Lana Bastašić’s novel Catch the Rabbit, published this year by Picador (UK) and Restless Books (US), has launched the author and her work into the orbit of contemporary world fiction. Translated into English by the author herself, the book delivers an unprecedented and riveting tale of female friendship, which spans the recent history of the Balkans. Best friends Lejla and Sara, a Bosnian Muslim and a Serb, whose strong yet strained bond suffers a twelve-year discontinuation, reunite on a quest for the missing pieces in the puzzle of their personal lives in post-war Bosnia. Here, Bastašić discusses her writing process and translating the book into English, as well as the possibility of catharsis in contemporary Balkan fiction—at a moment when ongoing political and social processes provide none in real life.
Jovanka Kalaba (JK): Catch the Rabbit, which came after two collections of short stories, a collection of poetry, and a book of stories for children, won the 2020 EU Prize for Literature for Bosnia and Herzegovina and was shortlisted for the NIN Award. Moreover, it has been widely read in the countries of former Yugoslavia. How do you understand the success and impact of the book?
Lana Bastašić (LB): In the past three years I have found myself in a very peculiar situation of having to explain or justify the success of my book. It was usually male journalists in the Balkans who would ask, “How do you explain this?”—the underlying assumption being that there is something surprising or unnatural about a young woman writing an internationally successful book. It simply doesn’t happen that often in the Balkans because we are faced with a thick firewall of institutionalized patriarchy. I didn’t make it through the firewall; instead I took another path, translated my own book, and found an agent in another country. But the most difficult part was not about getting published elsewhere. It had to do with battling impostor syndrome, becoming assertive, and believing that my work deserved to be read.
This is the battle all of us women writers in the Balkans have to fight within ourselves—to silence the centuries-old voice inside telling us we can’t write. Once I killed that phantom, I could do anything. And I did. The problem I am witnessing now is not about being successful or unsuccessful but about the language used to describe my success. My male colleagues in Serbia are usually “the biggest new talent” or “the most authentic new voice” and, if older, “genius,” etc. My female colleagues and I are simply “literary stars”—a category that says nothing of the quality of our work but simply states that we are popular. However, I can’t spend too much time dwelling on this, otherwise the phantom reappears and paralyzes me.
JK: The intricate political and cultural realities of the Balkans are reflected in your personal and professional path as well: you are a Serb born in Zagreb (Croatia), you spent a great deal of your life in Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and now you live in Belgrade (Serbia). Albeit challenging and traumatic, this experience of growing up during the country’s disintegration and belonging in some way to three former Yugoslav republics has provided you with a scope of understanding most young people, stifled within their own national and religious communities, could not have. What did you take from those life circumstances?
LB: On a personal level, I wish I’d had a more boring life. It would have been easier. On another level, I truly believe that it was this particular set of events and circumstances that made me the kind of writer and person I am today. My sense of belonging, of home, of origin, etc., is much more complex, more layered, and I am acutely aware of the fact that identity is an ongoing, ever-changing narrative with many different narrators, words, even languages. More often than not, it is a performance with a ready-made script, costume, and setting. As a writer, you have to be able to spot the pattern in the way people act, talk, and live. You have to be able to see through the pattern and try to get to the person hidden behind it.
Therefore, I also approach other human beings and their stories with the benefit of the doubt—instead of pinning one tag on them (say, Serbian, or migrant, or Jewish, etc.). I believe there’s always more to it, and if I open my eyes and ears I might learn something. But in order to do that, a writer has to get rid of her own personal and social patterns, and this is hard work which can last a lifetime.
JK: The narrator’s best friend, Lejla, embodies endless longing, frustration, and the despair that our Balkan homelands tend to produce in its people, whether they are emigrants or not. This elusiveness is perhaps best captured at the beginning of the novel: “You can’t have Lejla. Unless you finish her off, put her in a nice frame, and hang her on the wall.” Although the Alice in Wonderland epigraph in the original novel suggests that the book will avoid the trap of explaining, I will still ask: If you had to articulate the “illogical sadness on the edges of [our] being,” the particular brand of gloom that we cultivate in our Balkan wasteland, what would you say?
LB: I always say that it can’t be explained, it can only be experienced. I travel a lot and usually meet well-meaning people who tell me they would like to understand the Balkans, and I tell them it’s impossible. You can’t truly understand another human being, let alone the whole tapestry of experience through history and culture and language. The position of the well-meaning Westerner is already problematic in itself, and the understanding part always stinks of colonialism to me. Somehow it turns the Balkans into a dark, vague, and exotic land of mystery. However, what we can do, and what literature should do, is to offer an experience, take you through the web of someone else’s words and perspectives and emotions. Literature is the field of empathy—it connects complete strangers on their basic human level, making it possible for them to empathize with situations far removed from their own. This is what I wanted to do, not just for the reader but also for my narrator: to attempt an understanding, even though it is impossible, because this attempt is the most humane thing we can do.
JK: I found the book’s narrative voice to be superbly powerful and stylistically nuanced. What were the major challenges in the process of rendering it into a foreign language?
LB: When I set out to translate the novel, I never thought my translation would be published. I simply needed a readable draft to show to an agent, so that he or she would know what the book was about. Later, I had to rework the text and improve it because the UK publisher wanted my original translation. This was a difficult process but also very educational. When you translate your own work, you look at your text from a distance. Suddenly you are thinking as a translator, and you can see every little weakness of the book. This was immensely useful for me because I could then edit the new edition of the Bosnian and Serbian book and make it much better. I also understood very early on that I couldn’t just translate Sara’s words into another language. I had to find her in English. It has been her language for twelve years, and surely she is not the same person in that medium. This is why I didn’t care about being literal or one hundred percent accurate. I was more concerned with her voice, rhythm, and style. I had to accept the fact that it could never be the same book. Once I accepted that, I could translate more freely. And better.
JK: How would you describe the experience of working with your editors?
LB: I loved working with Ansa Khan-Khattak, my editor at Picador UK. She was extremely respectful of my decisions, and her advice nearly always made the text better. We tried to neutralize my overly American English for global readership and also managed to avoid footnotes by incorporating minimal information in the text itself. I also feel lucky that my first English editor and publisher was European. I don’t want to run the risk of overgeneralizing, but it seems to me that there still exists a very European way of doing literature for the sake of literature. There is no elevator pitch in Europe, or at least I’ve never been asked to provide one. Americans seem more worried about wasting time (which they interpret through money), so everything needs to be cut, shortened, delivered in under a minute. Another thing I have noticed among American journalists is the obsession with the real story. They keep asking how much of the book really happened. They seem to be confusing truthfulness and truth with reality, which I find very worrisome. Fiction can tell the truth without including a single fact. That is its unique power. We need to invent the scaffolding in order to reveal deeper truths. Otherwise, journalism would be enough.
JK: The beginning of the novel reminded me of Chingiz Aitmatov’s celebrated novella “Jamila,” which also begins with a description of a painting of two lovers: “if they were to take another step, they would disappear behind the frame.” And they do—the counternarrative that the protagonists claim even materializes into a happy ending. You wrote that Milica Vučković’s new novel, Smrtni ishod atletskih povreda (Fatal Outcome of Athletic Injuries), “does not allow the ‘bourgeois’ consolation of a beautiful sentence, nor does it provide an easy catharsis of happy endings.” It seems that for Balkan authors, producing a piece of writing suffused with some hope of redemption and—if I may—happiness is almost indecent. Why is that so?
LB: I don’t think happiness is indecent, nor did I ever impose a sad ending to a story—I simply follow the logic of the story itself. I don’t even know what a happy or a sad ending means exactly. Someone gets married? Characters hug? Lejla wins the lottery? Happiness is an elusive category, and it is different for each of us. What I do know is that literature is not there to provide us with a quick dopamine fix. That is pornography. I always advise my readers to turn to different activities if climax is what they are after. Literature is there to provide the journey and to make us question and reflect on things. In the case of my novel, a traditional happy ending, where everything is fixed and everyone is happy, would betray the story itself. My narrator would have learned nothing. I would have prostituted the story of my country—which is painful and had no happy ending whatsoever—to give the reader a three-act Hollywood drama. It is a Bosnian story and not an American one. I simply followed the thread. To me, it is a happy ending. Something is learned, Sara has unlearned important things, and Lejla is finally free.
JK: David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” tackles what he calls “new sincerity,” breaking away from numbness, irony, and detachment in literature. “The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh, how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.” But as he says in the same text, “Maybe that’ll be the point.” The essay was written in 1993. I have a feeling that our literary voices lack this consideration. Do you think we will catch up? And when?
LB: I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace, but at the same time I don’t think literature should do one thing. The beauty of it is precisely that we all do different things, in different ways, and when you put all those pieces together, something is communicated. However, I do agree with Foster Wallace on one point he had made throughout his interviews and essays: we have been so afraid of sounding sentimental that we have gone to the opposite extreme and have become cynical. Everything is ironized, he said, so that after reading such books he needs to “go look at a flower.” He talked about this more than twenty years ago. I think it is important for a writer to battle the cliché, the commonplace, the pattern, while not falling into the fangs of a different pattern altogether. I still believe in beauty, and I believe it is best shown in the simplest of details, with language devoid of fancy attire. I also believe that all great literature talks about Love, capital L, or lack of it, in all its different forms and attitudes. This is where cynicism can be lethal for literature, and we should battle it just as hard as we battle the cliché.
JK: If we don’t catch up, how interesting do you think our literatures can be to foreign readership in the future?
LB: I have a problem with this way of thinking and talking literature, because it presupposes that what we do is a sort of scientific field. This suggests a scientific discourse, the one of patents, and catching up, etc. Our job is not to catch up, it is not to attract foreign readership, or to think globally. Literature is not a fast-food chain. Each one of us should do their own thing and do it truthfully and the best we can. It might be telling the simplest story in the simplest language, or writing a thousand-page historical novel. As long as you are doing your thing, because you simply have to do it and nothing else with quench that thirst, it doesn’t matter what it is or whether it fits globally or whether a reader in Iowa or Japan or Gambia will connect with it. It is simple. Tell the truth. Do it with dragons and fairies if that’s your thing, but tell the truth.
Lana Bastašić is a Yugoslav-born writer. She majored in English and holds a master’s degree in cultural studies. She has published three collections of short stories, one book of children’s stories, and one of poetry. Her debut novel Catch the Rabbit was shortlisted for the 2019 NIN award and was awarded the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature. She lives in Belgrade. Her short stories have been included in regional anthologies and magazines throughout the former Yugoslavia. She has won the Best Short Story section at the Zija Dizdarević competition in Fojnica; the Jury Award at the ‘Carver: Where I’m Calling From’ festival in Podgorica; Best Short Story at the Ulaznica festival in Zrenjanin; Best Play by a Bosnian Playwright (Kamerni teatar 55 in Sarajevo) and the Targa Unesco Prize for poetry in Trieste. In 2016 she co-founded Escola Bloom in Barcelona and she now co-edits the school’s literary magazine Carn de cap. She is one of the creators of the ‘3+3 sisters’ project, which aims to promote women writers of the Balkans.
Jovanka Kalaba is editor-at-large for Serbia at Asymptote, an English language and literature graduate, with a PhD in philology (comparative literature) from the University of Belgrade, as well as a literary translator from and into the Serbian language. She is the translator of Jovanka Živanović’s Fragile Travelers, published by Dalkey Archive Press.
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