A Magic made modern

An interview with Andreea Iulia Scridon

When encountering Andreea Iulia Scridon’s work, readers time travel between myth and modernity, across worlds of romance and scholarship: from Oxford to Florida, from London to Paris and beyond. A friend of the Napkin and author of three collections, Scridon shares how she balances craft, inspiration, and overall wellbeing: how can we sustain ourselves as body-locked humans and creatives all at once? In prose as ethereal yet grounded as her poetry, she tells us, “If the world around is a clump of flour — bouncy, moist, tender — then to create a poem is to put that flour in the oven and taken out a fragrant, gilded loaf of bread.”

You've had such a prolific year, publishing 3 distinct collections: A Romanian Poem, Across The Nile-Green Sky, and Calendars. What inspired and sustained you throughout this creation process?

Although they were published in close succession to each other, I wrote these books between the ages of 19 and 23: everything was as new and fresh as it was for the conquistadors who discovered what went beyond the ends of their flat map, I was a university student of Letters discovering everything about the world for the first time. Poetry, romance, travel. I lived in London and Oxford, spending time also in Bucharest, Paris, Florida, Barcelona, and these books are also to a great extent bestiaries of these cities, which I saw as exotic, heavy-breathing animals. For instance, in one poem, I write of Bucharest, a sensual and vegetal city, as a pulsating carnivorous plant. And so I wrote these poems on the go and on the road, but always contouring in my mind, at every step, the principles, themes, sensations behind every book up from the sum of its parts until its completion.

I do stand by the contemporary affirmation that writing is a craft, in the sense that you need skill and strength in the same way as a craftsman does, dedication and conviction are responsible for the successful completion of any longer project. I do believe in inspiration (just as I believe in talent as a living, breathing thing) in the line of Mens sana in corpore sano — misery never inspired me to write (although I do tend to have better ideas under pressure, but it’s not the same thing) and the pieces I am most proud of were produced when I felt I was overall flourishing psychologically.

In terms of sustenance, it’s a much more introspective phenomenon, which comes from within (if inspiration comes from outside), then sustenance is something that one must unfortunately provide oneself, what with the volatility of the exterior world. I’m still learning to manage the delicacy of my interior microcosm: how to keep myself at a baseline pleasant state, surrounded by the protective talisman of poetry, but also how to protect my values, which are also exteriorized through poetry. Sustaining oneself through a creative project requires discipline too, but also decency.

Something definitely changed during the pandemic…my way of understanding myself in relation to the world was put under question then, in a fundamentalizing — though not necessarily negative — sense. It absolutely represents a “before” and “after” in my consciousness.

You describe Calendars as a work of "anti-love" poems, yet your sense of wonder—an appreciation some might liken to love—is unshakeable throughout. So, what exactly does "anti-love" mean to you?

Thank you for reading them this way. Yes, love is the first fundamental law in the construction of my personal worldview, totemically speaking (and I am obsessed by totems). I was recently in a taxi and noticed that the driver had a tattoo on his wrinkled hand: in faded script, MARIA. I thought — well, it's a foolish thing to do, because people change and so do emotions; whatever happened to Maria? But then maybe that was precisely the purpose — he wanted to remember forever the moment in which he was so crazy about Maria. So "MARIA" is a poem, and "MARIA" is a totem. What's in a name..?

Set in a polyphonic crossroads between the tradition of succinct Chinese poetry, medieval and Renaissance music, and contemporary London, Calendars is an examination of a dual nature that is at the same time frighteningly intense and pathologically self-questioning. In simpler words, it's a self-pastiche (Charlie Baylis called it "a playful, uncertain sexuality" — I believe less in the sense of ambiguous as much as treading unstable ground, if I read his analysis of my work correctly) of someone who belongs — aesthetically, somehow morally — to the past but is trying to navigate modern love. I find that the excessive positivism of this age, characterized by multi-dating, hookup culture, represents mass masochism. I am not a puritanical person and don't mean this in the sense of an ethical reprimand, but am rather raising concern about the way in which people are interpreting romance nowadays, and are consequentially miserable. There need to be people who sound the alarm when Rome starts burning, and these people are often poets.

Especially in your A Romanian Poem, we get the feeling that poetry is more than a form of expression: it's a way you define your worldview. Can you speak to how you use poetry as a lens?

If the world around is a clump of flour — bouncy, moist, tender — then to create a poem is to put that flour in the oven and taken out a fragrant, gilded loaf of bread.

I have kept a journal intermittently throughout my life and while the aims of journaling are classically different from those of poetry, the two have more often than not been a blur of confusion for me...I'm less interested in The Perfect Poem and more interested in the way in which the poems in a collection inform each other — or more recently, since having multiple collections out, themes which whisper to each other through holes in the wall, across collections and different books. It could be that this is something I internalized as a Comparatist, considering that the comparative lens is the most competitive and laureled way of seeing that a man or woman of letters might adhere to. Perhaps this is in detriment to my work — the ease with which I write. I'm quite prolific, although I stand by the fact that not everything is a poem. But I edit with greater and greater acrimony and sharpen my fangs on the surface of my own heart in the process. I always felt intensely drawn to poetry and intensely affected by it, but didn't really know what to do with it — it somehow became my own, through innocence and experience. And this is the spiritual dimension of poetry: I think, well, I might have suffered terribly over something, but at least I have a poem to show for it. It wasn't for naught — someone else who is also suffering might read this poem and see it as a balm. (Sometimes a poem comes at the right moment.) Perhaps the opposite is true and I allow my experience to be a vessel through which poetry passes, never seeing things at face value but always haloed with the aura of a deeper meaning. I think of a translation I put together of Romanian poet C.D. Zeletin’s poem “The Past”: he says, “The past is built sheet upon sheet/from what it steals and what it cheats”. So a worldview is a constant negotiation and a conclusion drawn: you say yes, this is the way. And you say it through poetry. Poetry which you are always in the habit of writing, reading, and reporting to.

In both your personal and poetic styles, you maintain a magic that's both timeless and unexpected. Some might call it mythological. What techniques do you use to create this atmosphere in your work?

I’m glad you see it that way. I believe that myth remains one of the noblest human endeavors, and so I work with individual mythology (understanding the story of my life and actively writing a story for what happens to me and what I participate in) but also with universal myths, not shying away from (what is hopefully) well-placed erudition. I like to think that this is a hallmark of my work, the dialogue between the flatness of what is here and now, contrasting against the aura of tradition. My poems are, in thousands of variations, suspended between body and soul, between corporeality and spirituality. I do believe in magic but am also dedicated to understanding objective reality. I decide where we are in a poem, why, how; I think of the ways in which the composite elements (rhyming or unrhyming, for various purposes) inform each other or stand alone and above all I read voraciously and diversely, while heeding to a canon, in order to reflect the uniqueness of my personal vision while at least trying to make a guarantee for quality, or at least take it seriously. But I am most interested in the adaptation of a classic myth on the terms of one’s own life, ergo serving the original purpose of the myth: to enchant and educate in equal measure.

How have you navigated your international life and Romanian roots in your poetry?

Caroline (I write your name because it’s lovely and brings your face to mind every time I do), I like the way you use this verb of navigating because it reminds me that life is a battle, and this can be as exhilarating as the sight of stormy waters painted by Delacroix, if seen the right way.

Perhaps like many writers, I cannot remember a time in my personal history in which I did not feel a radical sense of difference — for better or for worse, though I trust natural laws, I also trust myself to defy stereotypes. Compound this with being a diaspora child, an immigrant from an obscure country to a massive empire…but the prairie of my imagination, vast and open as an American, is furnished with Romanian aesthetics. I give myself to the idea that the roots of my life spread out like those of a banyan tree, into a sublime work of art. This is faith, trust. 

As you are also a translator, how has working in multiple languages impacted your own writing?

It's made me attentive to the pliability of language. I can get maniacal about the origins of an expression or the etymology of a regional word, and I take The Word very seriously — I value verbal precision, and look at a written text as at a mosaic — in minute, individual pieces first, and then as a whole. And then back again. I do this both with fiction and translation, but I started using this technique as a translator. Therefore, being a translator has taught me how to edit. It has taught me mathematical exactitude, or how to understand a text as a doctor understands a body.

Do you have any poetic, artistic, or related plans for the future?

Out of superstition, I hesitate to go into too much detail, for perhaps to speak a secret would be to break its spell; but I will say that I continue to remain my own subject of analysis and treat myself as a complex bacteria in any genre…or alternative medium…