Elisa Taber Interview

Elisa Taber is a writer, translator, and anthropologist who divides her time between Buenos Aires and Montreal. Discovering Elisa’s work, I was captivated by her paradoxically sparse and lush prose style, unlike anything I’d read in a long time. Elisa was born in Neuland Colony, a remote Mennoite settlement in Paraguay. She returned in 2013 and 2016 to conduct fieldwork. Her book An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country: A Lyric Ethnography is the culmination of these experiences. Due out in November from 11:11 Press, Archipelago is a truly unique hybrid text, mixing ekphrasis, metonymy, and mythology. Elisa was generous enough to provide Ligeia some insight into the book’s creation. In our conversation below, we discuss the dichotomy of utopia vs. dystopia, the intersection of disparate identities, and the “wrongness” of translation.

I thought we could kick off our discussion with a bit of background. I must confess, before reading Archipelago my knowledge of Paraguay was extremely limited. I remember briefly learning about the Triple Alliance War in a history class, but I think most Americans have a narrow understanding of Latin America in general, despite us being in such close proximity and our government having long meddled in South American trade and politics. Your introduction to the book does a wonderful job setting the scene before throwing us headlong into this world within a world. Can you give us some more context about the Mennonite colonization and the settling of Soviet refugees in the Nivaklé region during the 20th century? What were the circumstances that led to your being born in Neuland?

When there is too much to say I synthesize it into something cryptic. It is a way of hiding in plain sight. But also form reflecting content. Paraguay in general and the Gran Chaco in particular are places to hide. The Mennonites call it both el infierno verde (Green Hell), a dystopia, and un paraíso terrenal (earthly paradise), a utopia. Bartomeu Melià said in an interview before he died, “The invented Paraguay is a dreamt Paraguay. Nothing is more difficult than keeping a dream awake.” Foreigners are led there by a hallucinatory colonialist imaginary. Still, there is the Guaraní myth of the Tierra Sin Mal (Land Without Evil).

The Mennonites purchased the land where the colonies now stand from Carlos Casado, a Spanish businessman that owned the largest tanning industry and port in Paraguay. Valentina Bonifacio filmed a group of men killing a cow in Puerto Casado, I can still see its eye. Casado married into the Argentine Peralta Ramos family, which my childhood friend belongs to. Various threads tie me to Paraguay. The umbilical cord is that I was born there. My father, a field biologist, was studying wild boars in the Gran Chaco and my mother, an artist, was preparing a show for the Museo del Barro depicting the Nivaklé. I grew up surrounded by her drawings. We moved to Bolivia soon after.

The cryptic nature of Archipelago is what makes it so compelling for me. There’s a mysterious, oblique quality to your writing that mirrors the dense jungle foliage. Snippets appear through the trees, but the full picture never materializes. It’s a striking effect, like a kaleidoscope. The paradoxical tension you mentioned between nature’s splendor and cruelty (utopia vs. dystopia) is certainly present throughout the book as well. Humanity’s efforts to tame or exploit the land seem futile. Structures decay and collapse, skin washed clean is inevitably covered in dust. And yet we persist.

You made two trips conducting fieldwork amongst the settlements. What was the experience of revisiting your birthplace as an adult like? Did the idea for the book germinate before, during, or after your return?

I first returned to Paraguay when I was 12. Then I experienced the fainting from heat exhaustion described in the first pages of Archipelago. In that dazed state I spoke little and began observing with the intent to write. I say I am the same person I became that year. In an earlier version my age was included in the title and would change every year, so the book aged with me.

El gateo de los nuestros (The Crawling of Our Own) by Miguel Chase Sardi led me to return as an adult. A friend and I made Dictado (Dictation), a zine, which included my first translations of the Nivaklé’s erotic myths compiled by Chase Sardi. After college in New York, I traveled to Buenos Aires, then Asunción and Neuland. I began doing fieldwork without realizing it. I was 23. Everything feels like an accident.

In Asunción, people who barely knew me as a child were kind. In Neuland, less so. The woman I stayed with liked watching animals. I only asked once about El gateo de los nuestros. The conversation was coarse. Soon after the driver stopped the car. One of the passengers was a kind of botanist. She picked a plant from the side of the road.

I did not take notes but began to read. I visited the Ethnographic Museum Andrés Barbero. A beautiful building on a corner surrounded by palm trees with blinds on the windows that keep the light and heat out. I would buy a coke and baton chocolates at the corner store, then sit in the library taking photographs of books that were out of print until my phone died.

I entered writing through translation and anthropology through writing. I like the heat in Paraguay most of all. It is stupid to say given the climate crisis. But it does something to me. Keeps me still in a chair long enough to finish a book. Makes a lethargy that makes observation socially acceptable. I imagined this book during that first visit as a pre-adolescent.

Archipelago is really three books. That they aren’t made to be read in any particular order is not only formally inventive but also liberating. No two people will read it the same way. How did you land on structuring the book as a nonlinear triptych? What effect do you hope the fragmentary nature of the text will have on readers?

Yes, Archipelago is composed of three parts: an ekphrastic travelogue based on thirty-second films shot in Asunción, Filadelfia, and Neuland; a short story collection inspired by metonymically translated Nivaklé myths; and a novella that mythologizes the life of a third generation Mennonite woman.

Originally, I constructed my lyric ethnography as a hypertext only meant to exist digitally, not in print. Once I invited readers to enter my room one at a time and, partly out of curiosity, recorded the text each one “produced.” I am glad to hear a similar experience is possible with the book.

By hypertext I mean simply a multi-sequentially read text. By ekphrasis, the substitution of a moving image with a text. By metonymy, the substitution of an absent whole with an associated part.

In reference to the first section, I linked paragraphs in the travelogue to the thirty-second films that inspired them. I granted the reader three options: watch the videos, read the descriptions, or follow links from the descriptions to the corresponding videos and vice versa.

I filmed objects, landscapes, and animals because there is a silence to things with a concrete presence in the external world. By filming them for intervals of thirty seconds, instead of photographing them, I made my presence in the space they occupy, visible to the viewer.

In the present of a film the camera shakes in my hand, an animal peers at me until it grows distracted, or I choose the perspective from which to observe an object. I did not film people because I wanted to describe them from memory, so they became characters, not caricatures of themselves.

In reference to the second, I included the translated stories in the collection. Typography distinguished yet merged multiple versions, the parts, that gesture toward the source, the whole. I granted the reader three options: read the literary translation, read the literary and literal translation, or read both in addition to the footnotes.

I wanted to transform the objects, landscapes, and houses I filmed into homes and possessions by linking them to their owners. I did not film the people I spoke to or recorded our conversations. Instead I created my own speculative fictions based on the myths they retold.

I also took detailed notes of gestures performed by people in Cayim ô Clim. Actions render identity describable but also, because they are silent, like things, they show what I do not understand and cannot say.

In reference to the third, it remains unchanged. The preceding material dictated who the character of the novella was and what occurred to her. I believe fiction has the potential to be just. It creates a cyclical logic by which actions foreshadow repercussions, making the latter inevitable.

Fiction resembles myth in that both aid people in confronting their origin and death. However, the first is literary because it exists in the realm of imagination, while the latter is literal in that the narrated actions and their outcomes are perceived as real.

The transformations by which deviant characters are castigated through a physical transformation in the Nivaklé myths exemplify the generative potential of fiction.

In the book as artifact, the digital and polyphonic multi-sequential reading structure has been extracted to leave only my narratives which attempt to render three other kinds of realities—Nivaklé, Paraguayan, and Mennonite ways of being made over—and my own.

I created such a convoluted reading process to include the texts and films in my narrative, substitute the intrinsic linearity of the latter with a multilinearity which only obtains unity in the reader, and to endow the latter with the task of producing rather than consuming the text.

I was influenced by Barthes’ theory of the text as a hyphology, hyphos being the tissue of a spider’s web. As such a text is a network of signifieds without hierarchy, within which the reader traverses the path of their choice and produces a unified but ephemeral narrative.

This theory resembles Geertz’s definition of culture as the web of significance a person has spun and the task of the anthropologist as an interpretive one in search of meaning.

I can’t help but lead theory back to practice. Ñandutí is a Paraguayan unweaving technique. A spider web pattern is created by unraveling threads from a fabric. I imitate this practice by attempting to attune readers to absent presences.

You balance abstraction and concreteness in a remarkable way. Every fragment is dense with images and ideas and action, while your prose is spare, controlled, objective. This book is hard to classify because it’s both fictional and not, but I think “lyric ethnography” is the perfect description. I understand you’re working on a PhD which involves both anthropology and poetry. How has your scholarly work influenced your creative writing and vice versa?

Michael Snow says in Almost Cover to Cover, “My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor . . . sometimes they all work together.”

My fiction is done by an anthropologist and fieldwork, a poet. I am a Spanish speaker writing in English and vice versa. I am a foreigner.

Every time I begin to do something “well,” whatever that means, I switch disciplines. It is a pattern, not intentional. If I stopped, I would not know who I am.

Translation lies between anthropology and literature. Translate culture or language, they are inseparable, no?

Everything feels possible in fiction. Anthropology narrows the scope. A lyric instinct instills care. When writing and reading, I ask: What if that line described you?

Anthropology turns reading into research. Leading me from the publishing world to the library. I photograph books and transform them into PDFs. I read on a screen and summarize or copy lines in a notebook.

I replace words with symbols which I add to a growing dictionary. I am drawn to encryption, a form that only holds meaning for the author—conceiving authorship communally and the reader as the producer of the text.

Discomfort is an important part of my method. A chair, a table, and a text I struggle to enter.

It is also an important part of ethnographic translation, self-translation, macaronic writing, or exophonic writing practices. There is something “wrong” in the choice and order of the words. They only hold part of the intended meaning.

As a writer and reader, I seek discomfort and incoherence as signs of different, rather than bad, ways of poeticizing or narrativizing the world.

I’m really struck by your comments about the “wrongness” of translation. There seems to be a certain resistance to works in translation—especially in America. This idea that translations are inherently corrupt. It’s a shame because eschewing works in translation ignores such an abundance of remarkable international literature, films, music, etc. A sort of cultural malnutrition that results in a narrow worldview. What attracts you to translation, whether it be literal or literary? Why do you think people continue to be distrustful/skeptical of works in translation?

I am interested in the histories of disadvantaged literatures. Slug, the pamphlet series I edit with a friend, Tom Melick, grew out of dwelling on the depreciation of that word. A pamphlet is small, untrustworthy, poorly printed, a waste.

Exophonic writing, macaronic writing, and literature in translation enable peripheral literatures and languages to affect the core. I think that is why works in translation are distrusted. For example, perhaps in the same way that Jopara—a neo-language that merges Spanish and Guaraní—colonizes and conquers Guaraní, Portunhol Selvagem—a Spanish, Portuguese, and Jopara hybrid—decolonizes Spanish and Portuguese.

To translate is to render the source text into the target language. What is at stake is neither the intent of the author nor the interpretation of the translator. It is whether the intrinsic quality of the sum of the parts is made experientially available to the reader. The essence is akin to an aphorism. It cannot be rephrased. It is only apprehended in the act of reading.

The task at hand is to work at the microscopic level of word choice, finding an equivalent in the target vocabulary is a creative exercise. This close reading and rewriting practice consists of recreating the aphoristic effect while under its spell.

The figure I call the writer turned translator turned ethnographer employs the method and theory of ethnographic practice to reveal and push the limits of untranslatability between languages, chirographic and oral literary traditions, and different cosmologies.

The epistemology that underlies the reading and translation practices of the writer/translator/ethnographer is based on the ability to recognize and render an ontological poetics, a text’s potential to transform. A felt thought or thought feeling encrypted in those words in that order, it cannot be restated but shows the reader how to attune to other kinds of realities.

I am attracted to works in translation and the practice of translation for the same reason people distrust them, especially in the translation of verbally organized and inherited Amerindian poetry. They make the reader recognize and question their assumptions regarding literature, the canon, and authorship.

I wonder: How the aphoristic essence of a text withstands multiple mediations? Whether the transcription of orality using electronic media can invoke a secondary orality by testing the limits writing imposes on language? And how a translated poem or narrative from an oral tradition problematizes the terms literature and authorship?

The term literature can be refuted because it reduces verbally organized materials to a variant further developed by writing cultures. The term authorship can shift from an individual to a communal definition because these poems do not belong to those that recite them, they only author a version, not unlike a translator, but to the millenary indigenous cultures the reciters belong to.

Besides its blending of nationalities, identities, and histories, Archipelago deals with intergenerational tensions, particularly in Book III, “La Paz del Chaco Street.” So much trauma is passed down from one generation to the next. This section seems all too relevant for an American like me, as rampant socio-economic disparities and unchecked fascistic violence have boiled into much civil unrest here. The psychic gap demarcating the old and the young in this country (and probably throughout much of the world) feels wider than ever before, exacerbated even further by the pandemic and the accompanying isolation of countless people. Can literature serve as a bridge between generations? Perhaps as a means of contextualizing the experience of different age groups, cultures, genders, races, etc.? What do you consider to be the artist’s role during times of social strife?

Archipelago ends with Concepción’s birth. Her lineage is matriarchal. Neuland was originally called Frauendorf, the women’s village, as all one hundred forty-seven of the adult inhabitants were female.

I spent most of my time in Paraguay alone or among women artists a generation older than me.

There is an underlying threat of violence throughout my lyric ethnography which I felt while doing fieldwork. In my fiction, and both the history and present of this place, groups of women, regardless of age, create spaces where this fear subsides.

In “La Paz del Chaco Street,” the name of a street in Neuland and a play on the Chaco War, there are three generations of Dyck women: Agatha, Karin, and Verena.

In the end I say, “The third generation would not live like the second but the first.” The first and third are settlers, they build homes in “uninhabitable” spaces. The second opts out of life.

The writer’s role in times of social strife is inextricable from plot, lived or imagined.

In “Notas sobre lo gótico en el Río de la Plata” (Notes on the Gothic in the Río de la Plata) Cortázar posits that all children are gothic by nature, they live in a permanent state of what Coleridge calls the suspension of disbelief. I add that reading and writing fiction prolongs this condition.

In “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” Masha Gessen says, “humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.”

By suspending disbelief, I do not escape but accept reality and imagine a future, glimpse past the worst.

Yes, Gessen is absolutely right. Too many people living in denial these days. It’s a defense mechanism, I think. If more of us learned to accept reality and suspend disbelief as you mentioned, some real, positive change might be enacted. What a time to be alive.

I wanted to wrap up my questions by asking, what part of the process most surprised you while writing Archipelago? What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

What I allowed myself surprised me. The three genre shifts informed by theory are abrupt and unplanned. I was so close to the text I could not see it deforming. The unwieldiness of the hypertextual structure contrasts the fetishism, in an ethnographic sense, of the translated words. Editing means unweaving. The finished book comes apart. The parts—three sections subdivided into chapters—are meant to be read in disorder.

I believe in innocence, strangeness, and discipline. Estética y ética estética by Juan Ramón Jiménez, El gateo de los nuestros by Miguel Chase Sardi, Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido, Poeta en Nueva York by Federico García Lorca, Eisejuaz by Sara Gallardo, and Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles attuned me to those qualities. Those books accompany me. I hope Archipelago becomes an absent presence to someone.

Elisa Taber is a PhD candidate at McGill University exploring the ontological poetics of Amerindian literature. Her stories, essays, and translations are troubled into being, even when that trouble is a kind of joy. They appeared or are forthcoming in journals including #Colleex, OnCurating, and Minor Literature(s). She is co-editor of Slug and editor of an Amerindian poetry series for Words without Borders. Elisa lives between Buenos Aires and Montreal.