Humor in the Dark

Dubravka Ugrešić first began publishing her stories and novels in the early 1980s. She was one of the stars of her generation of writers in Yugoslavia, a breakthrough postmodernist, exploring literature through the lens of literary theory—her other love. In 1988, she was the first woman writer to be given the NIN award, Yugoslavia’s most prestigious literary prize, for her novel Forsiranje romana reke [Fording the Stream of Consciousness]. The war broke out in 1991, first in Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia and Herzegovina, and ultimately in Serbia and Kosovo by the end of the decade. Ugrešić took a firm stand against the growing hostilities, and despite her earlier Yugoslavia-wide popularity, the public reaction in Croatia to her anti-war position was swift and damning. She decided to accept an offer to teach abroad, first for a semester at the University of Amsterdam, then two semester-long stays at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, a year as a fellow at the Radcliffe Advanced Studies Institute, a semester teaching in the Harvard University Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, a stint of teaching at UCLA. After her first years of living abroad, she settled permanently in the Netherlands. She has published two books of short stories, six novels, nine collections of essays, a book of literary scholarship, two children’s books, a few screenplays for television and film, and a number of translations from the Russian. All of her fiction and the nine collections of essays have been translated into English, and several of them have also appeared in translations in a staggering array of languages: Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Russian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Finnish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Arabic, and Farsi. She has received ten major international awards, as well as, most recently, the prestigious Croatian T-Portal award. In the course of her career as a writer she has developed a strong critical voice, particularly in her essays. She sees herself not as Croatian or Dutch but as a public intellectual, a citizen of the Republic of World Letters. From her transnational position, she comments on global culture while also keeping an eye on what is happening in the cultures where she is from—now known as the “region”: the successor states of ex-Yugoslavia. I have translated two of her essay collections (Nobody’s Home and The Age of Skin) and have collaborated with other translators on two of her novels (Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and Fox). In the analysis that follows of the issues that arise for me when translating her essays, the examples are all taken from The Age of Skin, published in 2020 by Open Letter Press. Since the 1980s, I have had the honor of translating writing by authors who have lived or are now living in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and / or Serbia. Most of them address aspects of the 1990s wars as well as the post-war realities faced by the communities they know best. While translating their work, I have learned from them how important humor can be in communicating both their bitterness and their vitality. While thinking about how to write on Dubravka Ugrešić’s essays in general, and on her recent collection, The Age of Skin, in particular, I happened to be listening to a radio station that was broadcasting a day of US protest music. It was this biting, buoyant verse: