Russell Valentino
Photo by Yasuko Akiyama
Bio
Russell Scott Valentino has authored two scholarly monographs, edited three collections, and translated eight book-length works of literature from Italian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, and Russian into English. His essays and translations have appeared in magazines and journals including THE New York Times, Words without Borders, Slavic Review, Defunct, and Modern Fiction Studies. He has received two Fulbright-Hays research grants, three National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowships, a PEN/Heim Translation award, and institutional grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of State. He served as editor in chief at the Iowa Review from 2009 to 2013, and as president of the American Literary Translators Association from 2013 to 2016. He is a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Indiana University and senior editor at Autumn Hill Books.
The rigorous process by which the National Endowment for the Arts selects awardees, with its multiple thresholds, the careful scrutiny of the relationship of translated texts to their sources, and the high artistic standards applied throughout, made me feel an odd combination of equal parts humble gratitude (I also know the high quality of the competing submissions) and justification that the work was worth it and that I had produced something that other professionals saw as worthwhile. Having now completed the translation of this massive work—by far the longest I have ever tried my hand at—I recognize the fellowship as an absolutely essential motivational force. I found this text giving me more pause than others I have worked on, likely because of its length and the resultant tendency, especially at early stages of the first draft, to ask why. Why work on this and not something else? It’s just one book. Perhaps seven books of 150-pages each would be a better investment of my time? There were several tempting locations to give in to such doubts, at least every 150 pages, and chalk it all up to an initial moment of the translator’s version of delusions of grandeur. The NEA award helped me keep perspective and take ownership where I might have otherwise seen a mere contractual obligation. The process of pulling the application pieces together, which I know some colleagues have seen as overly burdensome and particular, actually requires one to think seriously about one’s chosen work and author, their place in the literary landscape, explain it to others as persuasively as possible, and polish the key text you have selected to include, again in a manner that seems to me the epitome of rhetoric in translation. Look at this, you implicitly say, pay attention to these words out of all the others you are being asked to read, these words, the ones he wrote and now the ones I have written in my best impersonation him in this other language, these are worth reading, don’t you agree? How could one not feel rekindled motivation when they say, why yes, yes we do?
From Kin by Miljenko Jergović
[translated from the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian]
He would sit in the park, his back turned toward the fountain, his thumbs pressed against the back of a bench, as he flicked the matches with his fingertips, one after another, miniature torches that would burn out in the air, leaving no trace of themselves behind. They would turn to smoke and dust, just as the Jewish people, in a year, or two, or three, would turn to dust and smoke. This too would be a wonder in which for a long time no one would believe, for to whom would it occur to do away with six million largely peaceful and unarmed people, harmless castoffs who stepped aside for others, small shop owners, mean money-lenders, gullible bankers, and industrialists, rabbis, village lackeys, shoemakers, lottery ticket salesmen, small time crooks and con men, idealists, communists and Zionists, soft-spoken worshippers afraid of life but even more of what comes after, famous doctors, surgeons, pediatricians, and psychoanalysts, disciples of Doctor Freud, whom the Nazis did not kill when they found him in his Vienna apartment, exiling him to London instead, for Doctor Freud, too, was a match juggler, the professors of biology who created the most beautiful herbariums in the history of Europe, archivists, librarians, and village teachers, whose worried wives concealed their Jewish heritage, great German poets and travel writers, who had journeyed all the way to India and Nepal in order to leave their testimonials to the German culture, circus performers and circus owners, village carpenters, proprietors of pawnshops and rare books, chemists and manufacturers of poison, barbers, mystics, tricksters of great imagination, quacks who for tiny sums would make the rounds of apartments in the center of town, performing abortions on the underage daughters of the city’s solicitous gentlemen, philosophy professors, peaceful and smiling like the Buddha, in whom the idea of world revolution and rebirth fermented, of a happy time for humanity, which would arrive once it had passed through the frightful twentieth century, building custodians, owners of small kosher restaurants at the border of the ghetto, where non-Jews were also welcome, handymen, servant girls, midwives, the authors of the first Aztec, Turkish, and Aramaic grammars, blind and deaf painters, idlers, dreamers, and devoted bookkeepers, industrialists with no heart for their workers or their workers’ rachitic children, who would not live long, rag merchants, peddlers, roofers, ice cream vendors, loafers, porters, dish washers and dish dryers in communal kitchens, where the Jewish poor found food, philanthropists, sponsors, coin collectors and counterfeiters, false prophets, proselytes and neophytes, who changed faith late for by then Nazism had come along? To whom, really, would turning all these people into smoke and ash have occurred? Or a better question: who would have believed that someone who desired to make all these people disappear would come forth and that his desire would be realized?
About Miljenko Jergović
Miljenko Jergović’s prolific fiction and nonfiction occupies a central place in post-Yugoslav literature and culture, and in the past decade translated versions of his books have signaled his increasing importance among European authors on the world stage. Jergović was born in Sarajevo in 1966 and lived there until being evacuated on a U.N. transport during the siege of the city in 1993. A harsh critic of the nationalist government of Croatia in the 1990s, Jergović has been a frequent commentator on South-Eastern Europe in both local and international venues. Kin is his longest and most ambitious work to date.