FAQ

Q: Where were you born?

In Oakland, California. (The earth didn't move, as far as I know.)

Q: And after that?

We moved to Colorado and I grew up in Boulder -- which is, of course, both a suburb of California and the Cosmic Center of the Universe. Went to college at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, then to grad school in Bloomington, Indiana -- which is not really a Cosmic Center of anything, but a very nice place.

Q: Is your family background Russian?

Ni sluc^ajno! (That means -- not really.)
It's Scottish, Irish, English, plus some undefined American -- grandparents from Pennsylvania and Tennessee, Richardsons and Tidwells.

Q: Do you speak any of the Celtic languages?

No. (I know two rather obscene expressions, not at all what I'd have expected my sainted granny to have passed along, and not the sort of thing you want to check for accuracy, meaning and proper intonation with most native speakers you'd meet.) I think I'm the only one in my family who feels a sense of loss about that -- even the cousins-once-removed in Brig o' Turk didn't seem to mind that everything they do happens in English.
My great-grandfather, Ewen Cameron, was the last native speaker of Gaelic in our branch of the family. He died in 1891, when my grandmother was three years old. He was coming back from a Highland dancing competition -- he used to win prizes doing that, there was an engraved silver cup that my cousin inherited -- and caught a cold waiting for the train, all sweaty in his tartan. The cold turned into pneumonia, and that was that. Let it be a lesson to you!

Q: How did you get interested in Russian?

I wanted to take Arabic when I got to Bryn Mawr (my marvelous and inspiring high school French teacher was from Morocco), but the guy who taught it was on sabbatical. So there I was all prepared to study something "exotic," and Russian was the next closest thing. I kept getting good grades in it so there was no motivation to stop, and in time I decided to pursue it more seriously.

Q: Have you lived or traveled in Russia?

I was in the Soviet Union, in Moscow and a little in other places, for two months in summer of 1982, as a student. Met Pasternak's son and some other almost mythical people. Ask me sometime about how I sang for some poets in Peredelkino. After that I wasn't back until summer of 1995, when I spent two months in Petrozavodsk. That's when I had the chance to visit Solovki. I took my family to Petrozavodsk again for five months in 1995, doing research on Fortune Tellers and Folk Healers, when I was in Kuzaranda. (My family wasn't doing research, of course). We came back with tons of fascinating information and a very fluffy part-Siberian cat. Our friends were amused that part of getting her out involved obtaining an official certificate stating that she was not a state treasure. The certificate cost about ten dollars. I imagine that someone must have been trying to smuggle out mink or sable as "household pets." The last time I was in Russia was for one week, in St. Petersburg, in March of 2003. It would have been more beautiful if it hadn't drizzled the whole time -- I couldn't really appreciate the marvelous view from under my hood and umbrella.
I spent nearly a year in Zagreb, then Yugoslavia, in 1986-87, traveled to most of the parts of Yugoslavia (missing only Kosova and Macedonia). For a while I was making it back there once or twice a year, until 1991 when the wars started.
Besides that: first visit to Poland in August 1995. It is lovely there, and the food is fabulous.
Though "Tu kupisz prase" does not actually mean that you can buy a suckling pig in the train station underpass. It does occasionally happen that greater knowledge means lesser enchantment.

Q: How did you get interested in these other Slavic places?

They make you do a second Slavic language for a PhD in Russian, in most graduate programs, and I wanted to do it properly. There are important linguistic and cultural links between all the Slavic countries; the poets read each other, of course, if they're any good. In the socialist days they wound up often translating each other, since that was an honest and fairly safe way to make some money as a writer. In many ways I find Eastern Europe more to my taste than Russia, maybe because I am descended from a small nation and don't have any particularly imperial pretensions most of the time, and I like eating things like porridge.
But I started to study Serbo-Croatian, as it was called at the time, because the teacher, Rada Borić, was so cool. I still have a pair of chic boots she gave me when she left the US, or rather my Yelegant daughter has them, because her feet are narrower and they don't pinch her toes. Because you can't get anywhere meaningful unless you're led there by affection.

Q: So you have no personal connection with the Slavic world?

Au contraire! Two of my favorite people in the world are Slavs (I won't do the math-infested American thing of talking about percentages): Yelena and Mislav. Yelena got so good at Russian by the end of our 1998 trip, thanks to the marvelous nyanya Galya, that when she answered the phone my friends would think they'd dialed the wrong number.
Also, I was inspired to undertake the translation of Irena Vrkljan's Svile, &shachek;kare [The Silk, the Shears], which came out in 1999 from Northwestern University Press, when I discovered that Irena Vrkljan and I have the same birthday -- Augsut 21. (Not the same year, though.) Just a little example of translators' mysticism.

Q: How long does it take to braid your daughter's hair every morning?

It depends. If she hasn't skipped a day, maybe 5 minutes.

Q: And where did Mislav get the dimples?

Sorry, I can't tell you that. Everybody would want some, and the price would skyrocket. But they show when he plays the trumpet.

Q: And how much does Raian weigh now?

When she had her three-year check-up she was 39 inches tall and 36 pounds. My reaction reminds me of Tsvetaeva's comment on her own (substantial) infants: paraphrased, "I value my children, like books, partly by their weight."

Q: And who cuts your hair?

Alice.

Q: What about the poetry?

After I won the $100 prize * as a sophomore, I was thinking I'd graduate from college and move to Santa Fe to wash dishes in some restaurant and write great poetry. (Maybe the early-to-mid '80's would have been a good time to do that? Sort of a lost opportunity, like the idea of studying the literary and cultural interactions of French and Arabic.) Instead, I read Mandel'shtam and Tsvetaeva and became convinced that I would never manage to do that sort of thing. So now I work as a kind of parasite on poetry. But who knows.
In July of 1996 I went to a writing workshop in Paradox, New York, in the Adirondacks. (Ask me if you'd like information on getting there yourself some summer.) I imagined that between the time in solitude, the writing atmosphere, and the nourishing sense of almost unjustifiable self-indulgence, the Muse might visit and be persuaded into agreeing to a more meaningful, long-term relationship. In fact, wrote some great stuff, though what sticks in my mind now is canoeing over to the island with my friends to skinny-dip.
In any case, don't let it (atrophy and abandonment of a gift) happen to you! A psychic once told me: if you let a talent lie idle, it turns hard like wood and starts to interfere with the rest of your life, to threaten your shins. And she is absolutely right.

Q: And the singing?

Well, the singing -- I think that more girls in the United States sing in choirs and whatever than boys, and it's not just because their voices don't change: the parents seem reluctant to put out money for good lessons. The guys get the brass instruments and the percussion toys (well -- they also have to come to terms with a completely new voice at some point in their teens). So I sang in choirs -- madrigals mostly, medieval things, renaissance and baroque. Thanks to singing folk songs for and with my lucky Russian language students, I didn't give up the guitar after college, though I didn't get any better either.
The moral of that I suppose is: if your talents turn to wood, at least make a guitar out of them.
For I few years I sang with the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Slavic and Easf European folk ensemble, Slaveja, which was wonderful. Then several of us became a new and smaller group called Svitanje (it's the Croatian word for the first light at dawn, and almost the Ukrainian word for same). I can tell when we're good because it makes my hair stand on end.

Q: So what would you do if you weren't doing this?

Well, if the poetry-and-dishwashing thing no longer holds water, I'd still like to:
Play accordion and do sultry vocals in a Klezmer band
Somehow combine my writing with body work and Tarot card reading. I'm sure those things don't tap the same kinds of energy -- but it would be something to get all the kinds tapped regularly, maybe to rub them against one another? Though my friends who are body workers say it's all very well to have such a lovely profession, until someone comes in with terrible personal vibrations or really evil-smelling feet.
Pursue my love of fiber arts by learning hand-spinning, dyeing, and designing sweaters and other knitted goods.
Take care of the herb garden in a Buddhist monastery
Be a birch tree (regress to a former existence)

Q: You have said that being a college professor is one way to satisfy histrionic tendencies in front of a captive audience. So what was your favorite dramatic role?

Definitely Elizaveta Bam, in the Xarms play, at the Bloomingtonskii akademicheskii teatr (BAT), imeni kogo ugodno.

Q: What do you enjoy doing when you aren't being a pretentious intellectual?

* And isn't it a ripoff that the prize is STILL $100 the way it was in 1981? It bought a lot more in the way of earrings back then.

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