In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Natalie Bakopoulos’s Archipelago is an unforgettable novel that explores themes of identity and language.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“[An] invitingly confiding tone, lovely descriptions of her surroundings, and thoughtful reflections on translation, swimming, aging, borders, and male menace.”
In her own words, here is Natalie Bakopoulos’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Archipelago:
Near the beginning of Archipelago, the narrator runs into an old friend (a writer) who calls her by a name not her own. Yet she chooses to answers to it anyway, setting the story in motion. She herself is a translator, and I was interested in the way things transpose and translate across landscapes and countries—even bodies.
The narrator (let’s call her Natalia) has a Greek father and a Ukrainian mother, as I do. Though English is her first language, she experiences the world with a multilingual consciousness. She’s left the states and her entire life behind, moving through Greece, when the novel opens.
There’s a great line in Idra Novey’s novel Ways to Disappear that ran through my head as I was writing this book. It’s an idea that has been expressed before but I love the elegance with which Novey articulates it. The line has to do with permission, and is presented in the form of a dictionary entry: “Permission: From the Latin for yielding. 1. Formal consent, as in: A translator must acquire permission to publish a story consisting of words that are not her own but that also incidentally are.” [emphasis hers]
But what happens when someone realizes that they themselves appear in someone else’s novel, another version of themselves that has been imagined onto the page? In Archipelago, Luka is writing a novel about Natalia, a novel that ostensibly tells the story of their relationship: the one that’s unfolding as he writes it, but also perhaps a version that was in place in some manner before the novel unfolds.
I’ve also been thinking about the way real places, when they appear in fiction, are subject to a kind of translation: what appears on the page both is, and is not, the actual place; it becomes bordered by the page. Likewise, the book is also about different kinds of shifting borders: midlife and menopause; about not finding a self but instead unraveling one, deconstructing one, translating one, re-casting and re-membering one.
So! I think of this as musical notes for the book, a hodgepodge of a semi-soundtrack that includes various languages, styles, genres. Some of this music appears in the novel directly, and it spans eras and borders and in some ways dissolves them too.
As I was trying to make a playlist, each track created the potential to turn in another direction. I have long loved these book playlists yet I really struggled with this one. I could do a whole playlist just for the musical styles and traditions of the Balkans recognized as “intangible cultural heritage,” from Croatian Klapa to Bosnian sevdah to Greek rembetika to Bulgarian multipart folk singing; I could include only the Ukrainian and Greek music the narrator sang as a child; in all these traditions I of course see overlaps and similarities and boundary crossings. But I hope you enjoy this sampling of the songs I imagine accompanying ARCHIPELAGO, diegetic or non-diegetic, whether in mood, in lyric, or rhythm and beat. Thanks for reading, and listening!
Ta Smyrneika Tragoudia, Pantelis Thalassinos
This melody, to my mind, matches the mood of the opening. It’s a melancholic song about the Great Fire of Smyrna, and about memory, and it has one of the most beautiful melodic refrains: “The songs of Smyrna, who taught them to you?” Archipelago does not deal with this historical moment addressed in the song, but it does ask: how do we preserve and translate our histories, or inherit or pass on our traumas? How do we learn, how do we remember, how do we know the things we know? And so on.
Apo Xeno Topo, Glykeria
You’ll find this melody all through the Balkans/places with Ottoman histories, in different versions, different lyrics, and different stories. I’m including the Greek version, which translates as “From a Foreign Place,” sung here by Glykeria, not because I’m claiming the Greek as the original but because it’s the version whose lyrics the narrator would recognize. Because this is a book about borders—their arbitrariness, their oppressiveness, their strangeness—I love the idea of a song that many cultures/nations claim as their own—often in quite a nationalist manner— but that also has a history that goes beyond borders. (This song was also the subject of a documentary film entitled Whose Is This Song?)
Pefteis Se Lathi, Gadjo Dilo
A bitter man wronged by a woman, but this version upends it a bit, gives it a hot-club-jazz upbeat tempo, and is sung by a woman. It’s playing at a party in the middle of the book, but I like the very literal translation of the title, “You’re falling into mistakes,” to accompany the book’s opening. The narrator just about literally falls into a mistake, stumbles right into an error that she doesn’t correct.
Polegnala e Todora (Bulgarian Folk Song), Bulgarian State Television Female Choir
I’m shifting gears here. Early in the novel, the narrator arrives in Croatia for a translation residency that is part of a larger cultural festival. At this festival, she attends a performance of various folk/traditional songs from the Balkans; this is one of them. In the song, a woman named Theodora is sleeping, dreaming of her first love bringing her gifts, but the wind wakes her up. A well-known folk song, one I’ve heard friends sing, spontaneously, at late-night gatherings. The narrator is deeply moved by its melody, as am I.
O bosanske gore sjnežne, Damir Imamoviç
Another folk song that the narrator hears at this festival. I came to this artist and song and style of music by way of Aleksandar Hemon’s wonderful novel The World and All It Holds. Hemon collaborated with Damir Imamoviç, a Bosnian musician, to create his own accompanying playlist for the novel—you can read about it here. It introduced me to the musical genre called sevdah, recognized by UNESCO on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. I fell in love with this song, about the snowy Bosnian mountains, when I first heard it. You can feel the sadness in it, yet somehow it makes me want to get up from my chair and dance; these are often my favorite types of songs. Greece’s rebetika music is often referred to as the Greek blues”; sevdah is often referred to as Bosnian blues, and I can see the ways the two traditions might speak to one another.
Shto Mi E Milo (Bulgarian/Macedonian Folk Song), London Bulgarian Choir
This beautiful melody is another song that’s sung at the performance the narrator attends in the novel. A man who wants a storefront from which to watch the women of the village come back from fetching water. (So many Ukrainian songs I learned as a kid also were also concerned with the pleasure of watching women perform this chore, and if I were one of the women carrying the water, I might shout to the admirers to help me haul those jugs of water, but whatever). I’ll note that I’ve seen this as listed as both Macedonian and Bulgarian, another debate of borders and languages that I won’t venture into here.
Shelter from the Storm, Bob Dylan, live version
I’ve always loved this song, both the acoustic and electric versions. It’s a song for a roadtrip, sung loudly and poorly, with the windows down. It doesn’t explicitly appear in the novel but I can imagine the narrator listening to it as she drives. “I came in from the wilderness / a creature void of form / Come in, she said, I’ll give you/ Shelter from the storm.” “From the wildness, a creature void of form”—this might be one way to imagine the narrator as she moves into Luka’s story, permitting his version of her by stepping into the name he calls her.
C’est La Vie, Khaled
This song brings me joy. It’s playing at a party in the novel and everyone hits the dance floor.
Dance Me to the End of Love, Leonard Cohen
When I was revising the book last summer, I seemed to hear this everywhere I went, several versions of it. This song is also played at the party in the middle of the novel, but the narrator keeps hearing it afterward too, a sort of echo. The party marks the beginning of the end of something, though she doesn’t know it at the time.
Voilà, Barbara Pravi
From time to time I love a good, catchy, and sometimes melodramatic Eurovision song. This song, a French Eurovision finalist, is so tender and vulnerable and powerful all at once, and I like to think of this as matching the mood of the narrator midway through the novel: devastated, confused, but somehow coming into her own triumph too.
When You Were Mine, Night Terrors of 1927 (featuring Tegan and Sara)
“It’s the end of the world/ It’s the last taste of wine.” Another song about the end of a relationship. I love the 1980s vibe of this one, the harmonies.
To Kormi Tis Koralias, Eleanora Zouganeli
This song offers (?) a warning to a beautiful girl like Koralia, whose beguiling figure drives even the priest mad. Don’t let your beauty define you, it’s saying, your body will become your tomb. I love the powerful voice of this song. It’s playing on the radio in a scene in a car, where the narrator is given a ride by two older women she meets at the beach, and who scoff playfully at its lyrics, though I think they also recognize some truth in them.
Stin Elefsina Mia Fora, Manolis Mitsias
Once, in Elefsina, someone fell in love with a girl, and he hits the streets one night to ask after her. There’s something about this song that I imagine at the beginning or end of a film, as opening or closing credits, a character driving in a car.
To Dihti, REMBETIKO soundtrack
Maybe one of my favorite, and one of the most moving, Greek songs ever, from the Greek movie Rembetiko, soundtrack composed by Stavros Xarchakos.
“Αν κάποτε στα βρόχια του πιαστείς / Κανείς δε θα μπορέσει να σε βγάλει /Μονάχος βρες την άκρη της κλωστής / Κι αν είσαι τυχερός ξεκινά πάλι”
If you ever get caught in the trap [of the net], it says, no one will be able to help you out. On your own you’ll find the end of the thread. And if you’re lucky, it begins again.
This is how I think of novel endings: reaching the end of a thread that’s another beginning.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Natalie Bakopoulos’s playlist for her novel Scorpionfish
Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of Scorpionfish and The Green Shore. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Glimmer Train, Mississippi Review, MQR, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, has received fellowships from the Camargo and MacDowell foundations and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and was a 2015 Fulbright Fellow in Athens, Greece. She’s an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her book reviews have regularly appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and she’s a contributing editor to Fiction Writers Review. She’s on the faculty of Writing Workshops in Greece.