In thinking about buying the English version (Our Man in Iraq) of the Croatian novel Naš čovjek na terenu (‘Our Man on the Pitch’) by Robert Perišić, my mind was made up (in favour) by the number of Britons and Americans who complained in online reviews that, to their surprise and disappointment, it wasn’t really about Iraq.
There is of course an understandable economic reason for Anglo-America being too often deemed in need of a lagging jacket of cultural familiarity in translations. Moreover, given that media types are central to this novel and that they are, in their souls (or lack of them), essentially the same everywhere, the temptation to impose a globalized sheen on this text must have been irresistible.
On the other hand, if the reader is from another small and more circumspect country, such as Ireland, one can maybe read more easily between the lines to get the Croatian flavour. A bit of online research only adds to the impression of what’s going on here. A Master’s thesis (2014) by Marinela Lovrić reveals some amusing examples of where the wheels come off this translation.
Where the narrator drinks a local liqueur called pelinkovac, this is rendered as “I drank vermouth” (“It does not have a lot in common with vermouth” – Lovrić). Vermouth is a joke of a drink, not least to American martini lovers, so I imagine it would be laughed out of the Balkans.
Other instances include a reference to Hello (“…it is highly unlikely that celebrities from… Zagreb… would give statements for a British magazine”) and one to a London club (in the context of “a popular night club in Zagreb which could be seen as an equivalent to The Blitz… But again… the reader knows that the book is set in Zagreb”).
Why the translator used a Scottish idiom in places is a little uncertain. Will Firth is Australian and although certain informal aspects of Australian culture are similar to that of the Irish – 40,000 Irish were given a free cruise there between 1790 and 1840 – others are far more British.
Falco for one was amused but a little baffled by all the peculiar British symbols he witnessed on a trip to Australia in the Eighties. Furthermore, Scotland is distinguished from Ireland by the harsher climate, the swift conversion of the majority to Calvinism, and, despite its whiskey fame, the generally inferior quality of its popular drinks.
The key Croatian phrase iz zafrkancije on the other hand seems interchangeable with the Irish phrase for the craic. Love and hunger may rule the wider world’s motivations, with the probable addition of malice or revenge, but over here, saying or doing something for the craic is a fourth ruling impulse.
The Croats, like the other small central European nations, also tend to be tickled by the golden rule of thumb among the Irish for avoiding misunderstandings on the European mainland.
Imamo zlatno pravilo, za izbjegavanje nesporazuma kada smo u Europi: recite da niste Englezi i niste Amerikanci.
P.S.
As our man in the Balkans for The Economist, Tim Judah was in a good position to flesh out the media background to Perišić’s novel. In an otherwise interesting and consciously amusing review for the magazine Critical Mass, he nevertheless at one point failed to look where he was going and produced a sentence that, in aviation terms, is a controlled descent into terrain.
He has a good job in Zagreb and a girlfriend ogled by other men with whom he has an exciting and imaginative sex life and with whom he is planning, somewhat reluctantly perhaps, to settle down.
Translation: how many men, again?
PS
Dr. John Flynn 