This belated English version appears half a century after the original, largely as a result of the personal endeavours of Will Firth, one of the pre-eminent translators of writing from the former Yugoslavia. I would love to say that it has been eagerly awaited. That may be true for the small number of Crnjanski scholars in the West, and for those members of the Serbian diaspora who already knew the novel. However, in the twelve months since its publication by the New Orleans-based publisher Diálogos, Crnjanski’s masterpiece has, so far as I know, yet to be mentioned on the pages of a literary review, let alone properly reviewed, barring a piece from the novel’s translator in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
As the Danish scholar Cay Dollerup observes in “Translation as Intercultural Communication,” most translation from small languages is “an imposition.” It is “deliberate, and driven by the source culture,” rather than arising from any demand or desire in the recipient culture—in this case, that of the Anglosphere. Finding funding, publishers, or readers tends to be a Sisyphean exercise.
Moreover, the fruit of the translator’s labour, like an unwanted gift, is often met with either polite indifference or perfunctory praise from potential readers who say they want more literature in translation but choose to spend their time in other ways. It is a given that no one makes money out of the enterprise. Sales of two hundred copies are considered a success even for the widely reviewed titles by those foreign authors who are still alive and available for readings and interviews in fluent English. Worse still, the study of literature remains largely compartmentalized by language: A Novel of London could only hope to appear on most university reading lists in the original, restricting it to the few students of Serbian.
What hope can there be for long-dead classics even with books and a life as interesting as Crnjanski’s? The basic facts will be known to most Serbs. Crnjanski was born in 1893, to a Serbian family living in Csongrád, in what was then Austria-Hungary (now Hungary), and educated in Pančevo (now in Serbia), Timişoara (now in Romania), Rijeka (now in Croatia), and Vienna, where his studies were interrupted by World War One. He joined the Austro-Hungarian Army (which was then fighting Serbia) and was on the front lines against the Russians in Galicia (straddling what is now the Poland–Ukraine border). After the war, he completed his studies in literature at the University of Belgrade in 1922, before working as a school teacher and later as a journalist. He then joined the Yugoslav diplomatic service in the 1930s (a fellow diplomat was the future Nobel literature laureate Ivo Andrić). Postings in Germany and Italy were followed by his evacuation to London after the fall of Yugoslavia to the Axis powers in 1941, and a carefully negotiated return to Belgrade in 1965. He died in the Yugoslav capital in 1977, at the age of 84.
As a prolific novelist and poet, in Serbia, and in the former Yugoslavia, Crnjanski has enjoyed—with a brief exception in the mid-twentieth century when he was in exile and out of favour with the post-war communist government—the status of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot combined. Lines from his poetry and prose are so widely known that they are quoted casually in everyday conversations. Yet, beyond ex-Yugoslavia, he remains little known and even less translated. The only other book by Crnjanski to have appeared in English was Michael Henry Heim’s translation of the first of the two volumes of Crnjanski’s novel Migrations, published in 1994 by Harvill (his name in that edition was transliterated, French-style, as Tsernianski).
In his excellent essay, “Filling the Gaps: On Translating Miloš Crnjanski’s Novel of London,” published on the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, Will Firth recounts the hustling involved in his role not just as a translator but also as a posthumous agent struggling to generate interest in the project. Notwithstanding a pledge of funding from the Serbian Ministry of Culture, he searched in vain for a publisher in the UK—a natural home given the novel’s setting—before finally finding an outlet for A Novel of London in Louisiana.
I can almost see a wry smile on Crnjanski’s face. If he could but hear about this saga, it would confirm every prejudice he bore towards the British. “So sorry,” they keep saying in A Novel of London, “So, so sorry.”
I must now declare a personal connection: A Novel of London partly inspired my own novel of London, Monsieur Ka. Although Crnjanski’s work has relatively little to do with Monsieur Ka’s final tone or shape, its 1947 West London setting was a key influence. My story, which focuses on Anna Karenina’s son Sergei, is considerably less gloomy than Crnjanski’s, and yet it is still an attempt to “write back” to my favourite writer.
Less importantly, but more personally, Crnjanski’s novel has also shaped my private life. His representation of London has left an indelible imprint on the way an average Serb imagines the English capital—as an inhospitable, alienated, endlessly cold metropolis (this last both literally and metaphorically). As I embarked on my own migration in the mid-1980s, my parents and my wider family gloomily cited lines from A Novel of London to support their suspicion that I had little hope of finding happiness among the English.
Tolstoyan in its epic scope and yet richly lyrical in its tone, as befitting the work of a novelist who was also his country’s leading poet, A Novel of London is both a bittersweet story of a marriage and a devastating portrait of mid-twentieth-century Britain. At its centre are two dispossessed Russian aristocrats, Count Nikolai Repnin and his wife Nadya, living hand-to-mouth in the North London suburb of Mill Hill. I won’t spoil the story to reveal that, for much of the novel, Repnin teeters on the brink of suicide. He lives only because he cannot leave Nadya.
Their lives already devastated by the Russian Revolution, the Repnins’ existence is rendered even more precarious by new waves of post-World War Two immigration, and particularly by the thousands of East Europeans now competing for the same miserably paid jobs. (His descriptions of London’s Tube and buses echoing mournfully with the cacophony of Slavonic languages offer an uncanny sense of recognition for readers now.) Crnjanski’s London is not a jolly place, but it is still a pulsating refugee Babylon—one that is familiar yet seen through alien eyes, as British readers have not encountered it before.
Earlier I mentioned the external challenges that A Novel of London poses to the translator. Yet the work carries just as many internal, practical challenges because its original already involves many and multilayered implicit acts of translation. Although A Novel of London was completed and published in Serbian in 1971, it was first conceived in English in 1946 when Crnjanski began writing what was then titled The Shoemakers of London. This ur-version was inspired by Crnjanski’s stint as a bookkeeper in a Bond Street shoe shop, one of a series of menial, short-lived jobs that constituted his increasingly desperate, patchwork émigré CV. Along with the hardships of exile in the British capital, where he had arrived as a suspicious foreigner from a diplomatic posting in Rome in August 1941, the deficiencies of Crnjanski’s English—functional but unequal to writing fiction—conspired to leave The Shoemakers unfinished. The proposal failed to elicit any interest from British publishers, in spite of efforts by eminent friends and supporters, among them the novelist Rebecca West.
Many years later, once again living in Belgrade, Crnjanski returned to the story—this time in his mother tongue—and transformed it into A Novel of London. Thus, the original began its life as a double and delayed translation. Its account of London is personal and raw, yet linguistically there is also the distancing inherent in the choice of Russians as its central characters. Crnjanski did not want to write about his compatriots: there was no love lost between him and the exiled London Serbs. He was not, to use the euphemism loved by British obituary writers, the easiest of colleagues.
A Novel of London uses an elevated, highly charged Serbian prose to recreate an imaginary Russianness, in a voice deliberately anachronistic even at the moment of its writing (it is not an historical novel but does read like one). When you say “pure Crnjanski” in Serbian, you call to mind a long sentence punctuated by startling commas and full of inversions impossible in English, often closing in on itself with a “moreover” or a “nevertheless.” Then there is A Novel of London’s near-total immersion in Englishness: it is about lives lived in England, after all. The narration—some of the most richly nuanced Serbian prose ever written—is peppered with phrases of often imperfect English, as well as equally imperfect French and Russian, to create a unique voice.
In addition to a thorough introduction by David Norris, the leading scholar of Crnjanski in the West, the Diálogos edition carries a prefatory note on translating A Novel of London by Will Firth. In the process of translating, Firth has also added a vast apparatus of foot- and end-notes, creating what amounts to a critical edition and a valuable contribution to the study of the author and his work.
Choosing the English vernacular in which to render the complexity of Crnjanski’s style was never going to be easy. Contemporary English is bound to sound too informal, and any period variant would carry its own canonical baggage. The novel was, after all, published in the 1970s but set in an epoch which fewer and fewer now remember. And English in itself seems like a different musical instrument: its overwhelmingly iambic sound is never elegiac enough to a Slavonic ear. It may offer an ampler vocabulary than Crnjanski’s Serbian but its syntax is less supple. Yet, in spite of such intractable hurdles, A Novel of London’s beauty shines through in Will Firth’s English as well. I hope that it will find the English readers both Crnjanski and his translator so richly deserve.
