Language: Croatian

The Dangers of Complacency: An Interview with the Founders of Sandorf Passage

. . . there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.

Sandorf Passage is a new independent nonprofit publishing house, whose first titles have been launched this month. Its founders, American Buzz Poole and Croatian Ivan Sršen have both previously worked as editors and obtained EU funding to bring works from the former Yugoslavia into English. Sandorf Passage focuses on “writing inspired by both conflict zones and the dangers of complacency.” Their first title, From Nowhere to Nowhere, by Bekim Sejranovic was published at the beginning of March. Now, with their second, Vesna Maric’s The President Shop released yesterday, and two more books due for release next month, Blog Editor Sarah Moore spoke with the founders of Sandorf Passage about the importance of translated works and what to expect from their titles.

Sarah Moore (SM): How did you both come to editing?

Buzz Poole (BP): I was a lifelong reader, studied literature in college as an undergraduate and then graduate student at San Francisco State University, where I got involved with a handbound letterpress literary journal called Em. At the time it was a hotbed of indie lit journals. I moved to New York, got a job as editor at Mark Batty Publisher (MBP), and moved on to be Managing Director of Black Balloon Publishing, which is now an imprint of Catapult—that’s where my story and Ivan’s started to merge. We had met at the Frankfurt Book Fair when I was at MBP and hit it off. Ivan was there as an agent and translator, and at the time we thought that we might try to do something, though it never quite worked out. Then fast forward to Black Balloon. I saw Ivan and said, “Hey, I’m acquiring fiction now—what have you got?” And he had Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, which was critically acclaimed and unlocked the floodgates in terms of our continuing collaborations.

Ivan Sršen (IS): During my studies I started working in a small bookstore that was owned by a small publishing house in Zagreb. I was just a twenty-year-old student, watching all these great authors and translators coming into our small bookstore. Being part of that collective was very important for me and shaped my view of the business of publishing and what editing really is. It’s a lot about communication: knowing the people, what they are looking for, what they have to offer, and where their horizon is spreading. I was lucky enough to get a job as an intern editor working on music books, which launched me into the world of creative publishing—a small scene but very diverse, with the legacy of former Yugoslavia. Many big writers came from Yugoslavia, like the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, and I wanted to pursue a literary editing career. So I worked with a few publishers until, in the end, I realised I would have to start something on my own. That’s how I started Sandorf in 2008—basically without any savings and on the verge of the world economic catastrophe! So those were interesting years, but that’s the time when I met Buzz. I always knew that I wanted to go beyond the borders. Not just national borders, but all kinds of borders—imaginary, mental—and in working with books there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.

SM: So how did Sandorf become Sandorf Passage?

BP: We’re very similar and we both have the desire to be as self-sufficient as possible and to do things the way we want them done. The Our Man in Iraq project was the first stepping-stone in this becoming something more official. Ivan was representing Robert as his agent and the book had already been published in a UK English-language edition so I had the benefit of being able to read it. When I read it, I liked it, but immediately said—with my editor’s cap on—that it needed to change and could become so much better. Robert and Ivan were open to that, and that’s the reason why the book got as much attention as it did; it’s a better book now, having received a more thorough edit than it had received originally in the Croatian or in the UK edition. This opened the door to its potential. Then Ivan and Robert were given funding from the Croatian Ministry of Culture to start a literary festival called Lit Link, which still exists. We started being able to invite international writers and editors to Croatia to meet Croatian authors. For the first project, Journey to Russia, Ivan was able to secure some funding for a Croatian domestic English-language edition that I worked on with Ivan and Will Firth, the translator. Then at an ALTA conference in Minneapolis three years ago, Ivan and I were both there. Sandorf had gotten to a very good place so we thought, what if we did a US imprint? And here we are. We got a grant from the EU to provide subsidies for bringing writing from the former Yugoslavia into the English-language market.

IS: Yes, having these four books that are now coming out, buying the rights for them, and discussing them with Buzz marked the beginning of Sandorf Passage. I already had the rights for late Bekim Sejranović’s novel From Nowhere To Nowhere. Then Vesna Maric sent me her new manuscript, The President Shop. And we had Journey to Russia, already translated by Will Firth and published by Sandorf in Croatia in English. So with these three main books in English, we agreed that we had to continue—we couldn’t say no! It’s great when you start a new independent publishing project because you can really enjoy the books and dedicate your time to each title. That’s what it’s all about in publishing: having time to work on the books, to take care, and to discuss them with the author. READ MORE…

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.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Border” by Olja Savičević Ivančević

Here’re her documents. You better hide ’em in a safe spot once you get to Zagreb.

A brother’s mission to bring his estranged sister to Zagreb betrays less-than-altruistic motives in Olja Savičević Ivančević’s short story “The Border,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Set in the cultural aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, the enduring religious and ethnic tensions between Bosnia (majority Muslim) and Croatia (majority Catholic) foreground the social taboos that persist at the borders of ethnicity, religion, and sexuality. Our narrator is an exasperated sibling charged with taking care of his (seemingly) eccentric and persistently angry half-sister, Ribbit. Through a sequence of flashbacks and narrative breaks, Ribbit’s true goals are unveiled, bringing to light the source of her defiant anger and her siblings’ xenophobic and homophobic motives. Savičević’s strategically unfolding plot and her skillful use of a morally unreliable (i.e., a clueless and bigoted) narrator provides a fascinating character study of a young woman who must transgress national, societal, and even familial boundaries to freely live her own life.

The cold is unbearable, yet Ribbit, head freshly shaved, wears a miniskirt.

“Isn’t your head cold?”

We stand on a patch of ice in front of her building. It’s Christmas morning. The steam fogs up my glasses. She smokes and shivers in her short jacket.

“I’m asking if you’re cold. Don’t you have a hat?”

“Are ya fuckin’ cold, baldie?! What kind of a bullshit question is that?”

She’s like that. It’s how she talks. A normal person would slap her, but I don’t. She knows I won’t harm her. She flings the cigarette and lights another, ignoring me. Buraz pulls up in my car and steps out. He blows into his hands to warm up and tosses a purse into the trunk.

“Jesus, Ribbit! Don’t be such a dumbass!” He yanks the hood over her head and turns towards me.

“Have her sit in the back and don’t let her out before you get to Zagreb under no circumstances. She’ll cut and run. How do I know where she’d go . . . Yesterday I left her alone for ten minutes. She put on an act like she needed to pee and ended up shaving her head. She can piss in a bag for all I care.”

Buraz pulls forward the seat and she crawls in, onto the back seat.

Ribbit graduated last summer, and is now nineteen. She’s grown tall, five foot eleven. Black eyeliner frames her green eyes. Before her brother slams the door, she screams from the top of her lungs:

“Hey, Buraz! Drop dead, ya filthy scumbag!”

She’s crazier than she used to be, but then again, she was never terribly normal.

I press the gas pedal. The car rattles, then slides down the slope’s muddy ruts, across frozen puddles. I exhale when I see Buraz disappear toward the building. In the rearview mirror I catch Ribbit’s empty side profile. She’s stuffing her thumb, with its blue fingernail, into her mouth.

The streets are empty as the snow-water pisses down. Random windows sparkle with Christmas ornaments and crosses made of string lights. A plastic Santa with a busted nose climbs over one balcony.

“There’s some ice on the road, but fortunately it’s not a long trip,” I tell her in the rearview mirror.

I had received the call from Buraz two days earlier. He had begged me desperately to take our sister in at my place in Zagreb. A few months, a year, who knows? Maybe even for good I thought, and did not like it one bit.

“Buraz pleaded for me to take you,” I try to suck up to her a little. “He’s terribly worried about you, you know. Look, he couldn’t even wait until after Christmas. I know you’re upset right now, but you’ll like it in Zagreb. Don’t worry. You’ll work in my shop. I can use the help.”

“I heard you went bust!”

I’m not close to Buraz, or Ribbit. The last time I saw them was two years ago in Bosnia at the funeral of a man who had been our father, my sorta-father, just like they’re my half-sister and half-brother.

I remember when I first met Ribbit. She was five and wore a flannel nightgown around the flat. She had the flu, yet still she kept chirping, wouldn’t keep quiet. Now she’s mum the entire trip, impenetrable.

New bright snow starts sprinkling and as soon as we leave the city the world outside the car windows becomes dreamlike, like a piece of naïve art, but beautiful. The small houses in snow-blanketed valleys are all equally white, even the ones without doors and windows. Smoke from the chimneys disappears into the hills. The roads are lined with newly built minarets, or tall church towers under construction, depending which town we’re passing through.

“Check it out, Bosnia with whipped cream,” I say to break the silence.

“Right. Shit topped with cream still tastes like shit.”

I surf the radio stations.

“If you say so.”

Her problem, not mine. I’ve got nothing to do with Bosnia except for my father and except for the two of them. And we aren’t even alike. The folk singer cursing love on the radio sounds better than Ribbit piercing my ears with silence. She glues her forehead and nose to the window. A young lady, yet still a child. A big bald baby. While on a straight stretch of road, I look over my glasses at my hairline in the mirror. She’s right, goddammit, I’m rapidly losing my hair.

“Want to sit up front? It’s more comfortable.”

Curled up in that tiny skirt, she shakes her head and then drops it between her embraced raised knees. On her scalp is a fresh scar and redness, probably from shaving. What the hell did she do that for? I remember she used to have long, golden hair when she was a child, nearly platinum. Later she had red hair, then it was black with a piercing in her brow. Then it was green with another piercing in her belly button, and the last time I saw her, canary-yellow.

“Well,” I give it another go. “It won’t be so bad. You always liked Zagreb. It will be nice, it’s a big city. Theatre, live music, nightlife. You’ll see, dear. So much better for a young girl than in a small . . .”

She lifts her head and looks at me with hatred, then lays it onto her knees again, without a word. She remains that way the entire trip, motionless—all the while the news keeps forecasting a snowstorm and negative twenty degrees that night. Only after we pass through the villages near the border does she stir. At that point she gets antsy. I tawt I taw a puddy tat, I think to myself and keep slowly driving toward the border.

“Hey, can we stop? I gotta pee. Oh, come on! Don’t be a dick, brother. I’m not gonna run away. Where the hell would I go, anyway?”

We’re surrounded by a desert of snow. An erased space. A few empty houses gape hollow by the side of the road and in the distance are woods. A kilometer down the road we see a large house with a neon Tavern sign. Only the bottom part of the lemon-yellow facade is finished. I park near the front—looks like it’s open. Ribbit gets out of the car and spreads her arms over her head as if she’s surrendering or waving and for a moment it seems as if a slight smile cracks across her face, the first one I’ve seen since I arrived.

In front of the tavern stands a scrawny Christmas tree, and inside, right above the bar, hang photographs of war generals decorated with shiny holiday tinsel.

While I wait for Ribbit, I order us coffee and settle closer to the fireplace. I hope she doesn’t vanish through the bathroom window, like in the movies.

Buraz said this: “Yeah, she’s a shame to me and the family but dammit, I worry about her. Someone’s gonna beat her to death while she’s walking home at night.” I imagine Ribbit tramping down dark city streets late at night with that once colorful, and now bald, female head beneath thin Christmas paper lanterns swinging in the wind.

It’s always windy around there.

“So, what’d Buraz tell ya?” she asks, returning from the bathroom.

He had shoved an envelope into my hands. “Here’re her documents. You better hide ’em in a safe spot once you get to Zagreb. It’s her ID, passport, health card, driver’s license, etc. There’s enough money for bills and food for at least three or four months.”

The envelope contained a whole lot more than food money. Buraz knows the shop has not been doing well, and that I’m up to my neck in debt. And I know it, too. He winked and gave me a tap, rubbed my shoulder for a second, like brothers do, a buddy to buddy. “You gotta keep her papers under lock and key. Swear on your life.”

“He told me everything, and just to be clear,” I respond to Ribbit, “in this case I’m entirely on his side. You can’t chase a married man.”

I lean over the table toward her. “A married man, and on top of that, one of theirs? You’ve really crossed the line. You’re truly asking for someone to break your bones and toss you into a trash can.”

Ribbit looks at me without blinking those green eyes, now smeared with makeup.

“Whaddaya mean, one of theirs?!”

“You know what I mean. Personally I have nothing for or against them, but I’m concerned about your wellbeing. You’ve crossed the line. That’s no small thing, Ribbit, not in Zagreb or Frankfurt or London or anywhere else in the world, never mind in the small . . .”

“What ya talking about, dude. One of their guys?!”

Ribbit laughs, but in a slow, heavy manner, as if she’s shorting, skipping. She tosses the small plastic coffee spoon toward me onto the tablecloth. “You mean their girls. It’s a she.”

“A she,” I repeat as if in a dream.

“Yep, a she. Her name’s Senada. What ya starin’ at,” Ribbit says rocking in her chair.

Senada is the woman Ribbit babysat for at times, that much I know. I only saw her once, at a funeral. A pale girl with dark eyes, two or three years older than Ribbit.

“And I ain’t chasin’ her. Her idiot husband’s been killin’ her since they got married. He’s after her. I ain’t chasin’ no one. We’re an item. Now ya know the whole truth.”

I feel the room spin and the coffee mixed with acid from my stomach returns into my throat. I inhale sharply, so much that it hurts.

“Since when are you into women? You used to have boyfriends.”

“I’m not into women. I’m into Senada. She’s my woman, gettit? We were gonna go with her kid to her sister’s in Sarajevo. She found a job there. But her husband figured everything out and collared Buraz. He stole her documents just like Buraz stole mine so Senada and I couldn’t cross the border to see each other. Buraz lied. He lies the moment he opens his mouth. Obviously the truth is worse than what ya thought,” she says and fires off another burst of laughter.

“Give me a break!” I yell. “Did Buraz shave your head?”

She blushes.

“Ah, well, good for him,” I say dryly and release the air from my lungs. I take the car keys and leave enough cash on the table for coffee.

“Wait for me in the car, it’s open.”

I feel the envelope with her documents and the money in the inside pocket of my coat. At the bar I wrap the envelope several times with tape and put it back in its place.

As soon as I walk down the tavern’s steps, I feel a hefty stone, or perhaps a piece of ice, hit my neck. The blow is cold and sharp. I’m stunned by the ferocity with which she pounces on me, biting my cheek and ear. She wraps her legs around my waist, mounts my back and keeps pounding, biting till she pulls off my glasses and snatches my keys. I barely break free and throw her onto the ground, stuffing her eyes and mouth with snow. That subdues her momentarily. My ear bleeds, and so does my lip. I hopelessly try to find my glasses, buried somewhere in the snow. Under my weight Ribbit cries, howls and wails from the top of her lungs. The few restaurant patrons are now crowding the windows, staring. They see a maniac strangling a bald girl. I hurry up before some fool dares to get involved. I thrust her down with my whole body so she can’t move and with my free hand I pry the envelope out of my pocket: “I see you’ve planned this all out, but you’re missing something.” I say into her ear, lying on top of her. I rub my own blood off her smeared face. “Merry Christmas, little sister,” I say. “And Merry Christmas to Senada.” I shove the envelope into her tights, ass-bound, deeply, so it won’t fall out: “You won’t get far without this.”

She kicks me in the groin and I turn over, folded up. Lying in the snow I see the blurry outline of that scrawny Christmas tree in front of the tavern at the Bosnian-Croatian border. Lights blink red-white-blue-red or perhaps in some other order . . . My glasses rest in the snow, too, surprisingly intact. I wait for her to stagger to the car, and then I put them on, slowly, not to hurt my ear. The forecast called for a deep drop below freezing and a blizzard. Another hour and a half to Zagreb. Ribbit finally starts the car and takes off in the direction opposite the border, toward Senada. By now people have already run out the front of the tavern.

I grab that hefty stone and throw it at the car, aiming precisely, so the rear window cracks audibly, and folks will never say I let her go without a fight.

Translated from the Croatian by Andrea Jurjević

Novelist and poet Olja Savičević Ivančević is one of the most prominent contemporary Croatian writers. Recipient of numerous awards and honors, her books have been translated into eleven languages. English translations of her work include her novels Adios, Cowboy (McSweeney’s) and Singer in the Night (Istros Books), both translated by Celia Hawkesworth, and the poetry collection Mamasafari (Diálogos) translated by Andrea Jurjević.

Andrea Jurjević grew up in Rijeka, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia, before immigrating to the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Small Crimes, won the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, and her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020).

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

What’s New with the Crew? (May 2020)

From hypermedia performances to publications, Asymptote staff have been keeping busy—even under lockdown!

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow’s co-translation, with Sean T. Reynolds, of Gustave Roud’s “Air of Solitude” followed by “Requiem” is now out with Seagull Books.

Executive Assistant Austyn Wohlers, who has just been admitted into Notre Dame’s MFA program in Fiction, recently published a story, “Lila,” in Short Fiction.

Editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova Chris Tanasescu (aka MARGENTO) will be presenting in late May a Twitter-based (@GraphPoem) hypermedia performance preview of a computationally assembled Belgian poetry anthology he is editing in French and in English translation and in early June an interactive coding computational poetry performance at Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2020.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursać’s translation of Robert Perišić’s novel No-Signal Area, out recently with Seven Stories Press, was reviewed by Ken Kalfus in The New York Times.  

Editor-at-large for Guatemala José García recently published the final instalment of a four-parter about the migrant caravan at The Evergreen Review. Click here, here, here, and here for the full series.

Editor-at-large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood recently translated an essay by Czech journalist Apolena Rychlíková for the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe published by Comma Press in March 2020.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Spring 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and twenty-four languages, as well as a Galician Poetry Special Feature. Not sure where to begin? Our blog editors can help, as they reveal their top picks from the new issue below:

It’s difficult to write, these days. In this state of global precarity, wrenching us from our patterns into stasis, the days stretch towards their completion; daily urgencies take on a more sinister tone, heightened by circuity. There is indeed time, heavier in our stock, yet the dilemma remains: the heaviness, the disintegration of form, the failure of words to justify their surroundings. After a while I realized that it is because in order to write, and to write forcefully, the writer must be able to imagine a world in which their text survives, and contributes. Yet the time has arrived, much sooner than anticipated, of a future in pieces. I’ve never been one to envision literature as a portal for escape—it seems to me that the most sublime of texts enforce us into the deep centre of the world we live in. So from Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue—a wondrous collection of work that arrives, across boundaries, to strike a new presence—I selected certain poems that bring a special dignity to our capacity for visioning.

Natalia Toledo’s poems, translated from the Zapotec and Spanish by Clare Sullivan and Irma Pineda, stir vibrant tremors across the senses. Precise in intimate reference and conditioned with everyday magic, her language is of the sacred nature we infuse into the ordinary in order to contextualize the world to our definitions. Take “Prayer”:

For those days when the sun burnished my hair
And my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.
For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,
their swift migration to our family altar.
For the petate and its map of urine stains,
for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.
For all that I made into a life.
I sing.

READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2020)

We’re bursting out of the gate with publications galore!

Other than editing your favorite literary journal, what have Asymptote staff been up to in the New Year? Catch up with our talented team with this latest quarterly update.

Gustave Roud’s “Air of Solitude” followed by “Requiem,” is finally coming out with Seagull Press at the end of February 2020 in Communications Manager Alexander Dickow and Sean Reynolds’s English translation; it is already available for preorder here. Alexander also published the story, “Rican’s Tale of the Expedition to Perigonne,” in Big Echo Critical Science Fiction.

Assistant editor Andreea Scridon read excerpts of her translations from the Romanian at a poetry reading in Pembroke College, UK, on February 12.

The  TA First Translation Prize was announced on February 12, and the runner-up went  to People in the Room by Norah Lange, translated by Charlotte Whittle and edited by our new Copy editor Bella Bosworth.

Contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac published her translation of Croation author Kristian Novak’s Dark Mother Earth with Amazon Crossing on January 14.

Editor-at-large for Morocco Hodna Nuernberg‘s co-translation, with Patricia Hartland, of Raphael Confiant’s Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem was published by Lavender Ink / Diálogos in January 2020.

Editor-at-large for Iran Poupeh Missaghi published her debut novel trans(re)lating house one with Coffee House Press on February 4. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part II)

At the airport, Honorio confesses to his wife that he has neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for new revolutions.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Yesterday in Part I, we featured an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs. Today, in Part II, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from that memoir, from a section called “Festival Selector.”

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Asymptote contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursać. Elias-Bursać spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short, an interview that was published yesterday as Part I of this series. In the excerpt that follows, “Festival Selector,” Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Festival Selector: the person who chooses the films, conceptualizes and shapes the festival creatively.

Cannes, 1981

In the hall of Palais des Festivals in Cannes, someone taps me on the shoulder and, before I have a chance to turn, starts talking about my movie You Love Only Once, in a jumble of Czech, Russian, and Spanish.

“Honorio Rancaño, selector for the Valencia Film Festival,” the man finally introduces himself, unshaven and chewing on a long, wet cigar. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part I)

I was on a blacklist of cultural enemies said to be destabilizing the state through their work . . . but this was something survivable.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Today in Part I, we bring you an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs.

Don’t forget to check back for Part II tomorrow, when Asymptote will have an exclusive excerpt from Rajko Grlić’s memoir!

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać, who spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short. In the excerpt, “Festival Selector,” which will be published tomorrow as Part II of this series, Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): In this entry from your memoir, you describe your involvement as a filmmaker in film festivals in Cannes (where the story begins), Spain (Mostra), Japan (Tokyo), Croatia (Pula), and your friendship with Honorio Rancaño, who was born in Spain but went on to live in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France, and, ultimately, Spain. What does “place” as such mean to you now? Where have you situated your movies, both in terms of storyline and the locations where they were filmed?

Rajko Grlić (RG): The story about Honorio is a tale of a different world, a world now long gone. About a man who was born in a utopian age, who, after those hopes were shattered, spent his life seeking for something new to hope for. Like any search, his tangled path through space and time touched many places and continents. This is one of the reasons why I believed that his life story, so scattered in bits and pieces all over the world, needed to be told. READ MORE…

Our Year in World Literature

The top 10 articles we published in 2019—according to you!

To send off 2019, we’re revisiting the ten most-read articles from our issues this year. Not surprisingly, most of them were concentrated in our Spring 2019 issue, voted by 290 readers as your favorite edition this year. Scroll down to see which article was the biggest hit in a year that saw never-before-published writing from 70 countries and 44 languages spread out over four quarterly issues.

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At No. 10 is Argentine author Sylvia Molloy’s thrilling but sensitive meditation on the bilingual condition from the Fall 2019 issue—read her essay “Living Between Languages.” READ MORE…

Review of Mars by Asja Bakic

[B]eing forced to live on Mars—named for the god of war and the male counterpart to Venus—makes her sick . . .

Mars by Asja Bakić, translated from the Croatian by Jennifer Zoble, Feminist Press, 2019

From a journalist reporting from inside a cult village to children who are convinced their neighbor is a forest monster, the characters portrayed in Mars, the debut short story collection by Bosnian poet, writer, and translator Asja Bakić, are forced to figure out how to survive in their strange realities. Bakić, playing a role reminiscent of Rod Serling in “The Twilight Zone,” carefully pushes aside the curtain on these parallel universes to underscore the uncanniness of everyday life. Each story in the collection takes place in a world that looks and feels familiar at first, but becomes stranger and more foreign the longer you spend in it.

Bakić was born in Tuzla, Bosnia, where she obtained a degree in Bosnian language and literature, two themes deeply explored in the collection. Mars, originally published under the same title in 2015, was shortlisted for the Edo Budiša Award. The stories shift seamlessly in genre from science fiction to dystopian horror, and Bakić deftly combines aspects of speculative fiction and realism to form a cohesive collection that explores universal issues. Bakić has a unique, perceptive voice and was selected as one of Literary Europe Live’s New Voices in 2017. Her work has been translated into seven languages. She currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. READ MORE…

An Interview with Asja Bakić

It seems to me that people today tend to underestimate Eros in literature when it’s obvious that the best books are full of it.

Asja Bakić’s short-story collection Mars, translated by Jennifer Zoble, is slated for release by the Feminist Press in March of 2019. Though she’s a prolific poet, short-story writer, translator, and blogger in the former Yugoslavia, Mars will be her first publication in English. Bakić grew up in a turbulent Tuzla, Bosnia, lives now in Zagreb, Croatia, and laments the limitations that national borders place on literary exchange. The twists and turns in her speculative narratives leave readers suspended in a heady no-man’s-land between Earth, Mars, and the moon; life, death, and purgatory. Bakić speaks with Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Lindsay Semel about translation, Eros in literature, and the proliferation of ideas.

Lindsay Semel (LS): You often participate in literary events around the former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe. Can you tell me about what you’re seeing there? What interests or bothers you? What trends are emerging? Which voices are notable? How is it different for you, interacting in virtual and physical spaces as an artist?

Asja Bakić (AB): Well, I am seeing my friends. We all know each other. Most of us were born in the same country in the eighties; the language is still the same if you ask me. It doesn’t matter if I go to Belgrade, Novi Sad, Skopje or Tuzla—it feels like home. The problem is that the crude political divide doesn’t let us read each other the way we should. I try to pay attention to what is published in Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro, but I fail miserably. The borders do not let books go through, so you have a Croatian author who must publish their book in the same language three times—for the Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian markets, which is ridiculous. We have four versions of Elena Ferrante. Do we really need to publish the same book repeatedly? Wouldn’t it be better if we were to translate and publish different and new voices? That is why I prefer the internet. You find your friends there, you read each other, you comment—it is livelier. The internet is more real nowadays, because it doesn’t try to deny common ground.

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In Conversation: Ivana Bodrožić

When you tell and retell something, sometimes you reach a point when you can no longer remember the event itself, but only the story.

To mark the anniversary of the Asymptote Book Club, we’re delighted to be publishing our first author-translator interview. Ivana Bodrožić, author of The Hotel Tito, speaks to her English translator, Ellen Elias-Bursać, about the events that led to her debut novel, the book’s initial reception in Croatia and Serbia, and how she went from being “everybody’s sweetheart” to being attacked by nationalist critics.

In a conversation that gets to the heart of the novel, Ivana Bodrožić reveals which scene was most difficult to convey on the page, and explains why she needed a police guard for her book-signing in Belgrade.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): What started you writing The Hotel Tito?

Ivana Bodrožić (IB): Ever since I first learned how to write I have been writing down anything that seemed important, the things that formed me and my world; in my pre-teen years it was wise sayings, when the war was raging around us I copied out the lyrics of Nirvana and R.E.M songs, I kept a diary. Then I tried my hand at writing my own poetry: when I was sixteen I’d shut myself in my room and by the light of a candle, with a little bottle of vodka, I’d imagine I was Yesenin—until my mother knocked at the door. Writing was always something important for me and a little exalted; I see this now as an attempt at interrogating the world around me. When I came to understand, as an adult, that my childhood had been out of the ordinary, I began to think that in time I’d forget, as people do, all that had made my life what it was, what made my world and me as I am today. That is when I began jotting down fragments of memories and after I’d written out some forty pages I realized I was writing prose that said something, to me. That was the point when I realized I needed a protagonist through whose eyes and heart I’d narrate this piece of my life and the life of my whole generation who grew up during the war. My love of reading and writing and my specific life experience quickly gave The Hotel Tito its shape.

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Announcing our November Book Club selection: The Hotel Tito by Ivana Bodrožić

“We talked,” the narrator tells us, “about what it would be like when we returned home,” but the awful truth is that a return becomes impossible.

This November, we’re celebrating the first full year of the Asymptote Book Club. Over the last twelve months, the Book Club has brought its subscribers newly-translated fiction from twelve different languages, taking readers on a journey from the Arctic Circle down to the forests of Bengal, from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century to Bangkok in the postmodern era.

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For our November Book Club selection, we’re excited to be showcasing one of the most powerful novels written since the independence of Croatia: a breathtakingly original coming-of-age story set in the aftermath of perhaps the most shocking massacre in recent European history.

For more information on Ivana Bodrožić’s The Hotel Tito, published in English by Seven Stories Press, read Assistant Managing Editor Jacob Silkstone’s review below or head to our online discussion group. If you’re not a Book Club member yet but would like to join us as we head into our second year, all the information you need is available on our Book Club page.

The Hotel Tito by Ivana Bodrožić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Seven Stories Press, 2018

Reviewed by Jacob Silkstone

Literature, according to Ahmet Altan, is our best method of confronting “the dark and bloody face of history.The Hotel Tito, which follows the first volume of Altan’s Ottoman Quartet as an Asymptote Book Club selection, spotlights a particularly dark and bloody episode of Europe’s recent past. Its chosen method of confronting history is no less courageous for being characterised by an impressively original subtlety and a surprising lightness of touch. While the earliest novels about the Yugoslav Wars (Slavenka Drakulić’s As If I Am Not There perhaps foremost among them) seethe with raw energy and anger, Bodrožić’s equally harrowing stories are interspersed with moments of humour: the comedy serves to enhance the tragedy.

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Spring 2018: The Dogged Chase of the Actual After the Ideal

Confronting the most immediate limits on human experience while resisting the arbitrary, narrow scope imposed by the commercial book market.

On 19 February 2018, responding to a pitch from Alessandro Raveggi—editor of Italy’s first bilingual literary magazine, The Florentine Literary Review—I arranged for Newsletter Editor Maxx Hillery to run in our Fortnightly Airmail the first of Raveggi’s two-part conversation with John Freeman on the occasion of Freeman’s Italian debut. “I do not feel American literary journals are doing a very good job of curating the best of our present moment,” the former editor of Granta says. “I think an American or American-based literary journal faces two ethical challenges right now, both of them related to aesthetics: 1) to try to redefine the cultural world as not being American-centric, and 2) to reveal America for what it is and has always been, but is just more apparently so now. Attacking these challenges means catching up with the best writers from around the world.” This brings me back thirteen years to the moment I stood up and posed a question to a panel of New York editors: “I am a Singaporean writing about Singapore; would my work be of interest to American publishers?” The immediate response: “Have your characters come to the US.” I end up submitting a story about Chinese diaspora in New York to a literary journal; the rejection letter that comes back reads: “Too much very culturally-specific backstory. . . that western readers would find compelling.” I remember a third encounter, this time with a literary agent who has read my work before our one-on-one meeting; she articulates very memorably why my fiction won’t be a hit: “A writer expresses his intelligence through plot.” But I like T. S. Eliot’s quote better: “Plot is the bone you throw the dog while you go in and rob the house.” Sometimes, in founding Asymptote, I wonder whether I was in fact revolting against all these things that all these well-meaning people have tried to tell me. But if the magazine isn’t a hit, at least I’ll have one fan in John Freeman: he very coincidentally writes me just as I’m composing this preface to say “how important what it is you do there has been for me and for a lot of us who itch to read away from the mundane.” Here to introduce our Spring 2018 issue, and the Korean Fiction Feature I edited, is Interviews Editor Henry Ace Knight.

The Spring 2018 issue is one of Asymptote’s most asymptotic. Its pages are bound together by the familiar themes of futility and compromise and populated by people running up against the invisible but all too real limits imposed on them by the mysterious contours of the self, the precarious obligations of kinship, and the arbitrary structures of power undergirding society. Orphans, émigrés, postwar castaways, and second-generation immigrants all struggle to make sense of asymptotes of personal relationship (how close can we get to one another?), teleology (to fulfilling our desires?), epistemology (to knowing ourselves?), language (to legibility?), and narrative (to completion?). The issue, if it is about anything, is about how people situate themselves in the lacunae that shrink and expand as one approaches only for the other to recede. READ MORE…