Miljenko Jergovic - The Walnut Mansion

One last point worth mentioning is that the story of Regina Delavale’s life lends itself to interpretation as an allegory of the fate of Yugoslavia. Regina’s rampages in the final days of her life, in which she lays waste to an entire apartment (a container of life, much as states are), seem to be a metaphor for the bloody rampages of paramilitaries that ended the state of Yugoslavia. And the reader travels back slowly to her childhood and then to her birth, when she is given a toy house carved in walnut. The little wooden house stands as a symbol of the novel’s idea that the legacies left by a generation seem tiny to future generations. (Indeed, Tito’s Yugoslavia was destroyed by politicians who belonged to the generation that came after its founders.) And in this way the little house in walnut can also be seen as a metaphor for the state granted to the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes by Woodrow Wilson and the Western powers after the First World War. Thus, the reverse chronology of the novel is oddly suitable for outside readers, the majority of whom first learned about Yugoslavia at its bloody end and only slowly worked their way backward to learn the history of the country.

Notes

1. Http://www.jergovic.com/bio-bibliografija/.

2. This label should not be confused with “Bosnian Croat”—that is, a Croat born and raised in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

3. Http://arhiv.slobodnadalmacija.hr/20030716/forum01.asp. Translations of his remarks in this interview are mine.

4. Http://arhiv.slobodnadalmacija.hr/20030716/forum01.asp.

5. See, for example, the review in the July 24, 2007, issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

6. I’m grateful to Aida Vidan for pointing these aspects out to me.

7. Http://bhknjiga.com/intervjumiljenko-jergovic-hrvati-su-sretniji-od-srba-zene-ce-im-prije-postati-europske-sobarice.html. Translation mine.

Like Jergović’s other prose works, The Walnut Mansion is written in a lucid, colloquial style; the language itself presents few unusual challenges to a translator, and only a handful of small changes in content for an Anglophone readership have been necessary.

One of the biggest issues presents itself in the title. The Croatian word dvori has no real equivalent in English, as it refers to a specific type of house in coastal Croatia. The word is defined as “a house with several rooms of solid construction, made of stone in coastal areas, usually with a portico, a rain cistern and a storeroom.” Not exactly a mansion in our current conception, but since “mansion” is defined simply as “a large, impressive house,” it works best, as the kind of house in question was often larger than average homes, and a portico represents a modicum of luxury.

A greater problem for a foreign readership is the very frequent mention of various names, places, and events unfamiliar to those who are not well-versed in the history of the former Yugoslavia. On the one hand, there are far too many of these to explain in footnotes or a glossary; on the other, removing them or translating some of them descriptively would in our view make the translation anemic. Thus, we have left all such references in the text intact. Though these references may impede the comprehension of the uninitiated in places, the vast majority if not all of these names are easily found on the Internet, and the curious reader should be able to find explanations of them there in English without difficulty.

Another problem for an Anglophone readership is the names of the characters. Given that the novel has some fifty of them, most of whom have distinctly Croatian, Bosnian, or Serbian names, the task of finding suitable equivalents is impossible. In our view, transliterating these names makes them very ugly, and this is normally not the practice in the media, which simply delete any pesky diacritics (e.g., “Milosevic” in place of “Milošević”), though this is no solution either. Therefore, we have opted to keep the names in their original form, including all diacritics. The following table will demystify their pronunciation.

B/C/S

English

c

Like ts

č, ć

Like ch

dž, đ

Like j in jam

i

Like y in yes

lj

Like ly in tell ya

nj

Like ny in lanyard

š

Like sh

ž

Like ge in rouge

Finally, Jergović uses various words referring to Croatian and Balkan concepts that have no convenient equivalents in English. As most of these occur in one form or another in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Merriam-Webster Unabridged, we have retained them in their attested Anglicized forms. They and two frequent political terms mentioned in the introduction are defined below; the reader may refer to these definitions when these words occur. The definitions given below are based on those in the aforementioned dictionaries except that we have tailored them slightly to reflect their meaning in Croatia and the Balkans.

borek

A savory pie made of puff pastry, containing a variety of fillings such as cheese, meat, and potatoes

boza

A popular hot drink in Turkey and the Middle East, made by fermenting an infusion of millet seeds

briscola

An Italian trump card game played in the Mediterranean and Adriatic

Chetnik

A guerilla fighter in the Balkans; more specifically, a member of Serbian royalist guerillas in World War II

gusle

A bowed string musical instrument in the Balkans that usually has only one string

hodja

A teacher in a Muslim school

salep

A hot drink made by sweetening an infusion of a four of the same name made from orchidaceous plants (cf. British saloop )

tekke

A dervish monastery

Ustasha

A member of a party of separatist Croats before World War II; during the war a term for officials of the fascist Independent State of Croatia

zikr

A Muslim ritual prayer recited by dervishes in which an expression of praise is continually repeated

“Oh, Mrs. Marija, I’m a daughter, not a monster! I took care of her for thirty years. My life passed me by while I was doing that, and I didn’t complain to anybody. I didn’t run away, like so many children do from their parents. They run all the way to the other end of the world. And it’s no wonder they do — with what passes for parents around here. But I didn’t do that, and now I have the right to say something. I’ve been going from room to room all morning long. They sent me from the second floor to the fifth floor and back again. I don’t know why they’ve been doing that. Would they do it if I came to report a murder? Mrs. Marija, I’m not a monster, believe me, but I did feel a load was taken off my shoulders, make no mistake about it. It was as if I had my life again. And the children had theirs again too. Can you imagine what it’s like to watch your own mother turn into a monster, into a freak, into — I don’t even know what to call it? She was my mother, for better or worse — it doesn’t matter. I don’t know whether I’m a good mother to my children, and so I won’t judge her. But I loved her! I can say that, and I know very well what I’m saying. But for the last three months she hasn’t been the same person. A demon got a hold of her. Now I don’t believe in demons, spells, or spirits — so don’t think I’m making this up. But at night we locked ourselves in the bedroom because that was the only way we dared to go to sleep. Me and my two children. In the morning I would clean up what she’d broken. I cleaned her. . her excrement from all over the house. It was everywhere — on the walls, on the ceilings. It was terrible — you have no idea how much of it can come out of one living being. In a month everything in the house had been defiled or smashed. A big oaken cabinet, a hundred years old and weighing at least half a ton — she chopped it up one night with an axe. With one of those big axes that not even a man can lift just like that! So, Mrs. Marija, that was the ninety-seven-year-old woman that all the newspapers have been writing about yesterday and today. I understand that; they think she was some dear old granny, like one of those little old grandmas on Stradun Street. Everyone had one. A heart-rending figure, like a seal being killed or a dog in the pound. Everyone wants to tear that boy limb from limb, and they’ll do it in the end! He’s done for. He’ll never work as a doctor again, and who knows what he’ll be like when he gets out of prison? They’ll convict him, I’m sure of it. But why didn’t you hide him? People will kill him! Why don’t you stick him in jail for now? Is it that you’re expecting them to come after him and string him up like in the Wild West? That would put an end to the whole affair. Without the hassle of a trial and you getting involved in a tragedy. That’s right, Mrs. Marija, this is a tragedy! But the victim isn’t some ninety-seven-year-old woman — it’s the young man who saved us. Me and my children! I could keep quiet because my agony is over, but I won’t, even if I end up just like him. If someone needs to be torn limb from limb, you’ve got us; we’re already used to it. Nothing can happen to us that we haven’t already had to endure. There are things more terrible than death, Mrs. Marija! What a person lives through is worse. Nor is shame the worst thing in the world. There are things much worse than that, and God forbid you ever suffer them, you or anybody in your family! I won’t be able to go on living if something bad happens to that young man on account of her. I can’t take it; I don’t care if you think I’m a monster instead of someone’s child a hundred times over! But that. . that. . I don’t know what you call it, that wasn’t my mother! If I thought it was, I’d jump out of this window this instant; I’d squeeze through the bars; I just wouldn’t be able to take it if something like that brought me into this world. You think I’m crazy? Oh yes, you must think I’m crazy, that I’m in shock, that what I’m telling you isn’t true, and that everything will be different tomorrow, after someone has a talk with me, convinces me it’s not true, explains everything to me, sends me to a psychiatrist, shoots me full of sedatives like a goose. But you’re wrong! You don’t know how wrong you are and how many times in the last three months I wished I could do what had to be done to save myself and my children, but I didn’t have the courage. I didn’t know how to do it, and today I’m sorry; I’ll never forgive myself because I’m the reason why that young man’s life is falling apart. That’s right; I’d have killed her and my hand wouldn’t have shaken at all, if only I’d known. .”