Poetic Justice: Will Firth on Translating Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly

May 23, 2024 | in Book Club, Interviews | by Sofija Popovska

Oh, plans. I can't make plans. I'm a translator.

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.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

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. READ MORE…

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Sofija Popovska

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Andrej Nikolaidis
Will Firth

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Hope: A Review of Faruk Šehić’s My Rivers

December 13, 2023 | in Reviews | by Michael Tate

From these unlikely pairings emerges a soul-shredding collection that is nevertheless immensely hopeful.

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by S.D. Curtis, Istros Books, 2023

In his native Bosnia, Faruk Šehić is known for his poems and the regular opinion pieces he writes for the weekly magazine BH Dani [Bosnia-Herzegovina Days], but he first came to the attention of English-language readers with a novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in 2016. A second fiction work, Under Pressure, followed in 2019, and both books were widely reviewed and praised for their poetic narratives—a difficult task when writing about the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. He achieved this by participating in, witnessing, and describing those events, restoring human dignity to the neglected living and the memory of the dead.

My Rivers is Šehić’s first collection of poetry to be translated into English, in an excellent rendering by S.D. Curtis. Here, the imagination and the presence of dignity continues simply and powerfully through his subjects and settings, crafting a postwar future shared by the survivors of all sides. The resulting collection is an act of amazing meliorism and reconciliation that summons the strength of the “Mangled Generation,” as they are known in former Yugoslvia. READ MORE…

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Michael Tate

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Bosnian

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Bosnia
Una River

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Faruk Šehić

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Translation Tuesday: “On How to Be a Good Immigrant” by Elvira Mujčić

June 30, 2020 | in Translations | by Matilda Colarossi

Don’t worry about it, somebody had to cry. What the heck kind of story on immigration would it be if nobody cried?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, two immigrants bare the wounds of their respective traumas in this excerpt from Elvira Mujčić’s novel On How to Be a Good Immigrant. Our narrator, a Bosnian immigrant haunted by the atrocities that robbed her of her family and her home, finds kinship with an immigrant from Mali, who opens up about the systemic racism he endures in Italy. Colarossi’s superb translation captures the subtleties of Mujčić’s prose: the uncomfortable silences, the hesitant divulgences, and the quiet pain that follows when the narrator’s emotional walls break down. A meditation on the myriad ways immigrants face trauma and are expected to appease Western stereotypes.

Chapter X

“Can you light a fire wherever you like in Italy?” asked Mele, a friend of my brother’s whom I had met the last time I was in Bosnia.

“What do you mean?” I asked surprised by the sudden turn the conversation had taken from the surreal dissertation on the non-existence of God of just a few minutes ago.

“I mean: can a man light a fire wherever he likes and cook lamb on a spit?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Well, life isn’t worth living in a country like that!”

Why did everything have to take a folkloristic hue, I wondered, annoyed and uncomfortable, like some sort of Austro-Hungarian elementary teacher sitting on an Oriental futon. I was going to meet Ismail when I remembered the incident. It was probably because of our last discussion and the African proverb with which we had greeted each other: “When you don’t know where you’re headed, remember where you came from.” You should have instructions on how to be a good immigrant when you go back to your homeland, I thought. And suddenly I realized that the longing I had felt for tens of years was gone, replaced with a renewed curiosity for that country’s present. But I only loved it if it was set in the past, because it couldn’t harm me from that distant place. My curiosity was not, however, light and untroubled: it was often laden with overwhelming sorrow and paralyzing fear. It was a visceral bond I could do absolutely nothing about, an incessant alternating of thoughts that went from the conviction that I had left something there that I absolutely needed to find, and the realization that what I was looking for was made of the same substance as fog. READ MORE…

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