Drawing on recent discussions in world literature and Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, in the present article I explore Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić within the formation of ...transactional exchanges between “small/minor” and world literatures. As I approach these exchanges, my focus is on texts and contexts in which translation and memory function as the key mediator. By reading Kiš and Ugrešić comparatively, my aim, in what I call “the minor drive,” is to address writers and translators that contest hegemonic narratives, and in doing so, examine the cultural enterprise of “small/minor” literatures from the perspective of “worlding” former Yugoslavia and Southeast Europe.
The paper develops in a specific reading strategy of appropriation of Danilo Kiš’s story Slavno je za otadžbinu mreti in Péter Esterházy’s literary opus (first in the story Mily dicső a hazáért ...halni, published in Hungarian in 1986 with changes due to aspects of the text that are necessarily changed in translation, then in his Introduction to Literature and Celestial Harmonies), in order to offer possible answers to the following questions: What is the role of (in-)translation in the study of literature? What does the metaphor of elliptical refraction (Damrosch) mean as “the most convenient” description for world literature? If the stories of Kiš and Esterházy are the same, but written in different languages and received in different cultural, historical, and social contexts, can we refer to it as one literary work? If the author is different – is the literary work only seemingly the same? Who, in fact, is the author – if Esterházy read and used Kiš's story in translation? How does this vortex-like example contribute to our understanding of world literature, its problems and difficulties, neuralgic and “blind” spots? Who authors world literature canon? How do notions of origins and authenticity resonate in the field of world literature?
Dániel Kiss/Danilo Kiš with Hungarian-Serbian-Croatian-Jewish ancestry, and (Kracsun) Ottó Tolnai with the Yugoslavian-Serbian-Vojvodinian one – both are equally figures and text creators of a ...cultural (national, social) intermediary position. In case of both writers, the intermediary position (which can be specified as Central-Eastern-European as well) generates a multi-dimen- sional, dynamic text world, abundant in transgressing, as well as back and forth connections. The purpose of the study is the analysis of the texts of early novels by Danilo Kiš and Ottó Tolnai in the context of the Southern Slav area, the Hungarian cultural region and European posi- tioning. The gallery of fractionality of the literary texts to be examined, their generic and inter- cultural transgressions, the frequently strange/peculiar alter egos developing from the various cultural contexts, appearing in the situations of one’s being cut-off, offer the possibility of express- ing, synthesising a multiple, exciting cultural model, representing the cultural patterns found in the 1960’s.
Descriptions of lucid dreaming, nightmares, sleep paralysis, and other dream-related phenomena were found in the novels "Garden, Ashes," "The Hourglass," and short stories written by the well-known ...European writer Danilo Kiš (1935-1989). Kiš provided a deep psychological insight into lucid dreaming. His literary examples of its use in the suppression of nightmares precede similar claims based on scientific research. Although Kiš could have acquired some knowledge about lucid dreams and nightmares from literature, his personal traumatic experiences were perhaps of even greater importance, as suggested by his biography; in particular, his traumatic childhood in exile, early loss of his father, and experiences of war terror and postwar perturbations. Implications of Kiš's writings for theories of dreaming are also discussed.
Most attempts to integrate “small,” or “minor,” or “third-world” literatures into a larger whole tend to be inadequate, deductive, and reductionist. Small literatures and their writers may crave ...recognition and attention, but they are not exactly helped if approached with a set of newly created stereotypes and dubious generalizations, which equate them with the geopolitical situation of their respective nations. This article focuses on Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters as an instance of this attitude towards small literatures. The article uses the example of Danilo Kiš, who figures prominently in Casanova’s book, and argues that his position within his native literary space and the place occupied by this space within world literature are misrepresented in The World Republic of Letters. This misrepresentation is not accidental: It necessarily follows from Casanova’s double mapping of this space, which is strongly influenced by geopolitical imagination and popular cultural geography. As long as the international literary space is imagined as overlapping with the space of great consecrating nations, comprising both their national as well as international writers, with the addition of international writers from the periphery “annexed” to them, the world literary map will only reproduce the (geo)political map of the world. The task of constructing a conceptual framework that will do justice to small or third-world literatures and their writers cannot be achieved so long as it is influenced by geopolitical imagination and popular cultural geography, and divides the world literature into the “first-world” and the rest.
Danilo Kiš's little known second novel, Psalm 44 (1962) is his first major prose work about the Holocaust. This novel was published for the first time in Hungarian translation in 1966 and English ...translation in 2012. The novel is quite different from Kiš's later works on the Holocaust, the autobiographical trilogy comprising Early Sorrows, Garden, Ashes, and Hourglass. The first difference is in setting. In Psalm 44, a number of important flashbacks take place in Újvidék/Novi Sad, the region of northern Serbia (then Yugoslavia) under Hungarian occupation after 1941; much of the rest of the book takes place in Auschwitz and associated camps in Poland. The amount of Hungarian material is significant, but the inclusion of so much material from Auschwitz is not found elsewhere in Kiš 's oeuvre. The second difference is in the author's graphic portrayal of gruesome atrocities. For the literary historian, Psalm 44 is an important milestone in the development of Kiš 's thematic and stylistic inventory. For other historians, the novel functions in part as a microhistory of the Újvidék massacres (the "Cold Days") of early 1942. Kiš 's quest to find his own voice to attempt to convey the tragedy of the Holocaust—as important for the entire human family and the very region of Central Europe as it was for his own family—finds a parallel expression in the confusion, exhaustion, and skepticism of the characters in this novel.
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