Ena Selimović
Photo courtesy of Ena Selimović
Bio
Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator who works from Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian (BCMS) into English. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and an MPhil in comparative literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, Slavic and East European Journal, Asymptote, World Literature Today, Journal of Literary Multilingualism, Boulevard, Reading in Translation, and Balkanist. In 2020, she was awarded the American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellowship. The following year she spent as an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow and Associate Research Scholar in the Program in American Studies and in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Croatian of the novel Vanilla Ice Cream by Đurđa Knežević. Published in 2012, Vanilla Ice Cream is the fourth of six novels published by Knežević, a renowned feminist, politically active, contemporary author of novels, short stories, and essays. It follows four characters on a late-night metro ride in Berlin and concerns the traumatic memory of war in the Balkans, exploring the complexities of race politics and migration. None of Kneževic’s novels have yet been translated into English.
Being awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship is an honor that directly supports those facets of imaginative work that are at times difficult yet necessary to nurture: motivation, energy, community, coalition, and a sense of meaningfulness. A survivor of the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s, I was not supposed to become a literary translator. Nor were the languages I spoke or the books I read supposed to endure. And they have—a hollering three-word sentence. I am incredibly grateful to the NEA for supporting the work that sustains me. The fellowship will fuel the next months, and I cannot wait until Đurđa Knežević’s brilliant novel gets another life, this time in English.
About Đurđa Knežević
Đurđa Knežević is an extraordinary figure in the cultural and political sphere in Croatia today. Her public activity was initially connected to political activism, while she began writing literature later—leading her into a different sphere of resistance. Knežević has published six novels, a book of essays, and an illustrated children’s book. Sladoled od vanilije (Vanilla Ice Cream), published by Fraktura in 2012, is her fourth novel. Among its most important features is that it challenges the balkanization metaphor, which stands in for the widely circulated myth that renders the Balkans foundational to territorial separation along racialized, so-called ethnic lines. Both the intensification of race politics and nationalism by right-wing governments and the social anxiety that has resulted from the pandemic make the translation of Vanilla Ice Cream into English an especially urgent project.