{"id":278486,"date":"2010-06-09T19:10:33","date_gmt":"2010-06-09T19:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/06\/09\/the-year-in-translations-so-far-baba-yaga-laid-an-egg-by-dubravka-ugresic\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:40","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:40","slug":"the-year-in-translations-so-far-baba-yaga-laid-an-egg-by-dubravka-ugresic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/06\/09\/the-year-in-translations-so-far-baba-yaga-laid-an-egg-by-dubravka-ugresic\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year in Translations (So Far): "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" by Dubravka Ugresic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth<\/a> to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these titles sound appealing to me, etc., etc. Click here<\/a> for the complete list of posts.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg<\/em> by Dubravka Ugresic. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson. (Croatia\/Europe, Canongate)<\/b><\/p>\n

OK, today is much busier than expected (it started with a fairly surreal interview with the Bay City Times<\/em> at 8am this morning and will end with Atwood’s presentation tonight at 7pm), but I really don’t want to fall off my summer recommendation plan, so I’m going to cheat a bit . . . Rather than try and write a whole new set of reasons as to why you should check this out (and you should—it’s one of Dubravka’s best books), I’m just going to re-run the review I wrote of this<\/a> a few months back. <\/p>\n

Promise that all future write ups will be new material . . . Most of the other books I want to recommend haven’t been reviewed on the site anyway. But regardless, here goes:<\/p>\n

This is an admittedly biased statement (disclaimer: the first book Open Letter published was Ugresic\u2019s Nobody\u2019s Home<\/em>, and I was responsible for Dalkey\u2019s publishing Thank You for Not Reading<\/em> a few years back), but I honestly believe that Dubravka Ugresic is one of the most interesting writers working today. Her books are consistently good, even across genres. The two aforementioned essay collections are spot-on, and her fiction — from The Museum of Unconditional Surrender<\/em> to Lend Me Your Character<\/em> to The Ministry of Pain<\/em> — is always enjoyable, surprising, captivating, and envelope-pushing.<\/p>\n

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg<\/em> is a perfect example of Ugresic\u2019s fertile imagination. The latest entry in Canongate\u2019s \u201cMyths Series,\u201d this novel is presumably a retelling of the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga — an old witch who lives in a house with chicken legs and kidnaps children. Which is why it\u2019s surprising that the novel begins with the rather mundane situation of the writer returning home to visit her elderly mother and her mother\u2019s hometown.<\/p>\n

Actually, the novel technically opens with a preface about old women, entitled \u201cAt First You Don\u2019t See Them . . .\u201d: <\/p>\n

\n

Sweet little old ladies. At first you don\u2019t see them. And then, there they are, on the tram, at the post office, in the shop, at the doctor\u2019s surgery, on the street, there is one, there is another, there is a fourth over there, a fifth, a sixth, how could there be so many of them all at once?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The presence and machinations of old women is the thread that runs throughout this triptych. The second part — my personal favorite — is much more fairy-tale-like than the first, with tragic deaths and reunions with lost children. It takes place over a week at a resort hotel and centers on three women:<\/p>\n

\n

In a wheelchair sat an old lady with both feet tucked into a large fur boot. It would have been hard to describe the old lady as a human being; she was the remains of a human being, a piece of humanoid crackling. [. . .] The other one, the one pushing the wheelchair, was exceptionally tall, slender and of astonishingly erect bearing for her advanced years. [. . .] The third was a short breathless blonde, her hair ruined by excessive use of peroxide, with big gold rings in her ears and large breasts whose weight dragged her forward.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In its exacting descriptions and twisted plot machinations, this section is vintage Ugresic. (Of her previous work, this section is closest in tone and playfulness to the pieces in Lend Me Your Character<\/em>.) It\u2019s also the most vulgar of the three sections of Baba Yaga<\/em> — which is kind of fun. Take this scene, where one of the elderly ladies is getting a massage at the hands of the marvelous Mevlo, who is the flipside of Hemingway\u2019s Jake Barnes:<\/p>\n

\n

Beba didn\u2019t know what to say. As far as she could judge, the young man was fine in every way. More than fine.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cThis thing of mine stands up like a flagpole, but what\u2019s the use, love, when I\u2019m cold as an icicle? It\u2019s as much use to me as a cripple\u2019s withered leg. You can do what you like with it, tap it as much as you like, it just echoes as though it was hollow.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cHang on, what are you talking about?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cMy willy, love, you must have noticed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cNo,\u201d lied Beba.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u201cIt happened after the explosion. A Serbian shell exploded right beside me, fuck them all, and ever since then, it\u2019s been standing up like this. My mates all teased me, why, Mevlo, they said, you\u2019ve profited from the war. Not only did you get away with your life, but you got a tool taut as a gun. Me, a war profiteer? A war cripple, that\u2019s what I am!\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If the second part is where Ugresic lets her comedic charms fly, the third is where she gets her postmodern on.<\/p>\n

This section takes the form of a letter from a Dr. Aba Bagay (who appeared in part one) to the book\u2019s editor, who is a bit confused as to how the first two sections of the book relate to the myth of Baba Yaga. So Bagay creates a \u201cBaba Yaga for Beginners,\u201d exploring the myth from a number of angles in a very scholarly way:<\/p>\n

\n

The elusive and capricious Baba Yaga sometimes appears as a helper, a donor, sometimes as an avenger, a villain, sometimes as a sentry between two worlds, sometimes as an intermediary between worlds, but also as a mediator between the heroes in a story. Most interpreters locate Baba Yaga in the ample mythological family of old and ugly women with specific kinds of power, in a taxonomy that is common to mythologies the world over. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bagay\u2019s scholarly apparatus is loaded with contradictions about the Baba Yaga myth and how it\u2019s been interpreted and told. The one constant is the \u201cold woman\u201d bit, which is also the thread which runs throughout Ugresic\u2019s novel, a novel that defies most novelistic conventions, that doesn\u2019t so much retell the story of Baba Yaga as explode it into several very enjoyable fragments. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these titles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[25476,13906,27896,33066,2186,15336,32096,11406,27886,33056,1646,32996],"class_list":["post-278486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-baba-yaga-laid-an-egg","tag-canongate","tag-celia-hawkesworth","tag-croatian-literature","tag-dubravka-ugresic","tag-ellen-elias-bursac","tag-european-literature","tag-grove","tag-mark-thompson","tag-myths-series","tag-review","tag-year-so-far"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322166,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278486\/revisions\/322166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}