Place: Belgrade

Translation Tuesday: “I, The Executioner” by Srđan Miljević

She did not think of how people, even the richest, humiliated themselves by picking up their own small coins off the street.

Today, we’re thrilled to debut in English the runner-up of the 2017 Festival of the European Short Story, “I, The Executioner” by Serbian writer Srdjan Miljevic. Distilled in nine bracing vignettes, the flash fiction centers on former prostitute Jasna who, on the brink of literary success, meets a gushing reporter—except, her mind elsewhere, she finds herself unable to concentrate. Through the stilted interview questions, which recall the stilted essay assignments she was given in a childhood disrupted by refugeedom, we are given to understand that Jasna’s life from the margins is one that does not fit the neat checkboxes that society has imposed.

*

In Sarajevo, in her second year of primary school, she got a D on her essay on the topic: “When I grow up, I want to be . . .” 

She never found out why a D, because the very next day she became a refugee.

*

A man in a worn-out McCloud jacket stopped in front of her. He bent down, trying to pick up a coin that fell out of his pocket from the pavement. He made it on his second attempt. Two dinars. She did not think of how people, even the richest, humiliated themselves by picking up their own small coins off the street. She thought how good it would be to try not to smoke more than one pack of cigarettes today. Up to two drinks. And one joint max. 

She had been smoking for nineteen years. More than half her life. On a daily basis. She could burn through up to three packs. Theories about what a cigarette was a substitute for and what processes occurred in your brain were comprehensible to her, but she could not think about that now. She would quit one day. And she would take more care today. It was different with alcohol. She had no craving for it, but she did not refuse it either. She did not like to lose control. The same went for ganja. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: The Judgement of Richard Richter by Igor Štiks

An excerpt from acclaimed writer Igor Štiks' soon-to-be-published novel, in translation.

Igor Štiks is no stranger to Asymptote. As his April 2012 interview with us states, he was born in Bosnia, wrote his books in Croatia, and now divides his time between Edinburgh and Belgrade. The title character of Štiks’ soon-to-be-published novel, The Judgement of Richard Richter, is a Viennese writer and journalist who retreats from Paris and a painful divorce to his childhood home of Vienna just as he’s turning fifty, in 1992. In the midst of remodeling the apartment where he’d been raised by his aunt Ingrid, he stumbles on a letter written by his late mother, hidden in a blue notebook, tucked behind a bookcase in a wall he’d been demolishing.

From the unsent letter, he learns that his father was a man Richard had never heard of—someone called Jakob Schneider, a leftist Jewish antiwar activist from Sarajevo. Just then, in April of 1992, the war is breaking out in Bosnia. Moved by this unexpected information about his parentage and the mounting hostilities in Bosnia, Richter decides to go to Sarajevo to report from there as a war correspondent and, while he’s there, to search for more information about his father.

Once he arrives he is quickly caught up in the reality of the war and, at first, he sets aside his search for his father. Instead he finds a student, Ivor, to serve as his guide and translator, and he and Ivor decide to shoot a film about a play which is being rehearsed, amid the terrifying conditions of the siege, by a Sarajevo theater, based on a script adapted from the novel, Homo Faber, by Max Frisch. While working on the play he falls in love with Alma, the play’s leading actress. It is from this love affair and the outcome of the search for his father that he flees with such shame and horror, as described in the opening sentences of the excerpt, which we’re thrilled to present to you today in contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac’s excellent translation.

When the United Nations transport aircraft took off from Sarajevo on the morning of July 7, I was convinced that shame would strike me dead right there if I looked back once more at the city. I stayed in the seat I’d been assigned and fended off the desire to gaze one last time through the window at Sarajevo as I fled. I held my face in my hands, dropped my head to my knees, and didn’t even rise to lift a hand and wave to the besieged city I’d arrived in as a journalist in mid-May—only to desert it that day like a coward running from my own personal catastrophe, which had intertwined so strangely with the city’s calamity. Coward-like, I repeat, with no word of farewell. Or better, like a beggar in disguise, because there was nothing left of the old Richard Richter but, perhaps, the name on the accreditation ID that allowed him to board the aircraft as simply and painlessly as if hailing a cab to whisk him away from a war he had no tie to whatsoever.

And the tears that dripped onto the grimy iron deck of the aircraft, finding their way through his tightly squeezed fingers, might be perceived as nothing more than a perfectly reasonable human response to what he’d been through, a reaction to the stress that is invariably a part of the work of a journalist, a release of emotions now that the danger had finally passed, after our famous writer, valiant correspondent, and shrewd analyst of this tragic European war at the century’s end had chosen to withdraw. Perhaps to write a fat new book about his experiences and the bravery it took to be there, on the spot, before anybody else could, to open the eyes of Europe—as long as the honorarium was generous enough. No one knew that the man they took pains to extract from the plane that hot day in Split when the plane had landed was no longer the man listed on the ID attached to his shirt. No longer did he answer to that name.

READ MORE…

KROKODIL Literary Festival: A Dispatch

"Every year in mid-June, in front of the Yugoslav Museum in Belgrade, a strange sect gathers: made up of friends whose names you don’t know."

When organizing an open-air festival, it is easy to realize how religions first came into being: man gazed into the sky and yearned for weather to save the harvest. For seven years now, we—the organization team of the Krokodil festival—have been just-as-obsessively peering at the sky and weather forecasts, always clutching to the one that predicts the worst possible weather. Finally, on the opening day, we phone the Hydrometeorology Institute every two hours. We’re on a first-name basis with its employees.

The festival takes place in the open-air amphitheater in front of the Museum of Yugoslav History, which makes for great atmosphere and an exceptionally high turnout. Krokodil (an acronym loosely translatable as “regional literary gathering which does away with boredom and lethargy”) is conceived as a reading festival and a festival of contemporary literature. More than 120 authors, from over fifteen European countries, have participated thus far.

This year’s theme was “Centers of Periphery.” We aimed to examine the relation between the “center” and the “margin” in literature, as well as in society and politics, exploring the geographical aspects of banishment from the mainstream. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: A Poem by Biljana Stajic

This twisting narrative from Serbia delves into our deepest fears and anxieties

Tickets for America

 

I am walking down the street

someone is following me

the heart is beating

it is dark

no one around

dread all over

I shiver

getting near

I start to run

the front door is locked

I ring the intercom

keep running

just so I am not standing still

such darkness

such a town

READ MORE…