Tag Archives: Serbian literature

Again Women in Translation Month

Incredible how fast one year has passed – another Women in Translation Month!

My modest contribution to Women in Translation Month is an overview regarding the books by female authors (or co-authors) I have reviewed, mentioned or from which I have translated texts (poetry) that I have published on this blog since last years’ Women in Translation Month:

Bozhana Apostolowa: Kreuzung ohne Wege
Boika Asiowa: Die unfruchtbare Witwe
Martina Baleva / Ulf Brunnbauer (Hg.): Batak kato mjasto na pametta / Batak als bulgarischer Erinnerungsort
Veza Canetti / Elias Canetti / Georges Canetti: “Dearest Georg!”
Veza Canetti: The Tortoises
Lea Cohen: Das Calderon-Imperium
Blaga Dimitrova: Forbidden Sea – Zabraneno more
Blaga Dimitrova: Scars
Kristin Dimitrova: A Visit to the Clockmaker
Kristin Dimitrova: Sabazios
Iglika Dionisieva: Déjà vu Hug
Tzvetanka Elenkova (ed.): At the End of the World
Tzvetanka Elenkova: The Seventh Gesture
Ludmila Filipova: The Parchment Maze
Sabine Fischer / Michael Davidis: Aus dem Hausrat eines Hofrats
Heike Gfereis: Autopsie Schiller
Mirela Ivanova: Versöhnung mit der Kälte
Ekaterina Josifova: Ratse
Kapka Kassabova: Street Without a Name
Gertrud Kolmar: A Jewish Mother from Berlin – Susanna
Gertrud Kolmar: Dark Soliloquy
Gertrud Kolmar: Das lyrische Werk
Gertrud Kolmar: My Gaze Is Turned Inward: Letters 1938-1943
Gertrud Kolmar: Worlds – Welten
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Sibylle Lewitscharoff: Apostoloff
Nada Mirkov-Bogdanovic / Milena Dordijevic: Serbian Literature in the First World War
Mary C. Neuburger: Balkan Smoke
Milena G. Nikolova: Kotkata na Schroedinger
Nicki Pawlow: Der bulgarische Arzt
Sabine Rewald: Balthus: Cats and Girls
Angelika Schrobsdorff: Die Reise nach Sofia
Angelika Schrobsdorff: Grandhotel Bulgaria
Tzveta Sofronieva: Gefangen im Licht
Albena Stambolova: Everything Happens as it Does
Maria Stankowa: Langeweile
Danila Stoianova: Memory of a Dream
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer (ed.): The Season of Delicate Hunger
Kathrine Kressmann Taylor: Address Unknown
Dimana Trankova / Anthony Georgieff: A Guide to Jewish Bulgaria
Marguerite Youcenar: Coup de Grâce
Edda Ziegler / Michael Davidis: “Theuerste Schwester“. Christophine Reinwald, geb. Schiller
Rumjana Zacharieva: Transitvisum fürs Leben
Virginia Zaharieva: Nine Rabbits
Anna Zlatkova: fremde geografien
The Memoirs of Glückel from Hameln

What remarkable translated books by women have you read recently or are you reading right now?

 © Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-6. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


Visit to a bookstore: Herceg Novi

I am travelling quite a lot; and I am reading quite a lot – no surprise that I visit also many bookstores while travelling. Therefore I will start here a small series with short portraits and impressions from book shops I visited and that deserve to be recommended. As you will see, I will focus mainly on small independent bookstores with a high-quality selection of books.

The excellent weather last weekend was the perfect excuse for a trip by bus from Prishtina/Kosovo (where I am working right now in an interesting project) to the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro. If you haven’t been there: it is a spectacular and very beautiful place! The contrasts of the high Montenegrin mountains and the bay with its rather unique topography, the Mediterranean climate and the old towns like Kotor (also sometimes known as Cattaro), Perast, or Herceg Novi are stunning.

As usual when I visit a place, I gather some prior information on the locations I want to see (this time Herceg Novi and Perast) – and of course bookstores also belong in that category. So I was rather pleased to find a very nice independent book shop in Herceg Novi, Salt Bookstore, a family business run by Viktorija Malović, wife of the author Nikola Malović.

The bookstore is a great place to find a small but well-curated selection of books in English and of course a high-quality selection of books in Serbian/Montenegrin language. Salt is also a small publishing house that focuses on literature related to the history and culture of the Bay of Kotor, and all the editions Viktorija Malović showed me are done with greatest care and obvious devotion to the subject. One of the books from their own publishing house is Bernard Sullivan’s Hiker’s Guide, The Austro-Hungarian Fortresses of Montenegro; the mountains around the Bay of Kotor are just perfect for hiking and with this guide book you will be not only always oriented where you are but you will be also informed about the many remains of forts, bunkers and other remains from the Austro-Hungarians you will come across during your hike which offers truly unforgettable views to this part of the Adria.

Nikola Malović is a well-known Serbian novelist from Montenegro and it would be interesting to see some of his books translated in a language that is accessible to me. Since I don’t read Serbian, I limited myself to buying a few books in English: David Albahari’s short stories Learning Cyrillic, Momo Kapor’s collection of feuilletons A Guide to the Serbian Mentality (with illustrations by the author), and an exhibition catalogue about Serbian literature during WWI.

The bookstore is a very nice place to learn more about the Bay of Kotor, and you can find always something interesting there – so don’t miss the place when you visit the Bay of Kotor. Herceg Novi, although very modest in size, even hosts a book fair and the place has always been a favourite place of many writers from the region, such as Ivo Andrić. Somehow you feel that this is a place for “bookish” people.    

Now that I am thinking of it: Montenegro has recently made a major shift in its geo-political orientation: it has become a NATO member, and it is a candidate country of the EU. Montenegro has always had very close ties with Russia, and it is not by chance that the country was extremely popular among Russian tourists, which now for various political reasons seem to stay away from Montenegro. The huge gap that this is causing in the state budget, and the threat this is to the many people whose livelihood depends on tourism is a huge problem – once again the average population has to pay the prize for a political decision and it is easy to understand that EU and particularly NATO are not the most popular institutions in Montenegro right now. But this doesn’t affect the people’s natural hospitality and therefore I can only recommend you again very strongly a visit in this beautiful country, and particularly the Bay of Kotor.

(And no, the Montenegrin Ministry of Tourism doesn’t sponsor me… ;-))

Bernard Sullivan: The Austro-Hungarian Fortresses of Montenegro: A Hiker’s Guide, Knjižara So, Herceg Novi 2015

David Albahari: Learning Cyrillic, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Geopoetika, Belgrade 2012

Momo Kapor: A Guide to the Serbian Mentality, translated by John White, Ružica White, Branimir Bakić, Danira Parenta, Goran Kričković, Nevenka Kojić, Ana Selić, and Mirjana Dragović, Dereta, Belgrade 2014

Nada Mirkov-Bogdanović / Milena Dordijević: Serbian Literature in the First World War, Exhibition Catalogue, National Library of Serbia / National and University Library of the Republic of Srpska, Belgrade / Banja Luka 2014

Nikola Malović: Jedro Nade, Laguna, Belgrade 2014

More information on Salt Bookstore in Herceg Novi you can find here or on their website.

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-6. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Lake Como

Residency programs are an important part of the working life of many authors today. They provide for a limited time, maybe a few weeks, a month, or a little bit longer a place in an interesting surrounding, suited to the specific requirements of authors, and frequently they come with a certain sum of money plus free board and plenty of opportunities to socialize with other people working on projects in the making in their respective field – other authors, artists, scientists. In the best case, residency programs provide an opportunity for an author to focus on his/her work, to write or finish a manuscript with which he/she has struggled since a long time and also to collect and exchange new ideas for new projects. Participating in such a program means that as an author you have for this limited time not to think about anything else than your work, particularly not about money. Everything is well taken care of by the host.

Contrary to what you could expect, the central role of residency programs for many modern authors is not reflected in the literary output of most of these authors. Very rarely – at least this is my impression – are works of fiction dedicated to experiences that authors make with such programs. There are exceptions of course, such as Lake Como by the Serbian novelist Srdjan Valjarevic, the book about which I am writing here.

Nothing spectacular happens in this book: the narrator, a Serbian author that has for sure many similarities with the author of Lake Como, wins a Rockefeller scholarship that comes with an invitation to spend one month in the lovely Villa Maranese in Bellagio near Lake Como. A good opportunity to finish a novel (which he has indeed no intention to write at all), and also to leave behind a flat in Belgrade with a leaking roof, some financial debts and other personal problems, and a more and more difficult situation for intellectuals that are not in line with the official ultra-nationalist Serbian politics and its consequences. It is the end of the 1990s and the armed Kosovo conflict is in its early stages.

During his stay in the Villa, the author meets all kind of other Rockefeller fellows from all over the world busy with all kind of projects. People talk, socialize, eat and drink, gossip, work a bit or rather not, a composer gives some house concerts. The author feels like an outsider because of his age (he is by far the youngest in the Villa), his origin, his interests and even his clothes (he only reluctantly gets used to wearing a tie, which is strongly recommended in the Villa), not to talk about his drinking and smoking habits. (My apologies when I mention the drinking so frequently, but there isn’t probably a single page in the book when the narrator doesn’t have a drink.)

An additional predicament is that the protagonist has to lie to almost everyone about his work: since he is known to be a novelist, people want to know how the work with the novel is going and instead of telling them that he is just enjoying the time doing nothing – except eating, drinking, sleeping, and the occasional walk to the village or a nearby hill – the author/narrator is making up things related to the non-existing novel. But the not existing work in progress is at least a good excuse to get away from activities in which he doesn’t want to participate.

Apart from that, he explores the village, has a short fling with a female guest of the Villa, makes friends with a friendly bar owner, as well as with Alda, a young charming girl working in another bar with whom he is communicating in a mixture of English, Italian, and drawings. He makes some friends at the Villa as well, particularly the waiters that provide a never-ending stream of wine, whiskey and other alcohol, but that are also a valuable source of information about the place. With Mr Sommerman, a holocaust survivor and retired literature professor and his wife, he is developing a friendship that will probably last even after he leaves the Villa when the time is over. And the meeting with another guest who visited once the island of Korcula in what is now Croatia brings back long hidden memories to the author because this place had a particular importance in his earlier life.

Of course, this book reminded me more than a bit of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. The villa is on a hill – ironically called “Tragedy” – not a real mountain, but the setting is very idyllic (Bellagio is already part of the Mediterranean world, but with a view to the snow-covered mountains of the Alps), like a temporary paradise isolated from the rest of the world with all its problems. Valjarevic has a very good ability to characterize people and it seems he talks of his own experience, so vividly retold are many episodes, frequently with a slightly detached irony. There are also beautiful pages where he is describing the nature at Lake Como. And also small observations like what he is writing about the transistor radio, were really interesting to read for me. The visit of Alda and her family on the hill – for some strange reason, most people from the village have never visited the Villa; so near and yet so far are these worlds from each other usually – is a highlight of the book.

A little bit on the downside though is the fact that a considerable part of the novel is a repetitive mentioning of drinking, eating and sleeping habits of the narrator. Not a single drink goes unnoticed, and after a while I was really not so much interested any more in what the narrator did to his liver. This feeling of repetitiveness is even strengthened by the author’s habit to write many short sentences starting with “I”. I did this. I did that. I did this. Then I did that. Ok, most sentences are a bit longer, but the style was for me in many parts of the book not very attractive. Although the narrator refers to Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin as favourite authors, the style of the novel is more like Hemingway – and that is not at all a compliment in my opinion. These issues somehow prevented me from enjoying this book as much as I wanted to like it.

Srdjan Valjarevic is an interesting and very talented author. With some more editing, Lake Como could have been an excellent novel. 

Geopoetika, a publishing house in Belgrade, has published a series of books by contemporary Serbian authors in English. I can recommend you this series if you want to get to know interesting literature from Serbia.

Lake Como

Srdjan Valjarevic: Lake Como, translated by Alice Copple-Tosic, Geopoetika, Belgrade 2009

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-6. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Women in Translation month upcoming

Following the good example of some blogger friends and in anticipation of this year’s Women in Translation month, I post a list of books by women which I reviewed or from which I published translation samples here, covering the period September 2014 until now:

Deborah Rohan: The Olive Grove
Herta Müller: The Passport
Marjana Gaponenko: Who Is Martha?
Elif Batuman: The Possessed
Neli Dobrinova: Malki mazhki igri
Virginia Zaharieva: Nine Rabbits
Ivanka Mogilska: DNA
Tanja Nikolova: Tolkoz
Isidora Sekulic: Balkan

More to come!

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Politics of Friendship

Isidora Sekulić  – unless you are from Serbia or former Yugoslavia you have very probably never heard that name before. And that is a pity because she was a very remarkable woman and writer.

Sekulić was born in 1877 in a small town in Northern Serbia, at a time when it was extremely rare and unusual for a woman to get a good education; but she was lucky: her father, a lawyer, thought obviously differently from most men of his time (not only in Serbia) and made it possible for his daughter to study.

Isidora graduated from the Teachers College in Sombor, then from the Higher Pedagogicum in Budapest and finally got her Ph.D. in Berlin; she was fluent in seven languages, traveled on her own, and had an excellent knowledge of European art and culture. Most of her life she lived in Belgrade working as a teacher and later in the lexicography department of the Serbian Academy of Sciences.

A small collection of her essays on the Balkans is to my knowledge so far the only part of her work that is translated at all. These essays have the titles: Balkans, The Balkans (notes of a Balkanophile), The Problem of the Small Nation, and Concentrating – Absentmindedness is not a fault but a vice. These essays are complemented in the edition I can recommend here by a short introductory essay The Policies of Friendship, by Nataša Marković and an instructive afterword Blood and Honey by Darko Tanasković and a short biographic sketch.

Sekulić’s main other works, although so far untranslated, give an impression regarding her intellectual interests as a writer: Fellow-Travelers, Letters from Norway, The Deacon of Notre Dame, The Chronicles of the Small-Town Cemetery, Analytical Moments and Topics, To My People, Speech and Language, a cultural review of the nation, and a biography of Njegoš, the Poet-King.

Sekulić was very modern in her writing. In her belletristic texts she used the stream-of-consciousness technique before Virginia Woolf. It is said that Sekulić was adequately Serb and adequately European and cosmopolitan at the same time. In her essayistic writing she would anticipate a concept that would be later called The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida. In her words

“only culture connects people, states and nations; everything else separates them. Cultural contacts are the joy of people…”

Her essay The Problem of the Small Nation should be obligatory reading for each politician of a big nation that thinks he is entitled to decide or have a say in the fate of small nations.

“It is not easy being a small nation: not in Finland, not in Norway, not in Serbia…we are small and we are alone!”

And the following note seems to be written today, so fresh and still valid is it:

“Serbia as a small country must join the world, Europe, at any cost, but not at the cost of losing its dignity and its identity…”

At its core, the Balkan nations have survived the roughly five centuries of Ottoman rule and the five decades of Communism with their particular identity intact; now it is time to become a part of Europe not only economically – without losing its identity and without inferiority complex. Sekulić’s message is as actual as ever.

Sekulić, in many respects a predecessor of Maria Todorova and other scientists that deal with the Balkan identity, is a fascinating author that should be discovered finally also outside her home country – so let’s hope for more translations of her books and essays and maybe also one day a biography that will be available to readers outside Serbia. Her Politics of Friendship are now needed more than ever.

Sekulic
Isidora Sekulić: Balkan, translated by Vuk Tošić, bi-lingual edition Serbian-English, Plavi jahač, Belgrade 2013

Jacques Derrida: Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London & New York: Verso, 1997)

Maria Todorova: Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory, Hurst, London & New York University Press, 2004

Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.