Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies

The works of the best Serbian prose writer and Nobel Prize winner, Ivo Andrić, have been translated into English many times. This latest collection contains translations of his 22 stories dealing with women. Several have been translated before, but most of them appear here for the first time. Moreover, this is the first time that his stories about women appear together in one collection. The book was edited by Radmila Gorup, professor of Slavistics at Columbia University. Translators hail from Serbia and former Yugoslavia, as well as from all over the world: John K. Cox, Celia Hawkesworth, Biljana Obradović and John Gery, Marijeta Božović, Milo Yelesiyevich, Henry R. Cooper, Bogdan Rakić, Drenka Willen, Joseph Hitrec, Michael Scammell, Kosara Gavrilović, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Radmila Gorup, Daniel J. Gerstle, Savka Gajic, and Natalia Ermolaev. All deserve to be named here because it is their expertise, as well as that of the editor, that does justice to Andrić's excellence in writing short stories and to the value of this endeavor. Addtionally, Zoran Milutinović has written a large, expertly presented introduction.

Almost all of Andrić's stories deal with basic human relationships such as love, jealousy, suffering, evil, hatred, desire for betterment, loneliness, guilt-feelings, fear, and so forth. As such they reach the pinnacle of story telling. "The Pasha's Concubine" ("Mara milosnica"), for example, shows subservience and helplessness of a woman, whose life depends on others, mostly males. "Anika's Times" ("Anikina vremena") illustrates a male's desire for conquest of a village beauty, an obsession that leads to collective destruction. In the story "Thirst" ("Žedj"), a police commander captures an outlaw but refuses to quench his thirst all night, while his own wife suffers because she cannot help him. "Love in the kasba" ("Ljubav u kasabi") presents a man [End Page 109] who cannot fulfill his love in a provincial town (for Andrić a symbol of alienation), which destroys both him and others. "Ćorkan and the German Tightrope Walker" ("Ćorkan i Švabica") depicts the split personality in human beings-on the one hand the unseemly look of Corkan inducing derision by others, and on the other hand he is a dreamer and idealist capable of dreaming about beautiful women.

Not all of Andrić's stories are morbid and hopeless, even though he primarily depicts the hard life in his native Bosnia, which has made him world famous. His short story writing is considered to be the highest in Serbian literature. Andrić's style is not the easiest to translate, on account of his originality, but the translations here are excellent, with some variation in quality. Hopefully, this collection will persuade publishers to present all of Andrić in English translation.