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Text: The Kharms Case

Author: Dubravka Ugrešić

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Plot: A Daniil Kharms stan writes endless letters to a publisher she supposedly admires, urging, cajoling, threatening him to publish HER translations of her favourite Russian author’s works.

Subplot: the world beyond letters is etherwave.

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‘Dear Mr. Tvrtković,

As I am most impressed by your publishing program, which displays surprisingly fresh and unconventional editorial taste, I am taking the liberty of offering you the work of a virtually unknown writer, equally unknown in his own country – in short, a writer as yet to be discovered. I am speaking of the Russian writer Anna Akhmatova Daniil Ivanovic Kharms [1905-1942].’

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This isn’t a novel or a novella but a novelette [maybe, haven’t counted the words] tucked in near the end of a collection called Lend Me Your Character.

I don’t think it’s the most famous of Ugrešić’s stories.

It’s ostensibly about translation [yet not], which is why I honed in on it. I’ve been looking to do something on Ugrešić for a long time, ever since I took out Fording the Stream of Consciousness twelve or thirteen years ago. Then, a few years after that, there was The Culture of Lies, a non-fiction book of Dubravka talking about Balkan politics and her exile from Croatia.

I didn’t read all of those books, just skimmed a few chapters.

She writes soft-surrealism well, Ugrešić.

Or Ugresic as this book calls her.

Typo?

Or two typos?

I’ve gone and checked the whole book and it’s consistently misspelt that way, Ugresic instead of Ugrešić. Apart from on the copyright page where it’s the original Croatian. Was that an intentional act by Ugrešić herself?

I don’t know.

The list of also-published books by the publisher at the back has other Balkan/Czech authors with the names spelt correctly [Danilo Kiš, Jiří Gruša] so perhaps it was done at the request of the author.

Or maybe it’s common practice for Croatian writers in translation?

I have no idea, just seemed a bit odd, and anything odd that catches my attention goes in here no matter how meaningless it might seem.

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