Chosen Tongue

Aaron Poochigian is a poet and translator with a PhD in classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. He is the author of the poetry collection American Divine and the verse tour Four Walks in Central Park. His translations for Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton include Saffo's Stang with Love and Marcos Aurelio's Meditations.


We talk about what it means to translate ancient prose as a poet rather than a classicist and why he calls his approach to meditations literary prose rather than strict translation. We get into how Aaron sees his own role in translation, less as a craftsman working on a fixed text than as a kind of spiritual medium, channeling Marcus Aurelius back to life.

Chiara Barzini is an Italian author and award-winning screenwriter best known for her debut English-language novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, and her nonfiction work Aqua: A History of Water and Lost Dreams. Born in Rome, she moved to California at fifteen, and her writing has appeared in Vogue, Harper's, Rolling Stone, and Vice. Her screenplay for the film Arianna was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Italian Golden Globes, and she serves as a Literature Advisor at the American Academy in Rome.
We talk about her move from Rome to California as a teenager and the binary life that split created, and about writing her latest book, a memoir set between Los Angeles and Rome, in English even though it was commissioned in Italian. She talks about juggling two languages on the page, and her conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri about what she calls a hybrid text, one that can feel like a betrayal of both languages at once. And we get into exile as a feeling of not fully belonging anywhere, and writing as a way of holding two identities together rather than picking one.

David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France, who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Stegner Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker as well as French-language publications including Brins d'éternité and XYZ La revue de la nouvelle, and he writes in both English and French.
We talk about growing up between English and Korean without fully belonging to either, and how he found French later, through Rimbaud, as a language that felt entirely his own choice. David talks about how French grammar suits the way he thinks better than English does, and about living in Paris, where he felt more visible as a minority than he does in the US. Finally, we get into the difficulty of being read as a bilingual writer, and David's recent decision to write more in French, partly as a way of holding onto the language from outside a French-speaking country.

Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant," and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Folio Prize, and the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her latest novel, Beginning Middle End, will be published in the US on July 28th by Knopf. We talk about how Valeria came to write her first novel in Spanish, even though English was the language she thought and studied in. And we also get into how she actually writes across two languages, since for Valeria it isn't a clean switch, but something closer to chaotic crossfade, with parts of a novel written in one language and then rewritten rather than simply translated into the other.