In Bedbugs, Croatian writer Martina Vidaić applies the epistolary to full-throttle effect, drawing out nearly two hundred pages of a woman’s complex and impassioned pursuit of selfhood and liberation. Though a voice that is humorously inviting, incisively driven, and utterly idiosyncratic, the novel draws from though the architecture of Zagreb, the the “unhappy villages” of the countryside, the omnipresent strangeness of the world and its people, and the turmoil of an intelligent, haunted mind to iterate our contemporaneity, its violence, its absurdity. Ellen Elias-Bursać’s English translation is alluring in its freneticism, all resulting in one hell of a ride.
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Ellen Sprague (ES): I’m really glad that a Croatian title has come to the Asymptote Book Club. And this is not just any book for so many reasons; one of them being the fact that it won the EU Prize for Literature in 2023. I wonder if you might have anything to say about how this book came to the attention of the EU Prize and its ultimate awarding.
Martina Vidaić (MV): I wrote this book in 2021, and with the Croatian edition, there were some critics who liked it, and some others not. It didn’t have a lot of success, actually, with the Croatian awards—but I didn’t expect much because Bedbugs is a pretty unconventional book for the Croatian context.
Still, I hoped for a little bit more regarding the reception in general, and I was very, very surprised when a Croatian jury for the European Union Prize for Literature chose this book to be nominated. The prize is mostly for emerging authors—such as those who haven’t been translated much or at all. The authors don’t have to be young, but there are a number of criteria; if they’re nominating a novel, for example, then it has to be at least the author’s second novel. It’s a very nice award for young poets and writers, because it then offers the opportunity for translation. Obviously, I was very happy when I was nominated, but I really didn’t expect anything. The Prize isn’t limited to just countries in the EU—other European countries are included, forty-one in total, but divided into cycles. Every year, the cycle has thirteen or fourteen countries, and in 2023, Croatia turned out to be included, with my book ending up as the overall winner.
I was very lucky that Ellen was translator of the sample pages submitted. I think that was very important, because the jury decided based on those forty pages.
Ellen Elias-Bursać (ESB): Also, Sandorf Passage were very pleased when they were able to publish it, and the translation itself of the winning book is subsidized by the European Union, so that makes it nice for everyone. It’s a wonderful thing to be part of the whole operation.
ES: Bedbugs itself is one big letter. Noticing that there are no paragraph breaks, I thought that it would either drag or be really fast. I wonder if you can comment on how you chose this approach, Martina, and did you feel it was a risk to not include any paragraph breaks?
Martina Vidaić: Actually, I didn’t think much about that, but now I realize that maybe it’s not the best thing from the reader’s point of view.
The whole time, Gorana is writing one big letter to this person called Hladna; at the end of the novel, we find out that Hladna isn’t so important as a character, but as someone who reads Gorana’s story. As Gorana is often very irrational in some of her decisions and not very logical, I needed her to explain herself and her movements, her decisions, to someone. She needs to confess. I wanted her to be someone who feels a lot of guilt internally, but not necessarily be aware of that guilt.
ES: Ellen, did the epistolary form create any particular challenges or opportunities for the translation?
EEB: Well, it’s interesting. As I was going through the book this morning and the comments that Martina and I had as we were working on it, one of the things I realized was that the no-paragraph format is something I’ve done before; David Albahari uses it in almost all of his writing. But for me, in this book, which is very intense and fast-paced, the experience of translating it was like surfing on a wave the whole time. There was this feeling of zoom, sort of going along with the text. It was just a very powerful motion, and having it all one paragraph, for some reason, really promoted that.
MV: I agree, but, you know, this kind of form is a very, very closed one. It’s very hard to write like that. Even though it looks like an open form, it’s not; you have to plan very carefully before writing. In a classic form, with chapters, they are usually organized as short stories, and one could erase certain chapters or shorten them, but in this kind of form, the text is like a chain. You can’t really erase anything, as everything—almost every sentence—has its place in this big chain of words.
ES: Ellen, you brought up the relationship and the process between you and Martina. How much back and forth was there, or what did that process look like for this translation?
EEB: I was in Zagreb—and I can put in a little good word for the fact that the Literary Translators Association of Croatia offers residencies for literary translators to come to Zagreb, stay in an apartment there, and work on a translation with a writer or with other translators. I had the great privilege of a month as a resident last October and November, so that’s when Martina and I were able to get together, because I was right there. We met in the accommodations of the Literary Translators Association, and had a nice morning going through the comments from our editor—Buzz Poole—and responding to them. Prior to that, we had exchanged a few emails and worked out a couple of the details we felt strongly about, so afterwards, we just submitted the document with all of our comments. It was very satisfying overall.
ES: Martina, why this character at this time, in these places? There’s a lot about Zagreb and architecture—and I know it was written in 2021. How did this come to be as a story that you needed to tell, and tell in this way?
MV: It’s hard to remember why. It was four years ago, and also, I tend to not to think about my past books. I just go forward. It’s a bit complicated to explain, because my ideas always emege in very chaotic and complicated ways, so I’m never working on one big concept. I usually have a lot of small ideas, or for example, I’ll see someone in reality and think that they would probably be very good as a character.
I had an idea that I want to write about architecture, then I had an idea that I want to write about freedom, about this nature of absolute freedom meaning absolute loneliness—and that turned out to be the main one. But all these other ideas existed at the same time, so in one moment, I realized that I could connect them in one book. With Bedbugs, I actually started with this family, basing these characters on a real family that I know. They are changed, of course, for literary reasons, but for many years I was interested in that family—not in particular individuals, but in their very complex familial structure. Later, when I started to write this novel, I needed that structure because I wanted this main character, Gorona Hrabrov, who is very successful professionally, to simply fall from that position. To have her life collapse in one moment. Then when she returns to her hometown to find herself, it’s just impossible because her family structure is so complicated, like some sort of a labyrinth.
Also, when it comes to architecture, the fact of Gorana being an architect is very important in the story. The city and Zagreb as a space are also very important. It had begun as more of a technical aspect, because I wanted someone who was very successful in a certain field—a professional field that’s could have a very masculine feel, and that’s how I chose architecture. Then, as the story and the ideas developed, that quality ended up being much more prominent.
ES: Ellen, can you comment on your favorite scene or portion to translate? I know that you were surfing the whole way, but . . .
EEB: Well, there are a couple of things. First, I really enjoyed that at the beginning of the novel, Gorana is in her apartment, surrounded by bedbugs, and then the phone rings, and it turns out the caller is her mother-in-law, whom she’s never met. There’s a wonderful metaphor there. It’s not culturally specific, but it really describes the feel of the way the book flows. In the book, the scene goes:
As soon as I heard the woman’s voice on the other end, I knew I shouldn’t have picked up. Not that I knew her voice, but that something about it rocked the stability of the day, a little like a hurtling roller coaster at an amusement park that trundles steadily along over level stretches of track, either going up or down, but when it reaches a curve, it does an abrupt, out-of-control jolt that tricks you into thinking the whole train is about to veer off and plunge downward, an impression lingering for a few seconds above the heads of those who are watching the whole thing from below, though obviously it won’t.
And that sense of beginning the story as a slightly out-of-control rollercoaster ride is a very good way to kick off the whole energy of the book.
And the other thing that was very particular about this book is that, as you heard, it’s a letter directed to someone named Hladna. Now, the name Hladna means “cold” in Croatian, and it’s never explained, so we actually did a sort of oblique explanation. In the first line of the novel, it starts, “I’m writing to you, Hladna, my cold friend, because I happen to know you’re the only person who won’t laugh,” and so forth. And then later, we also have bits where we explain it a little bit more, but we never really say that Hladna means cold; we just tried to sort of bring it in, obliquely. Whether or not that works, only our readers can tell us.
MV: I can’t say that I have a favorite character, but I do have some favorite parts of the novel—mostly the ones that I think are best written. I’m very proud how I wrote them. The part where Gorana arrives at her sister’s house and the complex family dynamic unfurls—it’s eally authentic, with a Mediterranean atmosphere in this part of Croatia called Dalmatia. I think you can sense there in the writing that Gorana feels a kind of belonging there—but then, a moment comes where she can feel like she doesn’t know her family at all.
ES: Were there other names that had specific meanings?
MV: Meaning of names are not especially important for the understanding of the novel, but I like it when they’e there. Hrabrov, for instance, is connected with hrabar, which is “brave.” And other surnames or names in the book were also very carefully chosen.
ES: I don’t know if you’ve thought about this, but where does this novel fit in the Croatian literary landscape of these days? Does it have a particular place in that landscape, or in the greater region, or even, where might it fit for U.S. readers?
MV: I don’t think about my novels in that way, but I’m really glad that many foreign readers have commented on the fact that it’s not a typical topic in Croatian literature. It’s not about the war or the post-war era, nor any of the themes that readers usually expect from the Balkans or from Croatia. They liked the fact that it’s a contemporary novel about a relatively young woman.
EEB: I agree. It feels very much like the war is sort of ancient history in this novel. What I thought about when I was working on it is that Bedbugs is part of what has happened in Croatian literature since the ’90s, when women writers and characters were really strong in Croatian literature. There was a real sea change in the 1980s and 90s, when a group of very powerful women voices came in and really transformed Croatian literature in a big way. Since then, many of the interesting writers have been women, and I’m often called upon to translate women writers. I have colleagues in other literatures who’ve decided to translate women writers because not enough of them are being translated, and I never had to make that decision.
ES: Martina, you’re both a poet and a novelist. Do you prefer one to the other, or does it just depend on what you need to say?
MV: Yes, it depends on what I need to say, but I don’t really separate the two. I started as a poet, and I’ve published five collections of poetry and two novels, so I can say that I write poetry more, but I just choose the form for the idea, because certain things you simply can’t say in poetry, and vice versa. But I think you can see a lot of poetic influence in my novels, as well as the other way around—especially in the poetry that I was writing at the same time when I was writing my novels.
ES: Can you tell us what you’re working on at this time?
MV: Well, I’m not working on anything seriously, but I do have a few different ideas. I would really like to write a movie script, and I’ve had this idea for a very long time. There are some ideas that I just can’t put into prose or poetry; I see them only as film scenes. So, I think that’s going to be interesting. I do have an idea for a new novel, and I’m still developing it, but I haven’t started writing anything seriously.
EEB: I’ve been translating two women. Lana Bastašići, a collection of stories called Milk Teeth, and Ivana Bodrožić, three stories from her latest collection of stories called Fiction. Both are really interesting writers with really interesting work.
ES: Is there any question that either of you wishes you would be asked right now? Anything you want people to respond to? Any questions for each other?
MV: I just want to say that I think Ellen did a really good job. In particular, I like that she saved this specific rhythm of the novel, which is probably the hardest thing and the most important, because it has it has to flow in a certain way. I really like how it sounds in English.
EEB: Well, I learned that when something is all in one paragraph like this with no chapters, the prose has to have pulses to keep it moving, and I think this novel does that very well.
Martina Vidaić has published four books of poetry, including Mehanika peluda (Pollen Mechanics, 2018; Ivan Goran Kovačić Price for the best poetry book written in Croatian in two-year period). She has also published the novels Anatomija štakora (Anatomy of the Rat, 2019) and Stjenice (Bedbugs, 2021; European Union Prize for Literature), and the hybrid book Trg, tržnica, nož (Square, Market, Knife, 2021; Janko Polić Kamov Award for the book of the year by Croatian Writers Society). Her work has been published in many Croatian and international anthologies.
Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including Daša Drndić, Dubravka Ugrešić, Ivana Bodrožić, and Robert Perišić. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer won the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, in 2006. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, she has taught at the Harvard Slavic Department and Tufts University, and spent over six years at the ex-Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as a translator.
Ellen Sprague was named professor emerita of writing when she left Principia College in July 2025, and she is now doubling down on her own writing and editing for the first time since earning her MFA in writing (creative nonfiction and translation) from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2013. Her writing has appeared in Emrys Journal, The Laurel Review, and Asymptote, among others; and her translations from the French have also appeared in Asymptote and The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation. She is a senior copy editor at Asymptote. She has conceived, proposed, and led three Principia study-abroad programs to Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia & Herzegovina between 2017 and 2022, studying “Stories from a Homeland of Shifting Borders” and focusing on language, literature, and culture.
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