Requiem for Bella Nemeth

By Vladimir Jakopanec

Requiem for Bella Nemeth, by Croatian–Australian writer Vladimir Jakopanec, is the first of his three novels to be translated. It tells an intriguing, exciting, truly soul-scorching story.
Bella is a polymorphous transgressor if ever there was one. She operates at times as a smuggler. At other times she is an interpreter for UN forces in war-ravaged Yugoslavia—another kind of border-crossing, to add to her breaches of sexual, relationship, political, and social norms. Acting as an interpreter (and sometimes a translator), Bella conveys the perceptions, preoccupations, and besetting anxieties of other people; but she herself remains a mystery, never confessing in the role of a narrator.
Many characters are familiar enough. We know people like the main narrator, and probably think we’d act as he does. We never learn his name or his line of work, but are at ease in his interior, behind his eyes. Here is a reflective and always helpful soul who elicits sympathy and understanding, going about his good deeds for the tortured and troubled protagonists he encounters.
We get the most clearly etched depictions of Milan Šoštarić. Milan arrived as a child migrant in Melbourne, with his honest hard-working parents. We learn much that is true to life in the Croatian diaspora through episodes he recounts to the narrator—or when the speaker’s staff is handed temporarily to Milan himself, or to a reminiscing friend. Milan’s encounters with women loom especially large and threatening, with Bella Nemeth as his archetypal nemesis.
Quarrelsome but quiescent, belligerent but passive, impotent victim but ferocious sexual opportunist when the mood takes her, Bella assembles many opposites in one ingeniously drawn character. Bursting across conventional boundaries and categories, she is effectively no one in particular. Or to put it another way, she is every one of us. Kind and gracious Milan is a watchmaker—a regulator or coordinator of social harmony—but with his own mechanism broken.
Reader, you will receive this very fine work of Vladimir Jakopanec in your own active fashion. Readers, like translators, cannot do otherwise; we are not Google’s automated translation facility, and we are not neural-network reading machines. Fine reading is an act of artistic creation—just like fine writing, and just like fine translating. So I now pass Vlado’s challenging and engaging novel to you as the next collaborator in the chain.
—Alan Crosier (translator)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vladimir Jakopanec
• Release date: Dec 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780992271572

Vladimir Jakopanec

Vladimir Jakopanec (Vlado) was born in 1948 among the green hills and vineyards of western Croatia, under an oppressively authoritarian Yugoslavian communist regime. As a child of religious parents, he suffered daily bullying from teachers in primary school, traces of which can be found in his writing.He later studied English and Croatian literature and Theology, at the University of Zagreb. For more than fifteen years he worked in Zagreb’s Social Welfare Centre. Then in 1987, at the height of Yugoslavia’s worst economic crisis and just before the Serbian occupation and war in Croatia, he migrated to Melbourne, Australia, with his wife Mira (a highly respected pianist and music teacher) and their son Andrew.In Melbourne he rapidly developed his artistic skills, opening his own Artis Gilding Studio for the restoration of gilded antiques and the production of sculptures in bronze. He also continued with writing, publishing in Croatia two books of poems, a volume of short stories, and three very successful novels. His Requiem for Bella Nemeth is the first to be translated into English, but others are in progress.As he adjusted to this new life in Australia Vladimir became a careful observer of its people and their ways of life, to find his place within the Australian mainstream. As one result of that studious scrutiny, we have very worthwhile novels and stimulating and entertaining short stories. All of these, it is hoped, will be published in English so Australian readers can enjoy them as much as his many Croatian readers do.Vladimir Jakopanec rođen je 1948. godine u selu Gornja Voća, na živopisnim padinama Hrvatskoga zagorja. Kad mu je bilo svega četiri godine, s roditeljima se seli u Koprivnicu gdje provodi djetinjstvo. Nakon završene srednje škole, studira engleski i hrvatski jezik na zagrebačkom Filozofskom fakultetu te teologiju na Katoličkom bogoslovnom fakultetu u Zagrebu.Do sada je objavio dvije zbirke pjesama, romane “U zamci Nefretitis”, “Heretici”, “Requiem za Belu Nemeth”, te zbirku pripovijedaka i novella “Omara”. Vladimir Jakopanec povremeno piše i za hrvatske tiskovine u Australiji i Hrvatskoj. Bio je dugogodišnji urednik i voditelj hrvatskoga programa na 3mdr radiju u Melbourneu, gdje još uvijek surađuje s prilozima iz hrvatske povijesti, jezika i kulture, a posljednjih godina predaje hrvatski jezik na Victorian School of Languages

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Vladimir Jakopanec

Requiem for Bella Nemeth

Requiem for Bella Nemeth

Vladimir Jakopanec

Translated by Alan Crosier

Melbourne, 2021

Publisher: Smashwords

Author: Vladimir Jakopanec

Editing, translation, and book design: Alan Crosier, Ozedit® Academic Editors & Research Consultants

Proof-reader: Julian Crooke

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Creator: Jakopanec, Vladimir, author Title: Requiem for Bella Nemeth ISBN: 978-0-9922715-7-2 (Smashwords)

Translation of Requiem za Belu Nemeth (Croatian), 2019

Copyright ©: Vladimir Jakopanec, 2021

Translator’s Preface ©: Alan Crosier, 2021

This novel is a work of fiction by the author. Apart from historical figures, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks go to Mira Jakopanetz for her patience, support, and solid help during the writing and throughout the translation process. Also to Andrew Jakopanetz, for being there when I needed him and his valuable advice; to Julian Crooke for painstaking proofreading and some very accurate stylistic fixes; to Eva Scheer for her welcome encouragement; and to Alan Crosier for taking care of what turned out to be an excellent translation, for his graphics, editing, and layout work, and for the literary expertise he graciously offered. They all contributed, to make this English edition of Requiem a reality.

Vladimir Jakopanec Melbourne, November 2021

Translator’s Preface

Forgive me!

With these words the eminent French philosopher Jacques Derrida began a lecture of sprawling European length at Melbourne’s Monash University, back in 1999 when people still flocked to such things. The Alexander Theatre was completely full for the spectacle. Philosophers, linguists, and literary scholars of all allegiances and creeds were there.

For those among us who were analytical philosophers in the hard-headed UK–US tradition, Derrida’s initial two-word flourish was a winning rhetorical gesture. We had been primed to receive this neo-everything post-everything-else thinker with scepticism if not derision; but he engaged us immediately, charming most of us into docile attentiveness. He dwelt long (very long) on the place of forgiveness in human life: interrogating its uses but also its very possibility.

In April 2020 – the early days of a great pandemic – my old friend Vlado managed to get in touch. I’d somehow lost track of him and his wife Mira over the years, and I was so pleased that they sought me out now. Would I be interested in helping to translate one of his novels?

My grasp of Croatian is tenuous. The very idea of me translating this Croatian– Australian novelist Vladimir Jakopanec was about as foreign a suggestion as taking seriously a lecture by Derrida. But once again, I was completely won over. I agreed to lead the translation of Requiem za Belu Nemeth, using draft material from the author and my skills as a verse translator and an academic editor – with much reference to the original, and sustained factual and linguistic detective work to back it all up. (Who knew? The word bolta occurs in no readily accessible Croatian dictionary and could be reliably tracked down for verification at xi just one online site. And who ever suspected a Romanian connection?) This English version is the result of that effort. Yes, I led the translation; it owes much to Vlado also – and to Mira.

What to make of this work? Perhaps no one gives texts a closer reading than their translators must – if the job is to be done competently. There is no way for us to skim over the anguish of these characters, nor the appalling torments most of them witness – or suffer or inflict, very often both. We witness with them, and almost suffer with them.

The inevitable question then arises: do I too inflict torment, as I see these victim– perpetrators doing? Confucius said he was always pleased to walk along a road with two companions: he might learn what to do from one, and what not to do from the other. Similarly, thoughtful readers might take Requiem as an instructive and very moral novel.

Do we wonder how the Nazis could achieve such massive collusion in their crimes – to the extent that horrendous evil became for many the ordinary stuff of daily work, as Hannah Arendt famously observed? Answers begin to take shape in novels like Requiem. If we are not near the front line – with its female hero either alongside us or there among the enemy, back in the worst days of conflict in the dying Yugoslavia – examination of our conscience may find us among the cheerleaders, or the mute acquiescers. This novel reminds us, like many other serious pieces of literary art, that we are all in this together. One way or another – or one way and another, could it be?

Derrida was born in 1930, in an Algeria under cruel and ruthless French domination. As a Jew he was therefore born in the Diaspora, but doubly exiled when in 1942 he was expelled from his lycée and expected to attend an ad hoc school specially for Jews. Such was life under Nazi dominated Vichy France. Enormously to his credit, young Jacques instead skipped school entirely (a theme we find at least twice in Requiem), took up philosophy, and dreamed of becoming a professional football player. He succeeded in the first, but not the second. Some believe Derrida might have done better at football; but he achieved notoriety in philosophy and made his way in the world as a serial boundary-crosser – an itinerant refugee luminary, censured and celebrated for deconstruction, his most famous and infamous intellectual legacy.

Derrida theorised about forgiveness near the end of his life, six decades after formative experiences in Algeria where much needed forgiving: the oppressed Algeria that Sartre obliquely comments on in Les Séquestrés d’Altona, critiqued a little more directly by Albert Camus (Algerian like Derrida) in L’Étranger and La Peste. These works seem highly relevant to the world of Requiem. So does the idea of forgiveness, which is prominent in this novel mostly by its absence. How could such atrocities be forgiven? But in Derrida’s characteristically paradoxical conclusion, it is only the unforgivable that is apt for being forgiven. Forgiveness must always be exceptional – unexpected or even outrageous – if it is to be genuine. It can never be merely prescribed.

Characters in Requiem need genuine forgiveness, and they desperately need to genuinely forgive. They might approach that impossible goal, then be thwarted by some contingency. Death, for example – another salient theme of this novel, confronted by each of its major characters.

Many characters are familiar enough. We know people like the main narrator, and probably think we’d act as he does. We never learn his name or his line of work, but are at ease in his interior, behind his eyes. Here is a reflective and always helpful soul who elicits sympathy and understanding, going about his good deeds for the tortured and troubled protagonists.

We get the most clearly etched depictions of Milan Šoštarić. (Milan suggests kind, gracious. But Šoštarić? There’s some homework for us!) Milan arrived as a child migrant in Melbourne, with his honest xv hard-working parents. We learn much that is true to life in the Croatian diaspora through episodes that he recounts to the narrator – or when the speaker’s staff is handed temporarily to Milan himself, or to a reminiscing friend. Milan’s encounters with women loom especially large and threatening, with Bella Nemeth as his archetypal nemesis.

First among the protagonists is Bella herself. A polymorphous transgressor if ever there was one, Bella operates at times as a smuggler. At other times she is an interpreter for UN forces in war-ravaged Yugoslavia – another kind of bordercrossing, to add to her breaches of sexual, relationship, political, and social norms. Acting as an interpreter (and sometimes a translator), Bella conveys the perceptions and concerns of other people; but she never takes on the role of narrator for us.

James Joyce said he had planted in Ulysses puzzles and enigmas to keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant. He’s succeeding so far. Jakopanec too has tricks up his sleeve, and Translator’s Preface some will be transparent to Croatian readers. Bela suggests white and perhaps pure (fitting with certain moments in the novel). Bella means beautiful, in the more recognisably feminine Italian form adopted for this translation. But in Latin bella means wars.

War is omnipresent for Bella – literally, but also in her harrowing home life as a girl in Zagreb and a young woman in Altona, a Melbourne suburb. Yugoslavia’s fragmentation in the dark aftermath of Tito is the story of a parallel dysfunctional family – of not-yet-nation states, complete with unthinkable atrocities (reader, be ready for those in little Bella’s life also) and poisonously paternalistic leaders.

The underlings in each of these family situations emulate and transform in their own actions the destructive examples they are given – the best or worst way they can. But Requiem alerts us that what is fashionably called toxic masculinity is echoed in a parallel manifestation of humanity’s worst failings. Toxic femininity is rife in this novel also, as a reminder that full equality entails equal moral agency – equal capacity for good and evil action.

Other parallels go far beyond those grimmest days of Balkan politics. In this novel we find more than one innocent female eating the sweet fruit of a forbidden tree – gaining a sudden inchoate knowledge of good and evil, then desperately attempting to flee from a vengeful God-the-Father. Indeed, the vigilant reader will find more than one alluring reptile (I counted three), and lusty rituals in a mythic sacred grove.

Bella’s surname Nemeth (NEH-met), not uncommon in Slavic languages and Hungarian, suggests that she is a mute or at least habitually silent (the word is nijem, in Serbian nem; nijemost or nemost is silence, quiescence, aphasia). But will even Croatians uncover a subtle twist in this, when Bella fails to land a job as a receptionist (a kind of quiescent receiver) back in Croatia? They’d wanted a German speaker (su tražili znanje njemačkog). The word for a German (Nijemac, Nemac) has the same Slavic root as the word for a mute person: because Germans could not speak (not as a Slav would speak, at least) they were given a name that branded them all as mutes!

Nemeth? We could think also of nema (absence), nemoć (incapacity, disability), nemo (Latin for no one) – and of Nemesis as suggested earlier (the Greek goddess of vengeance and retribution). Quarrelsome but quiescent, belligerent but passive, impotent victim but ferocious sexual opportunist when the mood takes her, Bella assembles many opposites in one ingeniously drawn character. Bursting across conventional boundaries and categories, she is effectively no one in particular. Or to put it another way, she is every one of us. Kind and gracious Milan is a watchmaker – a regulator or coordinator of social harmony – but with his own mechanism broken. He presents Bella with a valuable Areta watch (areta, Doric variant of Greek arete, virtue). May it be significant that Bella belittles so precious a gift, from such a determined lover? Did the author devise all those quirks for us to find or to remain ignorant of? We’ll never know. It’s unlikely; but that’s not the point. A work of art is set free like a helium-filled balloon (watch for those in the novel) – soon out of control, for whoever first pumped life and the possibility of movement into it. It drifts out of sight even. The wind moves the balloon as it listeth; our imaginings as readers will waft and steer any worthwhile novel in many unintended directions.

And translators? Well, this translator certainly does his share of steering off course. It is never possible for us to avoid being slandered as traitors, and every translation is a compromise among competing and irreconcilable