Found in Translation, Too

Literature is a crucial piece in the puzzle of Yugoslavia’s memory. Let’s give English translations a read again, through the eyes of translators.

With Ellen Elias Bursać, Will Firth, Rawley Grau, Mirza Purić, Ena Selimović, and Jennifer Zoble.

Listen: “Found in Translation, Too” (Episode #97)

Bonus Extras: “Found in Translation, Too” (Episode #97)

Ad-free version of “Found in Translation, Too” (Episode #97).

Transcript: “Found in Translation, Too” (Episode #97)

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PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok. Yugoblok is a global community and social network for all who celebrate Yugoslavia’s legacy, cultivate its memory, and imagine its future possibilities. It’s the new home of this podcast, it’s articles, newsletters, events, and a shop—it’s all Yugoslavia, all the time. Visit Yugoblok.com to explore and join.

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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your librarian Peter Korchnak.

We’ve already talked about literature in translation, that is books translated from the ex-Yugoslav languages to English, on this show. You heard from a publisher of such fiction and one of his publishing house’s authors. Today it’s the translators turn. 

I recently spoke with six translators of Balkan literature to English about their experience and about literature itself. 

That’s six of many, by the way; I could spin this topic off into a number of episodes. What these six had in common is that they’ve all translated books for Sandorf Passage whose main man Buzz Poole kindly connected me with them. 

All the conversations were one on one, but I asked the same questions and thanks to the wonders of technology, spliced it all into a faux panel discussion. 

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PETER KORCHNAK: My first question to the translators was how they got into into the biz. What inspired or motivated them to take up translating fiction from the languages of the former Yugoslavia?

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: I’d always been interested in translation because languages were the one thing I was really good at in school, everything else, it was kind of a mediocre student. And I liked Russian; I took Russian as a high school student. And already then I was thinking teaching seemed really boring (both my parents were teachers).

PETER KORCHNAK: Ellen Elias Bursać is from the US, she spoke with me from her hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

In college, Elias Bursać studied Russian and in 1972 ended up studying it in Zagreb, through a Portland State University exchange program that was one of the ways Yugoslavia was paying off its debt to the U.S. In Zagreb, she met a guy, married him, and then lived in Yugoslavia from 1974 to 1990.

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: During that time, the only two jobs as a foreigner that I could easily get were either teaching English or translating. Those were the things where I wasn’t taking a job from somebody else locally, because other people couldn’t compete with me for those things. 

So that’s when I started translating. I much preferred translating to teaching English anyway, so I jumped in and began doing kind of community translation: things that came through the door, people’s papers to read at conferences or subtitling episodes of television series that were going to international competitions, things like that, all kinds of different things.

PETER KORCHNAK: Soon Elias Bursać got tired of short-term projects. 

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: I really began to want to translate things that were written well and that were longer, so that I kind of work on them for a while, and then feel that I’d done something worthwhile with my time. 

The first literary things I translated were for the Društvo književnika Hrvatske. They published a journal called Most (Bridge), and they asked translators to translate excerpts from works of literature to sort of advertise show what the writers of Croatia were up to. So I worked for them for a while, and kind of got a taste for it. 

So I contacted some authors, David Albahari for one, Slavenka Drakulić asked me to translate a short novel of hers, and Dubravka Ugrešić and I were friends, we were just talking about, you know, she’d asked me questions about how to say certain things and stuff, but I wasn’t I started translating her work much later.

And then I got fascinated by the novel Oćevi oci by Slobodan Selenić, a Serbian novel. One of the main characters is a British woman who comes to live in Serbia in the 30s and she’s very critical of Serbian society, and sort of saying all these things about how it’s this way or it’s that way, and it’s it was Selenić’s way of showing Serbs their own society in the eyes of a foreigner. But I related to her enormously, this character, and so I got going on that and that took a long time to get published. It was another 10 years before it came out, but those are the things I started with.

RAWLEY GRAU: I love translation. I see translation as a calling, which sounds maybe a little pompous, but it is my, my art form.

PETER KORCHNAK: Rawley Grau is from Baltimore and spoke with me from Ljubljana. He translates primarily from the Slovenian.

RAWLEY GRAU: I’ve always been fascinated by translation itself. I studied Russian first in high school, then at university, did my graduate work in Russian literature, and was interested in translating from Russian. 

xAnd then in around 1999 after I had inherited money, I decided to move to Europe, and basically picked Slovenia as the place I wanted to live. Came first on an exploratory visit, and which confirmed that this was a good place for me to be, and then moved here, and very quickly fell into translating. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Grau had background as an editor, and he too thought he could either teach or translate from English.

RAWLEY GRAU: One of the first people I met in Slovenia was Aleš Debeljak who is a well known poet. He died sadly almost nine years ago, but he and I became friends. But after that very first meeting, which took place in the first week after I moved to Ljubljana, I’d already been learning some Slovenian. He asked me to work with him on a book that had been poorly translated to English to help improve it. And I said I would try to translate it myself with his help. He knew English very well (he had studied in America) and so together, we translated a book of his essays, and this was my first actual book translation from Slovenian into English. 

I barely knew Slovenian, and I was already translating into English from the language, and I was able to do that because of my graduate studies in Slavic linguistics and in Russian, which gave me a very good basis for learning this language. 

JENNIFER ZOBLE: It just got in my ears, there was something about the music of the language that really attracted me. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Jennifer Zoble too is American, and she spoke with me from New York state. She is a New York University professor of writing and translation and does literary translations of Balkan literature on the side, so to speak.

Her journey to the Balkans started in 2008 when she did an overseas writing workshop as part of her MFA program at the University of Iowa. She ended up in Istria and Zagreb, and decided to take up the language.

JENNIFER ZOBLE: I found I was able to sound fairly natural in the language and sort of mask my total ignorance as a virtual non-speaker. And so I just felt kind of encouraged. 

And the other thing was, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars in that period roughly coincided with my own undergraduate college years, which was a time that I believed myself to be turning into a much more globally aware, politically conscious person and I was forced to confront the fact that I knew very, very little about what had happened in the region during that period of its history. And as I was coming into contact with people who were my own age, who were, you know, themselves, had had their high school and college years disrupted by the wars, and their are other parts of their lives as well, obviously, I started feeling a sense of obligation—also because of the US involvement—I started feeling a sense of obligation to learn more. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Zoble studied the language at Iowa, traveled to the former Yugoslavia in the summer months for more language courses and research, and began developing relationships in the region. 

Zoble was also editing an online journal of literary translation which exposed her to that world and its inhabitants.

JENNIFER ZOBLE: And so I became very intrigued with with the sort of process and the life of a literary translator. 

So it seemed like there was just a really beautiful and obvious kind of confluence of these moments and these experiences that that led to me deciding that even though I was still a very new student of the language and probably didn’t have a lot of business starting to translate from it, I decided that I wanted to try. 

I was instantly drawn to the process of the work, the way that it really capitalized on what I consider to be my greatest strengths as a writer, which is I’ve always been a very strong editor and sculptor of the material I’m able to generate, and I found that that was a very apt skill set to have with a translation project, because you don’t have to worry about the generative part of the process. 

And before I knew it, I was publishing my translations and having opportunities to read and receive public recognition. 

WILL FIRTH: I started with social sciences and German, but got pretty pissed off at the dry academic approach to sociology in particular, so I switched to German and Russian, because I’d been a member of the Communist Party of Australia for two years, and although I didn’t stay in the party, I sort of imbibed this fascination for or respect for the Soviet Union and Russia and everything Russian. And that stayed with me over the years. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Will Firth is from New South Wales; he spoke with me from Berlin.

WILL FIRTH: And I also studied Croatian, as it was called, as a minor and taught myself Macedonian as well. I imagined I’d end up working as a translator or interpreter in the health system or in social welfare in Australia. And as you know, there were a lot of Yugoslav or ex-Yugoslav migrants in Australia after the Second World War. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Firth then spent a year in Zagreb, Yugoslavia on an academic exchange scholarship, in 1988 and 89, then another in the Soviet Union. 

WILL FIRTH: And there I met my wife, who is from East Germany, and I basically followed her back to Germany after a year in Moscow. So I’ve stayed in Germany and spent most of my early career as a translator, translating English from English to German, German to English, and translated all sorts of stuff, mainly in the humanities, but also lots of documents, birth certificates, contracts, stuff like that, you know, bread and butter work. 

I actually translated my first novel in 1992 that was from Russian into German. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Firth’s first translation from BCMS to English came in the second half of the aughts. His switch from German and Russian, too, was a byproduct of macro history.

WILL FIRTH: One factor was that a lot of ex-Yugoslav refugees came to Germany in the first half of the 90s, and Berlin was a hotspot. There were, I don’t know, tens of thousands of refugees here, and I ended up translating a lot of documents for them, particularly for the migration programs. And quite a few of the people who I translated stuff for ended up moving to the US and to Canada. 

But more seminal was the lovely, coincidental invitation in 2005 to a seminar for emerging translators from Slovenian and BCMS. The participants of the seminar formed an association, and so for the next five or six, seven years, until the group disintegrated, we did lots of sample translations, supported each other, checked each other’s work, organized readings and trips to various places. That was really, really, really nice. And it also got me started, got got me acquainted with a whole range of writers and colleagues, publishers. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Contrary to my expectation that translators to English be native speakers of that language, there are translators of ex-YU literature who are native speakers of source languages.

MIRZA PURIĆ: I grew up around books, and I’ve always read a lot, and I was by far the youngest boy in my street. So, you know, playing with other kids just didn’t have much appeal. So I stayed in and I read. My mother made sure that my reading list included, you know, stuff in English and German and some other languages. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Mirza Purić is Bosnian and he spoke to me from Sarajevo.

MIRZA PURIĆ: There was never a point where, where I pondered, what I wanted to do for a living. You know, I just eased into translation. It almost came naturally. 

As far how come I translate into English rather than BCMS. Well, I started translating for the local publishers here when I was 19 or 20 when I published my first book. And that went on for a couple of years, but at some point, it just became untenable, it just became unsustainable. 

Literary translation here is not considered a real job, and I never imagined it would be a hobby. I knew I wanted to do it professionally. I wanted to do it for a living, and in Sarajevo, it’s not a realistic prospect, you know? And at some point I decided, Okay, that’s it from me. I’m gonna switch languages, switch direction, and see how that works…and [it] worked out all right.

I wear many hats, and I have my fingers in a lot of pies. I do a lot of academic editing, technical translation, conference, interpretation. I don’t like any of these things, but it’s money. I work three jobs to finance my fourth and main gig.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: In hindsight, I can see translation determining the majority of my life story, where you know, you land in the U.S. and as children, you learn languages relatively faster than adults do, so you end up being translators for your parents. But these are technical translations, like how to pay the phone bill and this kind of thing. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Ena Selimović is from Yugoslavia, as she puts it. She spoke with me from Washington, D.C.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: The literary translation part really came up when I was in graduate school, and a lot of the texts that I wanted to write about turned out not to be translated yet. So Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie is one of these texts. I wanted to write a chapter or an article about it, and had to myself do the translating part. And then, you know, you read them intimately. You fall in love with these books, and you start advocating for them, and tell all your translator friends, like, Hey, you should look at this. 

I never thought about myself as a literary translator. But eventually it was like, Wait, why don’t I do this? 

And then in my case, I won an Alta Travel Fellowship, so I had like an external push to say, hey, you should do this. 

I mean, the rest is history. I have fallen completely in love with translation. It ticks all the boxes for me. It’s creative, it’s art, artistic, but it’s also very mathematical sometimes, and there’s a definite beginning and end. So that’s wonderful for my OCD mind, it’s not too open. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In addition to book translations, Selimović is one of the founders and editors of the literary translation journal, Turkoslavia. The fourth issue is coming out in Spring 2025. The publication is a, quote, “anti nationalist literary space,” which focuses on the work rather than its place of origin, and on commonalities rather than differences among the places and peoples. 

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: So, yeah, I love it.

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PETER KORCHNAK: There’s a wide range of experiences among the translators I spoke with. 

Having been at it since the 1970s, Elias Bursać is the veteran. In terms of the number of books she’s translated—

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: Gee, I haven’t counted them lately. I think probably between 30 and 40.

PETER KORCHNAK: In 2011, London-based Istros Books hired Firth to translate books from ex-Yugoslavia for them. 

WILL FIRTH: And we’ve done 12 books together over the years. 

PETER KORCHNAK: And an additional four with Sandorf Passage more recently, including Journey to Russia by Miroslav Krleža. 

RAWLEY GRAU: From Slovenian, I have translated, I don’t know, around nine or 10 books of fiction, a couple, including a couple of books of short stories.

PETER KORCHNAK: Rawley Grau.

RAWLEY GRAU: And last year, a co-translation came out that I did with Christina Kramer, who translates from Macedonian. We together translated a collection of poems by the Macedonian modernist poet Aco Šopov, who was a very important figure in Yugoslavia, actually.

PETER KORCHNAK: Christina Kramer, who teaches Slavic languages and linguistics at the University of Toronto, translated two novels by the Macedonian author, Lidija Dimkovska, A Spare Life and Grandma Non-Oui. 

Dimkovska is a Macedonian poet, novelist, and translator. She lives in Ljubljana, working as a freelance writer as well as translator of Romanian and Slovenian literature. Her books have been translated into 15 languages.

On September 28th, Dimkovska will be the guest at the first Yugoblok salon, discussing life as an author from the former Yugoslavia. 

“The Post-Yugoslav Lives of Writers,” moderated by Eamon McGrath, whom you may remember from an earlier #exyulit episode, is open to all and free for Yugoblok members. At the end of the event we’ll also be giving away a copy each of Dimkovska’s aforementioned novels.

September 2024

The Post-Yugoslav Lives of Writers

28 September 2024
19:00 – 20:30 CEST

🗓 28 September 2024

Lidija Dimkovska discusses how post/ex-Yugoslav authors think and feel about Yugoslavia and how the loss of the country affected them and reflects in their work. Moderated by Eamon McGrath.

$10.00 $9.50

Get tickets

Get your ticket at Yugoblok.com/Events. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Jennifer Zoble continued translating after her studies and has been doing so for 13 years while working at NYU, mostly during her summer and winter breaks.

She has translated three books to date, all short story collections, one by Lejla Kalamujić and two by Asja Bakić.

JENNIFER ZOBLE: Both Bosnian authors. Lejla Kalamujić is based in Sarajevo, Asja Bakić is based in Zagreb. They also both write in a style that is quite straightforward. They don’t have a particularly ornate writing style, and so I’ve found their work eminently translatable into English. It’s a very contemporary, simple idiom. They don’t have excessively long complicated sentence structures, they don’t rely excessively on figurative language. There’s there’s a plainspokenness to both of their styles that works very well for bringing their work into English, but it also makes it much easier on me, as somebody who is always struggling to maintain my language skills, since I do translation, you know, as a side gig. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Call Me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić was published in 2021 by Sandorf Passage; Mars and Sweetlust by Asja Bakić came out in 2019 and 2023 respectively at the Feminist Press at CUNY.

JENNIFER ZOBLE: I’m really, really fortunate. It’s my preference to work on the literature of living authors, because I really enjoy that any shape the collaboration might take, being able to consult the author, ask questions, or even if they’re willing, have them read excerpts, or what have you. I really appreciate the opportunity to do that, and I’m very, very fortunate that I’ve had authors who’ve been extremely supportive and not particularly intrusive. I have friends and colleagues who’ve had different kinds of experiences in this respect, but I feel like I have a lot of trust and support from from the authors I’ve translated, which is really, really lucky.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: So I’m very much emerging. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Ena Selimović.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: I just published Cloud the Color of Skin by Nebojša Lujanović. It’s about a novel about a Roma boy who gets accused of a crime he may or may not have committed. You have to read it to find out. And then Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović is coming out in January. And of course, I’m working on five other books, but they don’t have publishers yet. 

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PETER KORCHNAK: Just like I have my favorite podcast episodes, my translators have their own darlings, books they’ve translated that stand out for one reason or another.

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: When I started translating, I saw myself as part of a Zagreb generation, or Yugoslavia generation, of post modernist thinkers and readers and writers. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Elias Bursać’s favorite authors are David Albahari and Dubravka Ugrešić.

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: I mean this wonderful sardonic thing that she does that I’m very fond of. 

Translating their work over the years has really formed me as a thinker and as a writer. And so they’re the most fundamental to my work. Both of them died last year. 

Now there’s a new generation of authors whose work I’ve been involved with. One of them is Damir Karakaš, just recently, but also Ivana Bodrožić in Croatia, and I really like their work as well. It’s very different. 

WILL FIRTH: There are books that I enjoy, and then there are books that I’m proud of, and sometimes it’s a mixture of both. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Will Firth.

WILL FIRTH: Short stories are my favorite literary form. 

I think the favorite book of mine that I’ve translated is a book of Macedonian short stories by the author, Ivan Dodovski. In fact, I’ve only translated it into German, and I’ve only been able to place a handful of the English translations in various literary magazines. 

But I also very much like the short stories I’ve translated by the Macedonian writer Rumena Bužarovska, who’s relatively well-known, but I’ve only translated individual stories of hers and not a book per se. 

And books that I’m proud of but don’t treat them as favorite books of mine. One is definitely Krleža’s Journey to Russia. Another is the Serbian classic, A Novel of London by Miloš Crnjanski. 

I’m immensely proud of having co-translated the Macedonian classic Pirej by Petre Andrejevski. 

And one book that I think deserves a lot more attention than it’s gotten so far is the Bosnian novel Quiet Flows the Una by Faruk Šehić. Lovely book. 

RAWLEY GRAU: Slovenian publishers have come to me where they’ve already lined up a publisher for a book, and they’ve asked me to translate the book. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Rawley Grau.

RAWLEY GRAU: It’s been rare that I’ve actually had to find a publisher, I haven’t been the one choosing what books I want to translate. 

But I’ve been fortunate: even though I haven’t chosen the authors, I’ve translated a number of really excellent writers. 

As for my favorite book, I would have to say it’s a novel called Panorama by a wonderful writer named Dušan Šarotar. It is an unusual book, it’s hard to describe, though, first person narrative, but the narrator is, in a way, an alter ego for the writer.

He meets various people, and then he tells their stories, and then these people that he meets also tell him not only their stories, but stories of other people that they know. And so you have all of these stories, almost you know, that are intertwined in some way.

His writing is beautiful. It’s very lyrical and meditative and very visual. He can give such evocative descriptions of a place and describe subtleties like the movement of light over water, or the changing clouds, the certain moments of experience. And I remember, after I finished the translation, I had sent it to the publisher, I went on a holiday on the coast, and I found myself looking at things differently. This is a book that literally changed the way I viewed the world: I looked at clouds differently, I looked at at other things, I listened to things differently. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Grau’s translation of Panorama was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

MIRZA PURIĆ: When you do something for a long time, and then you look back on the things you did, like, 10 or 15 years ago, they often look funny, like, what was I thinking? And that’s the case with most of my old translations. You know, I rarely go through that stuff, but when I do, it’s always a bit cringe. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Mirza Purić.

MIRZA PURIĆ: What stands out? I don’t know, maybe Marko Pogačar stuff, it’s really difficult to translate. It’s not easy to read either. Marko can be merciless with these long sentences and all these embedded clauses and everything.

He’s primarily a poet, quite possibly the best contemporary poet in the entire language area, he’s just amazing. And for some reason, he started writing these really weird, genre-bending books that are neither fiction nor travel writing, nor, I don’t know, autobiography, but all of that in one package. One of those is available in my translation under the title Neon South, [it] was published by Sandorf Passage, and I’m working on two or three more at the moment, when I say working, I’m pitching them around to editors. I have samples and everything. We’ll see what, how it pans out. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Ena Selimović’s favorite happened to be the one sitting on my desk, a review copy of Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović kindly sent to me by Sandorf Passage. You may remember Kolanović, who teaches literature at the University of Zagreb, from Episode 36, “Dream of the Yugoslav 80s.”

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: It’s a slim volume, but this volume, slim volume, I translated over and over again, I think three times fully, over and over again, because every time I pitched it to publishers, they had something new to say, some new criticism that really helped me bring it to the next level. I think it was sometimes, probably it was backwards, but I would hope that it came to the next level eventually. 

It started out being much more conversational than it ended up being, because what I was hearing is that people wanted it to sound a little bit more literary. So the final copy is very different from the first copy, which was much younger sounding, but much truer to the voice of this young character. I think I brought her more into the voice of someone looking in hindsight at what happened in those years than I initially did when I first started translating it. 

PETER KORCHNAK: We’ll be reading Underground Barbie in the Yugoblok Book Club after it comes out. But first, at the inaugural book club meeting, on October 20th this year, we’ll be discussing the debut novel by Vesna Marić, The President Shop. Marić was the guest in the earlier episode about translations. 

In support of the book club and all of you book-loving Yugoblokniks, the publisher, Sandorf Passage, is offering The President Shop at a steep discount during the month of September. So you have a few days left to get the book at 30 percent off at SandorfPassage.org. Buy it, read it, and come talk about it at the Yugoblok Book Club.

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PETER KORCHNAK: Translating from BCMS, Slovenian, Macedonian, and so on is not without its challenges.

First, the market. Native speakers of English tend to read authors who write in English, that is their own. In the UK only 4 or 5 percent of all books are translations and literature is a small subset of that. In the US the figure is even smaller, only about 3 percent for all books, about 1 percent for novels.

By contrast, in many European countries translations are much more popular, as much as 50 percent in Italy, a third in France, and 13 percent in Germany.

Translation is expensive and it’s hard to stand out in an otherwise crowded fiction market.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: The reality is that translations from Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese are taking up the majority of the market.

PETER KORCHNAK: French, Spanish, and German have dominated the list of books in translation in the US for a long time. Finishing off the top ten are Japanese, Italian, Norwegian, Chinese, Swedish, Russian, and Arabic.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: So we are the, you know, 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 3% probably. 

So it’s a very, very small market. 

But we have people like Ellen Elias Bursać and Will Firth and Celia Hawkesworth who have opened that market up to people like me who are just emerging because they’ve done such good work for translation. 

PETER KORCHNAK: According to Will Firth—

WILL FIRTH: The publishing industry is probably becoming increasingly difficult for publishers, or publishers complain about rising costs, sinking figures…

But I think ignorance and disinterest in the Balkans is also a big factor. A  lot of people have not heard of Montenegro. What is Montenegro again?

I have a running joke with my dear wife who sometimes gets Montenegro and Macedonia mixed up. I call them Montedonia and Macenegro. And many, many, many people are like that, including some publishers who should know better.

PETER KORCHNAK: That English speakers tend to know the region because of the wars of the 1990s is itself an issue. Now that the region is peaceful, it’s not so interesting, so to speak, as are the places less affected by the wars. 

RAWLEY GRAU: One of the differences isn’t so much because of the size of the language, but because publishers are just more aware of the wars. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Rawley Grau.

RAWLEY GRAU: Bosnia means something to a publisher, Croatia and Serbia, they mean something to a publisher. They’ve been in the news. 

Whereas Slovenia didn’t really have that kind— especially for Americans, people didn’t know it. But after you know, 1992 everyone heard about Bosnia, right? So that has its advantages and its disadvantages. For the people, say, who are translating from Bosnian literature, which is such a rich literature, it’s such a fine they’re such fine authors  in Bosnian literature, and in Croatian and Serbian they’re all great, and in Slovenia as well. But yeah, I would say there’s less familiarity with Slovenia.

PETER KORCHNAK: The source languages themselves can be a challenge. 

First, there are numerous variations and dialects to contend with. I remember picking up a copy of a novel by a Croatian author where the story took place in Split and in the original the characters spoke the Dalmatian variant of the Croatian language. The translation made it sound like the characters were from the American South, and I found it impossible to suspend disbelief enough to finish the book.  

There are challenges translating from languages as small as Slovenian as well. Twenty-five years ago when Grau first started translating, there was a dearth of specialty dictionaries and reference books, which has improved slowly. 

RAWLEY GRAU: There’s still a lack, perhaps, of dialectal dictionaries. 

The other issue which is related to that is that Slovenian is an interesting language because there’s a formal Slovenian, which is what you are taught when you take a class as a foreigner in Slovenian. But then that language is not used really colloquially. 

Plus different regions of Slovenian of Slovenia have their own dialect and have their own vocabulary, sometimes for certain words, but in central Slovenia, and throughout most of Slovenia, I would say there are many, many germanisms in the language. 

PETER KORCHNAK: When Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire many germanisms suffused the language over the centuries. The when local scholars developed the official Slovenian language, they replaced the germanisms with Slovenian words. But the colloquial language didn’t catch up.

RAWLEY GRAU: All Slovenians go through the experience of being told by their teachers, we don’t we don’t talk like that in school. Now, in my upbringing as an American, when your teacher tells you we don’t talk like that in school, she means you don’t use words like shit and fuck in school; when Slovenian teachers tell their students, we don’t talk like that in school, they mean you don’t use a germanism, you use the Slovenian word for this, even though, at home, everyone would be using the germanisms. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Native speaker translators face yet another challenge in their work.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: One thing about being a quote unquote, native speaker is that you do have baggage that comes with your long relationship with this language. So when I read a book, sometimes it hits harder than it might somebody who learned it, who learned the language in college, like it might remind me of a specific family member that’s like, etched into the character that I’m translating, and that can make it hard to to translate. It can take a more emotional toll, I think, than someone who learned it from the books. That’s one one downside. 

Another downside is, like, I can call my mom and be like, “Hey, Mama, what’s this about?” Like, I don’t this idiom is not in any of the books that I’ve ever read. So explain this to me.” So, yeah, there’s that. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: So what are some of the trends and themes in the literature of the former Yugoslavia? 

MIRZA PURIĆ: There’s a bit of a boom in terms of sheer quantity of stuff that’s being published. 

WILL FIRTH: The first thing that comes to mind, I think, is the fragmentation of the book market, at least in terms of literature written in the main language of that former state, BCMS. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Will Firth.

WILL FIRTH: The legal framework and the narratives as well have sort of drifted apart. It’s not easy to publish a book in Croatia and get it sold in bookstores in Serbia and Bosnia and so on, and there are all sorts of banal issues like customs at the border and stuff like that. So interestingly, sometimes a book gets published simultaneously in, say, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia by three separate publishing houses, sometimes with the same cover design, for example, sometimes different as a way of circumventing these difficulties. 

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: The big change, obviously, is that younger writers aren’t writing directly about the war anymore.

PETER KORCHNAK: Ellen Elias Bursać.

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: Most of the stuff I did, both by David Albahari and Dubravka Ugrešić and then others used to be all about war. It was everything I did early on. And if it wasn’t directly about war, the war was there as this big shadow, always present, the elephant in the room sort of thing in everything that I did for years, and now that’s really changing. 

I think people can’t write personally about a war that they were tiny babies in or not, not even born yet. It’s not the sort of thing that feels important to them.

You know, during the war, people were here, American readers, were interested in the war and in postmodernism and in exploratory prose and all those things. And there’s no postmodernism much going on right now that’s a different it’s a different time in writing. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Instead, Elias Bursać nowadays sees much more localized stories in the novels she’s been working on, tied to particular places.

Additionally, according to Firth—

WILL FIRTH: Listeners might think that the wars of disintegration, it would be logical to expect that those experiences play a big part in contemporary literature. But my impression is that there’s not all that much focusing on those difficult and painful events. There’s a lot more focus on the resulting dislocation, migration, and identity issues in all their facets. The search for identity, I think, is a common theme of almost all writers. There’s a plethora of family histories, often autobiographical. You know, whether the writer’s grandmother is the central figure or the writer’s family, or something like that. 

A number of the Macedonian writers I’ve translated seem to have a penchant for magical realism. I don’t know if it’s the Latin American influence or something else, or something Kafkaesque, I don’t know. And a number of the Montenegrin writers I’ve translated, particularly the male writers, are very fond of a dense, stream of consciousness style. You know, they’ll write 30 pages with a full stop at the end, and that’s hideously, hideously difficult. I mean, it’s attractive, in a way, it can be enticing, especially if you like that kind of literature. But for a translator, that’s hell, because the English syntax is just so much more rigid than very flexible syntax you have in in most or all Slavic languages, BCMS in particular.

JENNIFER ZOBLE: In recent years, pretty much across the region, women and young women have really been a kind of literary vanguard. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Jennifer Zoble.

JENNIFER ZOBLE: There’s a general consensus that a lot of the most interesting and exciting new work, both in prose and poetry, that’s been published in recent years from the region, has been from women authors. 

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: They don’t necessarily have to be writing against patriarchy to be heard either.

PETER KORCHNAK: Ena Selimović.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: They’re doing interesting things with genre and they’re getting into scifi elements. So I’m thinking of Marina Gudel here, I just read Korana Silvar’s [UNCLEAR] and really enjoyed that short story collection which talks about topics I haven’t heard discussed in that way before, like IVF and rape outside the realm of war, you know, rape in the context of a domestic situation, a marriage. I see that as new trends in the in the literature.

RAWLEY GRAU: When it comes to the whole issue of yugonostalgia, I have found that’s not a major topic in Slovenian writing. 

There are writers certainly, older writers in their 50s and now 60s, who will be writing about their youth, or have novels which are set in a time of Yugoslavia, but my sense is that the transition from Yugoslavia to a capitalist country that’s now a member of the EU, it has the euro, was an important transition. But there wasn’t a lot of trauma. I mean, the most traumatic thing that happened about the breakup was the war, very short war, Ten Day War, in which a few people died. So that has resulted in a certain peacefulness, I would say, about looking back. 

The book that I might mention, that I translated, which deals most directly with those issues, came out last year from Sandorf Passage. It’s called In Elvis’s Room by a writer named Sebastian Pregelj. It’s a wonderful book looking at the 1980s in Slovenia. The narrator begins the novel when when he is just about five or six years old, and then you he tells you his story as he moves through the 1980s, he does his military service just on the cusp of the breakup of Yugoslavia. And then in the last chapters, he’s reflecting on what is happening. A lot of it is are things he overhears adults talking about—Tito becoming sick, you know, and what that might mean for the country if the old man dies, and then after Tito’s death, you see how the country reacts to that. And so you have that whole sense of history is there. 

WILL FIRTH: The nationalist narratives can be a problem, I think, although most of the writers I translate, be it by coincidence or my own taste, are more cosmopolitan, but still, I don’t think there’s much unitarian spirit left anymore, maybe a kind of nostalgia for things you know were part of the old system and the old perceived community of nations, but now I think there is a kind of a separate mainstream in each of the four main BCMS-speaking countries. And I feel that coming through in quite a few of the books that I translate, not in all of them, and not always to the same degree. But that’s something noticeable. 

I think, as a small or medium sized language in world terms, BCMS is receptive to a lot of foreign trends has been and is and reflects them in its own literary translation establishment. So a lot of books have been translated, for example, of Latin American writers and the writers I translate often refer to Borges and a whole range of other Latin American writers. And then with the great similarity between the Slavic languages and cultures, there’s often a lot of references to Russian writers or Polish writers, Polish culture, and so on. 

And then there are all the sort of the historical currents in this part of the world, the Byzantine history and heritage and Orthodoxy, Islam, Western Catholicism, all of these sort of coming together in the Balkans, merging and blending, conflicting at times or coexisting. And I think, I think the Balkans, I mean, this is a terrible cliche, but it’s a kind of a crossroads. And a lot of these things come together and are expressed, or at least reflected intentionally or unintentionally in the literature. And most of the books I that I read and end up translating, I find them immensely rich and rewarding simply because they they focus on the Balkans, of course, and the writer’s own world, but it’s like sort of a melting pot of Europe, if you like.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: As for the future, each of my translators has several irons in the fire.  

By sheer coincidence Elias Bursać has three books coming out this month: Water, Spiderweb by Nada Gašić, from Sandorf Passage; Celebration by Damir Karakaš, from Two Lines Press; and A Muzzle for Witches by the late Dubravka Ugrešić from Open Letter.

ELLEN ELIAS BURSAĆ: You know, I’m in my 70s now, so for me, one of my big jobs is to make sure that the next generation gets lots of experience doing interesting work, which means that I mustn’t hog too much of it for myself to turn down.

MIRZA PURIĆ: I’m working on a on a book by Miljenko Jergović, its working title is Levi’s Silk Spinnery. It’s a very weird and complex book, but I love it. It’s very powerful. It’s like a scrapbook, a collection of fragments, ideas, little poems, very short stories, not so short stories. And at first glance, it appears to be all over the place, but for some reason that eludes me, it works really well as a coherent narrative. I’ll start pitching it around soon. 

Also, there’s a book by Tea Tulić, Croatian author. It’s probably one of my favorite BCMS novels in the last 15 years or so. Working title is Big Flockness. It’s not proper English, but the Croatian title is also not proper Croatian, so I had to stretch the language a little bit. It’s a really good book that stands out in that there’s almost no plot to speak of, and it’s all about atmosphere. I’m going to be pitching that around very soon as well.

JENNIFER ZOBLE: It’s looking like there’s a possibility I will do the more recent book by Lejla, Lejla’s latest short story collection. It’s not set in stone, but there’s a there’s a likelihood of that happening. So I’m hoping that if that project does go forward, I’ll be working on that later this year, beginning of next year.

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: I think, I hope more books are being translated. I mean, this is still the field, is still that of a quote, unquote, small language. So I think there’s a long way to go in bringing more books out. Publishers could be publishing even more books from the ex-Yugoslav space. I’m very optimistic about where it’s going.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening…and reading. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/Podcasts. And while you’re there, join Yugoblok as a member and get your tickets at the upcoming literary events taking place at the Yugoblok House of Culture. 

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Additional music courtesy of Sticky Keys, check them out and inquire about commissions on Soundcloud.

Special thanks to Buzz Poole of Sandorf Passage.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!

ENA SELIMOVIĆ: Yugoslavia is a temporal and spatial designation first and foremost. I see it as a political project, so the fact that we can acknowledge we’re different people and that we can coexist for our mutual benefit and build something together is like something I live by. Like, I like collectivizing, I like collaborating, I like working with different sorts of people who have different strengths. And life is often painful, and you need to not think in divisive terms.