Ilya Kaminsky Interviewed by John Freeman at Literary Hub

Literary Hub shares the transcript from a live conversation between Kaminsky and Freeman that took place at BAM, centered on Kaminsky's most recent collection of poetry, Deaf Republic. "Mostly, one can detect his breath of reading in Kaminsky’s language," remarks Freeman in his introduction, "which rivers with the currents of poetry: in it you’ll feel Isaac Babel’s indoor yiddish, you’ll be carried along by Emily Dickinson’s pressure to get the self down right; there will be a current of Adam Zagajewki’s exile; and wherein you’ll remember Paul Celan’s miniaturization of all the world’s hearts into a size you can eat." More: 

What’s most remarkable, though, is not the depth of Kaminsky erudition but how through it all—he sounds only like himself. Like a man in love with the Word and what it can do, who has found in this gorgeous new book, Deaf Republic, a way to show The Word working its power, in quietude. When a young deaf boy is shot by a soldier, the town of Vasenka decides to stop hearing. Their silence is their protest, and thus we enter into their private lives—that of a mother and a father; of a theatre director who starts a revolt; of puppeteers who trick soldiers and teach sign language in secret; of a young child passed hand to hand like a torch.

–John Freeman

John Freeman: At the end of your book, Deaf Republic: Poems, you have a line that says, “The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.” I wonder if you can expand on that for me. 

Ilya Kaminsky: There are two answers at least. Well, there are probably seven answers, but we only have time for two. 

First, if you look at much of theology or philosophy in the western world, it is very much in flirtation with an idea of silence. It’s almost a fetish, silence. Silence and god, silence and morality, silence and public life, and so on. There are whole books written about it, whole bookshelves, really. 

Now what if you take it out—if you say that silence is just an invention, as most deaf people would tell you— what is left? If it’s just flirtation that’s left. It tells you something about our culture and its limitations, doesn’t it?

Because what is silence if you ask any deaf person and they tell you that it doesn’t exist? Because it doesn’t exist for 10% of the population of the planet. So what is it doing in our theology, and our philosophy, and so forth?

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