Translator’s Note
Living in the cultural in-between means never fully identifying with any of the cultures you “belong to” but also having a surprising amount in common with others who are in between. As a Romanian American who was born in Romania, grew up entirely in the United States, and recently moved back to Romania, I discovered a special affinity with Moldovan Romanian writers. The history of the Republic of Moldova is fascinating — ethnic Romanians from Moldova are a kind of diaspora that isn’t a diaspora. Like Romanians in the States, they developed ways to preserve aspects of their cultural identity despite hegemonic pressure when Moldova was under the control of the USSR. At the same time, those who now immigrate to Romania, which is better off economically, find that cultural differences between Romanians become salient.
When I heard Moldovan-born Romanian poet Diana Iepure read at a poetry festival we were both invited to in 2021, I immediately knew I wanted to translate from her work. Her collection Other Than That, Life Is Beautiful, especially the opening section, entitled “The Fatherland of Jars,” creates an affective map of the journeys between her mother’s home in eastern Moldova and the life she has created for herself in Romania. I could see how our experiences of transnationalism, family dynamics, and domestic tasks lined up. The similarities allowed for interesting comparisons, including important contrasts.
In the poems “spaces” and “chignon,” I decided to layer my experiences of certain words and concepts in descriptions in the footnotes along with the English-language word choices themselves. Essentially, I created a hypertranslation in which I translated “more” and in doing so revealed more of my process. For me, translation is second nature as well as completely unnatural. In my Romanian American community in the suburbs of Detroit, in my family, in my mind, I was always translating from one language to another. But when I began translating Romanian literature, I had no formal education either in Romanian or in translation studies. Most of what I know is intuitive, personal, and only secondarily from double-checking dictionaries and now the experience I’ve gained through translating.
The footnote for “fruit butter” in “chignon,” which traces what magiun has come to signify for me, is paradigmatic for how all language is layered through experience. I first heard the word as a child, as part of an experience that my mother, my grandmother, and in fact a network of women worked hard to create for me. Plum butter was the only object I had associated with magiun until moving to Romania, where I heard the word in other contexts. As I decided how to translate it, I had to question whether my understanding of the word had been complete, whether my mother’s had been complete, or whether language had changed. Even as the entry for the word in the Romanian dictionary reflects the current broader meaning, I’m aware that magiun in the poem very well could be simply plum butter — as much as any word is “simply” anything.
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