Сестрата на Зигмунд Фројд
извадок од романот
Гоце Смилевски
Illustration by Hong-An Tran
Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from FREUD'S SISTER by Goce Smilevski.
Copyright © 2011 by Goce Smilevski
Translation copyright © 2012 by Christina E. Kramer
Click here for more information about the book.
Goce Smilevski's novel is narrated by Adolfina Freud, the sister of Sigmund. In finding her voice, Smilevski has fashioned a style whose long, complex sentences and lexical repertoire expand the possibilities of literary Macedonian. The modern Macedonian language was not codified and standardized until the middle of the twentieth century. Although it partakes of a literary history dating back to the middle ages, this modern language, and its literature, are young. In addition to exploiting Macedonian's relatively flexible word order (as compared to English), Smilevksi has also been resourceful in his borrowings, coinages, and use of dialect words. This syntactic complexity and lexical richness provide both the challenge, and the standard, for my translation. Adolfina's memory circles back through repeated images, glimpses of color, shadows. The excerpt chosen depicts the complex relationships between brothers and sisters, men and women, doctors and patients, those inside the asylum, and those outside, masked and unmasked.
Goce Smilevski was born in 1975 in Skopje, Macedonia. He was educated at the Charles University in Prague, at Central European University in Budapest and at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, where he now works at the Institute for Literature. He is the author of the novels Conversation with Spinoza and Sigmund Freud's Sister. His works are translated into English, Serbian, German, Slovenian, Polish and Croatian.
Christina E. Kramer is an Editor-at-large at Asymptote. She is also a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She has published articles on various aspects of Balkan linguistics. In addition to Freud's Sister, she has translated My Father's Books and The Time of the Goats by Luan Starova and was also a member of the group of translators of the nineteenth century Bulgarian classic Bai Ganyo by Aleko Konstantinov. Further information can be found on her website here.
