Globetrotter
By David AlbahariTranslated by Ellen Elias-BursaćYale, 2014Learning CyrillicBy David AlbahariTranslated from the Serbian by Ellen Elias-BursaćDalkey Archive, 2014“Translated” or “Translated from the Serbian”? These two new books by David Albahari pose a more difficult question than one might think. Yale University Press has decided to avoid the “Serbian” initially, leaving it to the book flap to describe Albahari as a “Serbian writer and translator” who “has published eleven short-story collections and thirteen novels in Serbian.” Dalkey Archive leads with “the Serbian” and calls Albahari “a Serbian master” on the back cover. Ellen Elias-Bursać, who has translated several of Albahari’s books, including Words Are Something Else, Götz and Meyer, Snow Man, and Leeches, is listed variously as translating from “the Serbian,” from “Serbo-Croat,” and from “Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.”The language once spoken on the “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” that connected Zagreb and Belgrade was officially Serbo-Croatian, a unified and unifying language taught and spoken and used in all the republics of Yugoslavia. Books translated into English during the time the highway acted as a hyphen between the two cities, like Ivo Andrić’s Nobel-Prize-winning The Bridge on the Drina, routinely included a hyphen of their own: “translated from the Serbo-Croat.”But since the brutal wars of the 1990’s that separated the republics into sovereign states and that shattered multicultural Yugoslav identities forged over seven decades, publishers have struggled with how to designate the language of books coming out of the former Yugoslavia. The copyright page of Ranko Marinković’s Cyclops (Yale, 2010), for instance, vacillates between two options: “originally published in Serbo-Croatian” and “originally published in Croatian by Prosveta, Beograd, 1965, former Yugoslavia.” The idea of a book in Croatian published in Serbian Belgrade is as odd as the Dalkey Archive’s 2012 edition of Danilo Kiš’s Psalm 44 that claims the book was “originally published in Serbian by Globus” in the Croatian capital Zagreb. The Dalkey Archive 2003 edition of Kiš’s 1965 Garden, Ashes more properly (or less tendentiously) states that the book was “originally published in Serbo-Croatian,” an appropriate appellation for a time of “brotherhood and unity.”Although the new denominations signify political realities, the linguistic differences between Croatian and Serbian are no more pronounced than differences between the English spoken in Maine and Mississippi. Miljenko Jergović’s 1994 book of stories Sarajevo Marlboro, for instance, was “translated from Bosnian” for Archipelago Books in 2004, while Jergović’s 1999 Mama Leone was “translated from the Croatian” for Archipelago in 2012. Jergović’s original language was Bosnian-flavored Serbo-Croatian, but as Bosnia established its own identity he became a speaker of Bosnian and when he moved from Sarajevo to Zagreb his language metamorphosed into Croatian.As these examples suggest, the literature by post-Yugoslavian writers is often about identity in flux. That includes the books of David Albahari, perhaps the most widely read of contemporary Serbian authors. His work has been translated into German, French, English, and thirteen other languages.In 1994, Albahari emigrated from Zemun, across the Save River from Belgrade, to Calgary, Alberta in Canada. Although he emphasizes in interviews that the uprooting was mitigated by the reach of the internet and by ongoing relations with his Belgrade publishers, it was nonetheless challenging to leave familiar linguistic and cultural contexts behind. Albahari graduated from the University of Belgrade. He founded and was editor-in-chief of the magazine of world literature Pismo. He organized a formal petition to legalize marijuana in the 1980s. And he was head of the Federation of Jewish Communes in Yugoslavia. Although Albahari has good English (he is a prolific translator of works by Bellow, Coover, Barthelme, Singer, Pynchon, Carver, Updike, Atwood, Naipaul, Nabokov, Alexie, Sam Shepard, and others into Serbian and he has lived in Canada for two decades), he continues to write in his native language. Which is now Serbian.An earlier émigré from Belgrade, Charles Simic, wrote recently in the New York Review of Books about the experience of displacement as his family left Yugoslavia after WWII. Although Simic eagerly assimilated into the anonymity and freedom of the United States, he still had a problem American poets didn’t share: how to make sense of his own encounter with history. For that, he writes, he needed the Polish poets (and he paraphrases Czeslaw Milosz): “the poet crawling from under the historical steamroller has no choice but to face the moral obligations fate has assigned to him, unlike his colleagues in happier countries, who write as if history had nothing to do with them.”History has had plenty to do with the young writers who began their lives as citizens of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia but who are now Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian immigrants in countries around the world. Aleksandar Hemon, who emigrated to the U.S. from Sarajevo in 1992 at the age of 28, and Ismet Prcic, an emigrant from Tuzla to the United States in 1996 at the age of 19, are representative of the many writers steamrolled by the history of a disintegrating Yugoslavia. In their novels Nowhere Man and Shards, both written originally in English, Hemon and Prcic depict immigrants who suffer from seriously disrupted identities. A character in Prcic’s novel says they have been “fucked into shards.” Because the diaspora includes all the groups that made up the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian characters in both books encounter Serbian immigrants who themselves suffer from the disorders the Bosnians know so well. Although the meetings are tense with the raw memories of the conflict that has scattered them abroad, the Serbs are not depicted as the enemy in these novels. War is the enemy. Identity is the victim. And yet, as these novels remind us, all stories and identities are cobbled together. Only the ignorant suppose they themselves are whole.Novelists have always known this, and Albahari is no exception. Having learned from Faulkner and Beckett, Coover and Barthelme, all of whom he cites as influences, Albahari’s work before the wars explored identity fractured by the language that seeks to make it whole. This is evident, to give just one example, in the novel Tsing, first published in Belgrade in 1988, an exquisitely tortured attempt by the narrator to tell the story of his father: “These are not even fragments for ‘fragments’ would mean that the story had existed once and that it is broken now, and storytelling would look like a patient act of gluing together.”In an interview with Damjana Mraović-O’Hare, Albahari says he admired Samuel Beckett’s “attitude toward language (and certainly . . . his attitude toward memory, which is as unstable in his fiction as language).” Peter Handke, he adds, has been even more influential to him: “Handke persuaded me that the meaning of writing is mostly in questioning the exact meaning of writing.” Since his move to Canada, now with the added layer of immigrant experience, now as an emigrant from his homeland, Albahari has continued to question the exact meaning of writing, to explore the possibilities and limitations of narration and of identity.The unnamed narrator of Albahari’s novel Globetrotter, published originally in 2001 in Belgrade and now beautifully translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, is a Canadian painter in residence at an artists’ colony in Banff, Alberta. The painter becomes obsessed with Daniel Atijas, a visiting Serbian writer, a Jew who shares David Albahari’s initials as well as aspects of his identity. That congruence between author and character sets up an odd tension for a reader who assumes that Atijas’ thoughts are close to Albahari’s own but who must constantly account for the fact that everything in the novel is seen through the narrator’s excitable and often banal perspective.After discovering that a man named Ivan Matulić had visited Banff in 1924, five or six years after Yugoslavia had been formed as a country, and that he had signed a guest book as “Globetrotter from Croatia,” Atijas laments that the choice of Croatia over Yugoslavia meant that “things were already beginning to unravel even before they had properly come together.” The narrator reports later that Atijas told him that
he was peeved at himself, at his inability to wrench free of the sticky tentacles of history, to elude their foul stench, for history, he said, always manifests itself as a stink that become noxious in the places where the sedimentation of history is great, and no amount of excavating, either real or spiritual, could get rid of it. This was how he had been living, he said, for the past dozen years, from the moment hostilities erupted in his country and history was flung in everybody’s face like a cream pie. No matter how many times he wiped his face clean, he said, something sticky was left; it was as if, he said, everyone could see the stain, even here, thousands of miles from the frenzied mob.
From the beginning the narrator reveals himself as a frenetic associative thinker whose account jumps erratically back and forth in time and whose mind bounces like a pinball from Atijas to the elk that abound in Banff to Benny Goodman to various jealousies to random squirrels to explanations that link his Canadian experience to Atijas’ own to how cities are like women—on and on and on in a incessant torrent of prose.For Albahari, knowledge is relative, dependent on what you already know, risky in circumstances you don’t recognize, complicated beyond the niceties of indentation and quotation, and so the narrator tells his 200-page story in a single paragraph and without quotation marks (a formal device, Albahari told Damjana Mraović-O’Hare, that he learned from Austrian Thomas Bernhard).As is the case in Mathias Enard’s Zone, a novel told in a single sentence, and László Krasznahorkai’s paragraph-eschewing The Melancholy of Resistance, the lack of paragraphs simultaneously speeds up the narrator’s chain of thoughts and slows down the reader. These are novels of slowness, even as Enard’s train rushes toward Rome and as the imminent departure of Atijas makes the narrator of Globetrotter frantic. “A delicate slowness,” as Nietzsche said of his own work, “is the tempo of these conversations.”The painter and writer are soon joined by the Croatian-Canadian grandson of Ivan Matulić, a man who has spent his life trying to be Canadian rather than Croatian but who more recently, influenced by the wars, has studied his grandfather’s history and that of Croatia. He tells Atijas and the narrator that the wars kindled his interest in “a bond beyond politics and ideology, a sense of loyalty to the native soil and a sense of the transmission of purity from heart to heart. . . . In short, his initial indifference toward Croatian political events slowly eroded: ignoring the heightened nationalist rhetoric became harder and harder.”The narrator reports exchanges between the three men over the course of several days, conversations that address questions of history, of Croatian Ustasha atrocities against Serbs and Jews and Serb atrocities against members of the Ustasha, of the grandfather’s complicity in those and more recent crimes, of responsibility for the crimes of history, and of explanations for the disintegration of the multicultural state of Yugoslavia. Here a representative exchange between the narrator and Atijas:
Somewhere, I told him, I had read that the prairie populist movements were rooted in the rich soil of intolerance that had produced a dualistic view of the world, and this dualism produced, I said, a simplistic divide of people into friends and foes, and everyone who was not a friend, or whom you didn’t understand, or whose customs were strange to you, everyone like that could be only a foe. Daniel Atijas laughed again, adding that he had never bought into generalizations like these, and now, after all that had happened in his former country, he believed them even less, particularly because, as nearly everyone claimed, the country had come apart at the seams and the war had erupted because of similar hostile feelings from times gone by or perhaps, as some claimed, he said, because hostile feelings were always there in the genes, mind, heart, and guts of every person who lived there. Because of that, he said, he had made an effort to pin down the crux and thrust of the hostility and knew, he said, of no better explanation than one in the wisdom of the Talmud: if two people come to us for help and one is a foe, help the foe first.
Reflections on the part of the narrator gradually reveal an erotic obsession with Atijas. There is a joint climb up Tunnel Mountain. There is a death. And finally the characters, like Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, leave the hermetic mountains and return to the flow of history. Globetrotter is a magical novel about time and disease, narration and identity, immigration and love, a timely novel about the histories in and through which the other themes are so intricately and fatefully intertwined.The selected stories in Albahari’s Learning Cyrillic likewise explore what Albahari calls the “double consciousness” of the immigrant. The titles of the twenty-seven stories, a short form well suited to Albahari’s wry powers of observation and invention, reflect the nature of the short story as Goethe so well (and untranslatably) defined it: “eine sich ereignende unerhörte Begebenheit”—a sensational or incredible event taking place in the narration. “Squirrel, Peanut, Hat,” “Plums in Saskatchewan,” “Holding Hands,” “Calgary Real Estate,” “The Pajamas,” and “Hitler in Chicago” all announce their intent to recount a single event. And in Albahari’s case, these single events will disclose, each in its own way, the double consciousness of the stories’ narrators.“Hitler in Chicago” is an enigmatic three-page story-within-a-story told by a woman to the narrator while he flies back from “a meeting of writers from the former Yugoslavia,” writers who “were to build a path to a new understanding, but instead . . . just brought the old differences to the fore.” When the woman sees him reading Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies: A Love Story, she offers to tell him a story about a night she spent with Singer. She caught Singer’s interest by mentioning that she had once seen Hitler in Chicago. He invited her back to his room. She left Singer sleeping in the early morning, she says, left him with her story about having seen Hitler in Chicago, and left with his watch that she steals in exchange for the story. Later, she read Singer’s version of her story in the “New Yorker, or maybe The Atlantic”—the scene changed to New York but essentially her story. “Did you really see Hitler in Chicago?” the narrator asks when she is done with her account? “Everyone must see Hitler once in their life,” she answers. “No need to go to Chicago for that.” Displaced geographically and distanced by the passage of time from the historical events that disrupted their lives, immigrants live double lives in which Hitler (or the nationalist leaders Franjo Tuđman (Croatia), Alija Izetbegović (Bosnia), and Slobodan Milošević (Serbia)) are omnipresent. Albahari’s complicated tale of the narrator’s account of the woman’s account of the genesis of Singer’s story “The Cafeteria” is a performance of double or triple consciousness. In Singer’s actual story (not the one in Albahari’s retelling), the narrator reflects on the seemingly crazy woman who told him the story of Hitler in New York City and decides in the end that “if time and space are nothing more than forms of perception, as Kant argues, and quality, quantity, causality are only categories of thinking, why shouldn’t Hitler confer with his Nazis in a cafeteria on Broadway?”The stories in this collection are unsettling, especially as they demonstrate that identity is anything but singular. Near the end of “Fingernails, Mouse,” a story about young love and its potential dangers, a reader must pay close attention to follow the generations as they slip from the female narrator to her daughter to her mother to her daughter to herself to her mother who slapped her: “I looked at her. Then I looked at a photograph on which my mother, very young, was leaning against a blossoming tree. Her face wore the same expression I had seen on my daughter’s face Saturdays or Sundays, every time she came home late. When I came home late for the first time, Mother slapped me.” We cannot disentangle our experiences of love from those of our mothers and daughters.“’Let’s talk about love,’ says my wife.” So begins “A Story with No Way Out” whose narrator’s wife inhabits his text both as his wife and as a character in the story. “’Is there bread anywhere?’ asks my wife. ‘Where would bread fit,’ I answer with a question, ‘in a story about love?’ ‘Love won’t sustain you, dear,’ says my wife. ‘You should have mentioned a refrigerator at the beginning of the story.’” This story about stories is charming. It also raises questions about the stories on which we base our identities. “’If you really think love is measured in different ways inside the story and outside of it,’ says my wife, ‘then I definitely will not leave. I will hide behind a verb and no one will find me.’” Is there a way out of narratives that were incomplete at best and that have been further disturbed by history? The narrator hopes, in the end, that a reader can be of assistance: “. . . if a reader could bring a glass of water. Bread gets easily caught in the throat, particularly when it’s dry.”The narrator’s wife in “Calgary Real Estate” is fixated on keeping buyers with children away from the house for sale next door. She worries about a myriad of other things as well, as the narrator learns in a conversation with their lawyer. His wife has called the lawyer twelve times in the last two weeks: “’seeking a ban on bringing young children in public transport, reporting the woman from a nearby street because the grass was too long in her back yard, and yesterday she insisted that I write into your will that the funeral must not be held in the rain.’” Nonplussed, the narrator asks if she has made plans for where he would be buried: “’You will be cremated,’ the lawyer answered, ‘and then she is taking the urn to Belgrade, where there will be a memorial service.’” Not until this point does a reader know the characters are immigrants, and this disclosure by the lawyer is a moment of awakening for the narrator as well. Uprooted from Belgrade, resettled in Calgary, traumatized by unspoken events, fearful of or for children, she is reduced to stipulating that her husband not be buried in the rain. As the story continues the narrator joins his wife in her bizarre attempts to control what little she can. He too is an immigrant.“Learning Cyrillic,” the book’s title story, is divided into 37 numbered paragraphs, a formal device quite different from the novel without paragraphs but that likewise slows and disrupts a reading. The story is told by a lonely Serb who has emigrated to a cold, Canadian city where on Friday evenings he goes to church, not to pray, he says, but to teach Serbian to children of fellow immigrants. The story juxtaposes two lost causes: the impossible task of preserving Serbian language and culture in a context in which the English-speaking children are eager to assimilate and the equally impossible attempt by a mysterious Indian to preserve his Siksika language and culture in a place and time where his people are known only as Blackfeet whose remains are displayed in a museum.The events of this story are largely unremarkable, but as the fragments accumulate a reader begins to sense the narrator’s profound loneliness, a feeling heightened by the isolation shared in somewhat different ways by the genial but somewhat clueless priest in whose church the Serbian lessons are given and by the Indian who eventually reveals that his name is Thunder Cloud. The story’s last three sections (35, 36, 37) end with three bleak sentences: “I shut my eyes and I’m gone. . . . I find a dead mouse. . . . I start to walk until I find myself across the street.” Gone, dead, the narrator finds himself only on the other side of the street, not within the church and not in the Cyrillic letters of his Serbian language. He finds himself, as do all immigrants, in the language of the new country, in English-language “green letters” of the pedestrian signal that invite him to cross the street. The German word for misery, “Elend,” means in its root sense “out of or away from one’s country.” The characters in this and the other fine stories by David Albahari are all—humorously and gently and each with his or her quirks—miserably away from home. Which leaves me sad as well in the early darkness of this November afternoon. All readers are immigrants.____Scott Abbott is the author, most recently, of two books with Žarko Radaković: Repetitions and Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary (punctum books, 2013 and 2014; originally published in Belgrade in Serbo-Croatian)
