Fiona Sze-Lorrain © Sabine Dundure
Paris, a metropole of histories and artistry, has long been a muse for writers who navigate its lambent streets and fevered dawns: Zola; Balzac; The Lost Generation; Marina Tsvetaeva; Paul B. Preciado; the Symbolists. The list could go on: Vénus Khoury-Ghata; James Baldwin; Mahmoud Darwish; Jean Kwok; the Négritude movement of Martinique; and more. Walter Benjamin, in his 1938 essay “Paris, die Stadt im Spiegel,” observed: “Among all cities, there is none more closely connected with the book than Paris.” And every time Kafka heard Bruant’s “À Batignolles” in 1911, he wrote “I felt Paris in my throat.”
For Fiona Sze-Lorrain, a writer, poet, translator, and zheng concertist, Paris is both a canvas and a collaborator with its literary and artistic legacies. From the echoes of Cavafy’s “The City” in her debut collection Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010) to the spectral presence of French résistante-memoirist Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz as well as artists Pierre Bonnard and Man Ray, her poetry and prose engage with Paris as a palimpsest: a place where belonging and banishment blur. How does the city’s grandeur and ghosts shape her lyrical (and antilyrical) voice? In “Dear Paris,” she muses: “I come to you for salvation, / old and delicate, / aging yet timeless / […] I drag with me Marx and Hemingway, / on the train I read Machado,” evoking Chopin’s émigré soul.
Sze-Lorrain’s poetry collections—particularly The Ruined Elegance (Princeton University Press, 2016), a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and Rain in Plural (Princeton University Press, 2020), shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize, as well as My Funeral Gondola (El León Literary Arts, 2013)—grapple with exile, memory, and Parisian reinvention. Her latest novel-in-stories Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023), longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, extends this exploration to Asian women in the diaspora in Beijing, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, and Paris. Working in English, French, Chinese, and occasionally Spanish, she has also translated poets who wrote of the city, Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994) and Swedish modernist Greta Knutson (1899-1983).
In this interview, we map how Paris, its art and literature, informs Sze-Lorrain’s original writings and translation. What does it mean to write from Paris today, amid its timeless lore and reimaginings? How does her multilingual, polycultural lens prism the city anew?
—Alton Melvar M Dapanas, May 2025
Alton Melvar M Dapanas: Your life in Paris, enriched by your multilingual and polycultural background, resonates through your poetry collections Water the Moon (2010), My Funeral Gondola (2013), The Ruined Elegance (2016), and Rain in Plural (2020). In Water the Moon, you quote Cavafy’s “The City:”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
Across these books, figures like Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Man Ray, Debussy, Georges Wolinski, and Hemingway appear. How has the Parisian heritage, its historical layers and cultural echoes, shaped your poetic voice and themes?
Fiona Sze-Lorrain: I’ve lived in Paris for more than twenty years now. I’m a French citizen born in Singapore. I write and translate in English, French, and Chinese. Singapore is a former British colony, but back in the eighties and early nineties, there were very few Francophones. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how lucky I was, how unusual my background might seem to the others. I’ve spent most, if not all, of my adult life in France and the U.S. I read French at Columbia University in New York before going on to work on a doctorate in French at Paris IV-Sorbonne. French is very much alive as language and culture in my imagination. I write in English but don’t often get a chance to speak it in daily life.
These days I speak English to a French mirror. When I exhale, the consonants shrink into
an outlaw I bedded when the moon was old.
—“Return to Self,” from My Funeral Gondola
I don’t know how the Parisian heritage might have shaped my poetic voice and themes—I don’t sit down at my desk and tell myself I must now write about a particular place or person related to Paris. I find that too thematically driven for my taste. But you’re right, many images and narratives in my work are specific to Paris, even though I don’t intentionally start out with them. Here’s one of my first poems:
Rendezvous at Pont des Arts
after Brassaï
You’ll find me at Pont des Arts
where water remains water
till it moves between tolling bells
while your light feet carry speed,
you chase after disappearing bistros,
then find me at Pont des Arts.
In my bed on Rue de Seine,
we whisper and you touch my cheek,
charting out time with your fingers.
At my window on Rue de Seine,
I light a candle to look into your eyes
which find their way to Pont des Arts
without compass, without map,
as the bridge arches into time,
charting history across two banks.
Days connect years, years become places—
you travel over dreams or on bicycle.
Will I find you at Pont des Arts?
Moon crossing bridge in vanishing stars.
I wanted to write a love poem and had spent the summer looking at Brassaï’s photographs, so this poem was a happy accident.
Water the Moon (Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan: Marick Press, 2010)
Dapanas: Your poetry engages deeply with other Parisian artists and writers, from Cavafy to Machado, Hemingway to Marx. How do you navigate the balance between homage and originality when weaving these voices into your work? Do you see your fiction and poetry as a dialogue with the past, or as a reimagining of it?
Sze-Lorrain: I don’t navigate any balance between homage and originality. On the contrary, I try to disrupt the harmony. I hope my work can dialogue with the past and reimagine it. I like one of Masha Gessen’s book titles, The Past Is the Future. Time doesn’t need to function in a linear way in literary imagination.
My Funeral Gondola (Berkeley, California: El León Literary Arts, 2013)
Dapanas: In your poems like “Chiaroscuro, 2 a.m.” or “Jardins sous la pluie,” your language captures the city’s breath with almost painterly precision. Do specific Parisian spaces, like certain streets or landmarks, directly inspire your imagery?
Sze-Lorrain: I think these spaces filter into my work on a subconscious level at the gestation stage, and when they are on the page—especially during the revision—I work with them consciously. In these scenes, I don’t “reconstruct” real spaces so much as discovering them in fresh ways. River Seine, Gare du Nord, Cemetery Père Lachaise, rue Sainte-Anne . . . I name these places in my poems because they are the protagonists. There are anonymous cafés and bistros too. Looking back, I realize that there are many poems about Paris in the first person from my first collection Water the Moon.
The two poems you’ve mentioned are from my third collection The Ruined Elegance. “Chiaroscuro, 2 a.m.” is an ekphrastic take on Chinese-French writer, playwright, and artist Gao Xingjian’s ink paintings. (I wrote my French dissertation on Gao’s plays and performances.) “Jardins sous la pluie” has a more existential outlook:
Like the old masters,
I seek a shape for rain. A form, a word,
something hard to fake. How foolish
I am to whitewash thoughts
into suitcases of cloud
only to find—May you feel
them rise—Monet and Debussy kept
rain with discomfort, trying to measure
a quiet too pure
and transparent for humans.
The Ruined Elegance: Poems (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016)
Dapanas: Living in Paris, a city often celebrated for its visible beauty, how do you find and channel the “invisible” or silent moments into your poetry? How does the city’s sounds, sights, rhythms, and its literary past inform the musicality and capture the unspoken in your poems?
Sze-Lorrain: How do you define beauty?
As to “visible beauty,” it depends on which neighborhood, which arrondissement, but I agree that Paris is a sensual city. The silence in predawn or nocturnal Paris contains different stories. I take walks at night. They provide me respite from the noise and stress. I think of Paris as a different beast during these hours. I listen to the city’s quieter moments and wait for the oft-unseen.
A chain novel from the postwar era.
Old footage, never lack of impostors.
Stillness like this to erase
better: nothing has happened, the break flawless.
Over a nightgown I put on my coat, leave the apartment
and walk without focus. Reading statues
or tourists, strangers in the middle of longing and speech.
—“After Being Loved,” from Rain in Plural
Rain in Plural: Poems (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020)
Dapanas: The city had been a refuge to countless exiled writers, from César Vallejo to Marina Tsvetaeva, from Oscar Wilde to Italo Calvino. Do you feel a kinship with exiled figures (some of them you’ve referenced in your poetry and prose), and do you, if at all, draw on this literary lineage?
Sze-Lorrain: Yes, I do. Paris isn’t an easy place, much less for writers, poets, artists who resist social conventions, censorship, and other forms of political persecution. I respect their resilience, their fearlessness—how they pursue truth and clarity, commit themselves to writing, make their opposing voices heard through stories and essays and poems even in the darkest moments of their lives.
Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories (New York, New York: Scribner, 2023)
Dapanas: Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories vividly portrays Paris in “The White Piano” and “The Invisible Window,” where the city is both refuge and reckoning for the novel’s Asian women protagonists. In “The White Piano,” a mysterious piano from Singapore disrupts the protagonist’s Parisian life. How did you craft Paris as a setting to reflect the diasporic experiences and emotional complexities of these characters?
Sze-Lorrain: I wrote these Paris stories before wading into the waters of Shanghai, Nanjing, New York, and Singapore. The story “News from Saigon,” which appears later in the book, is also based in Paris. It takes place at Le Petit Saint-Benoît, a brasserie not far from rue Séguier in “The White Piano.” In a way, Paris served as an anchor for these stories when I was linking their narratives not just to make them into a longer thread, but also to find ways to unsettle each story/character and make it/her more alive. I wanted Paris to exist as a centerpiece, in the middle of the novel in stories, but with its own tension and problems. “The White Piano” takes place in 1996, which is a break from the forties and sixties in the first few chapters. This is how it begins:
Before moving in, Willow had never known rue Séguier existed. She had quit her first teaching job in a lycée located across from the Luxembourg Gardens to try to become a pianist, but had found little work to speak of for her talent. She scraped out an existence in Paris and moved from one neighborhood to another. A year had limped by since Willow first transplanted herself from New York, after graduating with honors from Juilliard. No longer living off the largesse of her rich widow mother in Singapore, she took the new apartment with no second thoughts and despite its rent. After all, it was the only decent place she could have—without a laborious search or formal paperwork—where an upright piano was not considered a nuisance. For all she knew, most landlords, propriétaires—concierges, even—were more sympathetic to a dog or a cat.
When her friend Gaspard said that he had found her the perfect place in one of the best arrondissements in Paris, Willow mistook it for rue Suger. Also in the same neighbourhood, the latter took its name from a medieval abbot and displayed on one of its ancient buildings a plaque that read: “On February 5, 1848, French writer J. K. Huysmans was born here.” Willow took a few days to pronounce the street name right: the gui should sound as a caustic k in French, brisk but exact, before it falls flat on a softer and more sensual er. After some practice before the mirror, Willow felt she could at last and with ease say it aloud in public. This was one of the things she must do to convince herself that she belonged to the address.
Dapanas: In your novel-in-stories, Paris connects global narratives of exile, alongside cities like Shanghai and Beijing, rooted in historical events like the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square massacre. In “The Invisible Window,” the French cathedral is a powerful space for reunion and reflection. You chose this Parisian landmark to deepen the story’s exploration of grief, faith, and shared memory. What role does the city play in weaving these stories of displacement?
Sze-Lorrain: This is a difficult question, but let me say this: I’d like to imagine Paris as a “mediating city” for my woman characters. It’d be ideal if all of them could reunite in Paris.
The French cathedral in “The Invisible Window” is a “composite cathedral.” I had a lot of fun writing that story. A reader told me that she’d have thought it more likely for the conversation between the three women—Ying, Tong, and Lou—to occur at a party, over a mahjong game, at a market . . . than in a cathedral. I was glad that some of the humour and irony worked!
Dapanas: Paris, a city between exile and belonging, sound and silence, seems to inhabit your work as more than a setting. In your poetic imagination, is Paris a muse, a palimpsest, or is it something more?
Sze-Lorrain: “Palimpsest” is a good word. The immediacy of our experiences is defined by places and their people. With time, these experiences overlap and create new knots. My relationship with Paris has its ups and downs. The city can be inspirational, of course, but not in a touristy way for me. I find ways to relate to it even when it seems impenetrable. It can be exhausting. Also, we breathe both its history and present in our daily life. Even with globalisation and technology, it can feel alienating; in those instants, I learn to lean into the uncertainties and let the conflicting timespaces speak to me. This was how some of the stories in Dear Chrysanthemums began.
Dapanas: You’ve translated the Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca and Swedish modernist Greta Knutson, both deeply Parisian poets. Did their visions of the city influence your own, or do you resist such genealogies?
Sze-Lorrain: I admire their relationship with French language and am interested in how Paris nourished their creative lives. Ghérasim Luca fled fascism in his home country and settled down in Paris in 1952, while Greta Knutson moved here in 1920. I found the experience of translating their work a challenge, but a fulfilling one. The historical and social contexts of their writings are complex, yet their relevance is so timeless.
Cross-cultural nuances exist in their word choices, which sometimes defy translation. If anything, their writing in itself is already a form of translation. Knutson self-translated—she wrote her stories and poems in French and German, as well as translated between French, German, and Swedish. Ghérasim Luca did the same: During the thirties and forties, he first wrote in Romanian. He later translated these early writings into French. French became his principal language. For readers interested in looking up their work in English: I published a selection of translations of Ghérasim Luca in an issue of Poetry International. More recently, “The Black Virgin,” a story by Greta Knutson, which I translated with Christina Cook, appeared in New England Review.
One more thing: Ghérasim Luca and Greta Knutson are accomplished visual artists. Luca made collages, Knutson painted. Paris played a role in offering them the liberty to pursue different artistic expressions, in ways that their home cities might not have been able to do so.
Dapanas: Which Parisian writers, of any nationality or era, feel most urgently necessary for Anglophone readers to discover?
Sze-Lorrain: I don’t know about “most” and “urgently,” but I’d like to recommend Milan Kundera, Michel Tournier, Annie Ernaux, and Yasmina Reza.
Dapanas: If you were to teach a course on Paris as Literature, what would you include as key texts? Could you share writers, texts, or books you might consider including in your teaching? Which literary voices resonate with your approach to these themes?
Sze-Lorrain: Too many to list . . . Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle) is a must. I’d also include writings by Émile Zola, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre, American writer Diane Johnson’s Le Mariage, and French novelist Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’Élégance du hérisson).
