Ulysses's Cat

This anthology of new writing from south-east Europe and Wales is published as a result of the Ulysses’s Shelter project based on the Croatian island of Mljet, but (partly due to the pandemic) not all of the material was produced as a result of this. All the content is in English but much has been translated, some by the writers, some by others. There is a fascinating and significant essay by Katja Zakrajsek (Between ‘Them’ and ‘Us’) about being a literary translator, especially one translating into a ‘minority’ language. She also refers to the difficulty for writers in such languages to get translations published and this anthology is partly intended to remedy this: bringing writers who are well regarded at home to a wider, English-speaking audience. As might be expected, the contributions in prose are, no doubt, easier to translate than the poetry and, in a few cases, the reader is unsure whether the obscurity of the text is intended or the result of translation. However, the whole collection gives the reader interesting and widely varied samples of contemporary writing in Croatia, Greece, Serbia, Slovenia and Wales. In many of the Balkan contributions there is a background awareness of the disruption of recent war, but also of the more recent experience of refugees from other conflicts. Masa Senicic’s ‘Tiny rampant beasts’ describes her horror at Serbia’s recruitment of ‘border hunters’ to drive away refugees and her guilt at tolerating this. Her poems are suffused with the landscape of dreams, of a land threatened by commercialism, decay and loss. Vitomirka Trebovac’s poems are accessible sketches, beautifully selected, as in the apparently random memories that make up an individual and a life (‘I will never forget’), and the tenderness of ‘About Old Age’ (and Tamara Bozic’s translations flow so well). As well as these Serbian poets, Srdan Srdic’s short story ‘About a door’ (translated by his wife Natasa) is a haunting memory of an isolated child travelling towards a door closed to him, ‘waiting for the man with the right words’. As might be expected in such a project, several of the contributions reflect on the act of writing or the nature of language itself. The Croatian poet Katja Grcic is playful, but her world is in flux, redesigned and redefined by the action of words. Marija Andrijasevic’s narrator’s account of an unsatisfactory love affair turns her into a writer. Greek short-story writer Dimitris Karakitsos’s piece, ‘The Algerian’, is about how authors put obstacles in the way of their characters to create a story. Steven Hitchins’s extraordinary poem follows the old Glamorgan canal through industrial sites in south Wales to the sea at Cardiff; through its history, geology and ghosts, a melding of chemistry and language creating new alloys in the process. From Slovenia, as well as the essay on translation, the poems of Kristina Kocan evoke a rich and colourful landscape, and the tender sensuality of love in ‘Brushwood’. There is a poignant story from novelist Tomo Podstensec (‘Bobby’) about a family almost without attachment, (which could well be the basis for a film), while Welsh author Eluned Gramich contributes a charming story of an elderly Welsh widow, at first very nervous and alienated, visiting her son and his German wife in Munich but finding life and the city opening up for her anew as she learns the language. There is so much more to discover, beyond those I have mentioned, in this anthology and one hopes that the project’s connections and stimuli will extend beyond this publication. -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales.com