Our October Book Club selection, Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, is a profound documentation of the author’s fight with cancer, and as such it is also an interrogation of time, of physicality, and of transformations. In writing of illness’ warping effect on reality, Marić broadens the claustrophobically private experience of disease and recovery to address universal themes of loss and survival. In this following interview, Carol Khoury talks to Marić and her translator, Celia Hawkesworth, about the immediacy of the text, the mirror image, and how powerful emotions can be distilled into text.
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Carol Khoury (CK): Despite the narrative of Body Kintsugi not being contemporaneous, it’s written with such an engaging power that it feels as though it is happening in real time. So my first question to you, Senka, is about your relationship with time. Is it really as you say in the book—that it has no meaning?
Senka Marić (SM): In a sense, I have told the story of a distinct experience—that of suffering from breast cancer—in a relatable way. Within those moments dictated by illness, time becomes really relative; it doesn’t flow as it normally would, as it is directed or determined by check-ups and operations and chemotherapies. All other matters really cease to exist in the reality of the person who is sick, and as such, time becomes relative, because everything that life normally contains is no longer present. For me, personally, that was the case.
CK: Celia, how did you experience time while you were translating this?
Celia Hawkesworth (CH): Because I had to spend a lot of my own time physically putting myself in the place someone who was going through such hell, I was always quite relieved to get to the passages where the protagonist was remembering her childhood, or other parts that took us a bit away from that continuous, strange world where time didn’t have the same meaning. It’s a bit like in Shakespeare, when you have high drama and high tragedy, and then occasional moments of release. I thought that aspect was very important for keeping one’s attention, but also giving one a bit of a break from the real horror of the suffering.
CK: Senka, one other element in the book that caught my attention is mirrors. There’s something like fifteen mentions—all of which refer to physical mirrors. Yet, the whole narrative is about another mirror. Might I say there was some sort of a mental mirror, one that you used not only to see and show the “you” and the “I”, but also to negate other existences.
SM: Frankly, I was trying to play with the idea of reality in its most basic sense: how we take things for granted, and how a sense of reality can be distorted when catastrophe occurs. That’s the background for the whole story—not being able to believe what reality is, and how we then perceive it. When everything is slipping out of our hands, time and space and mirrors in general are our checkpoints. We can be spiritual, we can be this and that, but in the most basic sense, we are physical beings, and we identify with the image of ourselves. We need the acknowledgment from the mirror that we are who we are. That’s why I wrote the moment in which the main character loses her hair, and she starts to cry. That’s the only time she actually really cries.
By the time you undergo chemotherapy, you will have already lived for a while within that whole process: maybe a month, maybe a couple of months. And while you do have concerns that you might die, you get used to the idea one way or the other. You know that you’re going to have chemotherapy, and you know that you’re going to lose your hair—but once you are told that by the doctor, every one of us starts to cry. It’s not about vanity or about needing hair to feel beautiful, it’s about the physical identity. I think mirrors are important in that sense. When losing your hair, your image completely changes; you feel drained, and you look drained. Your eyes look different, your pupils might seem bigger, and it feels like someone else is looking at you in a mirror—or that’s how it felt to me. It’s another step of this illness that is really important: to be able to see and embrace the changes that you physically go through, and to find your identity somewhere deep inside of you—to distance yourself from your own image.
CK: Celia, as a translator, do you aspire for your translations to be mirrors of original texts, or do you think that’s detrimental to a translated work?
CH: I’ve never thought of it like that, but in a way—yes, that’s what a good translation should be: a mirror which gives us a faithful image, or rather reproduces the image faithfully. But at the same time, it’s not the same as the original person standing looking at the mirror, so it will be different—but one aspires for it to be as faithful as possible. It’s just because you want to be reproducing the same experience that a native reader has reading the text originally. You do realize that it can’t be a replica; you can only hope for it to be the mirror image.
CK: Do you stick to the original syntax? What changes do you allow yourself to make on the text?
CH: It depends very much on the text. In the case of this book, I’m not sure I did any syntactical changes, really.
But I’m working currently on a book where I have to reverse the order of many sentences, because it just sounds really awkward in English. So, with time (and I think the whole business of translating takes a great deal of time), I felt increasingly more confident to change things in order to have them convey the impact of the original. Now, I give myself quite a lot of freedom.
SM: The art of translation is something I don’t think I could ever master. This UK edition is the sixth translation (among various languages) of this book, and as I don’t speak any of them except for English, I would get my own copies and think: “God knows what’s in there. I can’t really read any of it. Maybe it’s the same book. Maybe it’s completely different book.” But luckily, I could read Celia’s translation, and I was absolutely amazed. The complete atmosphere of the book that I had in mind was present in English as well.
I know this might sound strange, but I don’t really personally feel any of what’s written in this book, as it’s my own experience manipulated to work as a text. I wasn’t getting emotional while writing it, but reading Celia’s translation, I did actually start to cry, thinking—that poor woman. It’s absolutely amazing how she made something completely the same, yet alien enough that I can read it and feel just like any other reader.
CK: Senka, the burning question, at least for me, is why the second person singular? Or rather why not “I” or “she”?
SM: It was a technical decision. Right from the beginning, I was aware that this story is not going to be easy, because there are real pitfalls of having it all be too pathetic, and being too emotional and self-centred, which is never the objective of literature. The text needs to be persuasive, and when it is “I” who is suffering a lot and constantly, we tend not to believe it.
I did initially start writing in the first person, and it just didn’t work. Then I tried the third person, but it felt too distant. I couldn’t reach that intimate, internal atmosphere I was going for. But when I tried the second person, the text started falling into place and making sense. It was close enough but distant enough at the same time.
It also works, I think, in that it’s trying to say to the reader: this could be you. We tend to think that nothing bad can ever happen to us, but they do, to all of us. No one is excluded from hardship. I think many readers find that discomforting, to buy into the idea that it could be them, but at the same time it is the main character telling all that to herself in order to survive.
CH: I thought it was an absolutely brilliant decision, because it brings the protagonist closer, and at the same time it miraculously gives her a bit of distance because it isn’t “I”.
There is a very small and insignificant practical issue with translating that, though. “You” in Bosnian is either singular or plural, whereas in English, it’s just “you”. So, one has to find other ways of conveying the fact that at certain moments, you’re actually writing of both you and your mother, or you and your children. That was a little bit tricky.
CK: Senka, what about the distinctive short sentences that characterize the text?
SM: I used short sentences to avoid excessive emotionality. Long sentences tend to be more dramatic, but short sentences are completely direct—as in the way of the imperative. The subject matter itself is already difficult, and building on an emotion further would take everything to the excessive. Concentrating on emotions consistently makes it feel unbelievable.
People who read the novel usually comment on how well I described the relationships between my main characters and her children, or her mother—but those are the things I barely described. I mentioned them a few times briefly, but we understand, from our own human experiences, these relations without needing to read them. We know what it’s like to love our mothers.
CK: Celia, suffering and illness have transformative abilities; translation, by its nature, is also transformative and a transformation. How much are you transformed by the works you translated?
CH: A lot. But some texts draw you in the way this one has, and some you live through completely, as in the example of another absolutely wonderful book, translated into English as My Heart by Semezdin Mehmedinović. I felt very close to the author, despite never having met him in my life until much later on—and then only electronically. But there is something about the process of translating that requires you to be an actor. You have to work your way into the head of the writer and become that voice, and sometimes it’s much more difficult than other times. In Senka’s and Semezdin’s case, it hasn’t been a problem. I have translated both Dubravka Ugrešić and Daša Drndić, both of whom are women I admire tremendously, but they are very different from me. They are somewhat fundamentally angry all the time, and I’m not. That takes a bit more work, but it’s fun trying to be somebody else—to see the world in a different way.
CK: The word “kintsugi” is only mentioned in the title, though one hardly feels any need to locate it in the text. I wonder how your editors felt about that.
SM: When you compare publishing in Bosnia with the rest of the region, or with Western countries, we don’t really have a real serious market here, and we don’t have as many rules. The whole thing is still quite underdeveloped—which is not really good for the writer. The whole process of working on the book, including choosing the title, is done by the writer. But at the same time, this offers us many freedoms. No one really questioned my title, or whether it’s mentioned in the book, or if it’s fully explained, or anything. If I lived in the UK, for example, I would probably have to justify it variously, but here, if the text works, that’s it. There’s lots of room for experimentation.
When choosing this title, I was aware that it was a bit risky. I was feeling that maybe it could—and perhaps this isn’t the right word—detract from the content of the book because it’s a foreign word, a Japanese word that my readers aren’t likely to know. But after I finished the book, I was trying to think of a title, and nothing seemed right. Then, all of a sudden, at like two in the morning, “kintsugi” clicked.
CK: Senka, as this is the only book of yours translated into English, can you please tell us a bit about your other works?
SM: Well, before this novel, I had written and published three books of poetry, and since Body Kintsugi was published in Bosnia, I have written and published another novel. It turns out that I always write about women. It wasn’t really intentional, but for some reason men don’t have anything to say in my stories. It’s not an agenda; it’s more that I’m really interested in myself. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but the reason I write is because I want to understand something. I want to take on the subject of my personal journey—to maybe find some truth in it, or even just to ask the right questions. For centuries, we’ve been reading the stories that centre men’s experience, and this is the most perfect point in time to write about female experiences, amongst other women speaking openly about their lives. So there’s this dialogue happening, and that is something that I would like to explore.
My new novel is called Gravitacije (Gravities), and it’s about three women in one family: two deceased grandmothers, and their granddaughter—a divorced woman in her forties with a teenage daughter. The granddaughter is trying to figure out the meaning of life, how to be happy, and what makes humankind this persistent in surviving, and she’s turning to these two grandmothers for the answers—though obviously, they don’t have any. I feel really passionate about this book, as I wrote into it many stories from the lives of my own grandmothers. I think it’s even closer to my heart than Body Kintsugi, in which the writing process mainly involved thinking about the text, about literature, what can work and what can’t. But for Gravitacije, it was more about self-searching and fighting with myself.
Senka Marić was born in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1972. She is a writer, poet, and editor and is the author of three poetry collections and two novels: Body Kintsugi (2018), and Gravitacije (2021). She is also the editor of the online literary magazine Strane. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Zija Dizdarević Short Story Prize in 2000 and the European Knight of Poetry Prize in 2013. Body Kintsugi was awarded the prestigious Meša Selimović Prize for the best novel published in 2018 in the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. It is her first book to be translated into English.
Celia Hawkesworth translates from the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. She was Reader in Serbian and Croatian at University College London. Among her translations are works by Dubravka Ugrešic and Ivo Andrić. Her translation of Daša Drndić’s Belladonna was a finalist for the inaugural E.B.R.D. Prize in 2018, and shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the Warwick Prize for Translation.
Carol Khoury is an Editor-at-Large at Asymptote, a translator and editor, and the Managing Editor at the Jerusalem Quarterly.
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