A somewhat complex translation
During his residency at Translation House Looren in September 2022, the Serbian translator Igor Cvijanović finished his translation of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest. The novel interweaves storylines at a tennis academy, in a drug rehab center, and from a Québécois separatist milieu into a complex narrative structure with numerous characters. In this interview, Igor talks about his work on this unique book – and why Novak Đoković’s success made translating it at least a little bit easier. He also gave us an insight into the fragmented Serbo-Croatian book market and the linguistic situation in the region.
Igor, during your Looren residency in September 2022 you finished your translation of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. How long did you work on this 1079-page text?
I started working on it in December 2020 and I finished the translation by July 2022. During that time, I kept a very strict schedule in order to combine the work on the text with my obligations as an English teacher and some smaller translation projects. At Looren, I was working with my editor on the final revision of the text. It took me a bit less than two years overall – which was faster than I thought.
Your editor Alen Besić was also staying at Looren. How did you work together?
We had worked together on many projects before Infinite Jest. Sometimes as co-translators and sometimes with me as the translator and Alen as the editor. Alen had already edited my other translations of David Foster Wallace (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Consider the Lobster). When I got the contract for Infinite Jest, I absolutely wanted to work with him. During the Looren residency, we were in the final stages of the text. We broke it up into ten sections and sent them back and forth to really work out the last details. We had such a productive time at Looren and the residency allowed us to finish this extraordinary project faster and more efficiently than we ever would have back home.
What is it for you personally that makes this novel so special?
I don’t even know where to start. For me, Infinite Jest is a unique book in world literature, but I would maybe point out two things. First, even with all its complexity and extensiveness, the book remains incredibly readable. I know that some people may not agree with me on that point, especially after they read the first 100 pages. But when you really get into it, it is a super complex page-turner. Which brings me to the second quality: maybe just because of its length and complexity, I think the book is incredibly rewarding. The further you go, the better everything starts fitting together. It creates a unique reading experience.
Can you tell us more about the novel’s complexity?
First, it is the very structure of the book. There are 28 chapters, but they are not that obvious and there are almost 200 pages of endnotes – and footnotes to the endnotes. There is an interesting detail about that. Originally, the novel was even way longer but the publisher wanted Wallace to shorten the text. The author then transferred a number of these passages into the endnotes and managed to convince the editor to keep them in the book anyway.
What else?
Wallace loves long sentences – some of them are more than two pages long. In my opinion, these sentences remain very readable and fluid once you get used to his language. But from a translator’s point of view, they are a major challenge. Furthermore, there is a huge variety of vocabulary. Not only are there a lot of very technical terms from tennis, psychoanalysis, media theory, and so on, but Wallace also constantly invents new words. And finally, there are many intentional grammatical mistakes in the text. We know that Wallace was very insistent on grammar, so it is clear that everything he did “wrong” was on purpose. But, as a translator, you have to make sure you spot these things and include them in your translation.
Can you give an example of mistakes made on purpose?
Mostly, in Infinite Jest, the narrator sounds a lot like the people they are talking about. In the book, there is a group of Québécois separatists. When the text talks about them, everything is narrated in an English that imitates the French sentence structure and includes typical mistakes that French native speakers would make in English. What I had to do then was to imitate this pattern in Serbian. That is an obvious example of errors, but there are also more subtle ones that are harder to spot: for example, words misspelled on purpose. While I was working, I had to mark them so that Alen knew they were intentional.
How did you tackle all the research involved in such a project?
One thing that really helped was that I had translated Wallace before. So, I was familiar with his work and writing. In addition to that, fortunately, there are some very useful resources out there. Over the years a real community of experts and fans has formed around Infinite Jest. There is an “Infinite Jest Wiki” where a lot of references and explanations can be found. The American David Foster Wallace expert Matt Bucher hosts a podcast called “The Great Concavity”, which was initially only about Infinite Jest. We created a mailing list with Matt Bucher and eight other translators who have translated or are translating Infinite Jest. Through this list, I also got to know the German translator Ulrich Blumenbach, whom I met in person during my Looren residency.
“We had such a productive time at Looren.” Igor Cvijanović and Alen Besić at Translation House Looren.
What is your personal relationship to the works of David Foster Wallace?
He is definitely one of my favorite authors and one of the greatest of his generation. I had read several of his books before translating him. To be able to translate his work, and especially Infinite Jest, was rewarding for me as a reader because I like to think that translation is a form of deep reading. And even if I didn’t translate him, I would still be reading David Foster Wallace.
How present is American literature on the Serbian book market in general?
It is very present and predominant. Most translated books in Serbia are translated from English. Interestingly, there are always some authors missing on the Serbian market or introduced very late. I keep trying to spot these missing names and introduce them. When a book gets published later, there is sometimes an additional potential to it.
What do you mean by that?
I believe now is a good moment to publish Infinite Jest in Serbian, or any other language for that matter. Even though American culture has been present in Serbia for a long time, I think the book is much more understandable today than it would have been when it was originally published. It is also funny that some things mentioned in the book have really happened in the meantime – the President of the United States in the story closely resembles President Trump, there is a terrorist attack on American soil and with the way people get addicted to a movie in the book, Wallace kind of predicted what everybody today knows as binge watching. And, as we mentioned before, tennis plays a very important role in the book. With the success of Novak Djokovic, tennis became a huge thing in Serbia and the very specific tennis vocabulary has become almost natural in Serbian. These days, even grannies know what a drop-shot is.
Was “western” culture always influential in Yugoslavia or was there a fundamental change after the country collapsed in the 90s?
Yugoslavia was a special case. Yes, it was part of the Eastern Bloc for a few years after World War II, and it was a communist country, but it was never as isolated as, for example, the USSR or Romania. There were very strong western influences earlier in the 20th century. French, German and American writers, for example, were regularly translated and published in Yugoslavia. In addition to that, there was a very strong rock music scene, especially in the 80s with a big punk and post-punk movement, which was strongly influenced by the West. For a communist country, it was not that culturally oppressive. The collapse of the state and the war in the 90s obviously changed a lot but not in terms of international cultural exchange.
Are books in Serbia published in the Cyrillic or the Latin alphabet?
Both. Infinite Jest will come out in the Latin alphabet – as do most translations from English, German, French, Italian, and so on. Some publishers print translations from Russian in Cyrillic. And there are Serbian authors who are published in Cyrillic. However, most books are published in the Latin alphabet. One of the reasons for that, I guess, is that they are also read in other Balkan countries. Even though the Cyrillic alphabet is the only official alphabet in Serbia, the Latin alphabet is becoming more frequently used in everyday life, I would say.
Is there a common book market in the independent states of Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro?
Kind of, it is complicated. Basically, there are two options: When you buy the rights for the translation of a book, they are sold only for Serbia or for Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, because that is where Serbian is spoken and is either the official language or the language in official use with other languages. Depending on the project, books will be distributed only in Serbia or in the other two countries as well. Or you could buy the rights for Croatia only or Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, because, again, Croatian is spoken in these two countries (the official language in Croatia and one of the three languages in Bosnia). The book markets of Serbia and Croatia, however, are completely separate.
Even though Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are the same language?
Yes, to my mind, it’s the same language. I grew up in Bosnia, where I went to primary school. It was taught as one and the same language there, just like in the rest of former Yugoslavia, and was called Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. Today, I live in the Serbian province of Vojvodina and as a literary translator, I work with this very same language, with slight dialectical variations. We should also bear in mind that books find their way from Serbia to Croatia and vice versa anyway. One of my favorite books in “Serbo-Croatian” lately is from a Croatian author: Doba mjedi by Slobodan Šnajder. Just to tell you how strange this all is.
So, it is a political question then?
Absolutely. I would qualify Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin as different versions of the same language. But historically, political and social forces have worked to turn these variants into languages that are separate from each other. As a linguist I find it hard to imagine anything more bizarre than translating from Croatian into Serbian, for example. That would be like translating from British to American English.
There are differences but they are not big enough to justify a need for translation…
Exactly. And they are differences between different dialects, not different languages, linguistically speaking. As with the different “Englishes”, the differences are not that big and speakers are very familiar with most of them. For example, the word for train in Croatian (vlak) is different from the word used in in Serbian (voz). But even if nobody uses it here, almost every Serb knows what the Croatian word for train is. Some years ago, there was this bizarre situation when a Serbian movie was subtitled in Croatian cinemas. This is just crazy from a linguistic point of view. But, as the famous Serbian linguist Ivan Klajn put it: “Unfortunately, this question has nothing to do with linguists!”
Igor Cvijanović (1979, Tuzla) completed his Bachelor and Master studies of English language and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, and obtained his doctorate from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. He has published translations of prose by John Barth, Annie Proul, Chris Abani, Reif Larsen, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. He lives in Novi Sad.
Igor created a Twitter account in which he documented his Work on Infinite Jest: https://twitter.com/beskrajnalakrd1
Interview and Photos: Steven Wyss, Translation House Looren