The apocalypse has always been a popular topic in literature, but Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly is no regular walk around the end of the world. From one of the Balkans’ most fearless voices, the last day of humanity sees a complete collapse of the timeline as everything that has ever happened begins to occur at once. All sins rise to the surface, the dead return to testify, and the Devil himself makes wry commentary on all the fluff and frivolity we use to conceal our deepest secrets. Incisive, indicting, but not without compassion, Anomaly brilliantly exhibits the vital and intrepid nature of Nikolaidis’ work, which, coupled with a poetically lucid style and explosive intelligence, provoke readers to consider our world’s most central and incendiary contradictions. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, we had the opportunity to talk to Will Firth, the translator of Anomaly, about his remarkable work in bringing Nikolaidis’ writing to English, and what it means to be both translator and advocate.
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Sofija Popovska (SP): Anomaly isn’t the first novel by Andrej Nikolaidis that you’ve translated, could you tell me more about how you two met and began to collaborate?
Will Firth (WF): I was first drawn to Andrej’s polished prose, coupled with his intelligent black humor—or cynicism as some would call it, and the remarkable imagery that he uses in all of his books. It’s basically the dense, intense intellectual challenge of his writing that I really like.
I didn’t actually meet him until 2012; I had translated his first novel, The Coming, and we had a launch event in London, at the now defunct Europe House. It’s a typical situation, actually; I don’t always meet authors before I translate their books, but I’m in touch with them while I’m in the process of translating, and several have become friends, which is a nice spin-off.
SP: You mentioned in an email to me that Andrej’s written about the apocalypse a lot, and this isn’t the first apocalypse-themed book he’s written. Has he said anything about why he loves this theme so much? And is Anomaly sort of a step—or a conclusion—in his literary project?
WF: Well, I don’t actually know what his greater literary project is. I’m not sure what he has in mind for the next few years and decades, but he certainly is fascinated by this idea of the apocalypse. In a text that I’ve quoted in various places, he calls himself an apocalyptist. He really feels it as a part of his existence: that the world we live in is doomed, in a way, and that better things, greater things, different things can arise from that.
But he’s playing with this idea all the time in his different books, and approaching the topic of the apocalypse from different angles. I’m not really sure why he’s so fixed on it, but it probably has a bit to do with his intellectual interests and the writers he’s into—Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, the post-Marxist, fairly radical writers.
But his personal experience of having to flee from Sarajevo in 1992 as a youth was certainly scary, if not traumatic. Add to that the experience of war, of systemic change, of being uprooted, being a refugee—and all sorts of other things. I mean, think of the massive earthquakes that the whole Balkan region has experienced: Montenegro in 1979, and Macedonia in 1963. Those are things that create a sense of insecurity, a sense that this world is dangerous and has its limitations, and we could be dead tomorrow. Those feelings perhaps flow into his interest in the apocalypse.
Though I think it would be wrong to see this interest in the end of the world as purely something negative, because there’s a kind of a progressive stream within apocalyptic thinking, that a new and better world could result from it. You find lots of that in Christianity, as well as in radical streams of the workers’ movement. So I think that a progressive thread also flows through Andrej’s thinking about the apocalypse—but this is just my take as the translator.
SP: Yes, the strain of hope was certainly noticeable in Anomaly, even though the book is so grim. I feel like this is a sentiment that a lot of people in the Balkans resonate with; Balkan society is oftentimes quite retrograde, and that can make its artists and creatives see the world in a grim light.
I was thinking that this relates to what happened when he received the English PEN Award for Translated Literature, and how some people reacted during the carnival in Herzegovina—could you speak about that a little bit?
WF: To give a brief summary of that incident, there is a tradition of the carnival in many parts of Europe, including in coastal cities of ex-Yugoslavia. In Montenegro, at one of these carnivals, Andrej was lambasted, and an effigy of him was burned. Although it’s part of that annual tradition that they have, it’s more than just bad taste. It’s really a threat to him, to his livelihood and possibly his life.
But I don’t think that the local committee was necessarily reacting to the awarding of the prize to Andrej. Admittedly, the Minister of Culture was present and took part in this nasty evil ceremony, but I think Andrej is generally a thorn to nationalists of every ilk—particularly Serbian nationalists, of whom there are quite a few in Montenegro. The way they burnt his effigy is just a general affront of theirs to him, and I don’t think it was specifically linked to the prize.
SP: Speaking of scandals, he’s had quite a few of them. And it’s exactly because he’s so blunt and unafraid to share his views, which are very emphatically anti-nationalist and anti-imperialist. There was that instance where he defended victims of police torture and then got death threats, as well as his famous scandal with Emir Kusturica. I was wondering if you could talk more about the scandals that have resulted from him speaking his mind as freely as he does.
WF: I don’t know much about the first instance you mentioned, about the death threats—that was fairly early on, around the time when Montenegro became independent in the mid-noughties. But I’ll try and give a brief version of the Kusturica conflict, and there’s one other that I’ll mention as well.
In 2004, Andrej wrote an opinion piece titled “The Executioner’s Apprentice”, in which he accused Kusturica of being a tool of Serbian war propaganda in the 90s and early noughties, as well as participating in the whole Greater Serbia project, which has caused so much death and so much fear throughout the Balkans. Kusturica then successfully sued Andrej for libel, and Andrej appealed, but in the end, he had to pay a fine. So Kusturica, who has very powerful friends in the Serbian national lobby, “won”, if you like. But I think everything Andrej wrote about Kusturica was correct: that he is a very good filmmaker, but allowed himself to be used for the purposes of that Serbian national campaign.
The next interesting event was in 2012, when Andrej wrote an article with the title: “What is Left of Greater Serbia?” It caused a storm of indignation—perhaps even more than the Kusturica scandal—because he suggested that: “the guns and explosives that a disgruntled worker had hidden in a hall in Banja Luka, in the Serbian entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, should have been used against the Serbian politicians and clergy who assembled there to celebrate the foundation of the Republika Srpska”, the Serbian entity. He then concluded his statement by saying: “It would have been a step forward in civilization and also poetic justice.”
So yes, Andrej really speaks his mind, says what he thinks, and he believes that the Serbian entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina has basically been built on the foundation of genocide—which, I think, is not far from the truth. Andrej certainly pokes people in the eye with his opinion, but it’s good that he’s free.
And maybe I should just finish this little summary by saying that Andrej was the advisor to the Minister of Culture and Speaker of the Parliament in Montenegro for a year or two. So, for many people on the opposite side of the political fence, they see him as a part of the pro-Western, pro-NATO establishment. It’s understandable, but not quite correct, because Andre is also critical of many structures and phenomena in the West as well.
SP: You yourself have been anti-establishment—being involved in the anarchist movement, and having advocated for Esperanto as a more accessible and less imperialist alternative to English. I was wondering if these personal factors drew you to Anomaly, or if it was some other aspect of the text?
WF: I guess you could say that Andrej and I both have a cosmopolitan, internationalist, and leftist worldview, but we haven’t really talked about it. We normally talk about books and literature and difficult expressions, so we haven’t touched base at this theoretical level, but I’m sure we have a certain amount in common there.
But I wasn’t actually drawn to Anomaly in that way; I was just drawn to his writing in general, and that was why I tried to find a publisher for The Coming, The Son, and Till Kingdom Come; those are the three novels that I translated prior to Anomaly, and Anomaly was also the first in that series of Andrej’s novels where I didn’t do the negotiating. Andrei’s agent found out about it and ended up finding the wonderful Peirene Press in Britain. They then approached me and asked me if I wanted to translate it.
So I was attracted to Anomaly, and it’s sort of a culmination of my cooperation with Andrej and my work on his ideas and his literature. A very nice development, of course; I’m always glad when a publisher approaches me rather than me having to push all the time. Now that I have translated it, I’m very glad. It’s a fantastic book, and I enjoyed the intellectual challenge. More than the other three books that I’ve translated of his, it leaves a lot of open questions, a lot of things to leave you thinking about.
SP: You mentioned that the tenses were kind of an issue when you were translating, because there’s multiple levels of time colliding, and you had to convey that. Could you tell me more about the translation process, generally?
WF: I always find it fun to translate cultural allusions—when say, there’s a quote from a film, or wordplay. I enjoy that kind of everyday struggle. It’s something that really attracts me to the profession of a translator—just working in the language, with the language, sometimes fighting against the language, struggling and sweating to find the right expression. Sometimes one sentence can take an hour or two to translate, if it’s got a really hard nut in it that you need to crack.
What I always find to be a challenge is translating the tenses from Slavic languages. It’s a slightly different ballgame in Russian or in Macedonian, which I also translate from, but they all have similarities—both in their grammatical structure and also in how they interact with narrative traditions in English. My feeling is that we like or need to have a kind of a temporal logic going through the text. There are avant-garde, postmodern styles of literature that don’t adhere to that, but I believe there is a general tendency in the world of English literature to want this temporal structure, so you know what’s before, what’s after, what’s coming up.
In Serbo-Croat or BCMS, as we call it these days, that’s not important. It’s much more important to be focused within a particular passage or within a particular scene. There isn’t necessarily a time structure pervading the whole work, so that’s a general struggle I have when trying to recreate a narrative structure that makes sense in English, while also respecting the author’s own take on things.
In Anomaly, there was one chapter in particular that was exceedingly difficult to translate. It would just be too vanilla in this day and age to have a novel about the collision of time and space that limits itself to an articulate description of a time warp. No, Andrej has to make it complicated and postmodern. So, within this particular chapter—chapter seven, which takes place in the Cathedral in Kotor—there are several time levels or time planes that collide, which is already a complex notion. And to make it even harder, they’re not marked in any way; it’s almost like the narrator is just going mad and has three different levels of his mind or of his life interweaving. It was very, very hard as a translator to get my mind around that and to find a way of transporting that into English, and to be honest, I worked very closely with the editor from Peirene on that. Her take on that chapter was crucial in reaching some kind of solution.
SP: Regarding the narrative itself, do you think that the pairing of narrators (the Devil and a woman) was purposefully done to highlight their otherness within their respective symbolic systems—the Devil as opposed to God, and woman as opposed to man? How do you interpret this choice?
WF: I think Andrej likes to choose protagonists or narrators who are underdogs or outsiders. I mean, Lucifer has gotten very, very bad press in Christianity, so having him as an intelligent narrator sort of makes sense from Andrej’s perspective. He is an outsider, the Devil. Then, the narrator of the second half is a Bosnian Muslim woman with a young child in a Balkan context—where Serbian nationalism, for example, was directed against Bosniaks. She’s an endangered species, basically, and an outsider as Andrej’s sees it.
The other characters in “Toccata” (the first part of Anomaly) include the museum caretaker, an ordinary working man who has to get a second job on a building site in order to pay his wife’s medical bills. There are the two match girls. There is the nurse who has to look after a misogynist old writer (allegedly meant to be Ivo Andrić, but it’s not said anywhere). All of them are, in a way, victims or underdogs; they’re either gay, HIV positive, from some minority, or working class, etc. And I guess that fits into Andrej’s progressive worldview. He likes to look at the fates of ordinary people.
SP: I’m sure there are a lot of references from the author’s culture that a reader foreign to it might miss. Could you name any examples of these?
WF: Andrej’s language itself is very polished, very clear, except when he writes complex sentences—so there are sort of misunderstandings at that level. He also doesn’t go along with the fashion of using lots of regionalisms, which unfortunately a lot of writers from the Balkans do. I think it’s show off-ish. They want to show that they know all of the old medieval terms from their corner of the Balkans.
One of the things that readers probably wouldn’t have known, and which I added a word or two to help explain, is when a flotilla of small vessels suddenly emerges from the sea while two filmmakers are discussing a script. The way this scene is described makes it clear to readers of the original that these are dead soldiers from the Serbian army in the First World War. Just to recap briefly (because the events of the First World War and the Balkans are not widely known to people in the West), after a few successful battles against the Austro-Hungarians, Serbia was basically defeated and overrun in 1915. So, the king of Serbia, what was left of the army, and quite a few civilians went on a long trek from northern and central Serbia, all the way through the mountains of Albania and Montenegro to the coast, and ended up near Corfu. Not only did a lot of those Serbs die along the way, but when they reached safety, many of them died of hunger and disease anyway, and were buried at sea just off the coast around Corfu.
Now, these events are stylized in today’s Serbia as a kind of national trauma, and Andrej doesn’t see it like that. In Anomaly, a lot of these dead soldiers suddenly—through the time warp in the book—emerge from the sea where they’ve been buried for the last century. They’re disoriented, encrusted with shells and seaweed, and they don’t know what is happening. I don’t think readers would necessarily understand what that was, but I discussed this with the editor and we decided to add a few little references—short, small additions to clarify the background to this scene.
Also, Andrej doesn’t mention that the misogynistic writer character is Ivo Andrić, the best known Yugoslav writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 61 or 62—but everyone reading the original would know who he meant. After discussing this with Peirene, we decided not to add his name because that would have been a bit too sensitive, but I tried to pad it a little bit to make it clearer, so people might be able to guess the identity of the only Nobel Prize for Literature winner in Yugoslavia. Whoever’s interested in researching that a little bit will be able to work it out.
Those are two examples of cultural background that are concealed in the text—not intentionally concealed, but just written about in a way that the average, if I may be so arrogant, English reader would not recognise.
SP: You mentioned that it’s difficult to find presses who want to publish works from smaller languages, and that it’s difficult to get compensated. Can you tell me what inspired you to become a translator for these languages, considering how difficult it is and how little reward there is?
WF: I guess I’m passionate about language, so that keeps me at it, even when there are obstacles. To cut a long story short, I studied German and Russian at university, and used Russian as a springboard to learn two other Slavic languages—which makes sense at a mental, educational level because of the similarity between them. But sometimes I have difficulty keeping them apart at an active level when I’m speaking them.
How I got into the literature, that’s also a strange thing. I was never a bookworm as a child. I liked reading, but it wasn’t as important as football and riding my bike and watching television and other things that kids like to do. Then, I worked for the UN Tribunal in The Hague in the noughties, and when that ended in 2008, I was in search of a new source of work. It was more by coincidence that I slipped into translating novels from ex-Yugoslavian countries. I had translated a few things at that point, but it was then that I met my co-translator of the Macedonian classic, Pirej, and she suggested we translate this book together. So that was one of my first major projects in this phase of my life, which has now been going for seventeen years.
Then I was invited to a seminar of young translators from Slovenian and Serbo-Croat here in Germany, where I live. The participants of that seminar founded a group, and we started doing sample translations, checking each other’s work and organizing events. So, a lot snowballed for me, and it was quite coincidental that I’ve ended up where I am, but I really enjoy my work and I think I’m going to stick at it for as long as I can.
SP: Is there anything you’re working on at the moment? And is there any book you’d like to translate, but you haven’t made plans for it yet?
WF: Oh, plans. I can’t make plans. I’m a translator. All the big decisions are made by publishers and funders and so on. I can have dreams and ideas, but plans, that would be nice.
Anyway, I’m currently translating a large sample from a novel by a Russian writer who lives in Germany. And recently, in March, when I had a bit of a gap between projects, I finished a large sample project from a lesser-known novel by Petre Andreevski from Macedonia, Nebeska Timjanovna. That’s on my translator’s bucket list. I want to translate that in this lifetime. But finding a publisher and finding funds is going to be difficult.
There’s also a Russian classic that I’d like to re-translate, written by Konstantin Paustovsky and originally translated into English in the 70s. I think that could do with a redo, basically. But once again, that’s a bit of a pipe dream. I don’t think I’m ever going to find a publisher for that. And I have various other projects in the pipeline. I’m not sure what’s going to come about them. Also, I’ve just found out that I’ve been awarded a travel scholarship to spend a month in the Balkans later this year, probably in Montenegro. So I’m eagerly planning that at the moment.
SP: In an essay you wrote for Asymptote, you mentioned that the problem with translating from the languages you specialize in goes in two directions; it’s not just presses in the West that aren’t very proactive about publishing works from smaller literatures, but it’s also cultural institutions in smaller countries that fail to acknowledge the importance of translators. There’s also a lack of acknowledgement from educators, from cultural ministries and institutions like that. Do you think that anything can be done to better the situation, or is anything getting better in that regard?
WF: My perception is that not much is improving. Things are getting worse. Perhaps there is pressure on the fees that translators can earn, and I think artificial intelligence is also going to create a whole load of problems. But in terms of the facilitation of these literatures, there are not many paths by which literature can find its way from the book—via the translator—to a publisher in the anglophone world. There are a few models that could be used that might help a bit: for example, a network of German book institutes and publishers and institutions called New Books in Germany. They have an event in New York every year, if I’m not wrong, and that seems to help a lot with facilitating the transport of German literature into English. There’s also an interesting institution in Slovenia called the Book Institute, which also helps in the process by, for example, sorting out who holds the author’s rights, proposing model contracts, pointing out where there is funding, and maybe even provide funding itself for some translations. Having some kind of body like that would be exceedingly, exceedingly useful for the countries whose literature I translate.
Apparently, there is something like that in North Macedonia at the moment, but it hasn’t functioned very well. There are complaints about it being corrupt and not having all that much funding, and stuff like that. So that seems not to have worked, but it really is quite painful to see how much good literature there is—classics and contemporary works that simply do not find their way into bookshops in the West. There are a few literary agents, but not enough, so it’s often the task of us translators, when we feel passionate about a book or a writer, to invest energy ourselves in doing a sample translation—hopefully a paid sample translation. And then approaching agents, approaching publishers—there’s a lot of pro bono self-exploitation there. If it wasn’t such brilliant writing, I don’t know if I’d be doing it.
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.
Sofija Popovska is a poet and translator currently based in Germany. Her other work can be found at Context: Review for Comparative Literature and Cultural Research, mercury firs, Tint Journal, GROTTO Journal, and Farewell Transmission, among others.
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