Translator’s Note

I often consider the “cost” of translating from Serbian into English, of the price that’s paid when splitting a poem between two languages with starkly different grammar systems and histories. Ultimately, I worked with writers Milica Špadijer and Uroš Bojanović to create translations that maintain the essence of their original work while ensuring this essence is accessible to an Anglophone audience.

More specifically, I began seriously translating poetry from Serbian into English when I met Milica Špadijer over a cup of coffee in Belgrade, Serbia. After amazing conversation, she was generous enough to gift me copies of her poetry collections, Šar planina and Ново Гробље. The latter became a favorite of mine; its poems struck me with their unflinching gaze into grief, womanhood, and the inherent vulnerability of being a writer. Throughout the book, Špadijer composes in the surrealist, prosaic vein of poets like Charles Simic and Radmila Lazić, defining then deconstructing what it means to experience timeless loss in the rapidly evolving, ever-unfamiliar temporal territory of the 21st century. Ultimately, I admire Špadijer’s understanding of poem-making as an act of truth-revealing; she distills the grit of her lived experience into stunning surrealisms on the page, something I had to work hard on to replicate in English. 

While translating poems like “Classified Ad” and “Critics,” I was guided by the original works’ willingness to situate the universal in a defamiliarized image system, to describe the ugly truth of a matter with no desire to soften the blow, to maintain fidelity when rendering the pain of losing a loved one and having one’s work brutalized by critics. These poems depict emotions like grief and doubt through tonal simplicity and images of the body being dismembered, aspects of her work that I sought to evoke in English by clarifying   the sense of a Balkan body, both physical and metaphysical, that simultaneously internalizes and deflects the harm inflicted upon it.

Similarly, I prioritized accurately depicting the painful truths Uroš Bojanović reveals about geopolitical violence in his poem, “War in Three Parts.” This piece renders the realities of war, how brings out the worst in men and how their violence echoes across the Balkans to this day; survivors still grapple with what has been done to them and what they’ve done to others.

“War in Three Parts” comes from Bojanović’s book, Sam u vodi (Alone in the Water), a collection of poetry that’s cynically aware of how power is gained and relinquished in times of unrest. More specifically, I appreciate how “War in Three Parts” carefully renders the chaotic nature of war without indulging in the pain of its victims, whether they be soldiers suffering from PTSD or women experiencing sexual assault and abuse at the hands of men in uniform.

I sought to translate Bojanović’s work for two reasons, one being that Bojanović refuses to shy away from the complex nature of victimhood. The soldiers populating his poem are both victims and perpetrators, suffering from violence before grotesquely enacting that same violence upon others. This brutal honesty is something I rarely see in contemporary American poetry, which tends to avoid nuanced depictions of war and political violence, resulting in an Anglophone readership that’s unfamiliar with the level of risk that can be rendered in a poem and how this risk doesn’t have to be mere shock value; it can serve as an intentional craft choice meant to hold a mirror up to the reader, pushing them to look at themselves and question what they think separates them from the characters that makes their skin crawl. Bojanović’s blurs the line between “us” and “them,” implicating the reader in a way that interested me as a translator. 

The other reason I sought to translate Bojanović’s work is that I found it quite challenging to render in English, mainly due to its themes. I knew right away that I wouldn’t translate away or censor the more harrowing aspects of the poem; doing so would have done a disservice to Bojanović’s sardonically macabre writing style and to the victims of wartime rape that populate his poem. With this commitment to fidelity in mind, I worked to depict the original piece’s matter-of-fact, decidedly direct tone in English, which required some sacrifice of sound and language.

—Ajla Dizdarević