1Irrespective of my own early participation in professional literary life, the historical record shows that women have been consistently erased from the public domain, from professional organizations and institutions of canonization (national academies, school reading lists, histories of literature, and so forth). In mid-nineteenth century America, books by women made up half the bestseller lists. Critical opinion soon formed evaluatory codes for “women’s writing.” Women were tasked with domestic subjects such as children and the family, with matters of religion and morality, their texts aesthetically crowned or dismissed in accordance with how well they satisfied the burdens of gender expectations — in other words, the extent to which they conformed. Women didn’t create this division of labor, men did. How might we otherwise explain terms such “lady author,” “authoress,” “poetess,” or “criticess,” all ironically coined to describe women in literature?
2Bidisha, “I’m tired of being the token woman,” The Guardian, April 22 2010.
3The hymn, Hey, Slovaks, was written by Samuel-Samo Tomašik, a Slovak. In the spirit of the pan-Slavic movement of the time, he ended up dedicating the song to all Slavs, and in 1848 it was sung at the pan-Slavic congress in Prague. A hundred years later, Yugoslavs “adopted” Tomašik’s song as the official Yugoslav national anthem.
4The citation is from Andrew Bennett’s The Author (Routledge, 2005), one of the most instructive studies on the subject of the author and authorship.
5See John Mullan’s most interesting study, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Princeton University Press, 2008).
ON-ZONE
Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian better known as Sir Alfred, lived at Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1998 until 2006, and for much of this time was a kind of tourist attraction. Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal was in part inspired by Nasseri’s life story. In contrast to Tom Hanks’s character in the film, Alfred spent most of his time reading. “It’s like a day at the library,” he said.
1.
A few years ago at Bucharest Airport I spotted a sign saying Zona fumatore, which simply means a smoking area — it just sounds way better in Romanian. You see all kinds of zones on your travels: free zones (zona franca), no-go zones, duty-free zones, you name it. West Germans used to call East Germany die Zone, by which they meant the Soviet Zone. There are time zones, erogenous zones, even Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is set in a zone. There’s a weight-loss diet called The Zone, and then you’ve also got zoning, in the sense of urban planning. In sci-fi, a zone is usually some sort of dystopia. Hearing the word “zone,” our first association is a clearly defined space, our second, its evanescence. Zones can be erected and dissembled like tents, ephemeral. Last but not least, there’s a form of literary life we might call the “out-of-nation zone,” best abbreviated as the ON-zone. I know a person who lives in that zone. That person is me.
I write in the language of a small country. I left that small country twenty years ago in an effort to preserve my right to a literary voice, to defend my writings from the constraints of political, national, ethnic, gender, and other ideological projections. Although true, the explanation rings a little phony, like a line from an intellectual soap opera. Parenthetically, male literary history is full of such lines, but with men being “geniuses,” “rebels,” “renegades,” “visionaries,” intellectual and moral bastions, etc. — when it comes to intellectual autobiographical kitsch, they get free passes. People only turn up their noses when it escapes a woman’s lips. Even hip memes like “words without borders” and “literature without borders” ring pretty phony, too. The important point here is that having crossed the border, I found myself in a literary out-of-nation zone, the implications of which I only figured out much later.
It could be said that I didn’t actually leave my country, but rather, that splitting into six smaller ones, my country left me. My mother tongue was the only baggage I took with me, the only souvenir my country bequeathed me. My spoken language in everyday situations was easy to switch, but changing my literary language, I was too old for that. In a second language I could have written books with a vocabulary of about five hundred words, which is about how many words million-shipping bestsellers have. Unfortunately, my ambitions lay elsewhere. I don’t have any romantic illusions about the irreplaceability of one’s mother tongue, nor have I ever understood the coinage’s etymology. Perhaps this is because my mother was Bulgarian, and Bulgarian her mother tongue. She spoke flawless Croatian though, better than many Croats. On the off chance I did ever have any romantic yearnings, they were destroyed irrevocably almost two decades ago, when Croatian libraries were euphorically purged of “non-Croatian books,” meaning books by Serbian writers, Croatian “traitors,” books by “commies” and “Yugoslavs,” books printed in Cyrillic. Mouths buttoned tight, my fellow writers bore witness to a practice that may have been short-lived, but was no less terrifying for it. The orders for the library cleansings came from the Croatian Ministry of Culture. Indeed, if I ever harbored any linguistic romanticism, it was destroyed forever the day Bosnian Serbs set their mortars on the National Library in Sarajevo. Radovan Karadžić, a Sarajevo psychiatrist and poet — a “colleague”—led the mission of destruction. Writers ought not forget these things. I haven’t. Which is why I repeat them obsessively. For the majority of writers, a mother tongue and national literature are natural homes, for an “unadjusted” minority, they’re zones of trauma. For such writers, the translation of their work into foreign languages is a kind of refugee shelter. And so translation is for me. In the euphoria of the Croatian bibliocide, my books also ended up on the scrap heap.
After several years of academic and literary wandering, I set up camp in a small and convivial European country. Both my former and my present literary milieu consider me a “foreigner,” each for their own reasons of course. And they’re not far wrong: I am a foreigner, and I have my reasons. The ON-zone is an unusual place to voluntarily live one’s literary life. Life in the zone is pretty lonely, yet with the suspect joy of a failed suicide, I live with the consequences of a choice that was my own. I write in a language that has split into three — Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian — but in spite of concerted efforts to will it apart, remains the same language. It’s the language in which war criminals have pled their innocence at the Hague Tribunal for the past twenty years. At some point, the tribunals’ tortured translators came up with an appropriate acronym: BCS (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian). Understandably, the peoples reduced and retarded by their bloody divorce can’t stand the fact that their language is now just an acronym. So the Croats call it Croatian, the Bosnians Bosnian, the Serbs Serbian, even the Montenegrins have come up with an original name: They call it Montenegrin.
What sane person would want a literary marriage with an evidently traumatized literary personality like me? No one. Maybe the odd translator. Translators keep me alive in literary life. Our marriage is a match between two paupers, our symbolic capital on the stock market of world literature entirely negligible. My admiration for translators is immense, even when they translate the names Ilf and Petrov as the names of Siberian cities. Translators are mostly humble folk. Almost invisible on the literary map, they live quiet lives in the author’s shadow. My empathy with translators stems, at least in part, from my own position on the literary map; I often feel like I’m invisible too. However things really are, translating, even from a small language, is still considered a profession. But writing in a small language, from a literary out-of-nation zone, now that is not a profession—that is a diagnosis.