Translator's Introduction to Footsteps — Web Exclusive
By Ellen Elias-Bursac
Making the first draft of a translation of David Albahari's writing is always deceptively easy. His language is spare, his vocabulary simple. But the equivalent simple language in English produces a flat, boring text with none of the power and poetry that the original somehow tucks in between the words. Once the first draft is done I re-read it too many times to count, gradually tightening the language in little edits. My experience of it is that the tighter and more powerful the text becomes, the more lucid it is, and Albahari's lucidity is his finest quality.
Albahari has been writing since the late 1970s. The relationships between men and women, particularly the tense repartee of battling couples, have long been one of his favorite topics. However, the focus in this story on sex and body, particularly bodily function, is a more recent development. There is a sadness in this story which is less common in his earlier work, more typically narrated with an almost manic, dark, fast-paced humor, even when it is about sad, and even tragic, events. The pace of this story is strongly defined by the tentative steps taken by its protagonist, and he has found a slightly different voice for it.
The passages where Miroslava negotiates her way across the room with her eyes shut were the most difficult to translate in "Footsteps." Serbian has more verbs than English does for walking and stepping, and the Slavic languages have verbal prefixes and imperfective and perfective aspects which allow nuance and manipulation, so I had to work longer on these passages than the others to find ways of conveying some of the variety and precision of the original.
Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating novels, stories, and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers for the last twenty years. She has translated three books of David Albahari's writing: Words Are Something Else (1996), awarded the AATSEEL Award in 1998 for best translation from a Slavic or East European language; Gotz and Meyer (2005), awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translation Association in 2006; and Snow Man (2005). She has also translated writing by Antun Šoljan, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Slobodan Selenić. She has co-authored a textbook for the study of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian with Ronelle Alexander and has written a study on poet Tin Ujević and his work as a literary translator.