Dubravka Oraić Tolić

Utopia—we all want our own, but who pays for it and at what price? Croatian poet Dubravka Oraić Tolić’s delivers a masterful, thought-provoking answer with exquisite language and imagery in the epic poem American Scream. As Columbus’s dream of reaching India was interrupted by the discovery of a new land, we too discover unexpected lands in pursuit of our dreams.

Complementing American Scream is Palindrome Apocalypse—a palindrome that is artful in both technique and story—presented side-by-side with the Croatian original to preserve its visual effect.

Together, Oraić Tolić’s poems:

• Explore dark themes of social and individual selfishness in pursuit of dreams and the unintended consequences of those efforts.
• Examine the tension between a nation’s dream of freedom and the outworking of that dream.
• Capture the heart of pre- and post-war Croatia, yet speak universally of the pain of bringing one’s visions to life.

Translated specifically for an American audience, Dubravka Oraić Tolić’s epic poetry gives English readers a glimpse into the literature and culture of a society largely unavailable to English-speakers.

For more information: ooligan.americanscream@pdx.edu

ISBN: 978-1-932010-10-7
6″ x 9″, softcover
240 pages
$14.95

About the Author

Dubravka Oraić Tolić

Dubravka Oraić Tolić, poet, essayist, and literary theorist, was born in Slavonski Brod, Croatia on August 1, 1943. She studied philosophy and Russian language and literature in Zagreb, Croatia and Vienna, Austria; obtaining a doctorate with her dissertation on the phenomenon of the citation in literature and art. Since 1971, the author has been a member of the philosophy faculty, the Institute for the Study of Literature at the University of Zagreb, and since 1998, has taught literary theory in the Department for Slavonic Studies and Literature. She has published numerous articles in Russian, which have appeared in the journal Russian Literature (Amsterdam). Since 1969, she has published ten books in Croatian and one in German.

Interview

Dubravka Oraić-Tolić

Q: Why did you decide to write a palindrome? Did you do so for a purpose?

A: I wrote the poem Palindrome Apocalypse in spring of 1981 for a special issue of the journal Osiječka Revija devoted to wordplay and verbal combinatorics. The editor invited several writers, including me, to write something for the issue. Each of us could do whatever we wanted. At that time I was working on the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov; I was writing about his Language of the Stars and translating his “supertale” Zangezi. Most of all I was fascinated by Khlebnikov’s poem Razin in the form of a palindrome. It was absolutely untranslatable. And the moment I received the invitation to collaborate with the journal on the topic of combinatorics, I immediately got the idea: if I can’t translate Khlebnikov’s palindromic poem, then I’m going to write a palindromic poem myself, and in Croatian.

Q: Have you read the English translation of American Scream and Palindrome Apocalypse? What did you think of them?

A: I’ve read both translations several times and sent comments to the translator, Sibelan Forrester. Sibelan translated American Scream on her own initiative, inspired by her wit and with lots of linguistic play. She managed to translate both the contents and the form so that the translation is quite fascinating. Everything was different with the translation of Palindrome Apocalypse. The palindrome form could not be translated, just as I was unable to translate Khlebnikov’s poem. Sibelan and I agreed that she would translate only the contents so the reader could see what the magical form of the palindrome was capable of expressing. The publisher did the best possible thing by publishing the poem in a bilingual edition. The linguistic pyrotechnics in the original may entertain connoisseurs of Slavic languages, while American readers may be surprised that a palindrome in a small Slavic language is capable of expressing the twentieth-century history of the West. Here too Sibelan proved to be a brilliant translator. Her translation of the palindrome verses is not only accurate but also sonorous and rhythmical. You can feel the chain reaction of the events described, from the October Revolution to the Second World War to Chernobyl and the war in the territories of former Yugoslavia.

Q: Why did you want to publish your work in the United States?

A: Because I believed that my book would find a lot of readers in the United States. Perhaps the book would become an object of culturological analysis, on the one hand as a curiosity, and on the other as an excellent translation.

Q: How do you think Americans will relate to your work?

A: I worried a bit whether Americans would take my poem the way I intended it. That’s why I provided a commentary to both poems—to offer readers a frame for understanding. Of course, the author can never foresee all the dimensions of her work, but I think that I can explain at least one dimension. My commentary on American Scream stresses that in my poem America was not a geographical concept, but rather a symbol of Western civilization. In my commentary on Palindrome Apocalypse, it was important for me to call the reader’s attention to the magical power of language. Our everyday language is conventional and arbitrary; there is no real connection between the word and the object. In poetic language, and especially in a mythological form such as the palindrome, the connection between word and object does exist, in some strange manner. Poetry means the creation and discovery of such connections. And that’s exactly what happened with my poem. Ten years before the wars broke out in former Yugoslavia, the poem’s language (i.e. its palindromic form) foresaw that the only palindromic year of the 20th century—1991—would see a bomb dropped on the city of Zagreb. This is the palindrome’s grand and horrifying power. Of course, both my poems could be read in other ways. American Scream” could be read in the context of American studies and phenomena such as intertextuality, globalization, anti-utopia, and so on, while Palindrome Apocalypse could be read in the key of postmodernism, linguistic magic, the relations of sign and reality, ludic writing, etc.

Q: How long did you work on Palindrome Apocalypse?

A: I wrote the first version in three months in 1981. At that point I went around reading words and sentences from right to left and left to right, searching to find what might be expressed that way. I took only what expressed the fundamental idea, that is, twentieth-century historical events. I was fascinated at how the palindrome could express everything, and at how in fact I didn’t write the poem—the language itself wrote it. It was a divine game, and a satanic one too, as it turned out later. I finished the poem in 1991, when what the poem had foreseen in its first version, the bombing of Zagreb, was happening in actual history. I didn’t change much. I divided the old palindromes into five chapters and added descriptions of the main events in normal language, to make clear at once to the reader what was happening and what a magical form the palindrome is.

Q: What made you write a poem about America?

A: I wrote “American Scream” because I considered America the greatest symbol of Western civilization. I’ve had that impression since childhood, when I first encountered the myths of America in my little village in northern Croatia. Every week American movies came, even to a backwater village far from Western civilization. All of us children, including my future husband, would make a group pilgrimage every Saturday to the movie theater. We would write letters to the American actors, and their offices sent us cards and autographed photographs. America was such a great and shining word; it could contain everything that a little being on the threshold of life in late socialism might think and wish for. Afterwards, of course, that changed. America became a symbol that could call up absolutely everything: the very best and the very worst of Western history, the real and the ideal, the personal and the historical. So through the prism of that symbol, the book interweaves individual fate with life under socialism, American myths and cultural traditions, utopia and anti-utopia, everyday life and dreams, attachment to the local ground and global fears.

About the Translator

Sibelan Forrester

A noted scholar and poet, Sibelan Forrester brought her expertise with Russian and South Slavic language and literature and her poetic sensibilities to translating American Scream: Palindrome Apocalypse. Forrester has been a professor of Russian at Swarthmore College since 1994. She received her PhD in Russian Literature at Indiana University, with a PhD minor in South Slavic Literatures and Cultures. Her published translations include the first volume of Irena Vrkljan’s lyric autobiography The Silk, The Shears (Northwestern University Press, 1999) and a bilingual edition of Elena Ignatova’s poetry The Diving Bell (Zephyr Press, 2006). Currently, Forrester is working on a translation of Milica Mićić Dimovska’s novel Mrena (The Cataract). She writes and occasionally publishes her own poetry.

Forrester’s artful translation of Dubravka Oraić Tolić’s poetry earned her the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) 2006 Heldt Prize for the best translation in the last two years. In an interview with Ooligan Press, she discusses her experiences translating American Scream: Palindrome Apocalypse:

Q: How did you first discover the writing of Dubravka Oraić Tolić?

A: I met Dubravka before I knew she was a poet, when I visited the Center for Scholarship on Literature at Zagreb University, where she worked. I knew first about her scholarly work on comparative literature and literary theory. After a few conversations, she gave me a copy of her wonderful book, Urlik Amerike, which later became American Scream. I always cringe when readers refer to authors by their first names, but the personal connection we have makes me always think of her as Dubravka, and I add her last names almost as a guilty afterthought.

Q: Why did you decide to translate American Scream and Palindrome Apocalypse?

A: I was in Zagreb in 1986–87 on a university exchange program with a project of translating contemporary stories. When I read Dubravka’s poetry, I reacted to it as a translator as well as a reader. I read Palindrome Apocalypse after 1991, when Dubravka mailed it to me and asked me to consider translating.

Q: What were your biggest challenges while translating the two pieces? Was there anything in particular about Dubravka’s poetry that was difficult to translate into English?

A: First of all, I can say that it took me a long time, many readings and many passes through the translations to grasp what Dubravka is doing in her poems. They are exceptionally rich and multi–layered—and that makes sense, since they were first published at a time when many of their messages couldn’t be uttered loudly. American Scream was published in Croatia in 1981 and Palindrome Apacalypse in 1993—both periods of political unrest. The stylistic gymnastics work as an equivalent to Aesopian language, Anna Akhmatova&39;s “triple bottom” to the poetic casket. Also, you see how much Dubravka has learned from her studies of other Russian and East European poets, from her work on citationality. The poems are at once accessible and dense, and I worked hard trying to re-create that effect for an English—language reader—a surface that is artistically satisfying, but depths that continue to reward rereading and study.

Q: What do you think American readers can gain from American Scream: Palindrome Apocalypse?

A: Foreign literature in translation always offers historical, sociological, cultural insights, examples of how things are Other, delivered within an aesthetic whole that gives that Otherness meaning and emotional punch that would be lacking for a mere fact. So American readers could learn something about Croatia, or about Eastern Europe more broadly. But it’s also the case that a good work of art can be productively read from a variety of points of view, and Dubravka, especially in American Scream, has plenty to say about America too, or “developed” western culture in general.

Q: Can a translation be as good as the original?

A: Sure! A translation can be better than the original. The key in that case is to give a second–rate work to a superb artist. This happened from time to time in the Soviet Union, where some amazingly good translations were produced, but that doesn’t apply to the work I translated here. The readers who are equipped to read both the original and the translation would have to weigh in on the question.

I don’t know how helpful it is to ask whether a translation can be as good as the original—after all, unless you have as many previous versions as War and Peace has, the translation is giving you something you didn’t have before. It’s like a telescope through which you can see a heavenly body you knew was there but could only imagine from its gravitational influence on other heavenly bodies. Or else the translator is like a telescope and spectrograph, if the reader can’t “go there” him or herself.

Praise

Dubravka Oraić Tolić goes beyond playing with language and textual contexts. Although reality and notions of home, country, people, nation, and life permeate her poetry, the thematic weight does not rest on the semantic deconstruction of concrete geographical-historical localities, but on their empowerment through words, metaphors and symbols as elements of the text and culture.
— Dr. Bernarda Katusić, University of Vienna

Dubravka Oraić Tolić combines a wicked instinct for wordplay and verse form with passionate concern for the language and culture of Croatia. Each time I reread these poems I am freshly impressed by their depth, richness, and explosive potential. American Scream speaks to the reader at maximum volume!
— Sibelan Forrester, Swarthmore College