A literary sensation in her native (North) Macedonia and the surrounding region, Rumena Bužarovska is no stranger to English. She teaches American literature and English-Macedonian translation at the Philological Faculty of the University of Skopje. Her scholarly monograph On the Comic: The Theories of Humor through the Prism of the Short Story [За смешното: Теориите на хуморот низ призмата на расказот] (2012) incorporates both American and Macedonian writers.[1] She has translated works by such authors as Truman Capote, J. M. Coetzee, Lewis Carroll, and her favorite, Flannery O’Conner into Macedonian.[2] Bužarovska’s third story collections, My Husband [Мојот маж] (2014) was rendered into English by Paul Filev (Dalkey Press, 2020). The book under review here is her fourth story collection, I’m Not Going Anywhere (2023) [Не одам никаде (2018)]. It has been translated by herself and Steve Bradbury, an American translator of Taiwanese poetry with no knowledge of Macedonian.
In the Serbian podcast Sto minuta buke [A Hundred Minutes of Noise], the author speaks in some detail about the act of collaboration and the effect it has on her writing practice more generally. After meeting Bradbury at the Iowa International Writing Program, they worked together on Englishing I’m Not Going Anywhere, over the Internet, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Bužarovska would translate two pages at a time, which Bradbury would then edit (11:20). “He taught me how to translate and for this reason I learned how to write. (…) [This experience] is changing the way I write in Macedonian” (“Naučio me kako se prevodi i onda zbog toga sam naučila kako se piše. […] Menja me kako pišem na makedonskom”) (11:25, 12:56). An example of this change is her understanding of the need for exact verbs. Bužarovska says that she used to write simply “I left the room,” without indicating how (14:06). In English, she continues, there are many verbs, and if she cannot find a specific verb in Macedonian, she would then turn to an adverb (14:18). Furthermore, Americans avoid redundancies in their sentences (“redundance […] izlišnosti u rečenici”) (15:20). During the process of translation, Bradbury would point out to Bužarovska if she had already expressed something and shorten her sentences (15:51).
I thought of these statements as I was reading the stories in the collection I’m Not Going Anywhere and comparing them to the original. Additionally, I wondered how this stated desire for a more streamlined literary expression relates to the author’s stand against the domesticating approach to translation articulated elsewhere. In a conversation for Bibliotopia 2024, Bužarovska says that she would not worry if Bradbury did not understand a reference in her draft translation (45:36). Championing local specificity, she is not interested in “adapting” her work for foreign audiences (45:54); when she reads, she wishes “to learn about the places and the names and the cultures of those [other] places” (46:09). She asks the rhetorical question of “Why would I try to be something that I am not to cater to this kind of audience?” (48:13). Bužarovska and Bradbury’s equivalents of food and drink illustrate the interplay between concision and elaboration in the English version. The concision often corresponds to the original phrasing, staying philologically close to the source, while the elaboration might constitute a gloss or simply revel in the possibilities of the target language.
The eponymous story of the collection, “I’m Not Going Anywhere,” features many instances of food, centering on a goulash made with nearly inedible meat. Bužarovska and Bradbury translate “чорба со ќофтенца” (96) straightforwardly as “meatball soup” (89), but they have more of a challenge with “ќебапчиња” (96) which they render “kebabs” (90). The context here is that the family, disappointed with the mother’s meatball soup, decides to go to eat out, choosing the quintessential street food. While the two words have the identical etymology, “kebabs” belong to a broader category of skewered pieces of meat variously prepared, and “ќебапчиња” (the plural of “ќебапче,” which is the diminutive of “ќебап”) refer to grilled cylindrical pieces of ground meat. In the preceding story, “Tsi-Tse,” Bužarovska and Bradbury do something they could have easily done here, that is, transliterate the name of a culturally-specific food and print it in italics, with no further explanation: “gevrek”(74) for “ѓеврек” (81). The reader would understand from the context and, if necessary, look the term up on the Internet. Perhaps the precise type of food is not as important in the passage in “I’m Not Going Anywhere,” as much as the fact of its being eaten outside home and instead of the family meal.
A reference to the questionable goulash meat provides a memorable example of the translators’ expansion of the original. Riste, a disgruntled middle-aged Macedonian-Australian man, complains to his mother at lunch: “Veal my ass! I bet it’s beef from some leathery old nag the butcher picked up in a knacker’s yard” (95). Nothing in the Macedonian seems to inspire the rhythmical sound play of the English: “Кур мој, телешко! Ова не е ни јуне, ова ти е некоја стара говедина” (101) [Veal my ass (lit. dick)! This is not even baby beef, it’s some really old beef]. The colorful statement does not fit with Riste’s usual way of self-expression. It might not, on the surface, add much to the story. It is not there to cater to a foreign audience. It reveals the author’s larger fascination with the disgusting, visceral, and grotesque – a welcome jolt of exhilaration amidst all the dark subject matter (in the case of this particular story: diasporic alienation, physical and mental deterioration, marital infidelity, ungrateful children, neglected elders, stray dogs).
The favorite food of Sofia, the ethnically ambiguous wife of a diasporic nouveau riche in “Medusa” also receives an elaboration in English. Biljana, the narrator, explains: “Her favorite dish is a fried, oily, onion-laden minced-meat dish we call kjofte and she calls a meatball” (108). The Macedonian is fairly concise: “Омиленето јадење ѝ е пржено ќофте” [Her favorite dish is fried meatballs] (115). Bužarovska and Bradbury give a gloss and name the food item in two languages, to highlight Biljana’s scornful take-down of Sofia’s pretentiousness. Sofia tries to affect behaviors of the wealthy, but her pedestrian “Balkan” tastes betray her origins. The heaping of adjectives, two simple and two compounded, in the English adds to the effect of unsophisticated excess.
Some food and drink terms are more precise in the translation than the original because of their belonging to the American cultural context. In “Cherokee Red,” which takes place in Arizona, Vlado the frustrated patriarch of a family of three buys “roast chicken, potato salad, and four biscuits” from a Safeway for $12.99 (148); the last item is named less exactly in the Macedonian, “лепчиња” [little rolls/breads] (151). The pitiful yet problematic heroine of the concluding story, “The 8th of March (The Accordion),” Vesna Stojčevska drinks “a few screwdrivers” (202) before her big event at the US Embassy, which the source describes as “неколку вотки со џус од портокал” [a few vodka-orange juices] (207). English-language elements regularly occur in Не одам никаде, whether transliterated into Macedonian Cyrillic to mimic thick local accents, or represented in their usual orthographic form. In the Macedonian version of “The 8th of March,” the protagonist helps herself to “mini-burgers” (208) which mixed with shots of rakija lead to a spasm of projectile vomiting. Bužarovska and Bradbury translate this English compound into a single English word “sliders” or simply as burgers (204). What does rendition of English into English tell us about the interaction between domesticating and foreignizing? In any case, it would have been helpful to indicate in the translation, perhaps by means of a different font, when the Macedonian original contains words, sentences, or passages in English.
Bužarovska’s statements about her translation process and philosophy do not necessarily correspond to all aspects of the text that she creates with Bradbury. I’m Not Going Anywhere is not a strict philological translation of Не одам никаде, but neither is it a complete transcreation. The English version combines foreignization and domestication, compression and extension, meatballs and burgers, to create an uncomfortable, uproarious, and thought-provoking mixture that echoes Bužarovska’s tragicomic subject matter.
Bužarovska, Rumena. I’m Not Going Anywhere. Translated by the author and Steve Bradbury. Dalkey Archive Press, 2023.
Denis Ferhatovic is an associate professor of English at Connecticut College (New London, CT, USA). He has published translations from BCMS, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Karaim, Kosovo Gorani, Old English, and Ottoman in The Riddle Ages, Turkoslavia, The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, DoubleSpeak, and Ellipse Magazine. His reviews of translations have appeared in Asymptote and Exchanges.
Works Cited
“Bibliotopia 2024 | Interview with Pajtim Statovci and Rumena Bužarovska,” Foundation Jan Michalski, April 5, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS6TkEPRYkw
Бужаровска, Румена. Не одам никаде. Или-или, 2018.
“Rumena Bužarovska – spisateljica” [Rumena Bužarovska, Writer], Sto minuta buke, July 13, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x5HuCvAAv4&t=775s
[1] The table of contents and introduction are available here (in Macedonian): https://blesok.mk/arh/pdf/f01429d63a32b0ad3dfb5785e7fe615b6f69b90d.pdf).
[2] Bužarovska gives some context for literary translations since the standardization of Macedonian in 1945, and her own struggles with the publishers in the essay “Translating into a Minor Language,” in Translation: Craft, Contexts, Consequences, edited by Jan Steyn, Cambridge UP, 2022, 209-226.