Globetrotter

AFTERWORD. ONLY BANFF IS REAL

In the opening pages of Globetrotter, the painter (never named) from Saskatchewan searches for the right way to strike up a conversation with the Serbian Jewish writer Daniel Atijas. The two men are fellows at the art center nestled in the Banff National Park in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. After exploring several avenues, and still determined to start a conversation, the protagonist settles on the strategy of musing out loud about what kind of a novel he, a painter, might write about Banff.

Like his character Daniel Atijas, David Albahari was a writing fellow at the Banff Centre when he first came to Canada from Serbia in the middle of the wars of the 1990s. I had been translating Albahari’s stories since we first met in the late 1980s, while both of us were still living in what was then Yugoslavia: he in Belgrade, I in Zagreb. I returned to my native Boston in 1990, and Albahari came to Canada to be a resident in Banff in 1994. The first I heard of the Banff Centre was when Albahari faxed me an essay during his residency so that he could read it, in my translation, to a gathering of the fellows. I recently found fragments of it in the depths of my computer and was able to salvage this passage:

On the first floor and part of the second was the local bookstore. When I discovered it on my second day in Banff, I closely perused the shelves with books of prose and poetry and, by habit, pulled out the books I wanted to own. Then, one by one, I put them back on the shelves where I’d found them. The rest of the books had already begun to expand, taking over the newly emptied spaces, but I was persistent. I repeated this ritual, which I have developed over the past two or three years, denying myself any opportunity of bringing a book home with me from a trip. It took the war for me to understand the futility of all property; despite my intention to “wander free as a bird,” I had accumulated belongings, I had hoarded, I had stuck to things like a caterpillar sticks to a leaf, but when I greeted Jewish refugees from Sarajevo, each one spoke of “his” books, of despair at the thought that “someone else’s foot” was kicking them around or “someone else’s hands” were tossing them into flames.

We never learn what the painter or Daniel Atijas might have written about his stay in Banff, but Globetrotter is the Banff novel that David Albahari wrote; it was originally published in Serbian in 2001 and has been translated into French and now English.

The novels that Albahari wrote during his eighteen years in Canada create together a sort of meta-narrative. Each one functions well on its own, and each is quite distinct from all the others, yet if you read two, or three, or all of them, you will enjoy a rich interplay of images and perspectives, absences and presences.

The short stories he was writing before he moved to Canada secured his standing within Serbian literature and inaugurated themes he has explored ever since; a selection are published in English translation in Words Are Something Else. He has also shone as a translator of such American writers as John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon. Like the works he has chosen to translate, his short stories have been postmodern and experimental. Throughout his writing career he has employed a dark, feverish humor, and Albahari, it is fair to say, is obsessed by obsession. All of his prose is structured around bickering, dueling voices; he uses those voices to poke at the nature of fiction, art, history, to illuminate his characters, to move his story forward. A thread that runs through his work is the nature of presence and absence, which is particularly pertinent to his Canadian novels, since his absence from Serbia has so clearly defined the presence, in Serbia, of his writing.

Except for Götz and Meyer, Albahari’s Canadian novels, Bait, Snow Man, Leeches, Globetrotter, and Darkness (Mrak; the only one that has not yet been translated into English), have many common threads. Each features a writer. Jewish characters appear in almost all of them. Native Americans and their lore have their place, as does talk about the nature of words and writing. And the war is always an absent presence, dictating the narrative from a distance. It is only with Leeches that Albahari brings his story home to the hostilities shaping Serbian life in the late 1990s, although even Leeches is narrated from abroad, possibly Canada, to which the narrator is forced to flee. Götz and Meyer is the one exception among the Canadian novels, for the story explores the fate of Jews in Serbia during World War II; it begins and ends in Belgrade.

Unlike the writer-protagonists of Snow Man and Leeches, the protagonist of Globetrotter is a painter; the writer is the novel’s object rather than its subject. The counterpoint of conversation between the protagonist painter and the writer Daniel Atijas allows for a lively discussion about art that uses paint, and art that uses words. Atijas comes up with the engaging notion that the best stories “start from the middle and then, a little like a tangled skein, resist anyone’s predictions about how they will unravel.” The bickering voices of the two men are joined by a third interlocutor — Ivan Matulić’s grandson — and the complexity of the competing narratives feeds the novel’s thriller-like tension.

In June of 2011, I arrived in Banff. My project at a three-week translation residency was to translate Albahari’s Globetrotter into English. The Banff International Literary Translation Centre invited the author to attend as well, so David Albahari joined us there for five days. Although he and I have been working together for twenty-five years, we have been in the same room only a few times.

Together we went to the Museum of Natural History and looked at the stuffed owls, the lynx, the grizzly. Together we went into town from the Centre, walking by the cemetery, and roamed the streets, which really do have animal names like Badger, Otter, Wolf, Bear, Buffalo, Grizzly, Rabbit. We went to the Banff Springs Hotel and had coffee on the terrace near where the Spray flows into the Bow, on a bluff overlooking the two rivers and the Fairholme Range with its snow-covered peaks.

While Albahari was in Banff with us translators in 2011, he wrote a piece about our residency, which I translated on the spot and he and I read at one of our gatherings. It is entitled “The Banff Translators.”

Once they had finished translating everything there was to translate in Banff, the Banff translators, better known as Group 25, headed east. Along the way they translated all they saw: they translated elks into buffalo, Japanese tourists into an Aboriginal of the Blackfoot Tribe, the mayor of Calgary into Chief Sitting Bull. The squirrels in all languages remained the same, as did the words: cage, peanut, love, and communism. By then the translators had reached the East Coast of North America and here for the first time they were faced in all seriousness by their role in the world and life. It had been a breeze to be a translator in Banff, but how, now, to translate fish into gulls, salt into iodine, German submarines into optical cables, and the flushed cheeks of newly grown girls into the first dreams that would flush their faces even more? There was no help to be had here from the Old English, the Sanskrit, and the Celtic languages. Love is untranslatable, unless replaced by pure energy, such as: waves lapping at the toes of the Banff translators. The translators are barefoot as they have learned meanwhile that for a translation to be good there has to be first-hand, or first-foot, experience, their feet must feel the mud of the earth first if they are to catch sight later of the gleam of stars, there is an order which defies translation, and untranslatable is a breath or a heartbeat or that soft sound when tooth hits tooth at the end of a first kiss.

Back home in Calgary, Albahari was packing his bags to move back to Serbia. A few months later, in 2012, he made the move. These two stays in Banff, his as a writer in 1994 and mine as his translator in 2011, are, in a sense, bookends for his eighteen Canadian years.

Albahari has continued writing. Since his return to Serbia he has published four novels, which herald a new poetic and new, sharply provocative themes. In the spirit of this novel’s attention to presence and absence, it is worth saying that the translation of his novels into English guarantees him an English-language presence regardless of where he chooses to absent or present himself.

Novels and stories by David Albahari available in English:

Words Are Something Else, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

Tsing, translated by David Albahari

Bait, translated by Peter Agnone

Snow Man, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

Götz and Meyer, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

Leeches, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

Learning Cyrillic, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ