Friday, June 20, 2008

The Vampires / A Reasonable Dictionary


An email today from my friend Zarko Radakovic. In April he was a featured reader at the International ProseFest in Novi Sad. Here's a page from the festival brochure (click on the photos to see larger versions).




Several other pages list his work -- translations (including the one I  wrote about earlier here, Peter Handke's "Loss of Images," with Serbian translation and visual translation by the artist Nina Pops), edited anthologies, and novels (one of which is our "Repetitions" -- for a good look at how Serbo-Croatian declines English nouns, take a look at the Serbian side of the brochure, where the translation of "along with Scott Abbott" turns me into "Scottom Abbottom").



Mark Twain once famously wrote that he would rather decline three German beers than one German noun.

And a third page with information about Zarko's other work (translation is not as easy as it seems!)


Finally, the email contained great news. After Zarko's reading from "Vampires" at the festival, he was approached by several publishers who wanted the book. So, in October of this year, Stubovi Kulture, the publisher of Zarko's earlier novel "Pogled" -- "Look," will publish our joint text: Zarko's fictional "Vampires" and my travel narrative "A Reasonable Dictionary," which serves as what Zarko calls "the real landscape" for his fiction.

3 comments:

will said...

I don't know what case that puts you in, but it makes your first and last names both eerily anatomical.

Scott Abbott said...

I'm guessing dative case.

will said...

I'd guess dative too thinking from German and Greek, but Latin's 'ablative of accompaniment' (learned two days ago) is throwing me off now on this one.