeed, the collection pivots between two essential places, my homeland and NY. I grew up in the 80s communist Romania and ended up studying for my MFA degree in New York. My poetry collection documents the shifting selves and the geography I carry within. I am a nomad by nature but always wondered about how much we are defined by the sense and need of belonging to a place, a culture, a religion, to another. Spending two years in the MFA program, apart from my family and the familiar, gave room to such concerns.

LR: You’re certainly a linguist and I believe I remember you providing a compelling case about the sounds and tastes of words and phonics in your mouth (the poem A Stranger’s Doing in this collection is one such example.) For any readers who don’t know, you have extensive experience working as a translator. In your collection which travels between two distinct places, usage of the Romanian language is noticeably light. Can you tell us a bit about your process or how you move amongst various expressions of language, how you decide the linguist form in which your poems take shape?

CB: First of all, my poems are not translations from Romanian into English, despite my multilingual linguistic background. However, they reflect the way my Romanian background has influenced my manner of considering language, not only as a communication tool, but as an interactional sociolinguistic instrument, echoing to a certain extent my preoccupation for a sort of linguistic analysis of the conversational discourse I grew up with. Without being aware, I would reproduce, reenact, respond to such language exchanges in my poems. The fact that the poems were written in English, not in Romanian, did not come as a decision but rather as a natural impulse.

As the collection morphed from an end of program thesis into a ready for print material, I paid a lot of attention to my language. First, since English is not my mother tongue, I feared getting lost in translation -the mistranslation of myself into another language. Then, I became caught up in the process of capturing the “flavor” of my birthplace, my cultural background, my traditional family, the Orthodox upbringing and rendering it as authentically as possible.

Then, I paid attention to linguistic choices, I played with words and lines, translating them into Romanian and back into English, questioning the weight of meaning, the right synonymy and the ability of words to empower and disarm the speaker.

LR: Your thoughtfulness around sound and word choice is apparent, and also bridges nicely into my next question. Let’s get into the meat of some of these poems, get to the line level. Without any technical choices signaling a move between location, you give your readers a foothold by providing specific objects to a given place (I’m thinking of oranges and Chinese chocolate for the Romania of your past or the Mineola track for present day NY). And yet you’re coy with cultural markers, providing a vivid taste but declining to make marked comments on either. How do you handle culture in this collection, and is it what you envisioned when you began crafting your initial and final drafts?

CB: Language and culture are not separate entities. To me, Romanian represents the language of traditions, roles, expectations, growing up in a communist society with limited freedom. It is also the language in which I love my children, so there is some inherent fondness to it.

English started as the translator’s tool but softly turned into a second skin. One needs to surrender to the other language if interested in creating an intimate link between the source text and the target one. Elasticity and suppleness are essential to this practice. Then personal loss occurred -I lost my mother to breast cancer- and English became my survival kit. Poems were the way I made sense of my grief and navigated loss. A sort of schism appeared between the two languages as they came to represent different parts of me.

What began with the loss of my mother, later turned into various ways of looking at myself, home, belonging, identity, food, connections. The poems in their incipient form were less structured and at times, pulled me in different directions, but during the program’s workshops, I learnt to temper my writing, distil, simmer, sieve, taste - the essentials.

LR: I love that image of the distillation of essentials. In terms of various ways of looking at yourself, I noticed how the body is predominant in this book, explored and considered in multiple ways. I’m struck by scars and marks, how bruising appears in conventional and then very unconventional ways. You talk flesh-alteration but it’s never morose. Mother Wound is especially prevalent, reappearing frequently. You touched on this briefly in your last response, but please tell us about your handling of a body that identifies as daughter, lover, and mother.

CB: Again, I was raised in a traditional, Orthodox family, under a communist regime with very little knowledge of what freedom meant. Concepts like personal space, the right to decide over your body and mind, intimacy, self-worth were somewhat foreign to me and my generation. I was taught about what was expected of me: to honor my family, never shame my father, study hard, marry, raise a family, take care of my aging parents and grandparents, follow rules, stay low. Nobody read poetry in my family though books were valued and nobody told me it was ok to break the pattern. I didn’t feel seen, my body was invisible.

I discovered on my own that the body is very much responsive to whatever state of mind we find ourselves in, mirroring our emotions much as we have trained ourselves, as social animals, to behave well or to conceal them. Physical pain is registered by microscopic pain receptors and information is sent to our spinal cord, then all the way to our limbic system linked to our emotions. There is therefore this relation of interdependency that caught my attention. I felt the need to sing the body - its needs, bruises, mishaps- the way I was never taught to, but also shaking off old habits. It took me a long time to teach my body accommodate the daughter, the mother, the lover.

Another thing I learnt in the program we shared was to find and nurture my obsessions, the things that haunt me -Mother Wound is one of them. It remains one of the recurring preoccupations alongside the body, food, longing, domestic life, place, the human geography. Unmothering the body is one way of placing a lens/filter over the obvious and scrutinize the luminous cracks.

LR: Since you mentioned it, let’s talk more specifically about the body in context of place. I found personal connection and familiarity with the displacement that often surfaces in these poems. The View from Here, Self-Exile, Displacement, and Fugato deeply resonated with my own memories of “foreignness.” What was your experience writing these specific poems? How did your relationship to them change or remain constant depending on where you were globally at the moment?

CB: Foreignness and otherness are two other concepts I write about. They are, at times, related to place but not always about geography. One can feel displaced within their own culture, family, country, “set out into exile” as Roberto Bolaño says. Writing comes from a place of alienation and tension and I feel my poems are trying sometimes to defamiliarize the familiar. They allow me to look at myself from a distance, as well as from within, but always in relation to a place, another, language. When I reread them, I am reminded of that particular state of mind, the moment I tried to capture, the surroundings, that particular tension but at the same time, there is a sort of molting if you want, a regenerative process where both poet and poem are given room to shift.

LR: In seems you also make space for other poets in your lines. Your first poem A Taxonomy of Senses is expressly after Joshua Bennet and First Night in New York is reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Third and Final Continent. What writers and works have been influential to you as a poet? How have you invited them into your work, or otherwise discovered they were there? Do you ever purpose to write in conversation with or appreciation of other poets and writers?

CB: Such flattering comparisons, thank you. I think we are influenced by every piece of reading and every second of living. Inspiration comes from every interaction and exposure to any sort of mundane or artistic act. That being said, I feel consciously drawn and then certainly moved by the poetry, fiction and non-fiction I read. Lately, I have discovered the work of Adelia Prado, Sherwin Bitsui, Wang Ping, Alina Ștefanescu. Other poets that were really influential to my poetry are Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Ellen Bass, Jack Gilbert, Charif Shanahan, Saeed Jones to name a few. I follow my favorite poets’ work in various magazines, read interviews, reviews, work in translation, keep my ears pricked up, and an open mind. My work as a translation and poetry editor keeps me on my toes and very much connected to the literary world.

You invite such people into your own work by basking in their language, absorbing it through your own pores, reflecting upon it. At times, you are lucky enough to get introduced to such remarkable poets, collaborate, learn from them. My latest amazing project was a collaborative poem on how to tend to your sanity under these pandemic times that involved 14 poets and 4 translators. I feel most drawn to sharing and promoting the awesome people in my literary tribe.

LR: Thinking about the tensions of collaboration and how The Flavor of the Other came into being, what surprised you along the way? I’ve had the honor of reading some of these poems in their early stages, when they were as of yet unlinked. What was the evolution like for these poems and how did you determine which ones to pull together?  What does this first collection mean for you?

CB: I found curating the collection the biggest challenge. It took me some time to see the red thread myself. I first thought ordering the poems was the key and though I knew where to start -with one of my earliest memories- I felt the journey, my journey, was not done and therefore I could not close the circle or point to the ending point of the narrative arc. And then I realized that every poem had a flavor reference and addressed the senses in one way or another, so I built the collection with this Ariadne’s thread in mind. I just hope the readers will find the clues themselves.

This first collection felt like giving birth for the third time, long labor hours and all. The revision process was never-ending and at some point, my editor told me to make a decision: let this baby be on its own or keep laboring.

LR: I’m so glad you’ve let the baby loose. Thank you so much for letting us peek behind the curtain a little. Your voice is refreshing and powerful, with no doubt much more to come. What’s next on the docket for you? Any projects we should be anticipating?

CB: Thank you for the encouraging words. I have finished translating a Romanian poetry collection by Ștefan Manasia, an incredible poet, into English. And I have also finished a collection of modern sonnets. I have been toying a lot with form lately and I feel that, while sticking to the fourteen-line structure is a must, one can render the spirit of the sonnet in a modern, unrhymed meter that does not necessarily have to follow the iambic meter. I follow the same superstition that I had with The Flavor of the Other: have all poems published on their own before they are tied together in a project. It feels like a survival test -if they are able to reach an audience on their own, then they are ready to make it together as a collection.

*You may purchase Clara’s debut collection The Flavor of the Other at Dos Madres Press here. Her other collections are linked above. Thank you for supporting small and independent presses!