Cue: TRADUKI – Southeast Europe Takes the Stage! At this year’s Leipzig Book Fair, TRADUKI will be presenting authors from Southeast Europe in almost 20 events at the traditional “Café Europa” and, for the first time, at the TRADUKI Kafana. Under the title “Between the Lines – In Between Times”, our programme is dedicated to the hidden sides and moments of life, to the ambiguity of our experiences and perspectives, and the diversity of different ways of life. It is vital to look closer and strike up open dialogues. Authors and their moderating hosts will be looking closer at the breaks, leaps and turns in the lifelines of people and countries. Childhood memories will get reinterpreted anew and space will be made for the past in the personal and political future. The TRADUKI Programme 2023 in Leipzig wants to make the spaces “in between” more visible and tangible, because it is precisely here that decisive events often take place.
For us, the following question is obvious: Is Southeast Europe perhaps itself such an “in-between”? Not yet here – but neither there? Is it waiting in the antechamber of Europe? One gets the urge to cry out loud: Come on then, when will this (his)story finally move ahead and move along?!
Among our authors are last year’s Ingeborg Bachmann Prize winner Ana Marwan, who writes in Slovenian and German, the Romanian author and winner of the 2015 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, Mircea Cărtărescu, the Bosnian Lana Bastašić, who is currently a DAAD Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme Fellow, and the Slovenian poet Anja Zag Golob. In addition, TRADUKI will also present numerous new literary voices and discoveries of 2023.
But TRADUKI is no longer just literature, it is also film and music. The carefully curated film programme of the Balkan Film Week focuses on the act of “disappearance” and is in line with this year’s TRADUKI motto. The eight films deal with immigration and emigration, with life between different worlds, with the slow crossing over and growing into a new world. How can this state of being – in the here and the there and the in-between – succeed, without the individual losing themselves or even disappearing? In the Slavic languages, verbs have a perfect and an imperfect form with which one can express the completion or non-completion of an event. Izginiti is not the same as izginjati. Both can be translated into German with the word to disappear, but izginiti means: something has disappeared, is no longer there. Izginjati, on the other hand, represents a slow, steady, sometimes all the more painful act of vanishing: without a clear break and clear boundaries, the past is always snapping at the heels of the present.
For now, stay on TRADUKI’s heels and visit us in Hall 4 / D407, at Café Suedbrause – bei Freunden and at the UT Connewitz cinema, where – after an eventful day at the fair – we invite you to join us on Saturday evening for the legendary Balkannacht: Literature from the countries of the Western Balkans and music by Novi Sad-born and Vienna-based composer and violist Jelena Popržan will play us out and into the night.
In 2023, TRADUKI cooperates in many ways with this year’s Guest of Honour, Austria. The country presents itself under the title “meaoiswiamia” (more than just us), a sentiment that we happily join. And TRADUKI partner Slovenia, the Guest of Honour at the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair in autumn is also being given its due in this programme.
Your TRADUKI Team: Angelika, Barbara, Ljubica, Andrej, Marija, Radmila