Sarajevo Marlboro

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The circuitous routes traveled by literary texts across various borders, checkpoints, blockades and holding pens should finally, once and for all, lay to rest the romantic notion that such texts announce themselves and arrive simply by virtue of their inherent qualities as literature. Nothing could be farther from the truth: like any commodity, literary texts gain access through channels and furrows that are prepared by other means. Fashion, chance encounters, fortuitous circumstances, surrogate functions, political alliances and cataclysmic events such as war or genocide are much more certain and constant catalysts than judgment based on actual literary history or cultural importance. The texts that manage to sneak through the policing of our monolingual borders still only provide a mere taste — fragmented, out of context — of what such works might represent in their own cultures, languages, as well as historical and political contexts. One novel or book of poems by a single writer, removed from the cluster of other writers and artists from which it has emerged, unbuttressed by correspondence, biographies or critical studies — such a work of translation in America too often functions as a means of reinforcing the assumptions behind our uniquely military/industrial/new critical approach to the work of art as an object of contemplation rather than a call to arms, a cry for justice, an act of solidarity or a witness to history. The writer remains an individual, chosen by authorities as representative of a period or style, rather than one of many emerging from a densely textured and pluralistic scene.

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