Posts filed under 'Yugoslav Wars'

What’s New in Translation: September 2025

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

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From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.” 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…