The Literary Tourist is a series of conversations between literary translators about newly released books in translation. This month Andrea Gregovich interviews Sebastian Schulman, writer and translator of Yiddish and Esperanto. Schulman is the executive director of KlezKanada, one of the world’s leading institutions devoted to klezmer music and Yiddish culture. His translation of Spomenk Stimec’s Esperanto-language novel Croatian War Nocturnal was published by Phoneme Media in 2017.
Andrea Gregovich: I’m always excited to find books that are examples of literary translation as an urgent and necessary project, bringing hidden voices to a global audience. This book captures the lives of average people in a devastating war, and does it in Esperanto, a language many people have never heard of. What’s it like to translate a book that’s so important, but at the same time marginal? Does the translator have different responsibilities in this situation?
Sebastian Schulman: As a literary translator, I seem to be inescapably drawn to “small languages”—in addition to Esperanto, I primarily translate from Yiddish. In some sense, there is indeed an extra burden on translators from marginal communities such as these. You’re not only representing the author and her work, but somehow taking on the role of the seemingly sole ambassador of an entire culture. There is a double scrutiny. The “home” community is counting on you to represent them faithfully and get things right for their brief moment in the spotlight. And English-language readers expect you to bring them an entire worldview in a single work of literature. The historical context of war and genocide in this particular book further heightened those tensions.
At the same time, translators from small languages are also blessed with a certain freedom. The pressures that come with so-called larger languages’ “literary infrastructures”—from presses and agents and funders, for example—are largely absent. So, works in translation from marginal languages can afford to be more daring, both in terms of literary style or political messaging. I felt pulled in many directions when translating Croatian War Nocturnal, but my ultimate responsibility as a translator remained with the author and her vision, conveying her graceful prose without toning down the controversial and radical pacifism that pervades her text.
AG: The daily experience of regular people in war is so often missed. I was struck by a passage in which the Croatian narrator describes how the Serbs and Croats in her family always spent their holidays together, and that her Serbian cousin’s son Luka was growing up in a household of both Serbian and Croatian items. This idea becomes so poignant because later, the narrator describes how the brutal nationalism on both sides of the war creates the illusion that families in the former Yugoslavia are ethnically pure and need protection from each other, which clearly isn’t the case in her family. What were some of your favorite details of people’s lives in war?
SS: One of the strengths of Stimec’s writing is her ability to portray horrific events in an unadorned and simple style. I think this comes through most strongly in the chapter “An Ordinary Day,” where a Bosnian woman named Koka casually reports on her experiences in a concentration camp. The way she speaks so nonchalantly of coping with the insanity and violence of camp life, of how the women dealt with basic hygiene in the camp, and of the total obliviousness of well-meaning aid workers after her release, is all etched in my memory. The book abounds with small details of how daily life and relationships between people, objects, and memories are totally reordered by war. It’s a real insight into how devastating military conflict can be far from the front lines.
AG: At first it seems odd: why is this book about life in Croatia during the war in 1990 written in Esperanto? But as the story unfolds, Esperanto seems like a perfect metaphor for the ethnic tensions of the Balkans. Can you talk about this?
SS: At a few different points in the book, the narrator points out how people on all sides of the war can understand each other without the aid of interpreters. The main languages of Yugoslavia, whether we call them Croatian, Bosnian, or Serbian, or some combination thereof, are all mutually intelligible. And yet one of the principal ideas about Esperanto used to be that a common auxiliary language between disparate peoples would help bring about peace instead conflict. The use of Esperanto to write about the ultimate failure of communication between peoples united by a common language is then a biting critique of the false promises that both “Yugoslavia” and “Esperanto” seemed to offer. It underscores the sense of personal loss and betrayal that the narrator describes as these utopian ideas that have shaped her world until now start to crumble.
The use of Esperanto is also employed to chastise its own speakers and, I’d argue, the international community writ large. Esperanto is supposed to create understanding and closeness between peoples across the globe, but, as the narrator points out, the rest of the world didn’t seem to notice or care what was going on in the Balkans. At best, they thought it “unreal and distant as a video game.”
Yet, the choice of Esperanto isn’t just an instrument of critique. Stimec also uses Esperanto to embed a profound sense of optimism in the work. Although the world of the novel is in absolute disarray, the belief the people are still good and that hard, difficult work can bring us to a better place is at the core. What better language to keep the embers of hope alive than Esperanto—the word itself means “one who hopes.”
AG: Help me understand something: why is this book a “nocturnal”? The nocturnal (or “nocturne”) is a literary form, basically a night poem, which this isn’t literally. Does this concept translate directly from the Esperanto?
SS: In Esperanto, the book is called Kroata Militia Noktlibro, which literally means “Croatian War Nightbook”. Noktlibro is Stimec’s neologism, an invented opposite to taglibro, which mean “diary” or “journal,” but literally comes from combining the roots tago and libro, i.e. “daybook”. Closer renderings of this play on words (e.g. “night diary”) sounded clunky at best and lacked the inventiveness of the original. To capture the spirit of this wordplay, I chose “nocturnal” since it harkens back to these other poetic and musical forms and describes the way the novel was written—at night, in hiding, between aerial raids on Zagreb. “Nocturnal” (“of the night”) is also an etymological antonym for “journal” (“of the day”), so it’s also a little wink to those few readers in English who might also know the title in Esperanto.
AG: When I read the chapter title “René From Vukovar”, I got chills. I know about the total devastation in the city of Vukovar, so the foreshadowing of the title worked on me as it was meant to. It struck me, though, that a lot of readers would have to read on to understand the emotional resonance of the title. Do you think there were other elements in this book like that? Their literary importance clear to a reader familiar with the war, while the relevance lost on unaware readers?
SS: I think the text is suffused with elements like this. Their significance isn’t necessarily lost in translation, however. Rather this is a deliberate choice by the author. Stimec wrote the book for an Esperanto-reading audience rather than a Croatian one, but chose to leave many of the markers of the specific cultural settings intact. In one respect, this is a typical feature of much of Esperanto literature. “Foreignizing” elements are encouraged, reflecting a sort of aesthetic and political ethos of curiosity and cultural exchange. Readers in Esperanto are expected to do a little bit more homework, perhaps, than are English-language readers. For this specific book, I also think Stimec wants the reader outside Croatia to feel a bit disjointed, to have a gnawing sense that they are missing some aspect of things, as if to say to those who refuse to pay attention to the war in the Balkans that you are missing many pieces of your own puzzle when you choose to ignore us.
AG: I got curious about how Esperanto functions when a bit of the language is included in the text, and then described: “Mia amas Esperanto-n! I love Esperanto! The accusative ending –n was set off from the rest of the word by a hyphen. Not on account of any offense, however.” Can you explain about this word ending with a hypen, and a little about the structure of the language?
SS: Esperanto was invented as a language than would supposedly be much simpler to learn than any “national” language. The grammar is entirely regular with no exceptions and there’s a certain logic to how words are formed. But hand-in-hand with this hyper-regularity is a wonderfully productive and creative flexibility. A final n added to a word marks the accusative case (the only such case marking in the language), which gives Esperanto’s users the ability to shift word order almost endlessly and still be understood. The accusative case is also one of the trickiest points of grammar for beginners to remember and so often gets dropped accidentally. The sticker here adds a hyphen, ostensibly as a helpful reminder to students to attach this useful little suffix.
AG: How did Spomenka Stimec become a novelist in Esperanto, and what sort of literary tradition does Esperanto have beyond this book?
SS: Stimec talks about her choice to write in Esperanto in more detail in an interview I translated for Literalab last year. In short, for her, Esperanto provided a platform for creative expression that undercut the feelings of alienation she felt as a member of “small culture” in a world dominated by American Global English. The Esperanto literary community also warmly embraced her and quickly recognized her writing.
Esperanto’s literary tradition is as old at the language itself. L.L. Zamenhof, the inventor of the language, included original poetry as well as translations from world literature in the Unua Libro (“The First Book”), which introduced Esperanto to the world in 1887. The literature developed incredibly quickly thereafter and boasts all the attributes you would expect of any other literature such as stylistic conventions, a range of genres, a de facto canon of major texts, lively criticism, and much else. Today Esperanto has a truly global literature with readers and writers throughout the world. One of the most exciting things for me about Esperanto literature is the way in which the literary conversation has no real geographic center—ideas, styles, and forms from other cultures and from Esperanto’s own history are melded and blended in a way that is seamless and natural. In this context, literary translation isn’t seen as some sort of niche interest in the broader literary scene, as it feels sometimes does in English, but rather as an integral part of the natural ecosystem of ideas. At times, Esperanto literature has also served as a creative outlet to those, such as women or minorities, who have felt silenced in their native language, culture, or literature.
AG: How did you get involved with Esperanto? What else is going on with this niche language in the year 2018?
SS: Much of my professional and personal life revolves around Yiddish culture, so my initial point of contact with Esperanto stems from an interest in its role in 19th-century Jewish language politics. Esperanto was invented, in part, as Zamenhof’s answer to the so-called Jewish Question in Eastern Europe, an internationalist and offbeat alternative to Yiddish or Hebrew. Exploring that topic, I then encountered an entire world of Esperanto culture and history. Thanks to the internet, the Esperanto world is expanding rapidly these days. Just about anyone can learn the language quickly through different websites and apps and begin to take part in the community. According to some estimates, there are some two million people who speak Esperanto, who may come together at local meetings of a handful of practitioners or at annual international congresses attended by thousands. There are literary journals and presses, music groups and online radio stations, intensive summer courses, and all sorts of special interest groups. It’s a very lively, highly eccentric community and culture.
AG: How did you wind up translating this book, and how did it find its way to Phoneme Media?
SS: As so often happens, I fell in love with the book after reading it in the original and immediately felt that it deserved a wider audience in English. It wasn’t until a year later, however, that Boris Dralyuk, after hearing me gush about the book over a few drinks, convinced me to take on the project more seriously. And it was Boris who subsequently connected me with the marvelous David Shook at Phoneme Media. Phoneme is a press that really nurtures literature from unheard voices and “small languages,” and does so not only with style but a firm sense of justice. I feel very lucky to have found a home for this translation with them.
AG: Finally, what are you working on now?
SS: I’ve just moved to Montréal, where I’ve taken on a new position as the Executive Director of KlezKanada, one of the world’s leading institutions devoted to klezmer music and Yiddish culture. A few months prior, I also joined the board of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). These are exhilarating opportunities, though they sometimes leave little time for actual translation work. Nevertheless, from Esperanto, I am exploring a few possible projects, including a feminist novel about the limits of language and romantic love by Štimec herself; a harrowing memoir of the Second World War by Japanese pacifist activist Verda Majo (pseudonym of Hasegawa Teru); and the short stories of Tajik/Russian/German writer Lena Karpunina. From Yiddish, I’ve recently translated a few chapters from a 2012 novel by Boris Sandler entitled Nomansland, AZ. It’s a raucous satire of the neuroses of the Jewish diaspora and the contradictions of American life, half-written in the fictional language of “Nomanish”. It’s one of the most challenging and fun translations I’ve ever worked on.
Andrea Gregovich is a writer and translator of Russian literature. Her first translated novel USSR: Diary of a Perestroika Kid was published by Fiction Advocate in 2014, and her translation of Nadezhda Belenkaya’s Wake In Winter was released in 2016 by Amazon Crossing.