Episode 1: Kitchens and Commas

In the first of our recorded conversations, Kasper Nyholm sits down with the poet and translator Mira Halloran in a borrowed kitchen in Copenhagen. They talk for forty minutes about the rooms where poems get written, about moving a line from French into English and back again, and about the sequence of kitchen poems she has been working on for three years.

In this episode

• Why Mira starts a poem in one language and finishes it in another
• The kitchen in Marseille with a window onto a lift shaft
• Translating punctuation, and the comma that took her a week
• Reading of Sublet, from our winter issue Borrowed Rooms
• What a poem about a drawer has to do with inheritance

From the conversation

Kasper Nyholm: You told me before we started recording that you write most of your poems standing up.

Mira Halloran: In kitchens, yes. I have never had a desk that I liked. Kitchens are where I am when something occurs to me, because I am usually waiting for something to boil. So the first draft is on the back of an envelope, next to the cooker, and I do not sit down until the second.

Kasper Nyholm: And the first draft is in which language?

Mira Halloran: Whichever one the kitchen speaks. That sounds like a joke. It is not quite a joke. When I was living in Marseille the poems started in French, and when I came back to Dublin for a winter they started in English, and it took me a long time to notice that the city was deciding for me.

A comma in French and a comma in English look identical and do completely different jobs. I once spent a week on one. The word was easy. The pause was the problem.

Kasper Nyholm: Is that why the kitchen poems keep coming back to small things? Drawers, cups, string?

Mira Halloran: I think it is because small things translate. A cup is a cup. You can carry it from one flat to another and from one language to another and it still holds tea. The big words are the ones that get lost.

The full conversation runs to forty-one minutes. Recorded in June in a kitchen lent to us by a friend, with a fridge that joins in at the twenty-minute mark.