Milan Matović
Gojko Tešić
Leon Koen
Srđan Šaper
Cvetan Todorov
Cola Dragojčeva
Ioannis Ziziulas
Janis Ricos
Alexis Carrington
Leonid Šejka
Bora Ćosić
Amfilohije Radović
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikola Milošević
Ranko Jovović
Marko Ćirić
Nedeljko Rakić
Suzana Mančić
Ljuba Popović
Branko Kukić
Olja Ivanjicki
Kole Čašule
Gojko Nikoliš
Slobodan Milošević
Milan Popović
Živojin Pavlović
Ilija Gorkić
Svetislav Veizović
Cvitko Bdlić
Eddy Merckx
Sonja Savić
Dobrica Ćosić
Slobodan Gavrilović
Laslo Vegel
Miodrag
Petrović-Čkalja
Bohumil Hrabal
Jonathan Koehler
Jozef Škvorecki
John Glenn
Martina Navratilova
Marina Švabić
Slobodan Milivojević-Era
Goranka Matić
Nadin De Free Shop
Milojko Knežević
Predrag Marković
Mihajlo Pantić
Slavko Šajber
Mila Kostić
Ljiljana Tica
Vlada Mijanović
Dragan Blagojević
Freddy Mercury
Laura Jane Richardson
John Cleese
Charles Santos
George W. Bush, Jr.
Ignatius Reilly
Ken Scandlyn
Charlton Heston
George Harrison
Michael Moore
Denise Huddle
Louise Ciccone
Gary Hardwick
Steven Hawking
Oscar Wilde
Simon Gill
Emmanuel Radnitzky
Mikhail Bakhtin
Homer Simpson
Eddie “Son” House
Woody Allen
Note:
List is incomplete
and unverified
Author Bio
Svetislav Basara is a major figure of contemporary Serbian literature and the author of five collections of short stories, thirteen novels, a dozen books of essays, plays, and novellas. In 2006, Basara received the NIN Award for his novel The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease. His 1985 novel, Chinese Letter, is also available in English translation. Basara served as the Serbian Ambassador to Cyprus from 2001 to 2005.
Translator Bio
Randall A. Major teaches in the English Department at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, and is also one of the editors and translators of the Serbian Prose in Translation series produced by Geopoetika Publishing in Belgrade in cooperation with the Serbian Ministry of Culture.
About Open Letter
Open Letter — the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press — is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing ten titles in translation each year, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.
Making world literature available in English is crucial to opening our cultural borders, and its availability plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy and vibrant book culture. Open Letter strives to cultivate an audience for these works by helping readers discover imaginative, stunning works of fiction and by creating a constellation of international writing that is engaging, stimulating, and enduring.
Current and forthcoming titles from Open Letter include works from Argentina, Bulgaria, Catalonia, China, Iceland, Poland, and many other countries.
www.openletterbooks.org
~ ~ ~
* In ink that becomes visible only after two-hundred years, majordomo Grossman left the following note in the margins of the manuscript:
“On the order of the king-dishwasher I am copying this nonsense full of blasphemy and spitting upon me, Grossman, I who was just about to finish my doctorate and I who would be a doctor if evil tongues had not accused me of heresy. The fact is that he sees the future; any fool can prophesy. But what else can an educated man do in this time except to put up with the whims of madmen. Charles has become arrogant. He boasts of being the keeper of the faith, and he doesn’t believe in God, nor does God believe in him. A few years ago he knelt before the crucifix, just for the sake of things (may the omnipotent one forgive me), and the cross fell down and knocked old Hideous on the head. Since then the knot on his head has not receded. It makes him even more hideous, if that’s possible. In associating with me in that unfortunate tavern he learned a little bit about theology and now he constantly babbles about it to the courtiers who, pretending, flatter him and shout their approval. Why, recently he humiliated me in front of the followers while we were discussing whether women have souls. Non habet, I claimed, and was proving it, when Charles says: Huh, not only do they not have a soul, women don’t exist at all. And then he said that since he had placed the vagina as the center of the female organism he had cleared the way for Nicolaus Copernicus, and that since he claimed that women don’t exist, he was the forerunner of existentialism, some devilish thing. God save us! But even the Devil isn’t that dark. Realizing that he’d gone too far, he feigned to repent and confessed. But not for long. As soon as Father Albert, his confessor, came back from the blasphemy he had to listen to, the Hideous executed Queen Margot just because she returned a look from the Baron Von Kurtiz. He executed the baron as well, of course. He boasts of having driven nails into the back of the throne, that he is constantly crucifying himself. He did put the nails in, but he also took a file and shaved them dull by his own hand. And anyway, because of his rheumatism, he always wears an ox-hide vest. The genius of half truth. Now he wants to write the history of the world ahead of time, and I have to participate in that lunacy. May God have mercy on me and on Europe.”
** Note: The text of Majordomo Grossman is reproduced from the journal Oblique (3, 1967), dedicated in its entirety to the history of European heresies.
*** In 726, Leo III openly spoke out against the cult of icons for the first time. Bishops from Asia Minor, iconoclasts, certainly had an influence on him as they had visited Istanbul just before that; also, a powerful earthquake also had an influence on him, because he, in the spirit of the times, took that as a sign of God’s wrath, caused by icon worship. First, he held sermons in which he attempted to convince the people that respect of icons was against the Christian faith. (G. Ostrogorsky, The History of the Byzantine State)
**** The dream mentioned by Kowalsky is fairly well-known, and is related to dreams that come just before the alarm clock rings. In such cases, the long and logical flow of dreaming overlaps with the ringing.
***** Here is, among other things, what one of the members of the Order of the Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, Lewis Mumford, says: “The clock is, in addition, such an operational machine whose ‘products’ are seconds and minutes: in its essential nature it separated time from human events and helped to create belief in an independent world of mathematics and measurable sequences: an independent world of science. In everyday human experience there is proportionally little basis for that belief. During the year, days do not last the same amount of time, and the shorter travel from the east to the west changes astronomic time by a certain number of minutes.”