Death in Translation

DAVID DAMROSCH

According to the Preliminary Notes to Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, his book is a reconstruction of a long-lost encyclopedia concerning a people who lived around the Black Sea until the tenth century, when they disappeared from history. Published in 1691 by a Polish printer in Prussia, the Lexicon Cosri was destroyed a year later by the Inquisition. Only two privately held copies survived. One, fastened with a golden lock, was printed in poisoned ink; it had a companion copy, not poisoned, fitted with a silver lock:

Insubordinates and infidels who ventured to read the proscribed dictionary risked the threat of death. Whoever opened the book soon grew numb, stuck on his own heart as on a pin. Indeed, the reader would die on the ninth page at the words Verbum caro factum est (“The Word became flesh”). If read simultaneously with the poisoned copy, the auxiliary copy enabled one to know exactly when death would strike. Found in the auxiliary copy was the note: “When you wake and suffer no pain, know that you are no longer among the living.” (6)

Pavić’s book is one of a growing number of recent novels that take translation as an explicit theme. A novel in dictionary form, the Dictionary of the Khazars is presented as a translation of three different encyclopedias concerning the Khazars (who, unlike the poisoned encyclopedia, did actually exist). Both within the Dictionary itself, and in the novel’s own worldly circulation, issues of translation are closely intertwined with issues of national identity—explicitly of the Khazars, implicitly of Yugoslavia and its constituent republics. This theme proves to have deep ethical implications both within the book and in its reception at home and abroad, for running through the book is a current of Serbian nationalism deeply hostile to Tito’s attempt to weld Yugoslavia into a unified nation.

The book’s politics, and their ethical consequences, have often been obscured by the book’s status as a work of international postmodernism. Most commonly, foreign readers have celebrated the Dictionary of the Khazars as a tour de force of metafictional play, and this aspect of the text is certainly evident as early as the book’s cover and table of contents. Its cross-referenced entries invite the reader to abandon the narrative progressions of ordinary novels and consider whole new ways of reading, signaled from the start by the fact that the book is published in two different editions, “Male” and “Female.” As the front cover of the Female Edition dramatically announces (with corresponding language on the cover of the Male Edition):

This is a revised version of a discussion that appears as the ninth chapter of my book What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 260–79, where Pavić figures in a section of the book devoted to the contemporary phenomenon of works being written primarily or even exclusively to circulate abroad in translation.

This is the FEMALE EDITION of the Dictionary.
The MALE edition is almost identical. But NOT quite.
Be warned that ONE PARAGRAPH is crucially different.
The choice is yours.

Clearly, readers of this novel have new opportunities, and new responsibilities.

Pavić had been a respected poet and scholar of Serbian literature but was almost unknown outside Yugoslavia until he published his novel, which rapidly became a runaway success around the globe. The French rights to the novel were acquired while the book was still in press, and it was published in Paris as well as in Belgrade in 1984, by which time another dozen translations were already under way. By the late 1990s it had been translated into no fewer than twenty-six languages, including Japanese and Catalan, and had sold several million copies in all. Yet the book’s international success involved the neglect or outright misreading of its political content. Presumably the book’s Catalan translators were fully alive to Pavić’s covert attack on national unity, but most foreign readers missed this dimension of the text, at least until Yugoslavia began to disintegrate after Tito’s death. At that point Pavić began to speak out bitterly on behalf of the cause of Serbian nationalism, his international reputation giving weight to his words at home. The metaphysical magician turned out to have an angry joker up his sleeve. His novel contains a political polemic that had been hidden in plain sight from international audiences who had welcomed the novel as “an Arabian Nights romance,” “a wickedly teasing intellectual game,” and an opportunity “to lose themselves in a novel of love and death,” as the flyleaf of the American edition describes the book. How should we read this novel now, and what can its double life tell us about the ethics of translation across national boundaries?

The nationalist undercurrent of Pavić’s book could have remained invisible abroad not only through outsiders’ ignorance of local concerns but also because in many ways the book appears to be a satire of any one-sided viewpoint. The three encyclopedias represent three limited, warring points of view, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish: each encyclopedia tells the story of the Khazars’ conversion to that religion. Pavić based this multiple tale on a dialogue by the medieval poet and philosopher Judah ha-Levi, the Kitab al-Khazari or Book of the Khazars, written in Arabic in Spain in around 1140. Judah ha-Levi in turn was meditating on historical sources that told of the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in around 740 C.E. No other case is known of a non-Jewish country ever having converted to Judaism in this way, and apparently the kingdom remained at least nominally Jewish until it was defeated and dismantled by Russian invaders late in the tenth century.

In Judah ha-Levi’s account, the Khazars’ heathen ruler, the Kaghan, has a dream in which an angel tells him that his intentions are pleasing to God but his deeds are not. The Kaghan decides that he must determine which of the world systems surrounding him makes the most sense, and so he summons to his court a Greek philosopher, a Christian scholastic, and a Muslim theologian, and probes the basis of their beliefs. Dissatisfied by each of their answers, he reluctantly invites a rabbi as well; “I had not intended to ask any Jew,” the Kaghan remarks, “because I am aware of their reduced condition and narrow-minded views, as their misery left them nothing commendable” (Judah ha-Levi 40). The rabbi, however, gives the most persuasive arguments in favor of Judaism, stressing the events of Hebrew salvation history accepted by Muslims and Christians alike, whereupon the Kaghan and his people convert.

Pavić used this remarkable dialogue as the basis for his set of three one-sided encyclopedias. He added further entries to trace the later history of knowledge of the Khazars, centering on the efforts of a seventeenth-century Walachian nobleman, Avram Brankovich, to reconstruct these early events in the form of the original Lexicon, destroyed a year after he published it in 1691; still further entries describe several modern scholars’ efforts to reconstruct Brankovich’s destroyed book. They are frustrated in their efforts by the Devil—or rather, three devils, one for each major faith—who exert themselves to keep the scholars from re-assembling the three parts of the encyclopedia. Having long divided and conquered the world, the devils wish humanity to continue to see only one side of reality, each group trapped in its own partial viewpoint. Thus the struggle to create (and then to re-create) the multilingual dictionary becomes a cosmic battle to piece reality together into a whole, or to hold it apart in fragments.

The Dictionary of the Khazars has a multinational pedigree. It is directly descended from the imaginary encyclopedia of Tlön in Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” with the ambitious twist that where Borges only described his encyclopedia, Paviæ actually writes one, or at least three hundred pages worth of the supposed fragments of its three versions. Other Borges stories, like “The Library of Babylon” and “Death and the Compass,” are certainly in the background as well. Like Borges’s stories, the novel also plays on Mallarmé’s dream of a book as “a spiritual instrument” that would encompass the entire world within its covers. The Dictionary of the Khazars is also, as its cover says, “an Arabian Nights romance,” complete with tales embedded within tales, references to Haroun al-Rashid, and a Scheherazade-like poet-princess, Ateh, who has blind scribes draw sacred letters on her eyelids, letters that will kill whoever sees them, so that enemies cannot surprise her in her sleep (21). If the lost language of the Khazars survives at all, it is among a group of Black Sea parrots, descendants of parrots whom Ateh taught to sing her poems. Finally, in its use of a medieval Jewish source-text, the Dictionary was surely inspired by Danilo Kiš’s 1976 story sequence A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, published just two years before Pavić began his novel. Kiš’s title character, Boris Davidovich Novsky, is a modern reincarnation of a skeptical fourteenth-century rabbi, Baruch David Neumann, questioned by the Inquisition as to his faith, in an extended dialogue recorded at the time and retold in modified form by Kiš, who footnotes the sources he is transforming, just as Pavić does in turn.

Kiš’s book is an important precursor in the linking of nation and translation in a Yugoslavian context. On the first page, his narrator says he is about to tell a true story of the 1932 murder of a young revolutionary who is falsely suspected of informing on the activities of her cell and is consequently killed. He adds, though, that for the story

to be true in the way its author dreams about, it would have to be told in Romanian, Hungarian, Ukranian, or Yiddish; or rather, in a mixture of all these languages…. If the narrator, therefore, could reach the unattainable, terrifying moment of Babel, the humble pleadings and awful beseechings of Hanna Krzyzewska would resound in Romanian, in Polish, in Ukranian (as if her death were only the consequence of some great and fatal misunderstanding), and then just before the death rattle and final calm her incoherence would turn into the prayer for the dead, spoken in Hebrew, the language of being and dying. (3)

Pavić followed Kiš in privileging Hebrew as a key language hidden with the national languages of Eastern Europe, and he followed Kiš as well in commenting obliquely on the Yugoslavian situation by writing about anywhere but Yugoslavia itself. The stories in Kiš’s book are set decades (and in Rabbi Neumann’s case centuries) before the present, and concern characters from a range of countries, always outside Yugoslavia. Only in the final page of the final story does a Russian character, A. A. Darmolatov—significantly, a poet-translator—come to Montenegro. He is attending a jubilee celebration for The Mountain Wreath, the great tragicomic drama by Petar Petrovich Njegoš, Montenegrin prince-bishop and a founder of Serbian poetry in the mid-nineteenth century. Darmolatov sits in the tall chair built for the seven-foot Njegoš, his legs dangling childishly above the floor—a comic image of the Russian’s inability to fill the Montenegrin hero’s shoes. This final image is the closest Kiš ever gets to direct local application, but his book was widely understood to be a critical commentary on the lingering Stalinism of Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Building on his wide network of literary and historical sources, Pavić takes a further step along comparable lines, expanding Kiš’s Slavic framework to give his characters a global perspective. His modern scholars form a multinational trinity: a Polish-born, Yale-trained professor, Dorothea Schultz; an Egyptian Hebraist, Abu Kabir Muawia; and a Serbian archaeologist, Isailo Suk, professor at Novi Sad, a center of Serbian culture where Pavić himself long taught literature. These characters and their earlier counterparts are all flamboyantly multilingual, sometimes using different languages for specific purposes. Already in the seventeenth century, Avram Brankovich’s family “count in Tzintzar, lie in Walachian, are silent in Greek, sing hymns in Russian, are cleverest in Turkish, and speak their mother tongue—Serbian—only when they intend to kill” (25). Brankovich “cannot stay with one language for long: he changes them like mistresses and speaks Walachian one minute and Hungarian or Turkish the next, and he has begun to learn Khazar from a parrot. They say he also speaks Spanish in his sleep, but this language melts by the time he is awake” (28). In a dream he is told a poem in Hebrew, a language that he doesn’t know; when he manages to get it interpreted, it proves to be a famous poem by Judah ha-Levi concerning the poet’s divided self, living in Spain far from his distant homeland: “My heart is in the East, but I am at the end of the West. / … Zion is in Edom’s bondage, and I am in Arabian fetters” (29). Only a reader of Hebrew can know this, as Pavić places the reader into Brankovich’s position by giving the poem only in Hebrew, without translation, though this has long been the most widely translated medieval Hebrew poem. It is this poem that leads Brankovich to Judah ha-Levi’s Book of the Khazars, setting him off on his increasingly obsessive quest for information about the Khazars.

In a confidential report to the Viennese court, which is always on the watch for challenges to its imperial authority, an incarnation of the Devil named Nikon Sevast describes Brankovich’s efforts to assemble materials and to create a complete account of Khazar history and culture:

Brankovich had eight camel-loads of books brought to Constantinople from the Zarand district and from Vienna, and more are still arriving. He has sealed himself off from the world with walls of dictionaries and old manuscripts…. Brankovich’s card file, created along with the library, encompassed a thousand pages, covering a variety of subjects: from catalogues of sighs and exclamations in Old Church Slavonic to a register of salts and teas, and enormous collections of hair, beards, and moustaches of the most diverse colors and styles from living and dead persons of all races, which our master glues onto glass bottles and keeps as a sort of museum of old hairstyles. His own hair is not represented in this collection, but he has ordered that strands of it be used to weave his coat of arms with a one-eyed eagle and the motto “Every master embraces his own death.” (45)

The dictionary may well be the death of the reader if not of Brankovich himself, as the only surviving copies are the gold- and silver-locked volumes; a reader who finds a copy thus has an equal chance of being enlightened or murdered by the book on reaching the words “Verbum caro factum est” on the ninth page.

Isailo Suk and Abu Kabir Muawia are murdered in Istanbul in 1982, just before they and Dorothea Schultz succeed in reassembling the dictionary, and so Pavić’s 1984 novel can only be a partial reconstruction, incomplete and often at variance with information about the original. Late in the book, for example, Pavić actually reprints the ninth page of a Latin and Hebrew translation of Judah ha-Levi’s Arabic dialogue, published in 1660 as Liber Cosri and obviously prefiguring Brankovich’s lost Lexicon Cosri. The ninth page of Judah ha-Levi’s treatise does indeed discuss Christ’s incarnation, yet the fatal words from John’s gospel can’t be found there. Instead, the Christian sage paraphrases the Bible, interestingly translating within Latin itself between physical and metaphysical terms: “incorporata (incarnata) est Deitas, transiens in uterum virginis” (“God was incorporated [incarnated], passing through a virgin’s womb,” 298). Source and reconstruction together might even complete the true dictionary’s destruction: Judah ha-Levi’s Liber Cosri and Pavić’s Dictionary may resemble certain Khazar mirrors, made of polished salt, which come in two varieties, slow and fast, reflecting past or future events rather than the present. Princess Ateh is said to have died when her servants foolishly brought her a pair of these mirrors before the fatal letters had been washed off her eyelids:

She saw herself in the mirrors with closed lids and died instantly. She vanished between two blinks of the eye, or better said, for the first time she read the lethal letters on her eyelids, because she had blinked the moment before and the moment after, and the mirrors had reflected it. She died, killed simultaneously by letters from both the past and the future. (24)

…

To an unusual degree, Pavić’s book openly anticipates its circulation in translation after publication. Indeed, Pavić actually arranges matters so that his book needs to be translated in order to achieve a full expression of his themes. Intent upon breaking up linear ways of reading, Pavić stresses a consequence of the multilingualism of the “lost” original: its entries would have been alphabetized differently in Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, so that readers in each language would inevitably have been reading different books, arranged in a different order in each translation. Pavić’s original novel can only describe this difference without embodying it, since he doesn’t really want to limit his readership to the few people who could read those three languages, even assuming that he could write them all himself, which doesn’t appear to be the case. His book is written in Serbo-Croatian throughout, though he asserts that the 1691 Lexicon Cosri produced by the Polish printer Johannes Daubmannus was “printed in Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek,” as well as—improbably—Serbian (239). In his Preliminary Notes, Pavić describes his book’s monolingualism as “the main shortcoming of the current version in relation to the Daubmannus edition,” adding that at least the reader can choose to read the book’s entries out of order: “it can be read in an infinite number of ways. It is an open book, and when it is shut it can be added to: just as it has its own former and present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, and continuers” (11).

Only a fiction in the original novel, the entries’ multilingual mobility became a reality once the Dictionary was translated, a fact that Pavić noted with great satisfaction in a 1998 article:

I have always wished to make literature, which is a nonreversible art, a reversible one. Therefore my novels have no end in the classical meaning of the word…. The original version of Dictionary of the Khazars, printed in the Cyrillic alphabet, ends with a Latin quotation: “sed venit ut illa impleam et confirmem, Mattheus.” My novel in Greek translation ends with a sentence: “I have immediately noticed that there are three fears in me, and not one.” The English, Hebrew, Spanish, and Danish versions of Dictionary of the Khazars end in this way: “Then when the reader returned, the entire process would be reversed, and Tibbon would correct the translation based on the impressions he had derived from this reading walk.” (“The Beginning and the End of Reading” 143)

Pavić goes on to quote the closing sentences of the versions in Swedish, Dutch, Czech, German, Hungarian, Italian, Catalan, and Japanese. Foreign translations collectively create a multiple book, extending the original novel’s monolingual reconstruction of Daubmannus’s supposedly quadrilingual original.

Pavić’s international framework and his experimental emphases reinforced each other for his international audience, leading foreign readers to overlook any local implications of his book and instead to emphasize its metafictional concerns. Even after Yugoslavia had fallen into civil war, discussions by non-East European scholars continued to focus almost exclusively on apolitical readings of the book, an approach typified in 1997 by the theorist of science and postmodernism N. Katherine Hayles, in an article flamboyantly entitled “Corporeal Anxiety in Dictionary of the Khazars: What Books Talk About in the Late Age of Print When They Talk About Losing Their Bodies.” Giving a detailed and interesting reading of the theme of textual production and destruction, Hayles emphasizes the novel’s “radical indeterminacy” (804) and the operations of “a closed self-referential loop” within it (811). She says nothing at all about the book’s political themes or the cultural context of its composition and publication, apart from a passing reference in a footnote to an article by Petar Ramadanović, “Language and Crime in Yugoslavia,” which she describes as taking “a sociological approach” (819n.).

In the most extended presentation of Pavić to date, the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted over a hundred pages in the summer of 1998 to a cluster of a dozen pieces on Pavić’s novels, centering on the Dictionary and including a long interview with Pavić as well as his article on “The Beginning and End of Reading.” Nowhere in these pieces is there anything more than vague passing mention of the tragic events that occurred in the former Yugoslavia, beginning in 1987 when resurgent micronationalisms tore the nation apart. The articles have titles like “Dictionary of the Khazars as an Epistemological Metaphor” and “Milorad Pavić and Hyperfiction.” Even an article entitled “Culture as Memory” concerns intertextuality and makes no reference to battles over cultural identity and memory in the former Yugoslavia of the 1980s and 1990s.

For his own part, Pavić says nothing at all about politics in his article on reading, focusing entirely on formal issues and the future of the novel. In the interview, with a Greek journalist named Thanassis Lallas, Pavić speaks mostly of his ancestors and of his metafictional concerns, mentioning only in very general terms that “For a while I was not able to publish my writing in my own country. There were political reasons for it…. I had to wait until 1967, when the appropriate conditions were established that allowed me to publish my first book in my country” (Lallas 133). Asked directly about his views on Serbia, Pavić replies with a kind of gentle, distanced irony that gives little indication of his personal views, even speaking of the Serbs as “they” rather than as “we”: “It is a nation deprived of memory. They never forgive, but forget immediately. They are good warriors, but the worst diplomats. They win wars, and lose battles…. They always have their enemies in mind and they do not care a lot for their friends” (133–34). He then quickly turns the conversation to a discussion of Serbia’s prominent writers and filmmakers and to his own fiction. As the interview draws to a close, Pavić sidesteps a question as to whether he has ever been a Communist, replying that “I am the last Byzantine” (140).

Nowhere in this interview, conducted in Belgrade by a foreign journalist for international consumption, does Pavić make anything resembling a direct political statement. He describes his life’s goal as “to rescue as many pieces of beauty as possible. Tons of beauty sink every day in the Danube. Nobody notices. The one who notices it must do something to rescue it” (135). Asked specifically about the current situation in Serbia, he expresses a hope that the international success of novels like his may be “an assurance that love will overcome savagery in this world where there is always more beauty than love…. Let us for an instant count readers, not voters” (141). This is just what Pavić’s personal website actually does: the home page displays a tally of how many people have visited the site to date. Reflecting an awareness of the foundation of his global appeal, Pavić’s site is registered not in his own name but as “www.khazars.com.” Appropriately, like the Dictionary itself the site comes in two parallel versions, not male and female but Serbian and English. A capsule biography on the home page says pointedly that Pavić “is not a member of any political party.” Instead of party affiliation, the biography lists Pavić’s membership in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and in several European cultural organizations, with no hint of the fact that the Serbian Academy was extensively involved in Serbian cultural politics in the 1980s and 1990s.¹

Pavić’s stance had been very different in the late 1980s, when Slobodan Milošević came to power vowing to restore the greatness that had once been Serbia’s, with himself as the dominant unifying force. According to an account by Rajko Djurić, Milošević’s party modified the traditional nationalist “four-S” slogan, “Samo sloga Srbina sparava” (only unity can save Serbia) to read “Samo Slobodan Srbina sparava.” Speaking for domestic consumption, Pavić expressed his forceful support for Milošević’s goals in a range of articles and interviews for Belgrade newspapers, reinforcing nationalist messages of Serbian ancestral greatness, a favorite theme of Milošević’s. As Pavić declared in 1989, “In Serbia people were eating with golden forks in the thirteenth century, while the Western Europeans were still tearing raw flesh apart with their fingers” (quoted in Djurić 163–64).

Language was a crucial arena for the nationalist program of Serbian resurgence, spearheaded by activities of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, to which Pavić was elected in 1991. As Petar Ramadanović says in his article on “Language and Crime in Yugoslavia,”

Croats, Serbs, and Muslims used to speak a common language before the war; now they speak “Croat,” “Serbian,” and “Bosnian.” Serbo-Croat, the vanquished language, has no people, no folk anymore. But Serbo-Croat, the language of a ghost, the language of people who have lost their country, remains as a trace, as a witness of the un-speakable crime that is committed in the Balkans. (185)

Pavić, on the other hand, saw Serbo-Croatian as a political fiction created to suppress local identity, most specifically the historical greatness of Serbia and of the Serbian language. As he said in 1989, using the rhetoric of victimhood that would undergird Milošević’s declarations of war against Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, “the Serbs come from the midpoint of the world, from the navel of the Indo-European peoples, and the Serbian language is an ancient language, the ancestor of all the Indo-European languages. And so everyone hates us out of envy; they sense that we are the most ancient of all the peoples between the Himalayas and the Pyrenees” (Djurić 164).

These statements give a chilling cast to one aspect of the Brankovich family’s multilingualism: they use Serbian “only when they wish to kill” (25). Written words function as weapons throughout the Dictionary of the Khazars, from Princess Ateh’s death-dealing letters to the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet by Saint Cyril. Summarizing the move from the rounded early Slavonic alphabet (Glagolitic) to the angular Cyrillic, Pavić describes the process of alphabetization in violent terms:

While the Slavs besieged Constantinople in 860 A.D., [Cyril] was setting a trap for them in the quiet of his monastic cell in Asia Minor’s Olympus—he was creating the first letters of the Slavic alphabet. He started with rounded letters, but the Slavonic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language in them like a bird. (63–64)

In order to fit the Slavonic language within the cage of their script, Cyril and his brother Methodius “broke it in pieces, drew it into their mouths through the bars of Cyril’s letters, and bonded the fragments with their saliva and the Greek clay beneath the soles of their feet” (64).

The monastic theocracy on Mount Athos in northern Greece, where this scene takes place, has long been a focus of Eastern Orthodox identification; Pavić gives a further literary and heroic twist to the locale by identifying it with Olympus, a site he associates with Homer. In his interview with Thanassis Lallas, he cites Homer and the later Serbian bards as his predecessors in epic creation from oral material (138). Pavić went on to make Athos a key locale in his 1988 novel Landscape Painted with Tea, and well before he began the Dictionary he gave Athos pride of place in a poem called “Monument to an Unknown Poet,” in which several of his characteristic themes are already fully evident. “My eyes are full of blood and wine like plaster on Athos’ walls,” the poem begins; in the second stanza, the speaker develops the link between literature and liturgy:

 

My tongue three times peeled off its shirt of years

 and three languages forgot within me

But my tongue still recognizes the language of lost liturgies.

My feet are tired from choosing the staff that will not break

But my heart still makes a pilgrimage to your words set on fire.

In the poem’s conclusion, these Khazar-like lost languages are redeemed in an internalized homeland:

 

My tongue three times peeled off its shirt of time

 and three languages forgot within me

But my heart has tasted the rock of your homeland

 and found in it the flavor of hearth,

Although I was the apprentice of a poet who doesn’t exist,

 a poet without a poem. (“Monument,” in Simic 28)

From the eyes full of blood in the opening line to the “flavor of hearth” at the end, this poem resonates with the pre-Nazi tradition of celebrations of “Blut und Boden”—blood and ground, symbols of ethnic rootedness, typically mobilized against Jews and other newcomers who are thought to be supplanting the original inhabitants in their own land. There are, of course, no real monuments to unknown poets, just as no poet can exist without a poem: Pavić is playing on the imagery of monuments to the Unknown Soldier, here a man without a country fighting for his rightful home and hearth.

For all the ironic detachment of his interview with Thanassis Lallas, Pavić speaks rather differently on his website. To be sure, he belongs to no political party, and a brief “Autobiography” on his site insists that “I have no biography. I have only a bibliography.” Yet this autobiography closes with a direct self-identification with an unjustly persecuted Serbia:

I have not killed anyone. But they have killed me. Long before my death. It would have been better for my books had their author been a Turk or a German. I was the best known writer of the most hated nation in the world—the Serbian nation.

XXI century started for me avant la date 1999, when NATO airforces bombed Belgrade and Serbia. Since that moment the river Danube on whose banks I was born is not navigable.

I think God graced me with infinite favor by granting me the joy of writing, and punished me in equal measure, precisely because of that joy perhaps. Milorad Pavić

His website, www.khazars.com, is thus still developing the themes of writing, victimization, and divine inscrutability that pervade the Dictionary of the Khazars.

The novel complicates these themes by its use of a Jewish source-text. Pavić treats Jewish mysticism, in fact, with insight and sympathy as the utopian vision of an eternally displaced people. Having printed Judah ha-Levi’s “Song of Zion” in Hebrew early in the book, he gives a partial prose translation two hundred pages later, describing the poet composing the poem as he finally makes his longed-for journey from Spain to the Holy Land at the end of his life:

It was on this trip that he wrote his most mature poems, among them the famous Song of Zion, which is read in synagogues on the Day of the Holy Abba. He landed on the holy shores of his original homeland and died within reach of his destination. According to one account, just as he laid eyes on Jerusalem he was trampled to death by Saracen horses. Writing about the clash between Christianity and Islam, he said: “There is no port in either East or West where we might find peace…. Whether Ismael wins or the Edomites”—Christians—“prevail, my fate remains the same—to suffer.” (246)

The Jewish section of the Dictionary is the longest of the three; placed at the end, it is the section where the book’s many threads are drawn together. If the true Lexicon could ever be assembled, it would represent the hidden body of Adam Ruhani or Adam Cadmon, a figure from Kabbalistic mysticism, whose instantiation would redeem the fallen universe: “The Khazars saw letters in people’s dreams, and in them they looked for primordial man, for Adam Cadmon, who was both man and woman and born before eternity. They believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that each of these letters constitutes part of Adam Cadmon’s body on earth, and that these letters converge in people’s dreams and come to life in Adam’s body” (224–25). Samuel Cohen, a contemporary of Avram Brankovich’s and compiler of the Hebrew version of the Dictionary, struggles to assemble a text that will fully embody Adam Cadmon: “I know, my Khazar dictionary includes all ten numbers and twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet; the world can be created out of them but, lo, I cannot do it. I am missing certain names, and as a result some of the letters will not be filled” (229).

Far from treating Judaism slightingly or with hostility, Pavić does just the opposite: throughout his book, he implicitly identifies the Serbs with the Jews. Judah ha-Levi, trapped between Christianity and Islam, becomes the model for Pavić himself, a philosophical poet who records his country’s fate, caught between the Austro-Hungarian Empire on one side and imperial Russia on the other. At the very beginning of the Dictionary, The Khazars stand in for the Balkans when their independence is brutally crushed by the Russians:

A Russian military commander of the 10th century, Prince Svyatoslav, gobbled up the Khazar Empire like an apple, without even dismounting from his horse. In 943 A.D. the Russians went without sleep for eight nights to smash the Khazar capital at the mouth of the Volga into the Caspian Sea, and between 965 and 970 A.D. they destroyed the Khazar state. Eyewitnesses noted that the shadows of the houses in the capital held their outlines for years, although the buildings themselves had already been destroyed long before. They held fast in the wind and in the waters of the Volga. (2–3)

Before Yugoslavia plunged into civil war, it was natural enough to read such passages as expressing the heroic resistance of an indomitable nation to the oppression of imperial invaders. With Pavić identified as “Yugoslavian” and his book as “translated from the Serbo-Croatian,” the Dictionary could be read in a way pleasing to Western liberals and conservatives alike, as a general plea for Yugoslavian self-determination in the face of Soviet repression. Such a reading would accord well with the perspective of Pavić’s precursor Danilo Kiš, who did embody a liberal nationalism opposed both to Tito’s authoritarianism and to divisive ethnic rivalries within the country.

This turns out not to be what Pavić had in mind. Far from defending Yugoslavia, he wanted to see it taken apart. Once in power, Slobodan Milošević and his ultranationalist allies began to disassemble Yugoslavia and even Serbo-Croatia into separate ethnic identities and languages. Formerly virtually indistinguishable from Croatian except in script (Roman versus Cyrillic), Serbian now became a distinct language, and Pavić took the opportunity to have his book “translated” into Serbian. Though for most books this would have meant little more than transliteration, in the case of the Dictionary the new version acquired a new order of entries, and the “Serbian version printed in the Latin alphabet” is one of the translations Pavić points to as differing from the original (“The Beginning and the End of Reading,” 143). Christina Pribićević-Zorić’s widely praised English translation is described in the British and American editions as “translated from the Serbo-Croatian,” and yet when this same translation was locally re-issued in Belgrade in 1996, it was labeled as “translated from Serbian.” We are used to seeing translations change linguistically as they reinterpret a common source language. Here just the opposite has occurred: the identical English version is presented as a translation of two different original languages, as Serbo-Croatian is torn asunder.

Within the book itself, Pavić focuses the rhetoric of suppression and victim-hood on the Khazars. Modifying Judah ha-Levi’s dialogue, Pavić adapts the theme of the Jews as archetypal oppressed minority to describe the Khazars as an oppressed majority in their own multicultural land, in a translation of Serbian nationalist resentment toward Tito’s efforts to create a unified Yugoslavia. Tito’s program is sharply satirized in an extended discussion of the organization of the Khazar state, in which the causes of Serbian resentments can be seen in heightened form. Whereas the Serbs, with some 40 percent of the population, were a plurality but not at all a majority in Yugoslavia, “the Khazars are the most numerous in the empire, the others all constituting very small groups. But the empire’s administrative organization is designed not to show this” (146). The state is divided into districts, with more districts for the minorities than for the Khazar majority. Political representation, however, is proportional to the number of districts rather than to population. Moreover, the major Khazar region has been split up: “In the north, for instance, an entirely new nation was invented, which gave up the Khazar name, even the Khazar language, and it has a different name for its district” (146). Names are a crucial battleground:

Given this situation and this balance of forces, promotions hinge on blind obedience to the non-Khazar representatives. Just avoiding the Khazar name is already a recommendation in itself, enabling one to take the first steps at court. The next step requires fiercely attacking the Khazars and subordinating their interests to those of the Greeks, Jews, Turkmen, Arabs, or Goths, as the Slavs are called in these parts. (147)

It will be noted that this listing makes the Khazars the oppressed majority among a total of six ethnic groups, a number corresponding to Yugoslavia’s six constituent republics.

The Khazars’ struggle is economic as well as cultural. In a grim parody of Tito’s policy of giving preferential economic treatment to the smaller, less-developed republics, the Khazar government sells specially dyed bread to non-Khazar regions:

Dyed bread is the sign of the Khazars’ position in the Khazar state. The Khazars produce it, because they inhabit the grain-growing regions of the state. The starving populace at the foot of the Caucasus massif eats dyed bread, which is sold for next to nothing. Undyed bread, which is also made by the Khazars, is paid for in gold. The Khazars are allowed to buy only the expensive, undyed bread. Should any Khazar violate this rule and buy the cheap, dyed bread, which is strictly forbidden them, it will show in their excrement. Special customs services periodically check Khazar latrines and punish violators of this law. (149–50)

The Khazar state, in Pavić’s presentation, becomes the ultimate dystopia of a totalitarian multiculturalism.

The Khazars are exemplary victims geographically as well as socially, for the three hells of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism meet under their lands (52). The devils’ influence continually percolates upward, though naturally the devils themselves hate what they have wrought. As one of the three devils says to Dr. Muawia at the end of the book:

“Look at the results of this democracy of yours. Before, big nations used to oppress small nations. Now it’s the reverse. Now, in the name of democracy, small nations terrorize the big. Just look at the world around us. White America is afraid of blacks, the blacks are afraid of the Puerto Ricans, Jews of the Palestinians, the Arabs of the Jews, the Serbs of the Albanians, the Chinese of the Vietnamese, the English of the Irish. Small fish are nibbling the ears of the big fish…. Your democracy sucks….” (330)

Having expressed his views on democracy, the devil orders Muawia to open his mouth so that his teeth won’t be spoiled, and shoots him in the mouth.

A novel that achieved rapid worldwide success as “an Arabian Nights romance” and “a novel of love and death” actually contains more death than love, and it even helped to usher in the death it most longed for, the destruction of a multiethnic Yugoslavia. In an article on “Pavić’s Literary Demolition of Yugoslavia,” Andrew Wachtel points out that Pavić’s use of postmodernist techniques could be read in Western Europe as pure play or as a healthy corrective to Enlightenment certainties, whereas Pavić could deploy these techniques to very different effect in a Yugoslavia whose very creation expressed an Enlightenment ideal of unity in diversity based on a common, reasoned public discourse:

The philosophical demolition job Pavić performed on the synthetic concept of Yugoslavia grew out of his own importation of a particular postmodernist mode of thought into Yugoslav discourse. But on Yugoslav soil, the Lyotardian vision of separate and incommensurable language games did not remain a metaphor. It was embodied, instead, in a series of nationalist micronarratives whose primary mode of communication turned out to be shooting. (640)

Perhaps we were reading the poisoned copy of the book all along?

…

Closely connected to contemporary reality, the Dictionary was a pointed and polemical intervention in cultural debate in the uncertain years leading up to Yugoslavia’s vicious civil war. How should we read the book in light of this new understanding, or should we continue to read it at all? Certainly a book marketed as a romantic escape into hyperfiction would have attracted fewer readers if it had been presented as “A Playful Apologia for Ethnic Cleansing.” One possibility would be to regard the novel as a sort of con job. On this view, foreign readers haven’t realized that they were being sold a bill of goods: nationalist propaganda was falsely marketed as international postmodernism.

To take such a view, though, risks a kind of textual essentialism, as though a book really is one thing and has one meaning wherever and whenever it is read. Few of us still believe this in theory, thanks to a generation’s worth of poststructuralist theory, and yet in practice it is all too easy to fall into essentialist language in describing a book’s themes and effect, even though what we are really describing may largely be our own reading of it at a given time. To realize this doesn’t mean that we need to go to the opposite extreme, supposing that a book has an infinite multiplicity of meanings and perhaps no real ethical impact at all, a view that would be the equivalent of the relativistic translation theories that deny that there can ever be good and bad translations. Despite Pavić’s enthusiasm for his text’s reversibility, there are finally always going to be forty-five entries that collectively present the same elements for the reader to absorb. Further, individual readers don’t read in a private cultural vacuum. Though a range of readings is always possible at a given time and place, this range is limited, not infinite, and the readings produced in a particular cultural context will tend to have a definite family resemblance.

What the double life of Dictionary of the Khazars demonstrates is the major difference between a work’s life in a national context as opposed to a global context. As a work of Yugoslavian literature, written in Serbo-Croatian and printed in Cyrillic script, the Xaзapcĸи Peниĸ had one kind of impact, or a range of impacts, that began to change as Yugoslavia broke apart and the book became Hazarski Rečnik, written in Serbian and printed in Roman script. In both forms, it would naturally be read in a direct relation to the local literary, social, and political history that Pavić shares—and disputes—with his readers. An individual Serbian, or Bosnian, or Montenegrin reader might approve or reject Pavić’s satiric implication that the Khazars are the forerunners of modern Serbs as a majority oppressed in their own country, but this theme would be strongly evident for most readers in the area, however they assessed it. Probably many readers around Eastern Europe would be attuned to this level of the text, as it would resonate so strongly with issues close to home.

Farther afield, however, Hazarski rečnik changed character as it became a work of world literature, whether as Diccionario Jázaro or as . The novel’s nationalism remained subordinate to its inter-nationalism for most foreign readers even after Milošević came to power and ethnic tensions mounted throughout the Balkans, and it didn’t take the expanse of the Atlantic to induce such readings. In a 1995 survey of the French reception of the Dictionary, Milivoj Srebro finds French-speaking reviewers and critics consistently reading Pavić as the playful heir to Calvino, Cortázar, and Perec. She quotes a Swiss reviewer in 1988 describing the novel as “une machine infernale,” but this is not at all a political assessment; instead, the reviewer concludes, “the demoniacal Pavić teaches us that reality, like truth, is a sweet illusion” (Srebro 277). The reviewer makes no reference to any Balkan realities, even though at their closest point the borders of Switzerland and the former Yugoslavia are less than a hundred and fifty miles apart.

To understand the workings of world literature we need more of a phenomenology than an ontology of the work of art: a work manifests differently abroad than it does at home. Yet acknowledging such differences doesn’t mean that it is good to remain as clueless as the Swiss reviewer allowed himself to be, at a time when it would have behooved Western readers to pay much closer attention to the issues Pavić was raising. Having found one French critic (an Eastern European émigré) who “has even been tempted to see in this work a parable of the destiny of the Serbs,” Milivoj Srebro dismisses such an interpretation as denying the book’s universality. “It is precisely this universality,” she adds, “that makes the difference between a masterpiece and an ordinary work” (284). Even Srebro, though, ends by admitting that French responses to the novel have been one-sided: “To be sure, if we take up the formulation of Jean Starobinski according to which ‘the critical trajectory develops, so far as possible, between accepting everything (through sympathy) and situating everything (by comprehension),’ one could say that the reviews of Dictionary of the Khazars have stayed fairly close to the first pole of this trajectory” (284–85).

It shouldn’t be necessary to treat a foreign work with an uncomprehending sympathy in order to appreciate its excellence. It does no service to works of world literature to set them loose in some deracinated space, whether the “great conversation” of a 1950s-style academic humanism or the “closed self-referential loop” of recent poststructuralist metafiction. Aesthetically as well as ethically, a pure universalism of either variety is finally reductive, missing the real complexity of a work, just as much as would an opposite insistence that a work can only be read effectively in the original language, inextricably linked at all points to its local context. An informed reading of a work of world literature should keep both aspects in play together, recognizing that it brings us elements of a time and place different from our own, and at the same time recognizing that these elements change in force as the book gets farther from home.

Understanding the cultural subtext of Pavić’s Khazars is important for foreign readers, as otherwise we simply don’t see the point of much of the book. As Petar Ramadanović says, Pavić was composing an “appeal for compassion with the Serbian problem … addressed to the international community” (190). However we choose to react to that appeal, a full reading should be aware of it and should confront the ethical choices that the novel is pressing us to make. At the same time, when we read a work of world literature we have a great deal of freedom in deciding what use we will make of such contextual understanding. This freedom can most readily be seen when we are reading a work from a distant time as well as place. To take the case of Dante, for instance, it seems to me trivializing to treat the Divine Comedy as an essentially secular work, though various modern commentators have chosen to focus on Dante as “poet of the secular world,” in Erich Auerbach’s phrase. Auerbach went so far as to claim that Dante’s realism overwhelmed his theology “and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it” (Mimesis, 202). We can dispute such a claim on both historical and aesthetic grounds, taking seriously the idea that the Divine Comedy may actually have been a successful Christian poem. Even so, appreciating Dante’s profound religious vision does not require us to convert to Catholicism, or to take a stand on issues of Florentine politics, though both of these responses are ones that Dante might well have desired. A work of world literature has its fullest life, and its greatest power, when we can read it with a kind of detached engagement, informed but not confined by a knowledge of what the work would likely mean in its original time and place, even as we adapt it to our present context and purposes.

Pavić himself raises this theme repeatedly. The son of a house builder, he often uses architectural metaphors in talking about his books. He has tried, he says, to construct books with many exits rather than a single ending, so that the reader “can come out not only through one exit but also through other exits that are far from each other…. Slowly I lose from my sight the difference between the house and the book, and this is, perhaps, the most important thing I have to say in this text” (“The Beginning and the End of Reading” 144). We can extend Pavić’s metaphor: a book offers us many ways in as well as many exits, some of which are most readily accessible from a local standpoint, while others only become visible from a distance. For Pavić, indeed, it is the reader who has the true freedom of the text; caught within a web of circumstance and fatality, the writer has far less. It is the Devil in Istanbul who declares that “your democracy sucks,” but by giving this speech to the devil Pavić doesn’t mean to distance himself from this viewpoint, since he regularly identifies himself with the devil. Poet of a radically fallen world, Pavić creates a book from his own passions and prejudices, expecting that like-minded readers will see it likewise but different readers may find ways out of his book that he himself cannot take or perhaps even find.

A clear stand-in for Pavić within the book is the devil Nikon Sevast, a master calligrapher who spends his time painting frescoes in Moravian churches before he goes on to encounter Avram Brankovich and serve as a copyist of the Lexikon. Describing his fresco technique to a fellow monk, Sevast says that “I work with something like a dictionary of colors, and from it the observer composes sentences and books, in other words, images. You could do the same with writing. Why shouldn’t someone create a dictionary of words that make up one book and let the reader himself assemble the words into a whole?” (96). In so doing, the reader won’t merely share in the creative process but will actually experience a freedom denied to the devil/artist himself: “It is not I who mix the colors but your own vision,” Sevast tells his fellow monk: “I only place them next to one another on the wall in their natural state; it is the observer who mixes the colors in his own eye, like porridge…. Therefore, faith in seeing, listening, and reading is more important than faith in painting, singing, or writing” (95).

Reading gives access to a realm of freedom that provides strength to the dreamer, who is otherwise caught in the trials of the waking world. For Pavić it is world literature that typifies the possibility of escape from the tragedies of individual circumstance. Just as reciting Dante gave Primo Levi strength in Auschwitz, so too Pavić has Saint Methodius think of Homer while undergoing torture at the order of hostile German bishops:

He was brought to trial before a synod in Regensburg, then tortured and exposed naked to the frost. While they whipped him, his body bent over so low that his beard touched the snow, Methodius thought of how Homer and the holy prophet Elijah had been contemporaries, how Homer’s poetic state had been larger than the state of Alexander of Macedonia, because it had stretched from Pontus to beyond Gibraltar…. He thought of how Homer had seas and towns in his vast poetic state, not knowing that in one of them, in Sidon, sat the prophet Elijah, who was to become an inhabitant of another poetic state, one as vast, eternal, and powerful as Homer’s own–an inhabitant of the Holy Scriptures. (88–89)

Recalling his reading of Homer and Elijah, whose overlapping empires the poet and prophet themselves couldn’t perceive, Methodius can ignore the whips that seek to break his spirit.

Translation is a key to the reader’s freedom. Isaac Sangari, Hebrew representative before the Kaghan in the great religious debate, is intensely loyal to his language and tradition, but not exclusively so:

He made a point of stressing the values of the Hebrew language, but he knew many other languages as well. He believed that the differences between languages lay in the following: all languages except God’s are the languages of suffering, the dictionaries of pain. “I have noticed,” he said, “that my sufferings are drained through a rupture in time or in myself, for otherwise they would be more numerous by now. The same holds true for languages.” (274)

The only truly free characters in Pavić’s book are a select sect of “dream hunters,” devotees of a cult headed by Princess Ateh, an alternative to all existing religions. The dream hunters travel from one person’s dream to another, seeking pairs of people who unknowingly dream of one another; the rifts in the universe can be healed if the dream hunters can unite these pairs, who are the potential lexicographers of the full Dictionary. As a devil named Ibn Akshany remarks to one of these dream hunters, his hunt is the most privileged form of reading, and it is better than writing itself: “Anybody can play music or write a dictionary. Leave that to others, because people like you, who can peer into the crack between one view and the other, that crack where death rules supreme, are few and far between” (183).

Pavić’s book enters world literature both by its translations abroad and also by opening out directly, so far as possible, into the reader’s world, well signaled by the trompe l’oeil cover of the British and American edition, which appears to be an embossed dictionary cover, with a jewel set into the spine and a fly resting on the back cover. Though the Dictionary proper ends differently in different languages, in every edition Pavić follows the Dictionary with a “Closing Note on the Usefulness of this Dictionary,” in which he evokes the reader, or more specifically a pair of readers, male and female. These readers will each have read one of the book’s differently gendered editions and will now meet in the square of their town: “I see how they lay their dinner out on top of the mailbox in the street,” he says, “and how they eat, embraced, sitting on their bicycles” (335). In the Dictionary of the Khazars, the nightmare of history becomes the dream of world literature, a multilingual space of freedom from the limited viewpoints that enmesh nations and individuals alike, not excluding the book’s own author. The readers’ meal on the mailbox, and its hinted romantic aftermath, can form an antidote to the poison with which the book itself was written.

NOTE

1. I am describing the site as of March 2003. The site has been set up and maintained by Pavić’s wife, Jasmina Mihajlović, herself a critic and writer, who has written extensively on Pavić and is keenly concerned with his reception and reputation both at home and abroad.

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).

Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficciones, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962).

Djurić, Rajko, “Kultur und Destruktivität am Beispiel Jugoslawien,” In Suchbild Europa: Künstleriche Konzepte der Moderne ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 162–67.

Hayles, N. Katherine, “Corporeal Anxiety in Dictionary of the Khazars: What Books Talk About in the Late Age of Print When They Talk About Losing Their Bodies,” Modern Fiction Studies 43(3), 1997, pp. 800–20.

Judah ha-Levi, The Kuzari, trans. N. Daniel Korobkin (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998).

Kiš, Danilo, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, trans. Duka Mikić-Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).

Lallas, Thanassis, “ ‘As a Writer I Was Born Two Hundred Years Ago….’: An Interview with Milorad Pavić.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18(2), 1998, pp. 128–41.

Pavić, Milorad, “Monument to an Unknown Poet,” In Four Yugoslav Poets, ed. and trans. Charles Simic (Lillabulero Press, 1970), unpaginated.

———, Dictionary of the Khazars, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Christina Pribićević-Zorić. In Female and Male editions (New York: Knopf, 1988).

———, Landscape Painted with Tea: A Crossword-Novel, trans. Christina Pribićević-Zorić (New York: Knopf, 1990).

———, “The Beginning and the End of Reading—The Beginning and the End of the Novel,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18(2), 1998, pp. 142–46.

———, and Jasmina Mihalović. Www.khazars.com.

Ramadanović, Petar, “Language and Crime in Yugoslavia,” in Regionalism Reconsidered: New Approaches to the Field ed. David Jordan (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 185–96.

Srebro, Milivoj, “Le Coup médiatique de Milorad Pavić: Le Dictionnaire khazar vu par la critique littéraire française,” Revue de Littérature Comparée 69(3), 1995, pp. 273–85.

Wachtel, Andrew, “Pavić’s Literary Demolition of Yugoslavia,” Slavic and East European Journal 41(4), 1997, pp. 627–44.