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Balkan Bizarre
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14680 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1988 |
3,823 Words |
| Author
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Charles Simic
Charles Simic teaches English literature at the University of
New Hampshire and is the author of twelve books of poetry.
His forthcoming volume is entitled The World Doesn't End. He
has published eight books of translation, including Roll Call
of Mirrors: Selected Poems of Ivan V. Lalic (1987). |
It is astonishing that a novel so outrageously esoteric as Milorad Pavić's The Dictionary of the Khazars should have become an international success. For the most part, only works of realism achieve best-seller status: Experimental fiction and other works that play with and subvert the conventions of the novel have only a small following even when they're critically well received. That an unknown author from Yugoslavia, writing a novel in the form of a dictionary, and on the subject of an extinct people of whom next to nothing is known, creates a best-seller while breaking all the rules, makes its publication in this country an event worth watching.
Dictionary of the Khazars was published in Yugoslavia in 1984. It was discovered by the public before the critics noticed it, whereupon it sold some seventy thousand copies, which is a lot for a small country like Yugoslavia. As a suitable place to introduce the author and hold a book-signing party, the publisher chose the one thousand-seat Belgrade Opera House. The book finally received the prestigious Weekly Informative Newpaper Prize, offered by the largest weekly magazine in Yugoslavia.
It was only this spring that Pavić's book appeared in Germany and France. Dictionary of the Khazars is not the easiest novel to translate. As well as being a dictionary of a sort, it is also an anthology of styles and narrative techniques. Some of the best writing in the novel is extremely idiomatic; and idioms, as translators know, are notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another.
The success of the novel in France has been remarkable. Of some thirty reviews that I have seen, all are
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