Hanging with Dubravka

- By Ellen Elias-Bursac

It was already great that Columbia's Slavic Department and the Harriman Institute, at Radmila Gorup's prompting, invited Dubravka Ugrešić to teach a month-long mini-course this October.  And then Aleksandar Bošković, who teaches Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian language and literature in the Columbia Slavic Department, decided to share the joy: he organized a two-day conference dedicated entirely to Ugrešić's work, bringing together scholars from University College London, the University of Rijeka, York University, the University of Michigan, and Eastern Michigan University to talk about her novels and essays. Even better, Ugrešić herself was there to give the keynote. It's not often that a writer is present at a conference dedicated to their work; the panelists agreed they were fine with her hearing them present their papers, so we had the additional pleasure of her comments, notably in a lively discussion on the configuration of "nostalgia" in the post-war period.

The announcement that Ugrešić has been awarded this year's Neustadt Prize, coming the day after the conference, was a breathtaking coincidence for all of us steeped in Ugrešićiana that weekend in New York. It was a deeply gratifying to end the stimulating meeting in this way.

Ugrešić was nominated by Alison Anderson, an American literary translator and writer residing in Switzerland. The Neustadt Award is the highest honor conferred in the United States for international literature and brings with it a prize of $50,000. As someone who has had the honor of translating some of Ugrešić's writing, I feel a particular personal debt to Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim for putting Ugrešić's writing on the English-language map.

Ellen Elias-Bursac translates fiction and essays by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers. She has also recently published the study Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug of War.