Novel (excerpt) | Serbia | Serbian
March, 2020Death of Descartes (1996) is a late novel of the Serbian writer, philosopher, and public intellectual Radomir Konstantinović, increasingly considered to be his literary masterpiece and swan song. Konstantinović finished writing the text in 1993, during the height of internationally imposed sanctions on Serbia and a series of brutal wars in the neighboring Yugoslav republics, although the idea of exploring larger philosophical ideas through the relationship between father and son originated much earlier in the 1960s. Described by Konstantinović’s biographer Radivoj Cvetićanin as a “postmodern family novel” and a companion piece to his last literary work, Beckett, A Friend (2000), Death of Descartes freely combines fiction, biography, and philosophical reflection while retaining a taut dramatic structure. In many ways, the novel represents Konstantinović’s temporary withdrawal from anti-nationalist and anti-war political engagement in order to interrogate the common places of modern western philosophy, rooted in the apparent autonomy and rationality of the ego. As such, the novel partakes in the broader postmodern project to renegotiate the foundations of human subjectivity on the basis of our shared bodily vulnerability and openness to one's own and other's mortality. The text offers particular challenges to any attempts at translation because Konstantinović, first of all, inflects and estranges the Serbian language with classical French stylistic forms while--in a modernist register--radically breaking down conventional syntax.
- Vladislav Beronja
Drama (Excerpts) | Serbia | Serbian
July, 2007A tough comic look at the lost generation of Serbia caught between Milošević and the new state of possibility. In a long night of drinking, tall tales, sad stories, confessions, and intimations of murder, a couple of young men dream of England and try to find their place in their country.
(Caridad Svich)
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).