"Just Open a Door"
A Q&A with Christina E. Kramer on Translating Dimkovska's Grandma Non-Oui
Skopje-born Lidija Dimkovska writes in Macedonian and lives in Slovenia. She gained international recognition as a novelist with Rezerven Zhivot, which garnered the European Union Prize for Literature in 2014 and then was published a few years later as A Spare Life in English translation by Christina E. Kramer.
Along with a slew of literary translations, Kramer has authored the best-known Macedonian language textbook for North American students. This summer Istros Books published her translation of Dimkovska’s Grandma Non-Oui, about which you can learn more in a previous Balkanography entry or in Petar Penda's review for the European Literature Network.
Christina spoke with me recently about the novel, about language and politics, and about the joys and knotty challenges of literary translation.
Thanks for talking, and for bringing Lidija Dimkovska to English language readers. For those of us who can’t even imagine translating a whole novel, how do you go about it? How closely do you work with the author?
Every translator moves through the process in a different way. I tend not to read the whole novel before I start translating. The first-translation process is horribly difficult and slow—like hacking your way through a mountain forest—and I like surprises.
So I read and translate at the same time, just going through the first time and typing as I go (I’m a fast typist)—digging a foundation. That leaves gaps and question marks, strings of words I don’t know, or strings of possible alternative translations. On the second go-through I look up all the words I didn’t know, make choices, move the syntax into English, and mark with an xx the places that are most resistant, the knots. I solve as many as I can in subsequent passes, and then consult the author, only when I end up with a manageable number of knots.
What were some of the knots in Grandma Non-Oui?
For starters, the title. In Macedonian the novel was simply called Non-Oui. I added the word Grandma. I felt that for the book to gain traction with an English audience there had to be something more to hang on, and I didn’t want it to be Yes-No. There was a thought it should be No-Yes, or maybe Yes, Then No. Ideas for titles went around and around before Lidija and I and the publisher finally agreed
Why was that more of an issue in English than in Macedonian?
In Macedonian Lidija is already well-known, and is a major writer. The outreach, including the title, was much more important for gaining readers in English.
Both of the main characters, the granddaughter and the grandmother, are named Nedeljka, Neda for short. Neda (Ne-Da) means “no, yes” in Macedonian, so I suppose the wordplay that makes the author’s title work would be more obvious in the original.
Right, you don’t have to explain that to Macedonian readers! Another puzzle was the phrase that ended up in English as Ah, Nedi. The conceit of the novel is that the narrator is a young woman sitting by the grave of her grandmother having imagined conversations with her. So we need to know when it is the young Nedeljka, Neda, who is speaking, and when it is Grandma Nedeljka. In the book the switch between speakers is gestural, made partly in the layout by inserting line breaks between long paragraphs. But also when the grandmother starts talking she begins by saying , “Ah, Nedi…”
That short phrase presented a challenge. The first word comes from a specific conversational particle in Croatian that is hard to render in English. I considered “Aha,” or “Now, well” before landing on “Ah.” And then there’s Nedi. Croatian names are already tricky for an English speaker, and it had to be clear that Nedjeljka/Neda, and Nedi are the same person. Lidija and I had a lot of discussion about how to capture this colloquial and conversational shift in speaker, and Nedi implies intimacy.
You used Nonna to open passages addressed to the grandmother and the two terms work nicely to distinguish the speakers.
Well, thank you. I should add that translating Grandma as Nonna was suggested by an early reader of a draft of the translation and I thought it worked really well. So Nedi and Nonna’s speaking becomes familial and intimate.
These technical points raise a question about you—in making the switch from linguist to translator what did you most have to learn?
Everything. Really, everything. But mostly, I suppose navigating the tension between linguistic fidelity and literary fidelity. As a linguist I want the details to be right, 100 percent accurate in getting what it says in Macedonian onto the page. But I also need the literary freedom to let the translation breathe. It wasn’t until 2007, after many, many years of learning and teaching Macedonian language, that I decided to try translation, starting with Luan Starova’s My Father’s Books (Tatkovite knigi). My wonderful professor at the University of North Carolina, Madeine Levine, herself an award-winning translator, mentored me. The book came out in English in 2012, after a 5-year mentorship.
“I want the details to be right, 100 percent accurate in getting what it says in Macedonian onto the page. But I also need the literary freedom to let the translation breathe.”
Language plays an important role in Grandma Non-Oui. This novel’s original title is in French, and the action is set mostly in Split, Croatia, and Sicily. The granddaughter learns Croatian from Grandma and that creates a special bond between them. Language adds layers of identity, particularly as the book deals with a French journalist living in Split during WWII and Grandma’s foreignness after she follows an Italian soldier home to live married in Sicily. In translating, what did you think about how language functions in this book as well as in A Spare Life?
One of the lovely things that Lidija does is include multiple voices. But you have this complicated linguistic relationship: Lidija is one person writing in two strong women’s voices in both novels, and then I’m a translator having to find these two voices that are mediated through Lidija. And so, it’s a wonderful game, figuring out whose voice I am to be. And In Grandma Non-Oui there’s another layer because actually the young woman is voicing both characters, since Grandma has died.
So while the point-of- view switches back and forth between the two (and back and forth between Split and Sicily and the 1940s and the recent past), Grandma’s voice is in fact mediated through Neda. She is voicing Grandma. How distinct did you try to make their two styles of speaking in English?
Maybe I’m missing something subtle, but it seems to me that linguistically their voices are very similar. Young Neda learned from old Neda, after all, and they have this intimate relationship. I didn’t think of their manner of speech as distinct, but rather their perspectives and life experience.
For example, in old Neda there’s a funny bewilderment about the young people’s experience today. And in young Neda there’s an interesting nostalgia, a romanticization of her grandmother’s life.
Neda is in fact clear about what she’s missing in her life, including the empty-handedness of her romantic life. She’s almost envious, it seems, and longs for something that would make her story as good as her grandma’s.
Exactly. Also, language is a strong factor in identity creation, and we see in the novel what it means to have more than one language. We are in a political moment when we are not supposed to be hybrid, to have hybridized identities. But people do have multi-layered identities all at the same time. We are all stacks of competing and interwoven identities.
Because of Alzheimer’s, Grandma doesn’t remember Italian, but she is living is in Italy. She is left with Croatian. So, her language and her experience, her past and her present, become detached. Alzheimer’s often involves detachment, but here we have detachment from a life encoded in a way that cuts her off from all the intimate relationships of her time and place. She connects only with the granddaughter, who by chance she was able to bring into the circle of Croatian. There’s something very sad, and somehow, frightening, in that.
The book appears in English in long paragraphs with almost no margin on the page, kind of a continuous river of prose. Is the original like that? Didn’t A Spare Life look the same way?
Much more so! A Spare Life runs over 400 pages with fewer than 50 paragraphs, and that’s even after I added paragraphs to be friendlier to the North American reader. Even so, some reviewers complained that there were not enough breaks.
In Non-Oui I tried breaking it up. But then I realized that if you tamper with the paragraph structure it becomes unclear who is speaking. So I went back and put back every last paragraph break, line break, and indention! Lidija does write in very big blocks, but here they help separate out who is speaking.
It’s like a stream of consciousness. But also sometimes in the middle of a block of prose we would get a shift to third person. The granddaughter is talking to Grandma directly, and then all of the sudden she’s talking to us about Grandma. That was curious to me as a reader. Any thoughts on what Dimkovska is doing there?
Only that it’s an occasional reminder that the grandmother’s not actually alive. It’s almost a reality check for the reader.
In A Spare Life Dimkovska creates a clear political allegory, comparing the separation of conjoined twins to the breakup of the Yugoslav republics. Grandma Non-Oui draws parallels between past and present: eyewitness accounts of the fascism of the 30s and 40s and what’s happening today in Europe. Do you see a political impetus behind this book?
The rise of neo-Nazism and of totalitarian tendencies certainly was a motivator, but Lidija is very clear that this isn’t just a Croatian problem—it’s an Italian problem, a German problem, an American problem. Every generation has to have its own battle with totalitarianism. And so I was really interested in translating the book because of what it shows not just about societal issues—aging, the intergenerational transfer of language and cultural knowledge—but also about what it means for our generation to face totalitarian currents that we thought were defeated in the Second World War.
“Every generation has to have its own battle with totalitarianism.”
And for younger generations to face them as well, right? In fact I believe that my own children don’t have the awareness of authoritarian threats that I have, that they take some things for granted. Even though as a child I didn’t realize how close we still were to 1945, a sense of the vulnerability of democracy was still in the air and I absorbed it. Young Neda’s reaching back and seeing those connections seems very poignant.
It is very poignant. As is the portrayal of the grandson who gets seduced by neo-Nazism. We can see that he’s an outsider. He comes from a difficult family, he’s looking for community, he feels like he’s being othered— and in that context he finds safety in fascism. We know those young men. We see them. And I think it’s very good that in Lidija’s novel she’s humanizing what drives people like him.
I find it remarkable that an American-born linguist with no direct ties to the country becomes a translator of Macedonian fiction. From a folk dancing comp lit major studying Spanish and Russian to a Fulbright Scholar to textbook author and professor to someone bringing major writers from the Balkans into English—quite a journey!
As my colleagues and I tell our students, “You don’t need to make all your life decisions right now. Just open a door and see where it takes you. Just open a door.”