{"id":395436,"date":"2018-04-24T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2018\/04\/24\/directions-for-use-by-ana-ristovic-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-07T14:12:23","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T14:12:23","slug":"directions-for-use-by-ana-ristovic-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/04\/24\/directions-for-use-by-ana-ristovic-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Directions for Use” by Ana Ristovi\u0107 [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s poetry entry into the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series is from BTBA<\/span> judge\u2014and Riffraff co-owner\u2014Emma Ramadan.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Directions for Use<\/em><\/a> by Ana Ristovi\u0107, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Serbia, Zephyr Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

Very occasionally, reading a book in translation can feel like I\u2019m sitting across from a friend having coffee, and I get a little start when I remember that the book was written by someone I\u2019ve never met, in a country I\u2019ve never been to, and in a language I\u2019ve never heard spoken aloud. So familiar are the sentiments, so inhabitable are the ideas, so comforting is the communality between my lived experience and the words on the page.<\/p>\n

Ana Ristovi\u0107\u2019s Directions for Use<\/em> is full of sexy, coy, ruthless poems about the body, about a woman\u2019s experience, about love and lovemaking, about the life of a poet, about the underbelly of the day to day. Her poems are funny and terrifying all at once. seem on the surface to be deceivingly lighthearted or perhaps even lovely. But there is something darker lurking beneath the surface to stir up your ways of thinking about everyday occurrences.<\/p>\n

As her translators Steven Teref and Maja Teref mention in their foreword, Ristovi\u0107 refreshingly breaks from the \u201cWestern stereotype of Eastern European writing as chronicling political persecution, depressing tones and bleak lives . . . The poet represents a new generation.\u201d In a translation that finely emulates Ristovi\u0107\u2019s rhythms and peculiar word choices meant to accommodate seemingly nonsensical ideas that when read in this book somehow make perfect sense, this new poetry shines.<\/p>\n

In \u201cCircling Zero,\u201d Ristovi\u0107 describes female masturbation as caught up in the female experience.<\/p>\n

We are independent women.
\nWe breathe asthmatically
\nwhile waiting for new love.
\nWe pop pills
\nof unfulfilled promises. We drown in murky dreams.
\nTwenty-four hours a day we painfully make love
\nto a migraine and forgive her
\nbecause she\u2019s female.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

. . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Independent, we claim, more than ever.
\nYet during lonely nights, in our tight vulva
\nmore and more, we insert a small magical finger,
\nas if placing a bullet into the chamber
\nwhich refuses to fire.
\nAnd we smile with sadness in dreamless dreams.
\nAnd the safe hand, circling
\nthe soft zero.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other treatments of women\u2019s bodies and experiences are equally jarring and yet immediately comprehensible, as in \u201cThe Body,\u201d when she describes \u201ca woman\u2019s bones shuffling across the street \/ like fragile musical instruments.\u201d And in \u201c Little Zebras\u201d:<\/p>\n

When she opens her eyes she gazes at aluminum clouds; snow drifts through her skin. Glass pins
\nsink into the little canyons of her pupils and hoarfrost
\nspills from her smiling lips. She covers her face
\nwith squeaky palms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The author of six books of poetry, the translator of over 20 books of Slovenian literature into Serbian, and the recipient of numerous European awards, Ristovi\u0107 has an uncanny way of describing the outside and the inside at the same time, of seeing the world from one step more removed than the rest of us and showing us what we\u2019re missing. Reading her poems, I felt like she was winking at me, showing me glimpses of just how connected we all are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s poetry entry into the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge\u2014and Riffraff co-owner\u2014Emma Ramadan. Directions for Use by Ana Ristovi\u0107, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Serbia, Zephyr Press) Very occasionally, reading a book in translation can feel like I\u2019m sitting across from a friend having coffee, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":397842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[67756,35996,66446,49386,67746,60166,67776,67766,37876,1626],"class_list":["post-395436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-ana-ristovic","tag-btba","tag-btba-2018","tag-btba-poetry","tag-directions-for-use","tag-emma-ramadan","tag-maja-teref","tag-steven-teref","tag-why-this-book-should-win","tag-zephyr-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395436","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=395436"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397862,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395436\/revisions\/397862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}