“There was fascism, there was communism and the bugbears of communism. Now, there is, supposedly, none of that, and all the filth of those times has been swept under the carpet.” – from Canzone di Guerra by Daša Drndić, translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. B O D Y’s Winter Issue rolls on with […]
The Central European Short Story Issue kicks off its second week with a short story that harks back to Prague’s more fun and disreputable days of the early 90s. “That afternoon he took a taxi ride, bought a second-hand violin on the street of Alchemists, visited museums, had lunch and drank the best Austrian wine, […]
The world lost a major writer when Daša Drndić passed away earlier this year. The author of Trieste, Belladonna and Leica Format, all available in English translation, is still seeing her work coming out in English with the soon-to-be-published Doppelgänger coming out from Istros Books in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth and Susan Curtis. Read […]
Croatia’s Lit Link Festival takes place later this week from June 29 through July 1. With writers and literary editors from the UK as guests together with Croatian writers the festival takes place in three cities in three successive days – Pula on June 29, Rijeka on June 30 and Zagreb on July 1. The […]
Spomenka Štimec, who writes in both her native Croatian as well as Esperanto, recently had her book Croatian War Nocturnal published in an English translation by Sebastian Schulman by Phoneme Media. I conducted an interview with her by way of e-mail and Sebastian Schulman’s translation from Esperanto, where she speaks about beginning to write in […]
“…Pieces of dreams: in the morning, as he slept, she’d kiss the middle of his back. She’d walk barefoot, and he would hand her the slippers. He would shovel the snow in front of the door as she looked out the window. They would go to the mountains, rivers, lakes, and seaside. They would never […]
“The army wanted my brother to report the next day at nine o’clock. The draft card covered up the ladies with their long skirts at the evening cabaret. France cabarets its nights away. I was born here, where a different program is in store. A mix of fear and bitterness suddenly overwhelmed me and wouldn’t […]
“They say that when people jump from their own – or someone else’s – windows and balconies, they first take off their socks, shoes, trainers, slippers. They jump barefoot. With their hangnails, corns and hard heels. They go to join their barefoot ancestors.” From the absolutely unique and brilliant award-winning Hair Everywhere by Tea Tulić, […]
At Literary Hub, B O D Y-favorite translator Will Firth has compiled a list of 10 books by women writers from the Balkans that he’d like to see in translated into English. As he points out in his introduction, there are very few books in translation and of these, only about 25% are by women […]
2015 Nobel Prize for literature winner Svetlana Alexievich gave her speech (available in a translation by Jamey Gambrell) a couple days ago in Stockholm and like her books it was a mix of her present reflections, witness testimonies as well as her diary entries stretching from 1980 to 1997. Her conclusions aren’t very cheerful, but […]
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