An Interview with Burcu Sahin and Jennifer Hayashida on Embroideries
To celebrate the poetry debut Embroideries by Burcu Sahin, translated from Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida, Litmus Press intern Dahlia Olivo interviewed Sahin and Hayashida on writing, crafting, translating and finishing the collection. Plus, some advice for young writers and translators! Read more below.
DO: Burcu, how did you end up writing Embroideries? When did you know that the poems you were writing would become this book?
BS: It started as a work of translating between my mother tongues, but also between materialities like textile and text. I remember being curious about a particular homonym and how meaning can shift but travel through different places. The word ana means ‘mother’ in Turkish and ‘sense’ or ‘imagine’ in Swedish. I also knew that I wanted to write about the women in my family, because they are women who, like many others, are forgotten in history and rarely heard. But doubt is embedded in writing, and because of the fragmented nature of the poems, it wasn’t until towards the end of the process that I knew for certain.
DO: What was your writing process like? Did you have any rituals?
BS: I was attending Biskops Arnös’ Writers Workshop when I started writing these poems, so many people were involved in reading and shaping my understanding of what I was working on. The conversations around the participants’ texts can be described as a sort of ritual with very set rules. The writer does not speak, and there is always someone responsible for introducing the text before each person gives their reading. It was done with such care that a writer rarely experiences later on.
DO: You say that your mother “brought with her objects whose meaning and presence were so tied to the feeling of being at home that they could make any place recognizable” (10). Besides embroideries, what are some objects that you cherish and feel would make any place feel like home?
BS: I have become a person that tends to the archive of people in my family, and those forgotten. So it is not only objects, but what they carry and hold. I cherish the thimble of my Grandmother, and the sea shells that she collected for me that one day, the photographs that my mother took and some older ones of the family, prayer rugs and beads gifted to me. But in the end a home of course, is not its objects, but the people. In the poems, I try to gather those who are far away and separated from each other.
DO: Do you have a favorite poem in the book? If so, why is it your favorite?
BS: They are all part of the weave that is the book, and all threads have their place and importance.
DO: Is there a specific embroidery of your mother’s or grandmother’s that particularly inspired you to write these poems?
BS: The design cover is based on embroidery by my Grandmother, which made the collection whole in a sense. It reunited the stitch with the print, and the shapes resemble snowflakes. The winters are long and lonely in Sweden, but there is snow where my mother grew up as well. My mother was more of a seamstress, and I grew up with her fabrics in our home. I was inspired by her way of insisting on her craft, aesthetics and creating a dreamlike existence in a Scandinavian context that does not value migrants and their lives or histories.
DO: What advice do you have for young writers?
BS: Do not wait for others’ to recognize you, but try to create the communities you want to be a part of, if they do not already exist. And within that community, take pleasure and grieve all that work and life has to give, knowing that we are all just passing by in this world.
DO: Jennifer, what drew you to Embroideries initially? What made you want to become involved with this project?
JH: Burcu approached me in 2018, asking if I’d be interested in translating her debut. At the time, I had just started a PhD program and was a bit wary of taking on a book-length translation, but as soon as I read the poems, I was on board. I immediately felt the analytical beauty of her work, but also the importance of placing her poetics in dialogue with other anglophone poets and artists investigating how archives of memory and silence are passed down between women, the inherited labor of care and survival. We pursued sample translation funding through the Swedish Arts Council, and here we are, six years later.
DO: How does Embroideries differ from other works you’ve translated?
JH: In my reading, this collection is infused with a multitude of silences, all of which have their own pattern or texture. Translating those silences was a particular kind of challenge – that is, making sure that the poems in translation created a kind of edging around what is unspoken or elided. The poems are very much like lacework; however, rather than thinking of lace as delicate or decorative, well-made lace can also be considered resilient and deceptively strong. So, my task was to find a meaningful relationship between silence and sound, fragility and force.
DO: Is there any poem in the book that particularly resonates with you? Why?
JH: I cheated and read Burcu’s responses before writing my own, and here I have to simply agree with her: no one poem can be extracted from the fabric of the collection.
DO: Were there any peculiarities or difficulties in translating this work?
JH: The biggest challenge for me was translating the terminology involved in the labor of weaving, not because I couldn’t find the proper words, but simply because the way Burcu deploys the language of women’s labor permeates the book, and I wanted to do my best to ensure that the translation captured that aspect of her poetics. At a certain point, I began to think of the Swedish as the warp and the English as the weave, which in some ways was quite helpful to understanding how the two languages interacted in order to create something beyond the singularity of nation or language, entering, instead, the linguistic cosmology of women’s labor.
DO: How does your translation practice affect your own writing?
JH: I think a lot about how translation is a constant for me. The poet and translator Mia You says that translation is her mother tongue, and this idea resonates very strongly with me: I am always in a state of translation, it is a constant feeling for me, and so it is also ever-present in my writing. In recent years, I have thought a great deal about how my occasional bewilderment when it comes to syntax is one aspect of my poetics when it comes to my own writing, others being struggles with modifiers, adverbs, subclauses. If I stare at a sentence or line of a poem long enough, it all becomes foreign to me, and I ultimately want to write from that position of estrangement from language.
DO: What other projects are you working on now?
JH: I’m a bit inundated right now: I am translating the debut collection by Merima Dizdarević, far from the eye far from the heart, and then I am also translating Hjortronlandet, a novel from 1955 by the Swedish author/literary legend Sara Lidman. The way both writers deploy language is completely wild, full of dialect, sociolect, linguistic invention and inversion. Lidman was very much in dialogue with writers like Faulkner and Morrison, so her characters – abjectly poor crofters in the Swedish north – speak a language that is very much rooted in place and which, even to Swedish readers, is occasionally opaque. Dizdarević’s poetics are polyphonic and hover in the linguistic borderlands between Swedish, American English, and Našinski (“our language”) with sabotaged idioms and exclamations throughout. So I have my hands full. On top of that, I’m completing a PhD in artistic research at the University of Gothenburg, with the working title Feeling Translation.
DO: What advice do you have for young translators?
JH: I teach translation in the writing program at Biskop Arnö, outside Stockholm, and I think about this question a lot. It’s a multilingual and multidirectional course modeled after a course I taught at Columbia, and we talk a great deal about what it means to “become translator.” I think that my primary piece of advice is to always see language as a material that is in motion, on the move, even fugitive in the sense that the goal of translation is not to aspire to stability but to seek to achieve a translation which lays bare linguistic, political, and historical entanglements.
Dahlia Olivo is a writer and undergraduate student at Bard College, currently based between East Harlem and Annandale-on-Hudson. She is a writer for the Bard Observer newspaper and is pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Written Arts. Her work has also appeared on the Epicenter-NYC site. She interned for Litmus Press from September to December 2024.
Purchase your copy of Embroideries here.