#maclehose

The WiT-related ups and downs of this past year included the loss of Croatian author Daša Drndić in June, followed by her Belladonna—translated by Celia Hawkesworth (UK/Maclehose, US/New Directions)—winning the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in November.

See her obituary in the Guardian here.

From The Warwick site:

The 2018 winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is the novel Belladonna by Daša Drndić, translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth and published by Maclehose Press.

Belladonna is a novel about an ageing psychologist, Andreas Ban, who looks back in anger, and irony, on the many traumas of his times, and the upheavals of Croatia and its region, whose size has made it easily overlooked by historians despite its critical geo-political role on a world stage dominated by 'great powers'.

The judges described the book as: "An immensely powerful novel that breaks many of the rules in writing fiction. Part history, part (auto)biography, it is also a scrapbook of personal obsessions - lists of deportees; postage stamps; photos of unnamed people and plants - which all fuse in a furiously driven narrative. This epic reckoning with the past combines bleak comedy and historical investigation with a visionary, prophetic voice."

Author Daša Drndić was born in 1946 in Zagreb, in what is now Croatia, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She took her first degree at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, where she lived and worked for some years, and later her PhD at the University of Rijeka, Croatia, settling and living there for 25 years until her death from cancer in June of this year. Drndić’s final work, EEG, is available in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth from Maclehose Press.

Translator Celia Hawkesworth is one of the pre-eminent translators of Croatian literature, with almost 40 titles to her name, including works by Dubravka Ugrešić and Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić. Celia Hawkesworth taught Serbian and Croatian language and literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, from 1971 to 2002, and since retiring has devoted herself full-time to translation. She has been the recipient of the Dereta Book of the Year Award and the Heldt Prize for the best translation by a woman in Slavic studies. She has also twice been shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Judge Boyd Tonkin writes of Belladonna: "In addition to its rueful chronicle of a single life buffeted by history, Belladonna is also a visionary novel about the demons of hatred that haunt Europe - and a warning that they still threaten us."

Celia Hawkesworth says of Belladonna and her collaboration with author Daša Drndić: "Anyone new to Daša Drndić should not expect an easy read – from its unconventional mix of fiction and fact to its frequently angry tone, her work is highly original. Her Croatian publisher describes reading her as being like 'being repeatedly punched in the stomach'. But it is not as brutal as that statement might suggest: her Guardian obituary by Amanda Hopkinson states that Daša was 'incapable of writing a sentence that was not forceful, fierce or funny – or all three simultaneously'. So, strong stuff, but compelling and often entertaining. A recurrent theme of Daša’s is memory, what we remember, what we forget and often choose to forget. She reminds us frequently of the forgotten victims of Nazism, including lengthy lists of names as the only kind of tribute left to us.

"Daša was always generous with her guidance and patient with me, explaining unknown items from her rich vocabulary, drawn from various traditions in the former Yugoslav lands and their dialects. It was one of my life’s greatest pleasures to be able to work with her on helping this fine work reach a wide audience."

If you live in Shenzhen, you can go to neighboring HK for a great hiking experience. Even though this two places share very similar landscapes, the experience is different to some extent.Honestly, the trial design in hk is more clear and comfy, and the biodiversity is really well maintained. 

Tips:

1.bring enough water but not too heavy, there are several convenience store in the trail

2.try to breath when you feel tired and keep a consistent pace

3.if you travel from or back to the port, taxi is the ideal transportation,the cost is about 285HKD or so

High island reservoir- very clear water resources,  we starts our tour from here

wild buffalo，each with an identical ID

Die Freude ist riesig! Thank you, CWA, MacLehose and Jamie Bullock!

On No Picnic on Mount Kenya by Felice Benuzzi... and what it’s got to do with Wu Ming

On a 1943 equatorial night, three Italian prisoners of war escaped from camp 354 near Nanyuki, in order to climb Mount Kenya. They had secretely prepared their escape for about eight months. After two weeks of primeval freedom and fierce hunger, they reached Point Lenana (16,355 ft). Then they went back to the camp, to face unavoidable punishment. Was it worth doing it? Of course it was. With their romantic gesture, they overcame the horrific boredom and humiliation of the concentration camp. One of them, Felice Benuzzi, told the story in two books, one in Italian (Fuga sul Kenya) and the other in English (No Picnic on Mount Kenya). 

From 2009 to 2013, Wu Ming 1 and Roberto Santachiara worked on a book which, in the most conservative manner, could be described as a narrative biography of Benuzzi. It is entitled Point Lenana and was published in Italian in 2013.

Actually, as happens with several Wu Ming books published in the current decade, Point Lenana is best described as a UNO (Unidentified Narrative Object). It’s about mountaineering, the relationship between Fascism and the Alps, racism in 20th century Italy, postcolonial spleen, the ghosts of history walking in the streets of Trieste, Italian POWs in 1940s Kenya, the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya, fascist war crimes in Ethiopia and the Balkans and many other things. The book revolves around the life of Benuzzi, from his birth in Vienna (1910) to his death in Rome (1988), but there’s much more than that. 

Wu Ming 1 and Santachiara climbed Mount Kenya themselves in order to write the book. 

After Point Lenana came another biography of Benuzzi, this one more traditionally crafted, written by Australian author Rory Steele and titled The Heart and the Abyss. In the book’s credits Rory wrote: «I pay tribute to the authors of #PointLenana, whose work in many ways parallelled mine»

Being Santachiara a literary agent, in 2013 he also managed to get Fuga sul Kenya republished in Italy after a hiatus of several years. Then he decided to get No Picnic on Mount Kenya republished as well, in a revised, updated version, one that would be more close to the Italian one. 

Thanks to MacLehose Press, the book came out in the UK at the end of 2015... and now, as you can see in the pic above, it’s no.1 in the Times non-fiction bestseller list!