Virtual Memories Show 671:
Rachel Tzvia Back
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“Persephone lives in the land of the dead for half a year, every year. Emotionally, psychologically, how does a living girl end up in the land of the dead? And that’s what depression feels like.”
With The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir (Wesleyan University Press), poet-translator-professor Rachel Tzvia Back explores her life with high-functioning depression, weaving Ancient Greek myth, poetry, family history, interviews, and more into an amazing tapestry of life in the dark forest. We talk about the challenge of structuring the arc-less nature of depression, the shame of not being completely debilitated by her illness, how the myth of Demeter and Persephone helped her translate and understand her experience as a mother and a daughter, what it means to be the mother who fails and why she included interviews with her adult children in the book, whether there’s a therapeutic aspect to writing a memoir like this, and how much of a departure this book was from her poet-roots. We also get into how she found herself in Greek and Roman myths in contrast to her orthodox Jewish upbringing, how she manages to bridge the Athens and Jerusalem divide as a teacher, her family’s roots in Israel and what the country has become since she moved back 40+ years ago, what it’s like to live life under rockets and how normalizing it affects us, our takes on Achilles and Odysseus, and more. Give it a listen! And go read The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir!
“Depression has no real narrative arc, no rising action, no climax, no resolution. It just is.”
“The Israel I moved back to in 1982 is radically different than the Israel of today.”
“My children remind me how bizarre it is and how we have normalized that which is abnormal, these rockets, and we can’t begin to understand the long-term impact of it.”
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About our Guest
Rachel Tzvia Back is a poet, translator and professor of literature. The author of 12 books, her poems and verse translations have received awards and recognitions, including the Times Literary Supplement Award, PEN Translation Prize, and Finalist for the National Poetry Award in Translation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Rachel by someone else. It’s on my instagram.