Looking to the Balkans

This morning I heard a remarkable keynote address by Tomislav Longinovic.


For a year, my colleagues have been hosting a seminar entitled CrossRoads: Culture, Politics and Belief in the Balkans and South Asia.
Much as I would have loved to attend every session, I somehow managed to go to, yes, two: the first keynote on India and one of the last, today.

The experience was enhanced by the fact that I've known Toma for about a quarter century: he was hired at the University of Wisconsin about the time that Yugoslavia was becoming engulfed in the wars that tore it to pieces, and I was still in graduate school. But the warm embrace I got at the end of the talk was only half the reason I had a fabulous morning; the other half was the talk itself.

"Words that Hide: Balkan Politics of Translation" was his title, and his aim was to try and tweak our understanding of the Balkans and of the unfortunate term "Balkanization," which, as he pointed out, is always negative. No one ever strives for balkanization; no one wants to resemble the Balkans.

At the same time, the Balkans is a region with an ancient history and a multitude of peoples and languages, a beautiful land whose residents have generated all kinds of cultural artifacts. Why should it always be negative?

Toma was aiming to redefine translation as a movement across linguistic and cultural boundaries that parallels travel -- which more than anything is a movement across space. And has anyone ever considered travel to be a negative phenomenon?

Nabokov famously found translation to be jarring, difficult, and frustrating. The opening lines to his poem On Translating Eugene Onegin explain his experience perfectly:

What is translation? On a platter 

A poet's pale and glaring head,

A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,

And profanation of the dead.

But Nabokov was wrong. (And I couldn't regret more that I had my students read extensive portions of his Onegin this semester, because one of them is now convinced that Nabokov has a tin ear and was a terrible stylist, an atrocious writer. I will have to assign another story along the way to convince him otherwise!)

Instead, Toma argued, translations are encounters between cultural codes, opportunities to seek new forms of meaning, to strive for the horizon of novelty and freedom. Modernity, he said, is the spirit of transgressing boundaries, of exploring the beyond.

And if we could just redefine the Balkans as a "cultural mosaic," if they themselves could embrace their multiplicity of cultural codes and meanings and the freedom those meanings bring, then surely Balkanization could become a positive term.

Ashot and his son Gogol on the shores of New York beaches

Coincidentally, in class this week my students and I were discussing Gogol's "Overcoat," and I remembered Jhumpa Lahiri's wonderful novel The Namesake and the beautiful Mira Nair film version of it. The film (and novel) open on a train, moving through South Asia, and a young college student is reading the stories of Nikolai Gogol, specifically "The Overcoat." When another traveller encourages him to think about new horizons ("take a pillow and blanket and go see the world; you will never regret it"), he replies: "My grandfather says that is what books are for; you can travel the world without moving an inch." And that, of course, is true: a library is an entire world to those who know how to explore it.

Nabokov on the road

But Ashot, the young man in this opening scene, listens to his fellow traveller and decides to embrace both literature and travel. After all, you can et the world come to you, but you can also go out to seek novelty and freedom. Nabokov understood many things, but perhaps not this. Despite the many hours logged in automobiles across the highways of the United States, I don't think that Nabokov was able to embrace the journey, to enjoy the cultural mosaic that is America.

Instead, he retreated to Europe when he could. But Tomislav Longinovic -- and his generation of Yugoslav immigrants to the United States -- brought a positive Balkan experience to their lives here. Toma says that ways of seeing are culturally conditioned. Learning to explore those cultures -- their verbal and visual landscapes -- is the way of the modern translator. Our entrenched semiotic mechanisms, to quote Toma again, influence our perceptions. But if we expand our semiotic understanding, we will all see more -- more of the world, and more of what the world can be.