Sandorf Passage is a new independent nonprofit publishing house, whose first titles have been launched this month. Its founders, American Buzz Poole and Croatian Ivan Sršen have both previously worked as editors and obtained EU funding to bring works from the former Yugoslavia into English. Sandorf Passage focuses on “writing inspired by both conflict zones and the dangers of complacency.” Their first title, From Nowhere to Nowhere, by Bekim Sejranovic was published at the beginning of March. Now, with their second, Vesna Maric’s The President Shop released yesterday, and two more books due for release next month, Blog Editor Sarah Moore spoke with the founders of Sandorf Passage about the importance of translated works and what to expect from their titles.
Sarah Moore (SM): How did you both come to editing?
Buzz Poole (BP): I was a lifelong reader, studied literature in college as an undergraduate and then graduate student at San Francisco State University, where I got involved with a handbound letterpress literary journal called Em. At the time it was a hotbed of indie lit journals. I moved to New York, got a job as editor at Mark Batty Publisher (MBP), and moved on to be Managing Director of Black Balloon Publishing, which is now an imprint of Catapult—that’s where my story and Ivan’s started to merge. We had met at the Frankfurt Book Fair when I was at MBP and hit it off. Ivan was there as an agent and translator, and at the time we thought that we might try to do something, though it never quite worked out. Then fast forward to Black Balloon. I saw Ivan and said, “Hey, I’m acquiring fiction now—what have you got?” And he had Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, which was critically acclaimed and unlocked the floodgates in terms of our continuing collaborations.
Ivan Sršen (IS): During my studies I started working in a small bookstore that was owned by a small publishing house in Zagreb. I was just a twenty-year-old student, watching all these great authors and translators coming into our small bookstore. Being part of that collective was very important for me and shaped my view of the business of publishing and what editing really is. It’s a lot about communication: knowing the people, what they are looking for, what they have to offer, and where their horizon is spreading. I was lucky enough to get a job as an intern editor working on music books, which launched me into the world of creative publishing—a small scene but very diverse, with the legacy of former Yugoslavia. Many big writers came from Yugoslavia, like the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, and I wanted to pursue a literary editing career. So I worked with a few publishers until, in the end, I realised I would have to start something on my own. That’s how I started Sandorf in 2008—basically without any savings and on the verge of the world economic catastrophe! So those were interesting years, but that’s the time when I met Buzz. I always knew that I wanted to go beyond the borders. Not just national borders, but all kinds of borders—imaginary, mental—and in working with books there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.
SM: So how did Sandorf become Sandorf Passage?
BP: We’re very similar and we both have the desire to be as self-sufficient as possible and to do things the way we want them done. The Our Man in Iraq project was the first stepping-stone in this becoming something more official. Ivan was representing Robert as his agent and the book had already been published in a UK English-language edition so I had the benefit of being able to read it. When I read it, I liked it, but immediately said—with my editor’s cap on—that it needed to change and could become so much better. Robert and Ivan were open to that, and that’s the reason why the book got as much attention as it did; it’s a better book now, having received a more thorough edit than it had received originally in the Croatian or in the UK edition. This opened the door to its potential. Then Ivan and Robert were given funding from the Croatian Ministry of Culture to start a literary festival called Lit Link, which still exists. We started being able to invite international writers and editors to Croatia to meet Croatian authors. For the first project, Journey to Russia, Ivan was able to secure some funding for a Croatian domestic English-language edition that I worked on with Ivan and Will Firth, the translator. Then at an ALTA conference in Minneapolis three years ago, Ivan and I were both there. Sandorf had gotten to a very good place so we thought, what if we did a US imprint? And here we are. We got a grant from the EU to provide subsidies for bringing writing from the former Yugoslavia into the English-language market.
IS: Yes, having these four books that are now coming out, buying the rights for them, and discussing them with Buzz marked the beginning of Sandorf Passage. I already had the rights for late Bekim Sejranović’s novel From Nowhere To Nowhere. Then Vesna Maric sent me her new manuscript, The President Shop. And we had Journey to Russia, already translated by Will Firth and published by Sandorf in Croatia in English. So with these three main books in English, we agreed that we had to continue—we couldn’t say no! It’s great when you start a new independent publishing project because you can really enjoy the books and dedicate your time to each title. That’s what it’s all about in publishing: having time to work on the books, to take care, and to discuss them with the author.
SM: Tell me about these four books you’re publishing now. Why these four?
IS: First we had Journey to Russia translated into English, a dense text that shows a lot of the bitterness and whimsy of its great author, Miroslav Krleža. Krleža was a leftist and was travelling to Russia to witness the Soviet Union for himself. Even though he was disappointed in a lot of the things he saw, he didn’t lose his faith in humanity or in the cause of progress, of humanity becoming better. Working on that book with Buzz opened a perspective for other writers to come in and become part of Sandorf Passage.
Bekim Sejranović was a great nomad; he was a person without a country. What happened to him is described in part in From Nowhere to Nowhere, the story of a person being rooted from his soil and re-establishing himself in literature. We connected him with the sentiment of Krleža, for his writing shows a wish for humanity to be better. With Vesna Maric, we explored this perspective further. Vesna is a very powerful woman’s voice showing the perspective of Balkan literary culture, explained from a lineage of female characters. Then we had a very contemplative poetry collective by Ivana Bodrožić, who is having real success now with the books she published with Seven Stories Press, Hotel Tito and We Trade Our Night For Someone Else’s Day. She went through a very terrible experience in the war, but she was able to use this in literature; to channel frustration through literature and become a great author.
SM: I was very struck by Sandorf Passage’s description in its books, which also functions as its publishing vision: to release “work that creates a prismatic perspective on what it means to live in a globalized world . . . writing inspired by both conflict zones and the dangers of complacency.” What is Sandorf Passage’s vision addressing in today’s world? How do these four books fulfil it?
BP: It works, the mission statement worked!
SM: I loved it!
BP: Thank you. Well, I’m very proud of it as well. The President Shop and From Nowhere to Nowhere are two very different books, but they’re also very similar in that the protagonists are both dealing with a world they thought was safe and secure, until it was scattered in the wind one way or another. That’s certainly going on in Journey to Russia; Krleža goes to Russia months after Lenin died, and the entire system is breaking apart at the seams—but that’s also what’s going on in the world at large. So I like this both as a point of entry and it honouring the requirements of the EU funding, but it’s also what interests me about contemporary writing. I’m not interested in books about writers trying to write. That’s been done. Something I’ve always been drawn to in works of translation is when they show me things I don’t know about. And of course, the power of being shown something you don’t know about is that it also resonates on a sort of universal level. As foreign as a story, experience, or scene might be to my own immediate firsthand experience, great writing makes you feel something. That’s what I want to go after with any book we end up acquiring down the road. It won’t always be a work by an author from the former Yugoslavia, but we will be leaning heavily that way for the next couple of lists.
That said, our Fall 2021 list has three titles that fit these established parameters, but also a fourth title by a Nigerian writer who writes in English. I’m really excited about that. She is talking about indigenous traditions clashing up against the glare of smartphone screens, and really presenting something that I’m not overly familiar with but which I recognise. What I want all these books to do is to embrace and celebrate, even if they make you uncomfortable in certain ways, because that’s the only way we can understand the world. That’s how the world is today. Borders are meaningless in a lot of ways and great books, great art, know how to deal with that.
IS: Kasimma, the Nigerian writer whose book we are publishing in the fall, comes from a great literary tradition of Igbo writers in Nigeria, such as Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s a great tradition—the same as, for example, the former Yugoslavia or Bosnian literature. Both Vesna Maric and Bekim Sejranović are Bosnian writers and Bosnian authors are both unfortunate and fortunate: unfortunate because of the war, and fortunate because we can read them all over the world. A lot of writers from the former Yugoslavia had to go into exile, and therefore have brought this literature to the world. In a way, literature can repair the damage that has been done in the past by giving an original interpretation of what was happening.
SM: That’s interesting that you’ll be publishing a Nigerian writer because of course, the EU grant informs that a lot of your first writers are from the former Yugoslavia. Will you expand to different continents in the future?
BP: We’ll expand anywhere for any writer whose work matches that mission statement. That’s why we very intentionally balance conflict—which is a direct reference to the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s—to the dangers of complacency. What Ivan does at Sandorf, and what I’ve been lucky to do, is wear our tastes on our sleeve, for better or worse. That’s what Sandorf Passage will be: work that we find resonant and compelling.
IS: I have great respect for the tradition of independent American publishers. Ever since Walt Whitman and mid-nineteenth-century East Coast bohemian cultural circles, until the twentieth century, when a lot of European writers and intellectuals had to flee to the States, there has always been a great concentration of independent thinking in publishing. To be a part of that is already something that obligates me to work harder—to be responsible to the authors we acquire, and to follow that great example. On the other hand, publishing in ex-Yugoslavia and in Croatia, where I come from, still carries that legacy of being open and translating a lot of different languages. Sandorf has published more than thirty languages, so it’s a great experience when you are dedicated and persistent in looking for new voices, exploring the history of the world, and trying to see the connections between literature, art, and history.
SM: How did you find the translators?
IS: With Journey to Russia, Will Firth approached us. Will has invested a lot of his time in literature from Croatia, so we often met him at Frankfurt Book Fair. Then we offered for him to translate Bekim Sejranović, and of course Will knew about Bekim before we asked him to translate the novel. It’s very important to have a translator who is familiar with the literary scene; that’s the great role of translators, because they’re not only translating the text, they are also interpreters of cultural context. Sometimes they understand what’s going on better than the majority of the actors of that literary scene, because there are always rivals and competitors, but the translators don’t care about that. So that’s how we started working with Will on From Nowhere To Nowhere, and I have also known Ellen Elias-Bursać for some time. We asked Ellen to translate In A Sentimental Mood, and she wanted to work with Damir Šodan because she knew he was already working on it. He had worked for several years with Ellen at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, and she wanted him to take part in this translation. It’s important for a publisher to listen to the translator, and I think that Ellen’s idea to include Damir was a great suggestion.
Vesna’s book is written in English and how I came to the book is now a translator’s part of the story. I translate from English, and Vesna published an autobiographical novel that speaks about her refugee experience. I was amazed that nobody had published the book in ex-Yugoslavia. I decided I would translate it, which was a great challenge because I was actually translating a writer’s book from her second language into her first language. That’s the biggest responsibility a translator can have. It was a wonderful experience, and then she said “I have a new manuscript.” And that’s how we got to The President Shop.
BP: And to bring it all full circle, she will be translating one of our titles for next year!
SM: What’s the biggest challenge of setting up a publishing house?
BP: Raising awareness and making that awareness work for you. It’s something I’ve seen firsthand with books I’ve worked on—having amazing press doesn’t always translate to amazing sales. Something that I’m really proud to have done is that I wrote a letter that we sent out with the books to the top fifty independent bookstores in the US, wherein I introduced myself and talked about the importance of the independent bookseller. I want to really focus on indies and libraries because even the large publishers recognise that the hand sell is powerful. That’s what it’s all about—build a backlist that will be interesting and dynamic so bookstore buyers and readers will always be looking forward to what’s new.
Buzz Poole, co-founder and publisher of Sandorf Passage, lives in Maine. He has written about books, music, and culture for numerous media outlets, including The Believer, The Boston Globe, Print, and Lit Hub; he is also the author of Workingman’s Dead, published by Bloomsbury as part of the 33 1/3 series.
Ivan Sršen, co-founder of Sandorf Passage, lives in Zagreb, Croatia. In 2007 he started the Zagreb-based independent publisher Sandorf. As an author he published four books. He has translated a range of authors from English to Croatian including Charles Reznikoff, Frank Zappa, and Robert Graves. His translated works appeared in the literary publications such as Lit Hub and New York Review of Books. He edited the Balkan volume Zagreb Noir in Noir series for Akashic Books.