Quiet Flows the Una

The name of Australian-born translator Will Firth will be familiar to readers of this blog who remember his guest post on ‘The Perils of Translation’ and more recently his piece ‘Change is the Only Constant’ about writing in Macedonia, published in Words Without Borders. Now based in Germany, Will is the translator of A Handful of Sand by Marinko Koščec, which I reviewed back in 2013. He has the distinction of having his own Wikipedia page which includes an impressive list of books that he’s translated from Russian, Macedonian, German and Serbo-Croatian into English. His own website is here.

Will is also an accredited translator from Croatian, German, Macedonian and Russian, and – significantly from the point of view of his show more latest book, Quiet Flows the Una, he worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2005-07. I suspect that this experience has contributed to his sensitive translation of Quiet Flows the Una, by Faruk Šehić, a Bosnian author born in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and a veteran of the savage war which carved Yugoslavia into separate ethnicities. The novel won the 2013 EU Prize for Literature, and has since been translated into multiple languages, becoming available in English in 2016.

Quiet Flows the Una is a melancholy work. Narrated by a former soldier called Mustafa Husar, it tells the story of a man haunted by his past. Survivors of trauma, he tells us, have two choices, to suppress the past or to make a narrative of it, but the latter takes courage that he does not have.

The catalyst for him to finally confront his past is a fakir at a sideshow, whose hypnosis allows Mustafa’s memories to surface, enabling him to become a chronicler of a lost, sunken, incinerated age.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/03/19/quiet-flows-the-una-by-faruk-sehic-translate... show less