Tatjana Gromača’s contemporary novel Divine Child centers on the narrator’s relationship with her mother, whose bipolar disorder diagnosis coincides with a startling descent into Croatian nationalism. The book earned the Croatian Ministry of Culture’s 2012 Vladimir Nazor Prize of the for the best work of prose and Jutarnji list’s Novel of the Year prize in 2013. Yugoslav émigré writer Bora Ćosić called Divine Child “a small masterpiece” and stated that the author stands out for her “precious crudity”—a reference to its often stark, earthy descriptions despite the prevailing poetic and philosophical vein. Divine Child will be released in North America by Sandorf Passage in October 2021. Here, translator Will Firth describes challenges he encountered along the way.
In 2020, I was commissioned by Zagreb publisher Sandorf to translate three books of contemporary fiction by Croatian writers with funding from the EU’s Creative Europe program. One of them was the short novel Divine Child (Božanska dječica) by Tatjana Gromača. I had not read anything substantial of hers before.
I immediately related to Divine Child. It’s a diarylike biography of the author’s mother, which focuses on her slide into bipolar disorder, when she is cold-shouldered and denigrated by society. It makes an important link between socioeconomic crises—the collapse of former Yugoslavia, accompanied by virulent nationalisms—and the individual. The mother’s Croatian-ethnic neighbors label her an undesirable minority, in this case an ethnic Serb, although she has spent all her life in Croatia and shows few, if any, signs of otherness. But this was a time when having the “wrong” name could cause you problems throughout the region, and arguably still can. The exclusion triggers the mother’s illness.
The poignant novel is imbued with anguish rather than heated rage—both emotionally charged and deeply analytical. As a review in Publishers Weekly noted, it “takes on the hatred that was manufactured, mythologized, and manipulated to feed, justify, and rationalize violence.”
The title—Divine Child—is a dual reference: to the mother’s turn to religion in later life, and to the formative influence of her disciplinarian father, a military man, whose expectations she always strove to fulfill, even after his death, thus making her something of an “eternal child.” Typical of literature from the region, character development is sparse, even with the central character of the mother, and we have to piece together her appearance, occupation, and family history from a range of allusions and asides. Setting her in a historical and social context is more important for the author and omniscient narrator, and the reader is free to decide whether this sparseness is an exquisite literary pleasure or unnecessarily tantalizing suspense.
The editor of the English edition, Buzz Poole, was not convinced by the looseness of the narration in combination with its poetic style and philosophical ambit, so he made a major structural intervention: the novel in translation begins with an event central to the story—a visit to Mother at the hospital. This directs the flow and helps transport the author’s delicate voice. As translator, I was a go-between in negotiating this significant change.
Inconsistencies in the original also put me in the role of editor, and I collaborated with Gromača to tighten the language in translation. I like to correspond with authors to check my understanding of the text, even when I’m pretty sure how I’m going to render a particular term or phrase. With Divine Child, Gromača and I exchanged quite a few emails. We got on well and were on the verge of meeting up in the fall of 2020, when I was at a residency in Zagreb, but the worsening pandemic foiled our plans. In any case, our good working relationship was important for facing the challenge of translating this novel.
The main difficulties in translating Divine Child were to do with its startling imagery and metaphors. Here are several examples:
Frigid Sphinxes
Gromača describes packs of stray dogs in her hometown that “roamed the streets (…) and floated in abandoned fishing boats like frigid sphinxes with piercing, hypnotic eyes.” The original conveys this image as “poput pomodrjelih sfingi,” i.e., like sphinxes that have turned blue. I wasn’t sure in what sense the author meant “blue”—I thought it could refer to the bluish light by the river and the silhouettes of dogs in the twilight. In fact, she meant that the dogs have literally turned blue from the damp cold on the riverbanks and also from their lowly thoughts and those of the surrounding human society. “Frigid” conveys that physical and spiritual cold.
Salvos of Praise
The author’s mother went through a phase of religious zeal and self-righteousness, and we read that “she honored herself with salvos of praise.” This short sentence was a real challenge to translate. The original says, “s njezina su lica visjele salve. Bile su to salve pohvala kojima je hvalila samu sebe” (literally: “salvos hung from her face. They were salvos of praise for herself”). But a salvo is a series of shots or things being discharged, not a physical object that can hang from a person’s face. The author explained that when a person is fervent or their behavior is extreme in some way you can almost see it in their body, or at least in their body language. I found it difficult to bring out this “embodiment” and ultimately chose a clearer, unambiguous expression of the mother lauding herself for her exemplary piety.
Eastern Origins
There are times when the semantics of the source language contain wordplay and associations that can’t be conveyed neatly. This was the case with the adjective “istočni,” which can mean “eastern” but also “original.” Take the sentence, “undoubtedly the worst [suspicion] that could fall on someone was that they were of Eastern origin. Whether that possibly had some deep genesis and connection with original sin seems not yet to have been fully examined, but in any case a whiff of an Eastern origin (…) could be smelled a mile away.” The original has the same adjective for both notions—“istočno porijeklo” (Eastern origin) and “istočni grijeh” (original sin)—and the link is subtle. I tried to draw the terms closer together in my translation, but most of the options sounded forced. I decided not to worry, figuring that the very concept of “eastern” in European cultural history carries with it a range of religious, political, and other exotic-cum-sinister associations. But I did make a change with “deep genesis” (the original says “duboke veze,” i.e., deep connections), and I capitalized the initial E in “Eastern” to elevate its gravity, so to speak, to nudge it a bit closer to the powerful notion of “original sin.”
The Wall of Salvation
After dealing with such tricky associations and metaphors, I was wary of pitfalls everywhere! There is a scene in the psychiatric hospital where the mother becomes incontinent. The other women in the ward are disgusted but do nothing. One sentence reads: “[O]ne woman finally came to Mother’s aid. She dragged her like a wounded and bleeding soldier to the wall of salvation, which is to say, the bathroom.” I was concerned that the term in the original, “zid spasa,” had some deep connotation, perhaps religious, but I was relieved to learn that the author meant it quite literally. It’s the image of a solider dragging a wounded comrade behind a wall, safe from bullets and shrapnel.
Croatian Nationalism
One last example: The text required tweaking in various places to bring out the dimension of nationalism, which the novel alludes to amply but is never explicit about. It is reflective of Gromača’s craft that she refers to toxic Croatian nationalism with such minimalistic clarity that she was able to win two major literary prizes in Croatia without being perceived as unpatriotic. Take the sentence, “[She] now became a maligned murderer and hideous, bearded butcher—a wild rider from the Russian steppes, a crude Turk with a rusty scimitar, a Serb dogface from the Salonica Front.” The original here actually continues the description of the Turk, but its wording is a definite historical reference to Serbs (“u vunenim hlačama od čoje sa Solunskog fronta,” i.e., “in homespun woolen trousers on the Salonica Front”). The Salonica, or Macedonian, Front was a military theater of World War I, where the badly mauled Serbian army was reconstituted and pitted against Bulgarian and German forces to the north. Serbian nationalism glorifies the battles on this front, and the mother, being painted by her Croatian neighbors as a Serbian bogey, is tarred with that brush. I needed to bring this out more clearly in English to make sense.
Not labeling the mother, or anyone else, is a valuable political message and esthetic stance; putting people in ethnic, national, or other boxes can be damaging to the boxed and debasing to the boxer. Just a few pages into Gromača’s novel, there’s a sympathetic description of a watchman in his booth at the entrance to the hospital grounds, which strikes me as another good example of the author’s accepting, humanist approach. So it is with the mother. Although she is the central figure in the novel, the author leaves her sketchy in a few respects, but we get a powerful impression of the forces that have molded her and the nature of society. There is real art in aligning the individual and their surroundings in this way. These examples give a sense of Gromača’s stark, evocative style—a symphony of associations to describe an individual—her mother—without labeling her.
Will Firth was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991, he has been living in Berlin, Germany, where he works as a translator of literature and the humanities (from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croatian). His best-received translations of recent years have been Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, Andrej Nikolaidis’s Till Kingdom Come, and Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una. See www.willfirth.de.
*****
Read more from the Asymptote blog: