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Madonin nakit

Madonna’s Jewels

Serbia

Laslo Blašković

When I saw how, after two sweaty hours of tiring music-making, they continued to play and sing in a relaxed manner, smiling at each other in response to humorous gestures, speaking a common language and, illuminated by a quiet, barely noticeable happiness, complementing each other vocally, I became aware of my terrible, unbearable loneliness. I looked at the others who sat at the same table with me, and who were mostly going through the same pain. I only need the company of other writers so that I have someone to drink with, I thought, and accompanied this truth with a bitter laugh.

Blašković creates four voices that intertwine into a veritable quartet, singing about the agony of the turn of the millennium as they try to reconcile the iconography of the past with the present. Set in a prison infirmary during the NATO bombing of Serbia, Madonna’s Jewelry is a postmodern manual of political incorrectness. Sometimes profound and thoughtful, sometimes scathing, sometimes witty, all four narrators, each of whom is imprisoned justly but for the wrong reasons, encourage the reader to reflect on the meaning of form in an increasingly formless world.

Laslo Blašković was born in Novi Sad in 1966. He graduated in Yugoslav literature and worked as an editor, researcher and cultural manager in Vojvodina and Belgrade. He has published a number of poetry collections, novels, essays and short story collections. His works, especially Madonna's Jewelry, have been translated into Hungarian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Polish, German and English.

His most important works include the poetry collections The Life of Gamblers, Morning Distance, Writers' Wives, The End, the novels The Wedding March, Still Life with a Clock, Madonna's Jewelry, Adam's Apple, The Hunchback's Tournament, The Death Mask: A Picaresque Novel and the short story collection The Story of Exhaustion.

He has received several awards: the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Award from the Branko Čopić Fund for the Best Serbian Novel (2005), the Stevan Sremac Award for the Prose Book of the Year (2007), and the Borislav Pekić Fund for Literature Scholarship for Madonna's Jewelry (2001).

Translators: Randall A. Major Translation into English

Randall A. Major

translator

Randall A. Major (born in San Antonio, Texas in 1959) holds a BA in Classical Languages and Religion (from Baylor University, USA), a BA in Theology from Rüschlikon, Switzerland, and a BA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Novi Sad. He teaches translation studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Novi Sad. He is one of the editors and translators of the collection Serbian Prose in Translation, published by Geopoetika. He has published dozens of literary translations from Serbian into English. In his free time, he enjoys music (folk, blues, rock) and amateur photography.

Margaret Peggy Reid

translator

Margaret Peggy Reid has worked as an English language proofreader at the University of St. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje since 1969. She has proofread, among other things, numerous literary works – plays, poetry and novels. She is the recipient of the Struga Poetry Evenings Award for translation into a foreign language. In 1994, she was awarded the Macedonian Society of Literary Translators' Award; she has twice won first prize for her poetry at the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival in Great Britain, and a certificate from Queen Elizabeth II for services to Macedonian literature and culture.