Textual Notes:
They served as a kind of rosary: The following sentences were crossed out: “He needed to distribute his two hun- dred crowns fairly, the amount his stipend brought him, and not remain in debt to anyone. Because at this mo- ment he knew, with the lucidity that comes with the hour before death [. . .].”
The idea came to him, struck a part of his consciousness: This seems to bear little direct connection to what pre- ceded it, even considering the cancelled lines mentioned above. It’s difficult to say why this gap emerged, though the reasons for the deletion of the missing sentences are clear enough: the prematurely delivered exposition and the stylistic rawness of the second, unfinished sentence.
. . . it made him chuckle to himself: Left out of the first publication (Književne novine, October 15, 1992).
for all human endeavors . . . in silence: From Andrić’s letter to Tugomir Alaupović of July 6, 1920. Cited in Miroslav Kara- ulac, Rani Andrić (Beograd: Prosveta, 1980), 154–55.
over the course of his life: Written by hand on the margin was this (possible) addition to the sentence: “Jelena, for instance (and he tossed the thought away as from the deck of a ship . . . for it was too painful).”
the eyes of posterity: Written in pencil in the margin and on the back of the third page of the manuscript. In the text itself, following the colon (“. . . in bundles: poems, journals, notes . . .”), is a section that is circled in pencil and that contains only incomplete sentences. The circling might be understood as the designation of the spot to which the text from the margin and back of the page should be inserted (possibly as a substitution). This al- lows us to replace the incomplete passage from the main text and preserve it here. It reads: “love letters that, wrapped in the old-fashioned way with purple ribbon, he kept his whole life (and in which was . . .) politically com- promising . . . A will written down . . .”
proving a fool to be a fool amounts to compromising oneself: Incomplete.
As for the spiritual debts . . . one’s homeland: The material in this paragraph up to this sentence was crossed out by two heavy diagonal lines. However, since the text that fol- lows represents a natural continuation of what was crossed out, and cannot be understood without it, we de- cided not to move it to a note.
two crowns: The amount of the debt was written in by hand, later, first spelled out (“dvije krune”) and then with a digit. Considering the second method to be temporary, and chosen by the author for simplicity’s sake, we have written out all numbers in this story.
. . . historical necessity: A portion of this sentence, some- what altered, comes from the story “Dogs and Books” in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.
To Count Ivo Vojnović: This was proceeded in the manuscript by an incomplete entry: “To Mrs. Zdenka Marković . . .”
Mrs. Vera Stojić: Andrić’s girlfriend from wartime bohe- mian circles in Zagreb, with whom the writer carried on a lively correspondence during his stay in Rome in the early 1920s. In one of these letters we find the following sentence, which could as well have been written by Kiš: “I write little, and with difficulty; nothing exists without our country; and I can live neither with it nor without it.” Ka- raulac’s book contains, however, no information at all about the character of Mrs. Stojić, who was obviously Andrić’s privileged interlocutor, which perhaps accounts for the brevity of her entry here.
A and B
We can date this short piece of prose with relative certainty to 1986, the year that Kiš’s illness was diagnosed; the work has no title and consists of two circled entries labeled “A” and “B,” each of which has a subtitle in English: The magical place and The worst rathole I visited? This text, comprising three typed pages, was found in Kiš’s literary papers already prepared for publication, with the author’s name in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. Aside from the issue of dating the text, we were vexed by the question of why Kiš would suddenly return to themes, places (which are here placed in sharp opposition to each other, as indicated by the titles of the constituent parts: magical place and worst rat-hole), and images from his “family cycle”; and we were inclined, trusting in the correctness of our intuition, to link this “homesickness” with forebodings of his own imminent end. Today, following closer studies of his literary oeuvre, and an inventory of its topics and motifs, made over nearly an entire decade (from 1978 to 1986), we realize that our assumption was more a matter of the “treacherous influence of biography.”
(Mme Pascal Delpeche recently mentioned to us that this text could be a response to a questionnaire about “most beautiful and ugliest places” received by the author. While this solution would remove all mystification as to Kiš’s motive, it would not alter the significance of the chosen places themselves.)
The Marathon Runner and the Race Official
The story “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official” was written in Belgrade in the summer of 1982. It was intended for the volume The Encyclopedia of the Dead, as attested by the fact that the title is mentioned in the first three tables of contents for that work. The manuscript includes six continuously paginated typed pages. In Kiš’s papers, however, we found only the second, third, fourth, and fifth. Due to the fragmentary nature of the text, which we considered final, we did not publish the story in the first edition of The Lute and the Scars. It was, together with other fragmentary texts, published in the book Skladište, which contains all of Kiš’s unpublished literary papers. A few days after that book appeared, as we were completing work on a bibliography (the date was March 4, 1995), we leafed through a number of folders of press clippings. In the first folder we picked up, we noticed, between two yellowed sheets of newspaper, the missing pages (pp. 1 and 6) for which we had been searching in vain for two years. We revel in this miracle, which needs no commentary!
On two other pages were found additional elements intended for the story, which ostensibly should have formed part of its postscript. It is a matter of a brief introductory comment and also the translation of an anecdote from Abram Tertz’s book A Voice from the Chorus, which formed the basis of the story. We reproduce both of them here in this summary annotation:
(At one time I thought that it would be interesting to include in The Encyclopedia of the Dead the following text by Tertz as an appendix, in the manner of a Borgesian et cetera.)
“Someone told us about a dream seen by a Latvian serving a 25-year sentence. In the dim and distant past, he had been an athlete, and he dreamed he was a young man again, taking part in a 25-kilometre marathon race. He had a feeling of great physical well-being, almost of intoxication. But just as he had run half the course, the umpire suddenly appeared out of the blue: “Enough! It’s time you took a rest.” The Latvian tried to refuse, saying he wasn’t a bit tired. The umpire gently but firmly insisted: “Take a rest!” His late wife was there too, and she joined in, saying: “That will do! Enough!” Next morning the former runner had no sooner told his dream to his friends than he dropped dead of heart failure. He had precisely 12 years and 6 months to go before the end of his sentence.” [from Kyril Fitzlyon’s and Max Hayward’s excellent translation of Tertz’s A Voice from the Chorus. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), p. 75.]
Leonid Šejka died in November, 1970.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
A and B
The italicized phrases in this piece are in English in the original text. Additionally, the parenthetical statement in the first paragraph was originally written in French.
The Marathon Runner and the Race Official
on the sidewalks . . . : The available Serbo-Croatian text of this story picks up here, after the word “sidewalks.” It runs for most of the story, up to the sentence ending “. . . for more than fifteen years.” (See the following note). This text is found in the section labeled “FRAGMENTI” in the compendium “Dosije Enciklopedija mrtvih,” in Mirjana Miočinović, ed., Skladište (Beograd: BIGZ, 1995), 336–40. The first and last sections of this story were transl
ated from the French and German versions published after the missing pages of Kiš’s manuscript were found. These works are: Le luth et les cicatrices, translated by Pascale Delpech (Paris: Fayard, 1995) and Der Heimatlose: Erzählungen, translated by Ilma Rakusa (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1996).
for more than fifteen years: This phrase marks the end of the Serbo-Croatian text available for first publication in 1995.
DANILO KIŠ was one of Serbia’s most influential writers and the author of several novels and short-story collections, including A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Hourglass, and Garden, Ashes. He died in 1989 at the age of 54.
JOHN K. COX is professor of history and department head at North Dakota State University. His translations include the novel The Attic by Danilo Kiš, as well as short fiction by Kiš, Ismail Kadare, Ivan Ivanji, Ivo Andrić, and Meša Selimović.
COPYRIGHT
Originally published in Serbian as Lauta i Ožiljci, by BIGZ, Belgrade, 1994
Lauta i Ožiljci by Danilo Kiš © Librairie Arthème Fayard and Danilo Kiš Estate
Translation and afterword copyright © 2012 by John K. Cox
Preface copyright © 2012 by Adam Thirlwell
First edition, 2012
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kiš, Danilo, 1935-1989.
[Lauta i ožiljci. English]
The lute and the scars / Danilo Kiš ; preface by Adam Thirlwell ; translated and with an introduction by John K. Cox.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“Originally published in Serbian as Lauta i Oziljci, by BIG2, Belgrade, 1994”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-1-56478-735-4 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
I. Thirlwell, Adam, 1978- II. Cox, John K., 1964- III. Title.
PG1419.21.I8L3813 2012
891.8’2354—dc23
2012015154
This translation has been published with the financial report of the Serbian Ministry of Culture
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
Partially funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency
www.dalkeyarchive.com
Cover: design and composition by Mikhail Iliatov
Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America
THE LUTE AND THE SCARS Page 12