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"The Ministry of Pain" Author: [Netherlands] Dubravka Ugresic Publisher: Beijing Daily Press
"The Ministry of Pain" Author: [Netherlands] Dubravka Ugresic Publisher: Beijing Daily Press
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Description
Introduction · · · · · ·
Coming from a country that no longer exists, teaching a language that is in pieces, I stick out my tongue like a fairy tale dragon and it forks: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Macedonian…
Can a language so painful, a language that has never learned to describe a reality as complex as one’s inner experience of reality, tell stories?
It all started this way. Or that way. They did that, went there, and ended up in Holland. The exiles’ narratives are dateless. So much had happened in the short “post-war” period that their mental clocks had broken down under the strain. Everything had broken down. Places and times had been divided into “before” and “after,” life into “here” and “there.” They were suddenly without witnesses, parents, family, friends, or even the everyday people they had seen to reconstruct their lives. Without these reliable intermediaries, they were thrown back into themselves.
In the mediatized world, nothing is real. Memory passes through many intermediaries, in the form of Juliette Binoche or a red, white and blue woven bag, translating my personal pain into my language. Only this one thing is real.
Pain is silent and useless, but the only real witness.
About the Author
Dubravka Ugrešić (1949-2023) is a Croatian-Dutch writer born in the former Yugoslavia. While studying at the University of Zagreb, he majored in Russian literature and comparative literature and began to write literature. After graduation, he stayed at the university to engage in literary theory research and began to publish literary works in 1981. In 1991, the Yugoslav Civil War broke out. Dubravka was attacked by domestic public opinion for openly opposing war and nationalism and was forced to leave Croatia in 1993. Since then, Dubravka has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, Free University of Berlin and other universities. In 1996, he settled in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, engaged in novel writing, cultural criticism, translation, literary research, editing and publishing, and is committed to promoting the openness of the mother tongue and maintaining cultural continuity.
He is the author of Fording the Stream of Consciousness, The Culture of Lies, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Thank You for Not Reading, Ministry of Pain, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Foxes and other works, which have been translated into more than 30 languages. He won the Yugoslav NIN Award, the Austrian National European Literature Award, the Neustadt International Literature Award, was nominated for the International Booker Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Dubravka insists on writing in Serbo-Croatian but refuses to identify herself as a Croatian writer. She defines herself as a "transnational" or "post-national" writer and in 2017 she participated in signing the Common Language Declaration jointly initiated by intellectuals and public figures from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.
⭐️Translator profile
Jiang Haoqian, a freelance translator, has studied economics and logic. He has translated "The Structure of Production", "Thinking Through", "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes", "The Biography of Maugham", etc.
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