book review--the mountain wreath by petar petrovich njegos
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SERBIAN STUDIES PUBLISHED BY THE NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR SERBIAN STUDIES
CONTENTS VOLUME 4, NUMBER 3 SPRING 1988
Alex N. Dragnich AMERICAN SERBS AND OLD WORLD POLITICS 5
Vasa D. Mihailovich THE IMAGE OF AMERICA IN CONTEMPORARY SERBIAN LITERATURE 2 7
Michael Bora Petrovich KARADZIC AND NATIONALISM 41
George Vid Tomashevich BIBLICAL MOTIFS IN MEDIEVAL SERBIAN PAINTING AND LITERATURE 59
Laura Gordon Fisher THE PATRIOTIC POETRY OF MILAN RAKIC 71
NOTES (Student essays)
Jelona S. Bankovic-Rosul ORIENTAL FATALISM AND VICTORY OF TANAT SIN DEVJL'S YARD AND DERVISTI AND DEATJJ. 79
Ani Lo. L kic-Trboj vic NARRATOR AND NARRATIVE IN ANDRI ' Pll KLETA AVLIJA. 33
REVIEWS
Sveta Lukic War Games in Vrbovac (Ratne igrc u Vrbovcu) Belgrade BIGZ, 1986 263 p. (Radmila Gorup)
Petar Petrovich Njegos The Mountain Wreath Translated and edited by Vasa D. Mihailovich Charles Schlacks, Jr. Irvine, California, 1986 XVIII + 121 pp. (George Vid Tomashevich)
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P.P. Njegos: The Mountain Wreath. Translated and edited by Vasa D. Mihailovich. Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher, P.O. Box 5001, Irvine, California 92716, 1986. Pp. xviii + 121.
This sizable, tastefully produced and well printed volume contains an excellent scholarly Introduction (vii); a sensibly short and useful Pronunciation Guide (xviii); the entire text of The Mountain Wreath in parallel Serbian and English columns (1); an erudite and helpful Commentary (105); and a Selected Bibliography of all the works by Njegos and the principal ones about him (119).
A professor at the University of North Carolina, Dr. Vasa D. Mihailovich is the foremost living Serbian prose poet and an artist and scholar of enviable talent and learning. He is an authority in Slavic studies and a widely respected translator and editor of important surveys, anthologies and compendiums of Serbian, Yugoslav and Slavic literatures in English. In addition to several books of his own exquisite Serbian prose poems and short stories, particularly noteworthy is his refined translation of Plave Iegende - Blue Legends, prose poems by the great poet Jovan Ducic, his predecessor and stimulus in this genre in Serbian literature.
In his amply documented and informative introduction, the translator presents the basic facts about NjegoS's country, time, life and work and puts the fascinating and enigmatic personality of this lonely bishop, prince, poet and philospher in the context of the political and intellectual ferment of the first half of the nineteenth century. He refers to the influences of Njegos's mentor, Sima Milutinovic-Sarajlija, as well as to the young ruler's contacts with and travels to the Adriatic Coast, Italy, Austria and Russia.
Dr. Mihailovich appreciates Njegos's endeavors as a statesman and diplomat to secure the recognition of his country's sovereignty; his dream about the liberation of all Southern Slavs; his struggles with the still powerful Turks; and his Sisyphean efforts, through education, public order and political and social reforms, to unite the fiercely independent Montenegrin tribes into an organized, civilized polity.
This tragic and heroic figure, this poet and philosopher of genius who referred to himself, with subtle irony, as "a prince among barbarians and a barbarian among princes," was constantly watched, spied upon and slandered by all the agents and informers of the great powers who flocked to Cetinje as midwives at the birth of a new Balkan state.
Professor Mihailovich also mentions Njegos's meeting with Vuk Stefanovic-Karadzic, his early poems and sources of readings and his publication of his "first important work, Luca mikrokozma (The Ray of Microcosm, 1845) ." This great dualistic disquisition of the highest poetic inspiration and profound philosophical and religious implications is truly comparable to Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost.
Naturally, Dr. Mihailovich pays even closer attention to the genesis and complexity of The Mountain Wreath (1847) which "epitomizes the spirit of the Serbian people kept alive for centuries." This historical drama of epic
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proportions, interspersed with frequent philosophical meditations of great power and depth, is, indeed, a work with which the Sorbs identify more than with any other and which they quote as if it were an integral part of their folk tradition.
The translator rightly notes that, because it is very hard to stage, the play is seldom performed. He aptly compares it to a Lescdrama, easier to enjoy as a lofty reading experience than as a theatrical spectacle.
Essentially unclassifiable, this irresistible piece of literature is "based on a historical event in Montenegro that took place toward the end of the seventeenth century." Professor Mihailovich translates it as "the extermination of the Turkish converts." Whatever the factual details of this fratricide, "it is known that at approximately that limo Montenegrins attempted to solve radically the problem of many of their brethren who, having succumbed to the lure of Turkish power, had agreed to being converted to Islam, mainly to improve their increasingly harsh lives."
In my opinion, the phrase "istraga (iii seca) poturica" calls, perhaps, for a locution somewhat different from the one just quoted. There is no semantic problem with the morally repugnant word "extermination," but there is some with the phrase "Turkish converts ." All Yugoslavs and others familiar with this topic will, of course, readily understand what the translator meant, but readers unfamiliar with the subject might ask: "Turkish conver~s to what?" It might, possibly, be less ambiguous to speak of "the extermination of Turkified Montenegrin renegades who apostatized to Islam." In any event, it is not my duty to solve this minor problem, but only to point out that it exists.
A more serious issue linked with the plot of Njegos's magnum opus is in no way Dr. Mihailovich's responsibility: forgetting abou t their own (and Islamic!) excesses during the Crusades; the horrors of the Inquisition; the slaughter of the French population of Sicily in 1282; Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of the Parisian Huguenots in 1572; the Catholic-Protestant abominations of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and numerous more recent and current examples of religious, political and ethno-racial intolerance throughout the West, certain Western critics arc "shocked" by the fact that the most celebrated work of Serbian literature deals, indeed, with a case of unmitigated carnage! And what about Verdi's opera I Vespri Siciliani (1855)?! Should either Njegos or Verdi be blamed for the tragedies they depict?!
Totally ignoring the cruel dilemmas of the Serbian people's struggle for freedom and the overwhelming evidence that Njegos was by no means a bigot of any kind, some Yugoslav Moslems arc trying to exclude The Mountain Wreath from the academic curricula of their public schools on the preposterous charge that it glorifies religious hatred and genocide. Similar critics in the United States have recently tried to ban Mark Twain's book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) for allegedly condoning racism, this it merely describes.
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Besides, the Introduction contains a whole mini-essay about Njegos's "second play - and his last major work-Lazni car Scepan Mali (Stephen the Small. the Pretender, 1847)." In a restrained overview, Professor Mihailovich rightly concludes that "Njegos's preoccupation with some of the ... basic themes of human existence - man's origin and the meaning of his life, the constant struggle between good and evil, man's yearning for freedom - makes him a poet of universal significance and appeal." Njegos is, indeed, "the greatest Serbian and South Slavic writer," certainly worthy of comparison with Pushkin, Milton, Dante, Mickiewicz, and other literary giants.
Quite appropriately, the translator mentions earlier translations of Njegos into German, Italian, Russian, Czech and English as well as the most prominent earlier interpreters of the poet's legacy - Milan Resetar, Vida Latkovic, Risto Dragicevic and Nikola Banasevic. Mihailovich's suggestion that the interpretation of The Mountain Wreath "is far from being complete" and that this work "will keep inspiring research forever" strikes me as convincing and probably true.
Finally, Dr. Mihailovich expresses his great respect for and partial disagreement with the well known Wiles translation and his hope to transcend its now "archaic," "stilted" and old-fashioned limitations. He emphasizes his own "strenuous efforts .. . to be as faithful to the original as possible, without making the translation sound like one." He then discusses some of the problems inseparable from translation as a type of literary task and his decision to make "the language of the translation ... as contemporary as it was to the first reader." The rest of the Introduction is an expert exegesis of every step of his scrupulous and meticulous travail and of the methodological reasons for it.
Almost every responsible translation of a semantically complex and subtly shaded message from any language to any other involves perplexing dilemmas, tantalizing promises, treacherous lures, disappointing dead ends, hopeful new beginnings, less than ideal compromises, endlessly debatable choices and never universally pleasing final results .
All of this is certainly applicable to recent attempts at translating a literary masterpiece as controversial in its topic, intricate in its structure and open to interpretation in the wisdom of its lapidary epigrams as The Mountain Wreath.
Even when the translator is himself a highly gifted man of letters and an erudite and distinguished scholar almost equally at ease with both languages, the challenge is formidable and nearly insurmountable: The Mountain Wmalh is writlen in the traditional decasyllabic trochees of the Serbian heroic folk songs and based on a plot which is extremely culture-bound, but its philosophical message is truly universal.
Lexically and grammatically, Dr. Mihailovich's mastery of the English language is, of course, absolute and impeccable and his use of it remarkably skillful. terse and eloquent. Yet, not unexpectedly even of a superbly sensitive poet who acquired it as a young adult, his emotional responsiveness
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to its distinctive musical qualities and unconscious echoes of its stirring and majestic sonorities is not as spontaneous as his gooseflesh reaction to his native Serbian.
Professor Mihailovich claims that "there is something in the nature of Serbian sounds and the way in which syllables are formed that causes a loss of poetic quality in translation. Serbian sounds," he says, "especially those of vowels, are both shorter and clearer than in English. Syllables are usually made through regular interchange of vowels and consonants, producing a much greater musical effect than in English."
Being an anthropological linguist and a poet in both Serbian and English, I am aware of the unconscious effect of early enculturational conditi~ning on the subliminal formation of culture-bound values and preferential Judgments, including the one in favor of one's native tongue.
It seems to me, therefore, that, quite apart from the positionally variable length and clarity of both vowels and consonants in both languages, the claim that the usual makeup of Serbian syllables tends to produce "a much greater musical effect than in English" is not beyond controversy. In fact, it may be open to the counter-claim that it represents, albeit in all benevolence, an example of universal ethnocentrism and ubiquitous cross-cultural anomie. Actually, at least to the ears of its native speakers, every language is a musical instrument capable of producing equally great and emotionally equivalent musical effects.
Otherwise, I, of course, agree with Professor Mihailovich that many ~~sical, poetic and other qualities do get lost in translation! But, alas, th1s IS
no less true of translations from English into Serbian than it is of those from Serbian into English. In every translation, which is comparable to the pouring of quasi-liquid semantic contents from one symbolic container into another, a certain untranslatable residue of the original meaning tends to ad~ere to the original container, just as a physical liquid, poured from one cup mto another, tends to leave behind a thin residual coaling, a film-like layer or left-over, a lingering aroma or a tell-tale fragrance that defies all efforts at complete transference.
Only those who know this from at least roughly comparable person?! experience may come close to an adequate appreciation of the translators boldness, diligence, patience and perseverance, let alone his ability.' .the novelty of his approach and the semantic accuracy of his modern rend1t10n. Yet, no combination of these and other virtues can guarantee that such a painstaking and tortuously difficult labor of love, such an essentially than~less enterprise, will ever receive the serious critical attention and recogmtion it so demonstrably deserves.
In this instance, the valiant translator's difficulties are compounded by the fact that Serbo-Croatian, a highly inflected South Slavic hybrid, rep!ete with Turkish Joan words introduced by tho Ottoman Conquest, and Enghsh, a relatively uninflected Cello-Germanic hybrid, replete with French loan words introduced by the Norman Conquest. are, morphophonemically and syntactically speaking, two rather distantly related Indo-European lan-
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guages whose differences from each other amount, at times, to major structural incommensurabilities.
In view of these and other obstacles and of his declared resolve to "remain faithful to the author and his work" whose integrity of thought and accuracy of meaning he chose to preserve at virtually all cost, the translator courageously accepts and acknowledges the price he had to pay: "a certain loss of poetic quality in this translation of Gorski vijenac" of which he himself is fully aware.
As the French discovered long ago, choisir c'est sacrifier - to choose is to sacrifice. No translator can preserve it all: the accuracy of the original meaning, the meter, the rhyme, if any, let alone the original metaphors!
From this reviewer's perspective, in the legitimate approach for which he opted, Dr. Mihailovich did not have to encumber his work with his scrupulous preservation of ten syllables in every verse, because, without its trochaic meter, rather harsh and unnatural in English which prefers iambic patterns, the original decasyllabic line, with the caesura after the fourth syllable, tends to become indistinguishable, dysfunctional and superfluous.
At the end of his impressive Introduction, the translator astutely observes: "A literary work of the magnitude of Gorski vijenac deserves to be translated in, by, and for every generation. It is my hope that this is the translation for the second half of the twentieth century." I am confident that it is even more than that.
Professor Mihailovich's faithful, idiomatic, clear and up-to-date translation reads, almost always, smoothly, effortlessly and well and its modernity and freshness, somewhat disconcerting, perhaps, to those who know its original and its other renditions, sounds perfectly natural and interesting to those whose first encounter with the Mountain Wreath it represents. I have tested it for whatever reaction it might produce against several sophisticated (and almost invariably monoglol!) Anglophone colleagues and friends and they all liked it. Some even added that it belongs to a very respectable trend in current scholarship of this kind which seeks to modernize the classics of world literature all the way back to Graeco-Roman antiquity. While this trend may not be universally appreciated, it is intellectually and methodologically defensible and seems to represent the wave of the future.
In any event, the Mihailovich translation is likely to be welcomed not only by many curious intellectuals unable to read the original, but also by more than one g neration of students of Serbo-Croatian at least in the English-speaking world. All of these and others will find this work very useful and reliable: in its fidelity to the meaning of the Serbian text, it is almost literally precise. Therein lies its great documentary and practical value, irrespective of personal tas tes and pr dileclions in malters of prosody, poetic form and literary convention.
As a result of the translator's decision to pres rve the integrity of the work's s mantic content, even at a perceptible cost to its poetic form, Njegos-the philosopher has fared substantially bolter than Njegoo-the poet, be-
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cause the solid logical core of philosophical reflection tends to survive the rigors of translation more easily than the evanescent dew on the petals of poetry.
It would be invidious to compare the translations of The Mountain Wreath by James W. Wiles (1930) and Vasa D. Mihailovich (1986) in needless detail. Aware that neither has "completely succeded in reproducing the artistic and musical quality" of Njegos's Serbian original, Professor Mihailovich believes that both are, nevertheless, "decent renderings of this beautiful but difficult work." In my judgment, this is too modest an assessment of both of these quite different, but equally honorable and successful, accomplishments.
For the sake of illustration, let me quote the last two lines of Bishop Danilo's opening soliloquy:
Njegos: Francuskoga dane bi brijega, aravijsko more sve potopi!
Wiles: Had not the Rock of France its onrush curbed, Arabia's flood had surely deluged all!
Mihailovich: If the French dike had not stood in the way, the Arab sea would have flooded it all!
Of the two, the Wiles translation, with all its "archaic." "outlandish" and "unusual" expressions, which Professor Mihailovich has every right not to prefer, remains, by far, the more poetic, however structurally different it may be, as English poetry, from the Serbian original. On the other hand, the Mihailovich translation, with whatever poetic qualities its semantically preoccupied, declarative and narrative statements manage to preserve, is far superior to its less accurate but more flowery predesessor in the exactness and faithfulness of meaning. What Wiles sacrifices in content he tends to make up for in form, and what Mihailovich sacrifices in form he tends to make up for in content.
With all the old questions to which it draws fresh attention and offers an alternative solution and all the new ones which it inevitably raises, this seldom literal, but almost always maximally faithful, translation of the greatest poetic work of Serbian literature certainly represents an event of considerable cultural-historical significance. It is, by all means, a painstaking and admirable scholarly achievement worthy of the most respectful scrutiny and, with all the criticism expressed and implied, of the highest overall praise.
George Vid Tomashevich Buffalo state University College