Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

541 Pages·2010·2.49 MB·English

by  Marinković

CYCLOPS
CYCLOPS
RANKO MARINKOVIĆ
TRANSLATED BY VLADA STOJILJKOVIĆ
EDITED BY ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW
HAVEN & LONDON
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary
works from around the globe available in English through translation. It
brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets,
novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin
America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international
discourse and creative exchange.
Copyright © 2010 Estate of Ranko Marinković. Originally published in
Croatian by Prosveta, Beograd, 1965, former Yugoslavia. All rights
reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Set in Electra and Nobel types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marinković, Ranko, 1913-2001
[Kiklop. English]
Cyclops / Ranko Marinković,; translated by Vlada Stojiljković;
edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać.
p. cm. — (A Margellos world republic of letters book)
Originally published in Serbo-Croatian as: Kiklop.
ISBN 978-0300-15241-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. World War, 1939-1945—Yugoslavia—Fiction. 2. Zagreb (Croatia)—
Fiction.
I. Stojiljković, Vlada, 1938-II. Elias-Bursać, Ellen. III. Title.
PG1618.M28K513 2010
891.8’235—dc22
2010024516
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
INTRODUCTION
Making his way through a crowded Zagreb square one evening on the
eve of World War II, Melkior Tresić catches sight of a priest with
familiar, jutting ears. The priest, we learn, had taught him catechism
during his childhood in Dalmatia. The fleeting glimpse of the Dalmatian
priest in the opening pages of this quintessentially Zagreb novel is Ranko
Marinković’s nod to his native Dalmatia. The nod tells us that Melkior
Tresić is an outside insider, someone who, like Marinković, came to the
city as a student, and who sees Zagreb as someone born there never
could. Marinković captures Zagreb’s crowds, the shysters, the army
barracks, and the seedy neighborhoods in one of the most famous
fictional portraits of the city, yet he peoples the novel with a closely knit
group whose playful jibes and cheerful ignorance of the portentous
events taking shape around them have a certain resonance with the
insular Mediterranean culture in which he was raised.
When Marinković set out to write CYCLOPS in the early 1960s he was
thinking big. In shaping his plot he reached for the big writers, such as
Joyce (whose Ulysses had first been translated into Croatian in 1957),
Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky. For all the influence of other
literatures, however, the novel is anchored firmly in a more local
context. The story unfolds on the streets between the Zagreb main
square and the Opera House, and the streets and cafés are inhabited by
the poets, actors, and other public figures of Marinković’s student years
in Zagreb. Along with the readily identifiable references to Hamlet and
Leopold Bloom, the narrative and dialogue are interwoven with allusions
to various Croatian writers and their characters and to verses of Croatian
poets—all unfamiliar to American readers, including Ivan Gundulić,1
Ivan Brlić-Mažuranić,2 a character of Krleža’s,3 and lines of verse by
Vladimir Nazor,4 Vladimir Vidrić,5 Ivo Vojnović,6 and Tin Ujević,7—as
well as mentions of equally unfamiliar Serbian writers such as Simo
Pandurović8 and Jovan Dučić.9 The panorama of Zagreb life in the
opening pages of the novel, the MAAR street advertisements, the vendors
selling shoelaces, are authentic images of Zagreb life of the late thirties,
and Jutarnji List (Morning News) is still hawked by vendors on Zagreb’s
streets.
There are many comparisons that can be drawn between CYCLOPS
and other works of literature, most obviously Ulysses, the Odyssey, and
Hamlet. But the irreverence, irony, and satire with which Marinković
dissects Zagreb cultural life on the eve of World War II also resonate
with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Heller’s biography affords a
surprisingly productive comparison with Marinković’s. They both were
playwrights and short-story writers, as well as novelists, and they were
close in age. Heller fought in active combat in World War II, unlike
Marinković, who spent the war as an internee and refugee, but both of
them were the first, for their respective readerships, to write of World
War II in a darkly humorous vein. And they were each known chiefly for
their first novel, each of which became a huge best seller, never to be
outshone by anything else they later wrote.
The year CYCLOPS was published (1965) was pivotal for postwar
Yugoslavia. It followed on a period of furious economic growth during
the late 1950s and a repressive spell that came after Yugoslavia’s break
with Cominform in 1948. There were major economic reforms in 1965,
and the next year saw the dismissal of the Minister of the Interior,
Aleksandar Ranković, over a wiretapping scandal, which became the
symbolic end of the immediate postwar period. The Yugoslav
government began allowing its citizens to travel abroad freely in 1966,
thereby setting itself apart from the Eastern European countries that
were still “behind the iron curtain,” and these political and economic
reforms were accompanied by a thaw in culture. After a brief spell of
socialist realism in the early fifties, the literatures in Yugoslavia had
asserted a modicum of artistic independence, but only within limits
(there could be no mention of the Goli Otok and other prison camps, or
articulation of nationalist and separatist sentiments, or scurrilous
mention of the person of Josip Broz Tito). The limits relaxed somewhat
in the 1960s, which was a decade for ferment in all the arts.
Marinković’s CYCLOPS, published in the midst of all this, and Death
and the Dervish, by Meša Selimović, which appeared a year later, were
groundbreaking novels that brought new intellectual depth to the
treatment of controversial issues, such as, in CYCLOPS, the use of irony
and satire in the treatment of the recent war, and, in Death and the
Dervish the nature of repressive authority. As soon as it appeared,
CYCLOPS was showered with accolades, including the NIN award—the
most prestigious recognition for literary works in the former
Yugoslavia,10 and the same happened with Death and the Dervish the
following year.
To say that Marinković raised eyebrows with his ironic treatment of
the war theme in CYCLOPS is not to suggest that there had been no
antiwar Croatian prose before him. Miroslav Krleža, in particular, is
famous for his antiwar stories after World War I. Where Marinković
broke new ground was in his use of irony and satirical humor to
transgress the various strictures imposed by the victorious Partisans on
how the conflict would be described in the years following the war. But
it was precisely the madcap brand of humor, the sly nicknames used by
the denizens of Zagreb’s cafés, the fantastical tales of shipwrecked
sailors confronted by cannibalistic natives in the South Pacific, the
ingenuity with which Melkior Tresić keeps himself out of combat, that
gave the novel its irresistible charm and steered it through the sensitive
political waters of the day.
Marinković studied psychology at Zagreb University in the 1930s. He
was intrigued by the psychology of the artist and was drawn, in
particular, to Tin Ujević’s verse and the workings of the poet’s psyche.
While still a student, he published three brief articles11 on Ujević,12 in
which he remarks on “something mysterious, special and remarkable,
almost unintelligible” in Ujević’s personality.13 Marinković credits
Dostoyevsky with having a formative influence on Ujević’s
preoccupation with suffering, humiliation, and pain. He wonders
whether Ujević’s bohemian eccentricity is a form of mental illness, and
concludes that with an ear for the right resonance one could enter into
this complex, chaotic psychology. Marinković also describes the way
Ujević represents love and the feminine in his verse, saying that Ujević
is a poet of “spiritual love, the erotic turned mystical, stripped of its
sexuality, love that is felt with a sixth sense, like music,”14 a poet who
perceives woman as a symbol of “creative mystery.”15 Marinković and
Ujević got to know each other later, and there are several Zagreb
anecdotes stemming from their relationship, particularly that
Marinković dubbed Ujević the Baudelaire from Vrgorec, while Ujević’s
nickname for Marinković was the Voltaire from Vis (each man’s
respective birthplace).
Only a few chapters in CYCLOPS feature the Ujević-like character
Maestro, but Maestro’s spirit and his relationship with Tresić permeate
the entire novel. For all his curmudgeonly manner, Maestro has an
abiding fondness for Tresić, and chooses him as the only person from
their circle he can trust. Theirs is the principle emotional relationship of
CYCLOPS. Another vestige of Ujević’s is the mystique attached to the
name “Viviana,” which personifies the feminine “creative mystery” in
Ujević’s poetic.
In the immediate postwar years Marinković was one of the rising stars
in Zagreb cultural life, active in the theater and in publishing and
teaching, while in the same period Ujević was working only as a literary
translator, having been banned for five years by the Writers’ Association
from publishing his own poetry and essays—punishment for accepting
employment from the fascist regime as a translator during the war.
Marinković was among those who saw to it that Ujević always had
enough translation work to support him during this time. Harold Bloom
alerts us to the dynamic that often shapes relations between younger
generations of writers and the powerful figures of previous generations.
Ranko Marinković was not a poet, so he was not competing directly with
Ujević’s looming influence, but this dynamic is also worth keeping in
mind when parsing his portrait of Ujević in the character of Maestro.
Marinković is frequently hailed for his irony and the psychological
and social analysis he brings to his stories, novels, and plays, but, as
several recent critics have remarked, there is room for more scholarship
on his work. As one scholar comments, “CYCLOPS, the novel by Ranko
Marinković published in 1965, is regularly accorded a distinguished
place in critical and historical surveys of Croatian literary modernism,
but this claim is supported by a somewhat tautological argumentation.
Namely, instead of insisting on the stylistic excellence of Marinković’s
writing and the vivid elaboration of the characters, Croatian criticism
hardly ever moves beyond discussing the plot.”16
On the other hand, a critic notes, “CYCLOPS will continue to be read
for pure pleasure for a long time to come … It is a great urban novel.
Academic critics, in speaking of CYCLOPS, insist on the theme of fear
and other things which are certainly relevant, but which sidestep the
‘details’ that make even high school students enjoy this novel …
CYCLOPS will survive because it takes place on the street and in the
smoke of cafés, because it is promiscuous, witty and full of fools.”17
A new generation of scholars is rediscovering Marinković’s writing,
bringing the precepts of literary theory to bear on his themes, characters,
and structures in a variety of productive and engaging ways. Aside from
the two articles cited here, there is very little critical writing available in
English on Marinković’s work. The entry in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography is a valuable general overview of his opus.
Aside from delighting generations of high school students, Ranko
Marinković and CYCLOPS have entered into the cultural parlance with a
television series and a 1982 film based on the novel CYCLOPS (directed
by Antun Vrdoljak), and Kiklop [CYCLOPS] is the name of the most
prestigious cultural award conferred annually in Croatia to winners in
categories such as best editor, best prose work, best book of essays, best
first book, best children’s book, best translation, etc. The Vjesnik
newspaper also confers a “Ranko Marinković” best short story award.
I knew Ranko Marinković only briefly, late in his life, when he and I
occasionally ran into each other at a Zagreb publishing company. Always
the gentleman, Magritte-like in his impeccable gray coat and bowler hat,
a twinkle in his eye, he’d raised his hat in greeting, and it is in this pose,
hat in hand, eyes twinkling, that I will always remember him. Vlada
Stojiljković I never met, but several friends of mine knew him well and
tell of his fascination of many years with CYCLOPS, his commitment to
the translation, the quandaries he regaled them with, and the solutions
he devised for the book’s countless quips, puns, and verses. Hats off,
then, to Yale University Press for bringing this marvelous novel to
American readers!