Croatian authors in McSweeney's Quarterly

Most recently published issue no. 48 of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is featuring six Croatian authors: Gordan Nuhanović, Zoran Ferić, Damir Karakaš, Olja Savičević, Bekim Sejranović and Tea Tulić.
McSweeney's will also publish Olja Savičević novel 'Goodbye, Cowboy' and Bekim Sejranovic's novel 'Nowhere, from Nowhere'.
- With sixteen new stories and a full-length screenplay, McSweeney’s 48 was just too much for a single book to hold—a wild leviathan, you could say, whose tongue we could not tie down with a rope. (Job 41:1 is now believed to refer to this issue.) We were, however, able to split it into two books, and the results are terrific. In the first, we’ve got stunning work from Kelly Link, Rebecca Curtis, Etgar Keret, and Ismet Prcic, as well as stories of blind boyfriends and dead tourists and doomed Moldovan press junkets; in the second, we’ve got the delightfully weird debut screenplay of none other than Boots Riley, frontman of the Coup. Are there stories from Croatia, also? Are there love stories set amid street protests and ghost stories set amid nudist colonies? Is the issue, as a whole, so dazzling that you will feel a little bit dizzy afterward? There are, and it is, and we’re very excited to be bringing this one to you. - (source: mcsweeneys.net)

 

The Guardian, on 3 Winters

A big, inspiring play, with strong echoes of Chekhov, about the impact of politics on a Zagreb family during a tumultuous 70 years.
 

Ante Zlatko Stolica

Ante Zlatko Stolica (Split, 1985) lives in Bistra and works in Zagreb. He graduated from Croatian language and Philosophy. He is the author of several short documentary and feature films; coscreenwriter of Kratki izlet (A Brief Excursion), a film awarded with the Golden Arena for Best Film in 2017.

Close to Everything is his first published novel.

In the Grip of Madness

The New York Times - Sunday Book Review
‘Trieste,’ by Dasa Drndic

July 2006: Haya Tedeschi, 83, waits at her home in Gorizia, on the Italian-Slovenian border, northwest of Trieste, for the arrival of the son who was stolen from her 62 years earlier, during the war.

An American writer would no doubt focus on, or at least convey, the drama of their meeting. But “Trieste,” by the Croatian novelist, playwright and critic Dasa Drndic, is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick.

The first half of “Trieste” chronicles events in the lives of Haya and her recent forebears, multilingual Jews born under — or, for her generation, just after the fall of — the Hapsburg monarchy. These dense and satisfying pages capture the crowdedness of memory. There isn’t much plot beyond births and deaths, comings and goings and the rise of fascism — which creates more anxiety for the reader, it seems, than for the family, who make it through the war (comparatively) unscathed. Haya’s fate ensnares her one day in January 1944, when she’s 20 and a handsome German officer, Kurt Franz, enters the tobacco shop she’s tending. The following October their son, Antonio, is born. Franz soon deserts her (“My little Jewess, we can’t go on like this”), and Toni vanishes from his pram while Haya’s back is turned.

In time, the mystery of this disappearance will be solved, but in a discursive rather than a dramatic fashion. There is no suspense. And the unsentimental Drndic won’t offer Haya the sympathy you might expect. She condemns her, and Haya condemns herself. “The Tedeschi family,” Drndic writes, “are a civilian family, bystanders who keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism.” Bystanders: “For 60 years now these blind observers have been pounding their chests and shouting, We are innocent because we didn’t know! . . . these yes men, these enablers of evil.”

Almost halfway through, the novel stops abruptly to list, over 44 pages, the names of some 9,000 Jews for whose deaths Italy bears responsibility. From there, ­Drndic turns her attention to San Sabba, the gruesome concentration and extermination camp in a converted rice mill on the periphery of Trieste, and from there to the ghastly specifics of the Nazi extermination program. The connection is the same Kurt Franz, an all-too-real historical figure who was the baby-faced commandant of Treblinka before his transfer to Trieste.

Drndic uses various methods to recall the horror: trial transcripts, witness statements, biographical sketches, photo­graphs. The technique is Sebaldian, but the tone, especially surrounding Haya, is the old-man-in-a-dry-month rattle of T. S. Eliot. Allusions to “The Waste Land” recur, and the book ends with a collage of bleak lines from the poem. Beckett, too, is present in the insistent imagery of physical discomfort (“a nasty itch plagues her in the early evenings”) and of putrefaction so extreme (“they even leap into the containers voluntarily, choke on the sewage sludge in their own fermented excrement”) that if her tone wobbled for a moment it would cross the line into camp. But even at their most lurid, Drndic’s ­sentences remain coldly dignified. And so does Ellen Elias-Bursac’s imperturbably elegant translation: There isn’t a sentence that you would guess had been born in another language.

Drndic attempts to stave off despair with her faith in literature, quoting liberally from Borges, Pound, Montale, Bern­hard, the Triestine poet Umberto Saba and quite a few other great writers — but then she uses their words to shore up her despair, especially when, in the last part of the novel, she enters the consciousness of Antonio Tedeschi, Haya’s stolen son. We encounter him late in June 2006, when he is setting out to meet his mother at last. He’s not looking forward to it. Since finding out he is the son of “that murderer,” he has come to think of Haya as “that Jewish woman who spread her legs for him . . . while trains rumbled past, right there in front of her nose, on their way to killing grounds all over the Reich.”

If the reader hesitates to judge Drndic’s characters (the perennial doubt: would we have been bystanders? or worse?), the characters do not. They see themselves as trapped by history. Like the boots of a concentration-camp guard, Antonio says, “the Past, my Past, our Past, presses up against my face, which, beneath it, contorts in a grimace like the grimace of a crazed detainee whose innocence or guilt has yet to be determined.”

Innocence or guilt? But how can this man, born in 1944, be guilty? His near-­hysterical determination not to let his generation off the hook for its parents’ crimes verges on madness. Then again, madness may be the only appropriate response to the enormity of the Holocaust. To move on is unacceptable if not impossible; to succumb to obsession is self-­destructive and potentially suicidal. Once Haya’s son discovers his true identity, he does everything in his power to keep the horror and the pain alive. His anguish brings to mind an author Drndic doesn’t quote: Faulkner, whose Quentin Compson kills himself because he fears that the pain he is feeling is going to fade. Which, thank God, is the nature of everything earthly, including history. The pain of the Holocaust has faded already; it’s fading now.

 

TRIESTE
By Dasa Drndic
Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac
Illustrated. 359 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

 

Craig Seligman is a critic and the author of “Sontag & Kael.”

from: www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/trieste-by-dasa-drndic.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ante Zlatko Stolica-works/transl

MAIN WORKS

Close to Everything (Blizina svega, Fraktura, 2019), novel
After Martha (Ulica Marthe Argerich, Fraktura 2025), novel

 

TRANSLATIONS*

*none so far

 

 

 

 

Croatian Literature in Translation - Free Access Database

 

This database has been designed as a tool to assist professionals and other interested users to locate translations of Croatian literature according to different criteria and to facilitate promotion of Croatian literature abroad.

The database does not pretend to be a scientific bibliography in digital form, nor is it exhaustive and comprehensive at this stage. The genre and type of publication designations do not necessarily match those of scientific and library classification. They are intended solely for the convenience of the user who is searching for a particular literary work or a piece of information. The time coverage is at the moment also limited to translations published largely in the period between 1990 and the present day. However, as entries continue to accumulate, the coverage will be extended to include earlier translations.

While searching for data, we have consulted numerous published bibliographies and digital databases as well as data provided by authors. All these sources are meticulously documented in each entry.

If you find errors or wish to contribute with an entry of your own, please inform us at translation-grants@min-kulture.hr .

For registration and access to the database of Croatian Literature in Translation click here.
 

Susannah Clapp, The Observer

The warmth and intricacy of Štivičić’s writing makes you want to make these efforts and pulls you through some initial bemusement. When she eventually turns her kaleidoscope so that earlier hints and forebodings fuse into a complete picture, the result is generous, surprising and extremely powerful. Sympathy is never straightforward here; the unions and dissolution, principle and corruption of the family echo those of a country in flux.

Neue Zurcher Zeitung, on Black Man

Gromača's stenograms of an afflicted childhood and youth illuminate an individual story as well as a war-torn society. With their level of detail and poetry that prefers razor-sharp phrases rather than linear narrative, they are poignant in the best sense of the word.

Main works/Translations
Sample translation
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