Tectonic Shifts: An Interview with Montenegrin EUPL Winner Stefan Bošković and Translator Will Firth

. . . the Balkans are cultivated as a space of trauma, as an eternal misfortune in which everything is further emphasized.

In both literature and art, the Balkan countries are still tackling themes and topics issuing from the 1990s Yugoslav Wars. Although coming to terms with a nation’s disintegration is an ongoing process, one assumes that a thirty-year distance would have produced a more substantial corpus of literature, capable of integrating remaining traumas into burning contemporary matters—corrupt Balkan political elites, organized crime, simmering nationalism, and the slow but steady disappearance of the middle class as a carrier of democratic change.

Though there are few works of note that have managed this coherence, a novel that has succeeded is this year’s Montenegrin winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, Ministar (Minister), written by the dramatist, scriptwriter, and prosaist Stefan Bošković. The story follows nine days in the life of Valentin Kovačević, a fictional Montenegrin minister of culture, immediately after he accidentally kills an artist while participating in a performance. Initially oblivious of the heavy burden of guilt resulting from the act, Valentin goes on with his life entangled in a web of shady political deals, strained familial and conjugal ties, and dead end shortcuts he takes to get himself out of a situation of impending doom. The novel has not yet been translated entirely into English, though Will Firth—a literary translator from BCMS (Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian), Russian, and Macedonian into English—has translated a fifty-page excerpt, which was published by the EUPL team along with translated excerpts from the other prize-winning books.

In this interview carried out with both Stefan Bošković and Will Firth, we discuss primarily the challenges of engaged writing that aims at the essence of contemporary sociopolitical developments in the Balkans, and the place their translations take—or dont take—within the dominant narratives of todays world literatures. The interviews were conducted separately, and have been edited to be presented here as one.

Jovanka Kalaba, Editor-at-Large for Serbia

Jovanka Kalaba (JK): Stefan, aside from your primary job as a screenwriter, you also write prose. How do your two forms of expression inform and influence one another? 

Stefan Bošković (SB): Writers often distinguish between the work they produce through different media—in my case, prose and screenwriting. I have been writing scripts for a long time, and it is inevitable that they have influenced my prose, as is the case with the prose that unknowingly becomes influenced by journalism. All influences are of secondary importance to me, because I view different expressions as a set of tributaries to a huge, confused mouth that flows into the same matter. And all the time its a game of digging, merging, bringing in connections. Literary talent—the ability to defamiliarize language—is crucial for writing prose, whereas a gift for storytelling is necessary for writing a good script. The organization of the novel is a very important segment, because that way, the sentences contribute to the fundamental accuracy of what is being told.

JK: Will, in terms of translation, the Serbo-Croatian language as well as Macedonian turned out to be your main interest, although you have a degree in German, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian. What drew you to the Balkan cultures and literatures?

Will Firth (WF): What fascinates me about South Slavic languages and literatures is their richness and diversity, and their home in a complex region with a twentieth-century history of Partisan struggle, multiculturalism, and a remarkable experiment in Bloc-free socialism. That’s the “positive” side; the West’s lack of real interest in these languages and literatures today fills me with a spite and a mission, which is perhaps the “negative” side of my motivational coin.

JK: The epigraph at the beginning of Ministar are Giorgio Agamben’s words: the modern is the one who looks at his time, and being modern is, first of all, a question of courage. Yet it seems that inclusion of certain issues originating from the civil war of ex-Yugoslavia—poverty, emmigration—are still always expected from artists in the region.

SB: I don’t know if the West is asking from us to present ourselves through stereotypes, or if we are so immersed in anachronistic and worn-out literature in this area that we have completely forgotten to keep track of where the world is going. It seems to me that one conditioned the other, and the problem does not only stem from the writers and the messages they think they should get across. The majority of this region’s literary scene (including editors and critics) has contributed to the preservation of uninteresting and calculated literature; there are certainly great novels in this rather conservative canon, but this dominant ideology has produced a line of soldiers who are happy to occupy a place in the mainstream, and the prestige of being translated into foreign languages has cemented their position. 

JK: Will, in your view, how do quality socially and politically relevant writings from Eastern Europe contribute to world literature? You have already translated into English some of Bošković’s short stories from the collection Transparentne životinje (Transparent Animals), and an excerpt from Ministar. What are your thoughts on Bošković’s work; how does it fit into the larger portrait?

WF: On the one hand, I suspect Eastern European literature has a lot in common with all other literatures, given that some themes are universal: love, loss, death, the thirst for adventure, etc. On the other hand, literature from the countries of ex-Yugoslavia since the 1990s can contribute original perspectives on the sometimes liberating, yet often harrowing experience of systemic change—experiences of war and/or rootlessness figure prominently. What I find special is that there is often a vivid energy in these works despite the often grim overall context, be it the playful humor arising out of mundane situations in Rumena Bužarovska’s short stories or the raw joie de vivre in Bekim Sejranović’s novel From Nowhere to Nowhere, to choose just two examples.

Stefan Bošković is a relatively young writer. I’m acquainted with his novels and most of his short stories, but I must say I find them hard to categorize. Let me try: whatever the theme, his stories abound in allusions to current affairs, social problems, and the reflection of such in people’s lives, often at an individual psychological level. His language is often minimalistic, yet expressive—quite powerful stuff. It’s as if the tensions of his tectonically unstable and politically fraught homeland charge his work. The difficulty I have in categorizing his writing any further may suggest that we are dealing with a very special, unique author.

JK: The absence of distance in the creative process can lead to failure—when we are too close to the things that occupy us, it can obscure our understanding of its reality. Ministar, however, does not have that problem, despite that it is taking place in the almost immediate present. Stefan, what guided you when you were considering this novel?

SB: The process is always my guide. At the beginning, I am obsessively attached to specific phenomena, but it is only after the process begins that my engines start. I always have to know the beginning and end of a novel before I start writing. Sometimes, for practical reasons, I make guidelines so that I dont wander in the middle. When I adopt the skeleton of a story, and to some extent, the form, I mostly rely on intuition.

As for distance, it is important, but who can really say how long or short that distance should be? I find that when its not there, its just as risky as when it lasts too long. What I think is crucial for producing a literary piece is rewriting.” For me, that is the distance that the text needs—when you objectify the subject, fill the cracks, compress the story, filter the language. And it shouldnt take too long, unless youre always authoring one, identical book. The stages and changes of daily life are as important for a writer as the creative ones; that is, one without the other is impossible. If I had dropped Ministar for, say, a couple of years and returned with new contexts and corrections, who knows what kind of story it would have been. It definitely wouldn’t be what it is now.

JK: For a translator, multilayered context and language are always a treat to detect and resolve, and intertextual subtexts, which appear often in Ministar, are only one part of the puzzle. What are the aspects of contemporary Serbo-Croatian literature that pose the greatest challenges before the translator?

WF: The challenges intertextual subtexts pose to a translator depend very much on where he or she is coming from. I tend to have trouble with pop-cultural references when the author knows Anglophone movies, music, or social media phenomena better than I do, because that’s not one of my strengths. (For example, Ministar refers to the Instagram function Boomerang, which I had never heard of, and he also wrote it with a small B, which had me well and truly mystified.) Dealing with volatile contemporary slang, snippets of dialect, and detailed references to Balkan history can also pose challenges. Occasionally there can be tricky stylistic borrowings from other writers, Balkan or otherwise, which I as a latecomer to literary translation do not always recognize at first, but they are often marked and identifiable in some way. Even when they’re not, I’ll usually realize that the author is playing around, and a pointed question usually produces the required hint.

JK: Ministar’s Valentin Kovačević is not a typical villain—in other words, not an evil-doer by intent, but a dangerous weakling of the modern age. He slips into madness because of what has happened to him, but it seems that even without the murder/death of the artist, the minister’s reality is too difficult—almost Lynchian—and as such, is enough for him to end up in the abyss of madness. What can redeem a character such as Valentin Kovačević in today’s world (and today’s literature)?

SB: You don’t have to be a typical villain to experience the abyss. Good guys go crazy too—much more easily than villains. Valentin is lost in the commitments and obligations he has as a minister, and seemingly it is ambition that drives him to ruin. This is another duality that appears in the novel. When we put aside the external influence that society has on the main protagonist, we realize that Valentin’s life is boring. Out of deep boredom, animality arises, and only in that way can someone like him renounce himself. The life of a minister is what oppresses him from the outside, while the censorship between the man and the animal takes place within him and withdrawal into animality arises as an inevitable certainty. Many readers see the novels ending as dark. I see it as salvation—a bud that blossoms through the final destruction of todays man, a collapse which must be complete in order for a new reality to be born.

JK: The most intriguing aspect of the novel for me is the minister’s relationship with his mother; a redemption seems to begin the moment Valentin Kovačević grabs his mother and rushes with her into death. The culmination is actually at the very end of the novel, and it talks about the love between mother and son. It is the language of love. Could you say something more about this aspect of the novel?

SB: The end of the novel and the relationship between Valentin and his mother is the most important part of this novel for me. First of all, because it deals with memory, which is one of the most powerful forms of love. His mother lost her memory a long time ago while the male war between father and son was still raging. Her isolation activated dementia. In order for Valentin to renew his love for his mother, he goes with her to where it all began. It is his return to where he came from, when he was innocent and carefree. Their disappearance is in fact a return, and the ideal place is in the memory. Death is the point at which the novel must end in order for the circle to be closed.

JK: In my correspondence with a US publisher I learned an interesting fact: 50 percent of all translations to the United States are from Europe, and only 7 percent of that from Eastern and Central Europe. From your perspective, what does these numbers tell us about the reception of the literature of the region in the West, and why?

WF: I can think of several reasons. French, German, and Spanish, for example, are large languages with well-established literary traditions and a high degree of prestige. Culturally they are perceived as closer to the English-speaking world . Also, many Western European countries have a concerted, ongoing marketing infrastructure in place. Eastern European literatures are simply outgunned. With a fairly small language like BCMS (about twenty million speakers), there are hardly any publishers who have an editor who knows the language, the individual Balkan countries’ attempts to promote their own literature are weak and sporadic, with little or no coordination between the different variants of BCMS, and I’m not aware of any supportive infrastructure for Anglophone translators from these languages, e.g. further-training workshops. My translation of Miroslav Krleža’s Izlet u Rusiju, for instance, had to be published in 2018 in Zagreb because it proved impossible to find a publisher in the Anglosphere, and Miloš Crnjanski’s Roman o Londonu was published this year by a brave, one-man operation in New Orleans.

JK: This year, the literary festival Krokodil featured renowned regional female poets and prose authors writing in the Serbo-Croatian language, contending that it is primarily they who have been effecting momentous changes in the regional literature. What are your thoughts on the literature in the Balkans written by women?

WF: That’s an interesting theory. I can imagine there’s some truth it, since women in these countries are often in a subordinate and precarious position, doing a disproportionate amount of domestic and “relationship” work, and women who write are perhaps able to draw on new and different perspectives that male writers tend to ignore. As such, female writers are perhaps indeed motors of literary innovation. One thing I can say is that I’d be very happy to translate more female writers. As things stand, I think about 80 percent of the short stories and samples I translate and 90 percent of the novels are by men. This arguably reflects the preponderance of male writers in the literary scene. On the other hand, interestingly, literary translation is a very female profession in all the countries I know. I think that tells us a lot about status and roles!

JK: At my remark that the region doesnt have a love novel, a Serbian author once said to me: “Of course! It’s the hardest.” What do you think is the most difficult thing to write about in the Balkan literatures?

SB: Im not sure I can determine whats easiest to write about. It seems to me that there is no easy writing, no matter how much you are deceived by someone’s “easy” style. In the pens of writers, the Balkans are cultivated as a space of trauma, as an eternal misfortune in which everything is further emphasized. Such literature has stifled the idea that a love novel can make sense in this arena. The great need of writers for recognition entails a series of calculations, then as dominoes, the contagion is transmitted from one writer to the other until everyone follows the same concept. Literature does not have to be difficult.

WF: I’m not sure I’ve come across a convincing and inspiring love story in long-form prose, although there are romantic strands and heart-wrenching love episodes in quite a few books. LGBT literature has a difficult time breaking through, I think. Stefan’s first novel, Šamaranje (Slap in the Face), was quite a taboo-breaker in dealing with pornography and sex, and some of his short stories in the Transparentne životinje (Transparent Animals) collection also go in that direction.

Stefan’s Ministar is very good in the way it delves into the mechanisms of power, including at a very intimate level, and I see it as the latest representative of a “school” of socially critical writing in Montenegro. One thing I personally miss in contemporary ex-Yugoslav literature is a clear socially critical stance: one which doesn’t just artfully deride today’s nationalisms and modern capitalism (such as Andrej Nikolaidis does so entertainingly), but puts the finger on the mechanisms and calls things by their names. I get the impression that there has been a backlash of aversion to clearly and unashamedly “social” literature in the last few decades, but now it is high time to reclaim that terrain. It could be done in different genres and styles.

JK: How did the collaboration with Will Firth look like? What is your attitude as an author to the translation of your works and the challenges it entails?

SB: I often think about the translation of my works, sometimes while writing, about how the text will surely torment the translator. Because the language I write in is often a collection of poetic phrases, slang, local expressions, and their endless variations—an organism that constantly evolves and changes shape. My collaboration with Will has been going on for some time, and after a few translated stories, I realized that his translation kept the juiciness in the sentences and gave them new consistency. And that is why Will was unquestionably my choice for Ministar.

Stefan Bošković was born in 1983 in Titograd (today Podgorica). His novel Ministar (Minister) received a 2020 European Union Prize for Literature. He has published a collection of stories, Transparentne životinje (Transparent Animals, 2018) and the novel Šamaranje (Slap in the Face, 2014). The title story of Transparentne životinje was included in the Best European Fiction 2019 anthology, published by Dalkey Archive Press. His stories have been translated into English, German, Chinese, Russian, Slovenian, Albanian, and Macedonian. He is also the screenwriter of the feature film Lowdown (2016) and the short feature films Tranquility of Blood, Peloid, The Road, and Martin. Contact him at stefanboskovic83@gmail.com 

Will Firth was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has been living in Berlin, Germany, where he works as a translator of literature and the humanities (from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croatian). Major translations of recent years have been Andrej Nikolaidis’s Till Kingdom Come, Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una, Miroslav Krlеža’s Journey to Russia, and Miloš Crnjanski’s A Novel of London. See www.willfirth.de

Jovanka Kalaba is Editor-at-Large for Serbia at Asymptote, an English Language and Literature graduate, with a PhD in Philology (Comparative Literature) from the University of Belgrade, as well as a literary translator from/into the Serbian language. She is the translator of Jovanka Živanović’s Fragile Travelers, published by Dalkey Archive Press. She can be reached via jovanka.kalaba@gmail.com and is on Instagram @kalabina_odmor_kuca 

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