Serbia has a very long and proud literary tradition, but in poetry and prose alike. This isn’t just a historical tradition, but an ongoing one with ample exciting examples of contemporary Serbian literature, too. The only problem is, some of this literature—perhaps much of it—doesn’t make it beyond a Serbo-Croatian readership because it is not translated into English and other languages spoken elsewhere. Thankfully, that is changing to a degree and a variety of publishers have made efforts to expand their Serbian-language works into translated editions. No publisher is probably more committed to this mission overall than GeoPoetika is with its “Serbian Prose in Translation” series. Funded in part by a grant from the Serbian Ministry of Culture, this project aims to bring contemporary Serbian novels into English translation so that those who can read English but do not know Serbo-Croatian are thus able to enjoy some of the best authors writing in Serbia today. While all the titles in their series are very exciting to me and represent some very respected and very important contemporary Serbian writers, the first one I want to draw readers’ attention to would be Fear and Servant by Mirjana Novaković. In part, this novel stands out because its historical setting and theme: it is set in Belgrade of the 1700s, where as Habsburg princess in Belgrade provides one of the central characters, while another one is found in that of a vampire and by extension, the devil himself. But this isn’t your typical vampire tale—neither Dracula nor Twilight—but based to a degree in the authentic conventions of Slavic vampire lore, which indeed are quite different from the Dracula variant of westernized vampire of which the world is more aware. Drawing from centuries-old vampire folklore of Serbia, the author returns to the mystical origins of the undead, which in Serbia and elsewhere in the Balkans was mainly a fear of the departed returning to the land of the living and causing serious problems. inserbia.info/news/2013/09/recent-serbian-literature-in-translation-fear-and-servant-by-mirjana-novakovic/
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 09:58:57 +0000
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