Christina Kramer is a writer and translator known for her prolific work introducing Macedonian literature to the Anglosphere. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Christina about her role as a translator and linguist, the interplay between these two professions, and the excerpt of Lidija Dimkovska’s Personal Identification Number, which recently appeared in Christina’s translation in Asymptote. Throughout the conversation, we touched on Christina’s fascinating translation process, her love of Balkan music, her collaborative poetry translation, and the increasing number of translations coming from Macedonia.
Sarah Gear (SG): I very much enjoyed your translation in the current edition of Asymptote, an excerpt from Lidija Dimkovska’s 2023 novel Personal Identification Number. As an overworked parent of three, I can absolutely see the appeal of the ‘wasteland’ the narrator describes! Can you tell me how you came to translate the excerpt, and what challenges were specific to the text?
Christina Kramer (CK): I first learned about the novel from Lidija in 2022, then received a copy from her when we were both in Skopje in 2023. I was somewhat reluctant to translate the book because I saw many difficulties in moving between the narrative sections about Katerina and her family and the sections describing the wasteland. I knew virtually nothing about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Then, last summer I ended up working intensively on a full translation so it could be presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I will be editing that draft, of course, but I was forced to push through, to make quick decisions, and with that intensive, compressed timeframe, I was immersed in the story, and what had seemed difficult became more natural.
The novel moves from Skopje, Macedonia to Bristol, England, to Cyprus, from city to suburb to village. Each location has different characters, different histories, different landscapes. It was a challenge to make each location feel present. And of course, every other chapter is devoted to life in the wasteland, a dystopic utopia, with its own setting, different style, different lexicon. We were fortunate that the novel seemed a good fit for the January issue of Asymptote, which focused on new forms. In my translator’s note I focused on the problem of the translation of the Macedonian word pustelija—a deserted, empty place, which I translated as ‘wasteland.’ When choosing this word, the father’s repetition of the odd phrase, “A man needs to find a wasteland,” also proved challenging. I didn’t want to use any word that would suggest a rural space, like boondock, backwater, or hinterland, and escape to a desert island now feels cartoonish. The word also needed to connote a spiritual wasteland. However, I was avoiding ‘wasteland’ because the word carries with it a long literary history from Chretien de Troyes through Wolfgang von Eschenbach to T. S. Eliot. In the end, however, the wasteland’s connection to a wound, or war, or the failure to ask the question seemed the right answer after all.
SG: How did you come to learn, and later translate from, Macedonian?
CK: I was a Comparative Literature major studying Russian and Spanish. I got involved in a campus international folk-dance group, a common sight on university campuses in the early 1970s. Because I play clarinet I was drawn to the sounds of Balkan music and its asymmetric rhythms (for an example, see here). As a student of Russian, I was drawn to the study of comparative Slavic languages by learning Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, and Bulgarian song lyrics. When I went to the University of North Carolina to do graduate work in Russian literature, Professor Victor Friedman, then a new professor of Slavic linguistics, convinced me to continue studying Balkan linguistics. Under his mentorship I was able to attend the Summer Seminar in Ohrid, Macedonia several times, and that launched my graduate career in Macedonian and Balkan linguistics. I spent a year in Skopje in the early 1980s and began teaching at the University of Toronto in 1986. More than twenty years would pass however, before I felt ready to translate, before I felt confident enough in my knowledge of Macedonian. I began translating Luan Starova’s My Father’s Books in 2007. I worked with Professor Madeline Levine, a renowned translator from Polish into English and professor at the University of North Carolina, who critiqued my work and mentored me as a translator. My first translations came out in 2012—three novels: My Father’s Books and The Time of the Goats by Luan Starova, and Freud’s Sister by Goce Smilevski.
SG: How widely are Macedonian and other Balkan languages taught at universities? Do you notice any change in popularity over the past few years?
CK: The short answer is not widely at all. The less and least commonly taught languages are part of very few universities’ curriculums. While the number of interested students grew during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, that interest quickly subsided. Some graduate programs offer courses in one or two South Slavic languages or Albanian, and there are intensive summer courses taught at a few universities, but few offer multi-year courses that enable students to reach advanced levels. There are summer in-country courses that are a tremendous resource. Toronto is one of the most polyglot and multicultural cities in North America with a relatively large population of heritage speakers of Macedonian. With community support, I had the good fortune to teach a two-year sequence of Macedonian for over thirty years, often with an enrolment higher than twenty students.
SG: You have written one of the most well-known textbooks for students learning Macedonian—how does this linguistic work interplay with your translations?
CK: I can’t translate what I don’t understand, and understanding begins with a deep knowledge of underlying grammatical structures and their meanings, dialect variation, and stylistic differences. The Macedonian textbook was based on years of fieldwork and study in Macedonia as well as collaboration with Macedonian linguists, including my co-author, Liljana Mitkovska. It also grew out of my engagement with the Toronto Macedonian community, whose speakers speak both standard Macedonian and dialects from across Macedonia, including Aegean Macedonian dialects. As a non-native speaker, this everyday engagement with language variation gave me a unique perspective on language history, language politics, and language variation. It forced me to pay attention to the details. I cannot imagine that I could have found my way to translation without this work and these experiences.
SG: How much do Macedonian dialects vary, and how do you address these when you come across them in translation?
CK: Like other languages, Macedonian has a range of dialects, some closer to the standard, others more distant. I recall the funny miscommunications I had with students when I began my academic career in Murray, Kentucky, and had difficulty distinguishing word pairs like fire and far. You have to learn what linguistic features are significant and then learn the correspondences. When I began teaching Macedonian in Toronto to students whose background had given them varying degrees of fluency in the language and who spoke in various dialects, I at first strained to listen just for understanding, but with time, I began to distinguish features that belonged to specific dialects. Understanding dialectical and cultural differences in speech is always a special challenge in learning a language. I have been studying French for the past three years but still have difficulty with radio announcers from Quebec. In my translations I have not had to use dialect, but I have had to make clear distinctions in register. I remember in translating Luan Starova’s The Path of the Eels there were contrasts between the local villagers and the speech of party functionaries, between the old women cooking together and the father talking about his scholarly discoveries. All those distinctions were made through colloquial language, formal language, bureaucratic language. I may someday have to consider dialects, but I cannot imagine that I would be able to approach the wonderful language landscape that Stephan Sarterelli created for his translations of Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano novels.
SG: You have translated fiction and poetry by many Macedonian authors. How do you come by their work, and is there anything you look for when you select a text for translation?
CK: My translations began with Luan Starova. I read his works and loved his quiet quest to show Balkan commonalities and shared sorrows rather than the frequent trope in the west of Balkan violence and interethnic hatred. I became close friends with Luan, and his works provided a gateway into translation. Those translations led to my translation of Goce Smilevski’s Freud’s Sister. Following these works, I began receiving commissions to translate the work of authors I had yet to encounter. I read their works to see whether I could imagine inhabiting the book, writing through in the voice of the author. Sometimes when I read a new text, I feel an estrangement that I can’t explain—I do not feel that I can get inside the work, or I don’t feel that I understand the author’s syntax, or I don’t feel that I understand stylistically how the book works. In those instances, I decline the translation. More often, however, I jump right in, and I love working with such different authors. I have been an avid reader my whole life and love the opportunity to work with varied writers and different genres. I did select two short sketches by Blaže Koneski, The City and The Move which appeared in Two Lines Press. Someday, perhaps, I will be able to translate some of his poetry. The poetry of Aco Šopov was a gift during COVID lockdowns. I was asked by Jasmina Šopova, the poet’s daughter, to translate the poems, but I could not have done it without the intense collaboration with Rawley Grau, a specialist in translating poetry. I am mainly a prose translator and would not approach more poetry without collaboration.
SG: What does your translation process look like?
CK: I usually do not read the entire novel before translating. The first draft is so difficult that I like the surprise of reading as I work. I read and type at the same time. I don’t worry about things I don’t know. I just mark a ‘xx’ when I encounter a tricky spot and keep going. I put in multiple ideas for words and make notes, but I continue reading and typing, creating a first messy draft. At that point, I can imagine the whole novel in two languages. Now I go back to the beginning and read carefully. I look up words and try to reduce the tricky ‘xx’ spots. I choose words more intentionally. By the third time through, I put aside the Macedonian and focus on the English. I engage in conversation with the author, if possible. Most of the authors I have worked with have been very generous in explaining expressions or words I don’t know. I have some wonderful linguist colleagues in Macedonia who have also advised me. As I said, I can’t translate what I don’t understand. No matter how much I read, no matter how well I know the language, that language is constantly changing, and authors are creative. Once I think I am done, I put the translation aside for a few weeks, then come back to it with fresh eyes. Inevitably, I hate some of my earlier decisions and start changing things again. I have a native speaker read my translation against the original to catch errors. Sometimes it is the easiest things that you get wrong. In an early draft of Freud’s Sister, for example, I had translated crn ‘black’ as crvena ‘red.’ Of course I know the difference, but my brain had blinked. It was such a relief that my reader caught it. I recently read an interview with Johnny Lorenz, who translated Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel Crooked Plow. He described a process that feels similar to my own: get everything down in English, even though the first draft is like a shipwreck, and then go back with a hammer and sandpaper to fix and reassemble. It is a wonderful feeling when the last ‘xx’ gets resolved.
SG: You have said that you worked collaboratively with translator Rawley Grau on Aco Šopov’s poetry. What are the specific challenges when translating poetry, and how did your collaboration with Grau work?
CK: In 2023, Rawley and I translated and published an extensive volume of poems by Aco Šopov, The Long Coming of the Fire (Deep Vellum Press), in honour of the centennial of Šopov’s birth. There were numerous events in 2023 celebrating Šopov’s work both in Macedonia and abroad. On World Poetry Day, 21 March 2023, there was an event held at UNESCO in Paris, and later that year there was a special session devoted to Šopov at the Struga Poetry Festival in Struga, Macedonia. However, the Šopov year kicked off with the publication of four of his poems from the volume Reader of the Ashes in the January issue of Asymptote: “Horrordeath,” “Lament from the Other Side of Life,” “If There isn’t Enough Light for You,” and “August.” In that issue, Rawley and I explained the basic mechanics of our collaboration. A more detailed explanation is in the preface to the anthology. Here, I will only say that just because I know Macedonian and have a great deal of experience translating Macedonian prose, and even though I have read and memorised a lot of poetry, that doesn’t make me a translator of poetry. Rawley is an award-winning translator from Russian and Slovenian, including the poetry of Yevgeny Baratynsky. I knew Macedonian; Rawley knew poetry. I would give Rawley a detailed interlinear translation as well as a first prose translation. He would send me drafts of his translations and we would email our comments back and forth until we felt we had a good version, which we then sent to Jasmina Šopova. She would send her comments back. The translations represent a true collaboration. No poem was considered done until each of our concerns was answered. None of us could have achieved it on our own.
SG: You recently translated The Summer Without You by Petar Andonovski with the support of a PEN Translates award. This was the first novel to be published in North Macedonia to address homosexuality, and the first Macedonian novel to be recognised by English PEN. Why was it important to translate into English, and did this translation affect the novel’s reception at home?
CK: I was so fortunate to be able to translate Petar’s EU Prize winning novel Fear of Barbarians. I loved working with Petar and found his language moved somehow naturally into English, and I was intrigued by the intertextual references that twined through the novel. I wanted to translate The Summer Without You because I wanted to work with Petar again. The fact that it was the first North Macedonian novel to explicitly address homosexuality was a secondary factor, but an important one. Love stories happen between all kinds of people and in all languages. I see my work as amplifying voices from Macedonia, and this complex love story of three men, a story of jealousy, love, and longing—with its references to Carrol, Hemmingway, Capote, and Woolf— was one I wanted to bring into English. The novel had its launch during Skopje Pride Weekend and attracted a large audience, but the English PEN award gave the novel more prominence both in Macedonia and abroad.
SG: Do you ever regard your translation work as a form of activism in this sense?
CK: While I do not always think consciously about activism when I translate, I am aware that I am letting people hear voices they would not have heard. As translators we bring stories into English from all corners of the globe that would otherwise be silent and unnoticed. In that sense, I regard my work as a form of activism. We are living now in a moment in which people in power are trying to silence voices, and therefore our role as translators becomes increasingly political and our ability to amplify the voices of others becomes activism.
SG: What are the challenges you face when pitching Macedonian novels to Anglophone publishers?
CK: I face the same challenges that others face: the number of books that appear in translation is a tiny percentage of the total number of books published in English each year. Even when more people read works in translation, the number of books that are published remains small and the number of presses willing to accept unsolicited manuscripts diminishes. Add to this the fact that most Macedonian authors do not have agents, so I have had to be both translator and de facto agent. It is an exhausting process and one that involves lots of rejection. It can take many false starts to find the match between book and publisher. It is wonderful to have journals like Asymptote that help to give at least an excerpt of the book wider exposure. I am optimistic that I will eventually find a publisher for each book, but the obstacles to publication remain.
SG: You have written about the Macedonian government’s project, “130 Macedonian Books in English,” which was providing funding for translations. What has been the impact of this project? Has the provision of this funding led to authors writing for an international audience?
CK: I can’t speak to the impact of this project. I thought then, and still think, that it was misconceived. When readers read bad translations, they think the works themselves are bad. Translators without enough experience were tasked with translating rapidly some of the most difficult, most important works published in Macedonia. Many of these works won’t be translated again, as it is difficult to convince publishers to publish a new English translation. No one reading the translations of Šopov’s poems in the 130-volume anthology, for example, can have any idea of his greatness. Rawley Grau and I were fortunate to be able to publish a new version with Deep Vellum Press, a project which took more than two years and involved consultation with my linguistic colleagues and collaboration with Jasmina Šopova. Difficult translations cannot be rushed, because the work suffers. The idea that “something is better than nothing” is a fallacy. A bad translation is worse than no translation.
SG: Has the Macedonian government launched any more translation programmes since? What does the funding landscape look like for novels from the region?
CK: Funding is never easy. Each of my translations has its own story. I have been funded through the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States; a United Kingdom PEN award helped with the translation of The Summer Without You; and the Šopov foundation, the Slavic Department at the University of Toronto, and United Macedonian Diaspora helped fund the poetry translations. My translations of Luan Starova were supported by the Toronto Macedonian and Albanian communities. Each novel requires so much work in addition to the actual work of translation! Fortunately, the Ministry of Culture in Macedonia helps provide funding to publishers of translations from Macedonian, and that has certainly made a difference.
SG: What is the current state and outlook for more translations of Macedonian literature into English?
CK: The number of Macedonian writers appearing in English translation is growing. In addition to my translations, other translators such as Paul Filev and Will Firth are bringing works to an Anglophone audience. In 2023, I was at the Struga Poetry Festival and was very impressed with some of the poetry translations into English by Professor Zoran Anchevksi.
While there is a growing cadre of qualified and dedicated translators, ready to extend the reach of Macedonian literature, translators and authors alike need opportunities to showcase and publish their work. Translation is something that not everyone can undertake, even if they know both languages. It takes intimate knowledge of two languages and their literary traditions. It takes patience and the careful working through of difficult passages. It takes an ethics of translation, that is, the translator must have a commitment to the linguistic and literary specificities of the text. That is to say that machine translation, for example, will not replace human translators. Algorithms do not yet capture the nuances of meaning, context, and sound of the original. As Jeremy Klemin wrote in his article “The Last Frontier of Machine Translation” for the Atlantic, “Don’t ask a bot to translate a book.” He states that the problem is that “at its core, literary translation is an act of approximation.” Hence—Asymptote is such a great name for this journal.
SG: What are you working on now, and what should we be looking out for from the region?
CK: I have completed working drafts of three novels. The excerpt in the Winter 2025 Asymptote is from Lidija Dimkovska’s fourth novel Personal Identification Number, which won last year’s Novel of the Year prize in Macedonia. I am also translating Petar Andonovski’s next novel. Tentatively translated as I’m Not Telling, it is about the complex relationships that develop between a gay couple and a lesbian couple who are coparenting a child. The third novel is my first translation of a novel by the prolific Macedonian author Vlada Urošević, Grape Molasses, which in 2018 won the prestigious Stale Popov prize and was runner-up for novel of the year. It is the story of a young boy growing up in Skopje, the capital city, at the onset of World War II. The three books are quite different from each other. I always seem to have at least two projects going at a time; I like the tension of translating different authors simultaneously. I think it helps me focus more intensively on the different authorial voices and recognize my own voice as well.
Christina E. Kramer is a literary translator from Macedonian, and Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Linguistics at the University of Toronto, where she has taught Macedonian for over thirty years. She has translated authors Lidija Dimkovska, Luan Starova, Goce Smilevski, Blaže Koneski, and Aco Šopov, and last year published Dimkovska’s novel Grandma Non-Oui with Istros Press, as well as Petar Andonovski’s The Summer Without You, as winner of an English PEN award, with Parthian Press. She is completing translations of Personal Identification Number by Lidija Dimkovska. I’m Not Telling, by Petar Andonovski and Grape Molasses by Vlada Urošević and hopes that they will come out in the next year or two.
Sarah Gear is an assistant interview editor at Asymptote. She holds a PhD on the influence of political bias on the translation of contemporary Russian fiction into English and is currently writing a book about translation and politics. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Language Review, Full Stop, the Glasgow Review of Books and Rights in Russia. She is based in Scotland.
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