A Chat With: Irene Solà

Irene Solà is a Catalan writer and artist, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, the Documenta Prize for first novels, the Llibres Anagrama Prize, and the Amadeu Oller Poetry Prize. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery.

Image credit: Àlex Garcia

First, would you be able to tell us a little more about the process of crafting this story. Was there a specific concept you had from the beginning?

For me, the process when working on a novel is as important as the result. So, when I start a novel, I never know what kind of novel I’m going to write, and somehow, I feel like it doesn’t matter. When working, writing, and researching, what I want to do is learn and ask questions, so my writing has a lot to do with curiosity, fun and playfulness. For When I Sing, Mountains Dance, there were different things I was interested in exploring, but I knew at the beginning that what I wanted to do with the novel was focus on a specific stretch of land. It could have been anywhere; it could have been the Pre-Pyrenees in Catalonia, it could have been an area in London, or any place really… What I wanted to do is look at that place and tell a story in that specific territory or landscape from the perspective of everyone who lives there or passes by. And I realised very early on that this would mean humans – the humans who live there, but also the humans who might have died there – but also animals, mushrooms, a storm approaching, the voice of the land itself, or even the perspective of fictional characters, such as folkloric characters that are supposed to live in specific places. And so that was one of the things I knew I wanted to do, but then there was another parallel thought I had in my mind all of the time, which had to do with looking at the specific place and trying to understand everything that has happened there, all the events that have taken place there – individually, but also collectively – and try to understand what kind of marks and traces those events might have left there. I imagined that stretch of the world that I chose as if it was covered with layers of the traces that had been left over generations. And what I was doing while writing this novel was lifting, analysing, and trying to understand and uncover these different layers – every single event, big or small, that might have been left here.

Do you have a personal connection to the Pyrenees mountains? If so, could you tell us more about your experience?

I wrote this novel when I was living in London, but I was trying to travel there often for my research. I grew up in a small rural town, but not one in the mountains. I’m not from the Pyrenees mountains, and I didn’t have a very personal or strong connection with them – I had an interest. And I knew that certain ideas I wanted to write about in this novel made sense there: for example, I knew I wanted to write about court proceedings and trials for witchcraft in Catalonia; I knew I wanted to talk about traces that history might have left; and I wanted to think and write about when the Republicans left Spain. When Franco won the Civil War and hundreds of thousands of people had to escape Spain, they left through the Pyrenees mountains during winter and it was extremely cold – they were carrying everything they had and, on their way, they had to leave behind most of their things. If you walk around the Pyrenees mountains today and you’re patient and you look carefully, you might still find objects or weapons that the soldiers or the civilians had to leave behind. So, I became interested in approaching the landscape of the Pyrenees mountains, getting to know it better, walking it more, and setting this story there.

For me, your novel felt like a story about nature, and a non-anthropocentric way of looking at the environment. It feels like a more ancient, spiritual, and indigenous way of viewing the world. Is an eco-centric philosophy one you relate to?

I was having a very interesting conversation with a Mixe writer and linguist; her name is Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil. I was in Mexico a few days ago and I was talking to this writer and thinker and linguist, and she said how in her language, Mixe, they don’t have a word for nature. I was extremely interested with this idea, and Yásnaya said that the word they have actually means ‘everything there is.’ I really like this idea because the word nature is a complicated one for me. For me, one of the catalysts for this project was perspective and voice. What I mean by that is, I wanted to reflect on the fact that we all experience the world, understand the world, feel the world differently. And that therefore, when we try to explain it, we do it differently. The same moment, the same place, the same event, and everyone who might be involved in it will remember it differently, explain it differently, have felt it differently. And if you include non-human perspectives, this idea is broadened out even more.

The novel is constantly asking questions in relation to this and in relation to voice: Which voices have we listened to, and which voices haven’t we listened to? Who could explain his or her own story, and who could not? What power does someone who tells the story have over those who are told in someone else’s story? When I Sing, Mountains Dance starts with a very important gesture and a very clear idea – it starts with a chapter written from the perspective of a storm, of a group of clouds that are raining and approaching a mountain range. And then suddenly there is this character on these mountains that the clouds are approaching called Domenec, who could be the perfect hero; Domenec would be the perfect protagonist and, as a reader, you might think, ‘Okay, this is the main character, and we’re going to follow him now’ – maybe especially because he’s a white man, a young man, a handsome man, a creative man because he’s a poet, as well as being a lover, and a husband and a father. And more than half of history, literature, or even folktales are all, in some way, Domenec’s story. But I wanted to do something different with this novel, so, on the second page of the book, these clouds release a lightning bolt, and the lightning bolt hits Domenec’s head, and he dies. So, the message here is that we already know Domenec’s story, and what we are going to do in this novel is tell the other stories, look at the world from other perspectives, and listen to other voices.

What was it like occupying the narratives of non-human characters? How did you envision and approach the creation of their voices? And what did you want to explore about the characters we give to places and objects and the way humans sometimes anthropomorphise objects?

For me, writing these non-human voices was similar to writing the human voices, in the sense that, all I had to do was research and read about cloud formation or roe deer or dogs, and all these things that I might not know, the same way I had to read and research lots of things I might not know for other human characters. But what I did, both with the human and the non-human characters was, on the one hand, be very playful and have as good a time as I could writing those perspectives, but then on the other hand, know very clearly why I was using those perspectives. For example, some of these voices for me were written as siblings, or interconnected voices. For example, the roe deer chapter and the dog chapter were absolutely connected for me, because what I was doing in both chapters was reflecting on humans. I knew I was using human language and that I was playing a very human game, which is literature. So, my intention when writing from the perspective of a dog or the perspective of a roe deer was never to reflect on how a roe deer might think or feel because I cannot know that, and I’m sure I could never explain it with human words; but I was reflecting on humans – using perspectives and literature and imagination in order to reflect on human behaviour.

For me, it was very interesting to write these two chapters because the roe deer is an animal that has never seen a human being in its life, so he doesn’t even have the language to explain human beings, and he doesn’t understand anything human beings are doing to him. And this is something that happens often; roe deer mothers go and hide their little ones in the forest while they go around and do their roe deer mother things. And later, they go back to them and feed them and teach them etc. But it happens very often that a group of hikers might encounter one of these little fawns hidden in the forest, and from a very human perspective, these hikers might assume that this roe deer is abandoned and alone, so they would try to rescue this little roe deer and take it with them. But that’s actually very complicated and not a very good idea because roe deer do not thrive in captivity and what people are actually doing is separating the roe deer from its mother well before it should be. So, by looking at the world from this very human perspective, by thinking you know things that you might actually not know, or by thinking that everything and everyone around you needs you, you’re actually putting these little roe deer in danger. I was reflecting on this, but then I had this parallel chapter on the dog, which is the opposite in the sense that this dog, Luna, has been brought up in a human context, in a human society, so she does not understand herself or her own life without humans.

Storytelling is at the heart of the novel; mythology, folklore, and memory are all ways in which we tell ourselves stories. Why do you think this was something you had an interest in exploring?

 I have a very strong interest in stories. I love telling stories, but I love listening to stories, and being told stories. Stories are different ways of looking at the world and trying to explain the world. And in the case of folklore and mythology, I am very interested in those stories because I have this feeling that in folklore and in mythology, there is some kind of DNA of how we have looked at the world for many years and many generations; of how we, as a group, might have tried to understand things or imagine things through storytelling. So, these stories carry with them our virtues and our faults, so it’s interesting for us to use them in order to understand a little bit more of who we are and what kind of stones we carry in our daily backpacks.

While one family’s story is threaded through the novel, their narrative is decentred and offset by the stories of so many others who once lived in the mountains or continue to live here. Was there intention behind this? For me, it made their story seem both smaller and larger at the same time.

Yes, exactly. When I started playing with perspective and with this idea that everyone understands and looks at the world differently, what you’re ultimately saying – the story of the family being both smaller and larger at the same – started to bring about lots of other things. If you look at a death from a human perspective, for example, it can be frightening; death can look like the end of everything, and like a complete tragedy. But, if we broaden the way we look at death, or if we look at death from different perspectives, this changes. The same goes for time; for a human being, 60 or 90 years is all the time we might have to feel and say and do everything we have to say and feel and do, but if you look at the world from the perspective of a mountain, even 90 years is just a second, it’s absolutely nothing.

So, when I was writing the novel, I was imagining it as follows: I imagine that all of these different voices were creating a mountain of voices. But then, in the middle of this mountain of voices, I imagined the story of this family as a river that was crossing this mountain of voices, and then, what I was doing for each chapter, was trying to place the river. And for me, this river – the story of this family – was binding together and connecting all the chapters, but the river was in a different place in each chapter. So, there were some chapters in which the only thing you could see was the river, but there are other chapters in which you might not even see the river, but if you are very careful, you might be able to hear the sound of the water. Or there might be other chapters in which you see the river in the distance, like a very small, shiny line. That’s how I built the balance between all the different voices and this very specific family story.

While reading, I found myself just letting go and immersing myself in the language and characters of each chapter, rather than necessarily looking for a plot as such. It was quite unlike reading any other book. How did you imagine the reader interacting with this story? Would you have any advice for readers who typically don’t read literary fiction or experimental stories?

I think, when I am working, I always imagine a reader that really wants to be there. I imagine a reader who is excited and willing to play. So, I think there is something of playfulness in this novel because you start a chapter, and you are not told from which perspective you are looking at the world. So, you have to read a bit first and then at some point you realise, ‘Okay, I’m a cloud, or I’m a roe deer, or I’m a ghost of the Civil War, or I’m this mythological character’. There is a game for me here, and a playfulness, so I always imagine a reader who is happy to play. I never imagine the reader as someone who cuts your wings as a writer, or someone who needs help or isn’t intelligent enough. I always imagine a playful, intelligent, willing reader.

And for readers who typically don’t read literary fiction or experimental stories, my advice would be just try it, and if you are having a good time, stay, and if you aren’t, don’t stay; however, never lose the willingness to try because you might not connect with something at some point, but you might like it at another moment in time.

What does it mean to you to write in Catalan, and to bring your language to a global audience?

I write in Catalan because Catalan is my language, and it never crossed my mind to write in any other language. It felt like an absolutely organic and natural thing, it wasn’t even a decision to make. But that doesn’t make it less powerful. I think it makes it more powerful, the fact that I and all the writers who write in Catalan know that Catalan is an amazing and incredible language to write in, even though I was addressing a global audience.

And lastly, how did you and Mara collaborate on the translation?

I think Mara did such a beautiful and incredible job. I am extremely grateful to her passion and her talent and her hard work. I can read English, so what I do is not only answer the questions the translator might have, but I also read the manuscript and try to be in the conversation while they are translating the book, which is a beautiful experience. It is an experience through which you learn a lot; you learn a lot about the book; you learn a lot about the languages; and also, you learn a lot about yourself as a writer.