Anna Moschovakis Talks About Writing the Unfamiliar

At the Creative Independent, Anna Moschovakis speaks with Ruby Brunton about the creative process behind her debut novel Eleanor, Or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love. "I was interested in this idea of how to write the aftermath of a feeling, or how to write a feeling that’s the aftermath of an event, without telling the backstory—an anti-backstory kind of narrative fragment," Moschovakis explains. "I had that in my head because I was learning how to meditate, and I was trying to learn to sit with the 'feeling' and not the 'story.'"  

I had just translated four or five novels, and I felt a hankering to write fiction. So I went back to the character of Eleanor, and set out into a world. Translation and poetry have always been connected for me. For instance, once when I was writing what turned out to be my second book of poems, I was translating—for hire—a Georges Simenon novel. An interesting novel, but with a lot of objectification of women, which I had to contend with. I remember translating those scenes, having to create those sentences, and the excess feelings I had about it all made their way into the poems. So much of my translating life had already made its way into my poetry—maybe in a way translation also formed the bridge between poetry and fiction.

So while you were translating the Simenon novel, the misogyny coming through affected you philosophically and emotionally. There’s not much you can do about that as a translator, as you have to stay more or less true to the text… so you put the spillover into your poetry?

Absolutely. It’s not something I’d label simply as misogyny; it’s an anti-fascist novel with a character who’s persecuted for being a Jew, and also for being an anomaly, for not fitting in, for being an outsider. And part of that is that he’s solitary, and a voyeur, and those were the scenes that were challenging to recreate.

Would you say you’re very attached to the idea of genre?

I’m really not. The other day I was talking to Adjua [Gargi Nzinga Greaves] about whether we identify as poets, or just as writers. And we were like, “Gah.” Then we tried to figure out where this resistance to calling ourselves poets came from. She tends to call herself an artist because she also does visual art. And I tended to call myself a writer rather than a poet, even before I had also published some fiction—that just felt more comfortable to me. But we were trying to figure out what that meant, given that we both identify strongly with the poetry communities we are part of. I think my identification as a poet is not so much about what the stuff I write looks like—it’s more about the positions poets hold in the world.

Read on at the Creative Independent.