Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  CYCLOPS

  CYCLOPS

  RANKO MARINKOVIĆ

  TRANSLATED BY VLADA STOJILJKOVIĆ

  EDITED BY ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ

  YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  Copyright © 2010 Estate of Ranko Marinković. Originally published in Croatian by Prosveta, Beograd, 1965, former Yugoslavia. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).

  Set in Electra and Nobel types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marinković, Ranko, 1913-2001

  [Kiklop. English]

  Cyclops / Ranko Marinković,; translated by Vlada Stojiljković;

  edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać.

  p. cm. — (A Margellos world republic of letters book)

  Originally published in Serbo-Croatian as: Kiklop.

  ISBN 978-0300-15241-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Yugoslavia—Fiction. 2. Zagreb (Croatia)—Fiction.

  I. Stojiljković, Vlada, 1938- II. Elias-Bursać, Ellen. III. Title.

  PG1618.M28K513 2010

  891.8’235—dc22

  2010024516

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  INTRODUCTION

  Making his way through a crowded Zagreb square one evening on the eve of World War II, Melkior Tresić catches sight of a priest with familiar, jutting ears. The priest, we learn, had taught him catechism during his childhood in Dalmatia. The fleeting glimpse of the Dalmatian priest in the opening pages of this quintessentially Zagreb novel is Ranko Marinković’s nod to his native Dalmatia. The nod tells us that Melkior Tresić is an outside insider, someone who, like Marinković, came to the city as a student, and who sees Zagreb as someone born there never could. Marinković captures Zagreb’s crowds, the shysters, the army barracks, and the seedy neighborhoods in one of the most famous fictional portraits of the city, yet he peoples the novel with a closely knit group whose playful jibes and cheerful ignorance of the portentous events taking shape around them have a certain resonance with the insular Mediterranean culture in which he was raised.

  When Marinković set out to write CYCLOPS in the early 1960s he was thinking big. In shaping his plot he reached for the big writers, such as Joyce (whose Ulysses had first been translated into Croatian in 1957), Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky. For all the influence of other literatures, however, the novel is anchored firmly in a more local context. The story unfolds on the streets between the Zagreb main square and the Opera House, and the streets and cafés are inhabited by the poets, actors, and other public figures of Marinković’s student years in Zagreb. Along with the readily identifiable references to Hamlet and Leopold Bloom, the narrative and dialogue are interwoven with allusions to various Croatian writers and their characters and to verses of Croatian poets—all unfamiliar to American readers, including Ivan Gundulić,1 Ivan Brlić-Mažuranić,2 a character of Krleža’s,3 and lines of verse by Vladimir Nazor,4 Vladimir Vidrić,5 Ivo Vojnović,6 and Tin Ujević,7—as well as mentions of equally unfamiliar Serbian writers such as Simo Pandurović8 and Jovan Dučić.9 The panorama of Zagreb life in the opening pages of the novel, the MAAR street advertisements, the vendors selling shoelaces, are authentic images of Zagreb life of the late thirties, and Jutarnji List (Morning News) is still hawked by vendors on Zagreb’s streets.

  There are many comparisons that can be drawn between CYCLOPS and other works of literature, most obviously Ulysses, the Odyssey, and Hamlet. But the irreverence, irony, and satire with which Marinković dissects Zagreb cultural life on the eve of World War II also resonate with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Heller’s biography affords a surprisingly productive comparison with Marinković’s. They both were playwrights and short-story writers, as well as novelists, and they were close in age. Heller fought in active combat in World War II, unlike Marinković, who spent the war as an internee and refugee, but both of them were the first, for their respective readerships, to write of World War II in a darkly humorous vein. And they were each known chiefly for their first novel, each of which became a huge best seller, never to be outshone by anything else they later wrote.

  The year CYCLOPS was published (1965) was pivotal for postwar Yugoslavia. It followed on a period of furious economic growth during the late 1950s and a repressive spell that came after Yugoslavia’s break with Cominform in 1948. There were major economic reforms in 1965, and the next year saw the dismissal of the Minister of the Interior, Aleksandar Ranković, over a wiretapping scandal, which became the symbolic end of the immediate postwar period. The Yugoslav government began allowing its citizens to travel abroad freely in 1966, thereby setting itself apart from the Eastern European countries that were still “behind the iron curtain,” and these political and economic reforms were accompanied by a thaw in culture. After a brief spell of socialist realism in the early fifties, the literatures in Yugoslavia had asserted a modicum of artistic independence, but only within limits (there could be no mention of the Goli Otok and other prison camps, or articulation of nationalist and separatist sentiments, or scurrilous mention of the person of Josip Broz Tito). The limits relaxed somewhat in the 1960s, which was a decade for ferment in all the arts.

  Marinković’s CYCLOPS, published in the midst of all this, and Death and the Dervish, by Meša Selimović, which appeared a year later, were groundbreaking novels that brought new intellectual depth to the treatment of controversial issues, such as, in CYCLOPS, the use of irony and satire in the treatment of the recent war, and, in Death and the Dervish the nature of repressive authority. As soon as it appeared, CYCLOPS was showered with accolades, including the NIN award—the most prestigious recognition for literary works in the former Yugoslavia,10 and the same happened with Death and the Dervish the following year.

  To say that Marinković raised eyebrows with his ironic treatment of the war theme in CYCLOPS is not to suggest that there had been no antiwar Croatian prose before him. Miroslav Krleža, in particular, is famous for his antiwar stories after World War I. Where Marinković broke new ground was in his use of irony and satirical humor to transgress the various strictures imposed by the victorious Partisans on how the conflict would be described in the years following the war. But it was precisely the madcap brand of humor, the sly nicknames used by the denizens of Zagreb’s cafés, the fantastical tales of shipwrecked sailors confronted by cannibalistic natives in the South Pacific, the ingenuity with which Melkior Tresić keeps himself out of combat, that gave the novel its irresistible charm and steered it through the sensitive political waters of the day.

  Marinković studied psychology at Zagreb University in th
e 1930s. He was intrigued by the psychology of the artist and was drawn, in particular, to Tin Ujević’s verse and the workings of the poet’s psyche. While still a student, he published three brief articles11 on Ujević,12 in which he remarks on “something mysterious, special and remarkable, almost unintelligible” in Ujević’s personality.13 Marinković credits Dostoyevsky with having a formative influence on Ujević’s preoccupation with suffering, humiliation, and pain. He wonders whether Ujević’s bohemian eccentricity is a form of mental illness, and concludes that with an ear for the right resonance one could enter into this complex, chaotic psychology. Marinković also describes the way Ujević represents love and the feminine in his verse, saying that Ujević is a poet of “spiritual love, the erotic turned mystical, stripped of its sexuality, love that is felt with a sixth sense, like music,”14 a poet who perceives woman as a symbol of “creative mystery.”15 Marinković and Ujević got to know each other later, and there are several Zagreb anecdotes stemming from their relationship, particularly that Marinković dubbed Ujević the Baudelaire from Vrgorec, while Ujević’s nickname for Marinković was the Voltaire from Vis (each man’s respective birthplace).

  Only a few chapters in CYCLOPS feature the Ujević-like character Maestro, but Maestro’s spirit and his relationship with Tresić permeate the entire novel. For all his curmudgeonly manner, Maestro has an abiding fondness for Tresić, and chooses him as the only person from their circle he can trust. Theirs is the principle emotional relationship of CYCLOPS. Another vestige of Ujević’s is the mystique attached to the name “Viviana,” which personifies the feminine “creative mystery” in Ujević’s poetic.

  In the immediate postwar years Marinković was one of the rising stars in Zagreb cultural life, active in the theater and in publishing and teaching, while in the same period Ujević was working only as a literary translator, having been banned for five years by the Writers’ Association from publishing his own poetry and essays—punishment for accepting employment from the fascist regime as a translator during the war. Marinković was among those who saw to it that Ujević always had enough translation work to support him during this time. Harold Bloom alerts us to the dynamic that often shapes relations between younger generations of writers and the powerful figures of previous generations. Ranko Marinković was not a poet, so he was not competing directly with Ujević’s looming influence, but this dynamic is also worth keeping in mind when parsing his portrait of Ujević in the character of Maestro.

  Marinković is frequently hailed for his irony and the psychological and social analysis he brings to his stories, novels, and plays, but, as several recent critics have remarked, there is room for more scholarship on his work. As one scholar comments, “CYCLOPS, the novel by Ranko Marinković published in 1965, is regularly accorded a distinguished place in critical and historical surveys of Croatian literary modernism, but this claim is supported by a somewhat tautological argumentation. Namely, instead of insisting on the stylistic excellence of Marinković’s writing and the vivid elaboration of the characters, Croatian criticism hardly ever moves beyond discussing the plot.”16

  On the other hand, a critic notes, “CYCLOPS will continue to be read for pure pleasure for a long time to come … It is a great urban novel. Academic critics, in speaking of CYCLOPS, insist on the theme of fear and other things which are certainly relevant, but which sidestep the ‘details’ that make even high school students enjoy this novel … CYCLOPS will survive because it takes place on the street and in the smoke of cafés, because it is promiscuous, witty and full of fools.”17

  A new generation of scholars is rediscovering Marinković’s writing, bringing the precepts of literary theory to bear on his themes, characters, and structures in a variety of productive and engaging ways. Aside from the two articles cited here, there is very little critical writing available in English on Marinković’s work. The entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography is a valuable general overview of his opus.

  Aside from delighting generations of high school students, Ranko Marinković and CYCLOPS have entered into the cultural parlance with a television series and a 1982 film based on the novel CYCLOPS (directed by Antun Vrdoljak), and Kiklop [CYCLOPS] is the name of the most prestigious cultural award conferred annually in Croatia to winners in categories such as best editor, best prose work, best book of essays, best first book, best children’s book, best translation, etc. The Vjesnik newspaper also confers a “Ranko Marinković” best short story award.

  I knew Ranko Marinković only briefly, late in his life, when he and I occasionally ran into each other at a Zagreb publishing company. Always the gentleman, Magritte-like in his impeccable gray coat and bowler hat, a twinkle in his eye, he’d raised his hat in greeting, and it is in this pose, hat in hand, eyes twinkling, that I will always remember him. Vlada Stojiljković I never met, but several friends of mine knew him well and tell of his fascination of many years with CYCLOPS, his commitment to the translation, the quandaries he regaled them with, and the solutions he devised for the book’s countless quips, puns, and verses. Hats off, then, to Yale University Press for bringing this marvelous novel to American readers!

  Notes

  1. Gundulić’s dream (510) refers to the scene painted by Vlaho Bukovac on the stage curtain of the Croatian National Theater in Zagreb.

  2. “Stories from the Olden Days” (432), the title of a popular collection of children’s stories.

  3. Leone from Krleža’s Glembays, 132.

  4. “We drank the blazing sun …” (42); “Each beech …” (527).

  5. “Zeus was a wonderful god …” (42); “a Pompeiian scene” (113); and “I have been on a cloud …” (145).

  6. “You are our leader!” (379), from the Dubrovnik Trilogy. The original line reads, “Gulls and clouds will ask us: who are you? what do you seek? … and our sails will reply: Dubrovnik sails! Dubrovnik seeks a barren reef, to hide her Liberty thereon.”

  7. “to be pure, to be pure …” (38); “a little smile on dear lips, a bunch of flowers in a water glass” (65); “and his feet are bloody …” (305); “A star on his forehead, a sparkle in his eye …” (512).

  8. See page 436.

  9. “to the queen of all women …” (456).

  10. The NIN award is still given out today for Serbian writers in Serbia.

  11. Ante Stamać reprinted the three articles (Republika 11, no. 4 [2004]: 38-63) as part of a discussion of Marinković’s understanding of Ujević and his development of the character of Maestro.

  12. Tin Ujević figured large on the Yugoslav cultural scene during the first half of the twentieth century, as much for his scandalous behavior as for his poetry. He dedicated his life to art and became a legend in his own time, the archetype of the bohemian figure in the cafés of Split, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb, a quixotic public personality. Having spent most of the thirties in Sarajevo, Ujević moved to Zagreb in 1937, where he died of cancer in 1955, ten years before CYCLOPS came out.

  13. “Esej o pjesniku rezignacija,” Republika 11, no. 4 (2004): 50.

  14. Ibid., 53.

  15. “Jeka ‘Ojađenog zvona,’” Republika 11, no. 4 (2004): 57.

  16. Morana Čale, ‘The Fraction Man’: Anthropology of CYCLOPS,” Slavica Tergestina n. 11-12. Studia slavica III, Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori, May 2004, 83.

  17. Robert Perišić, “Ranko Marinković;, on the Occasion of His Death,” Relations, 3-4 (2004): 295-296.

  Ellen Elias-Bursać

  “MAAR … MAAR …” cried a voice from the rooftop. Melkior was standing next to the stair railing leading down below ground; glowing above the stairway was a GENTS sign. Across the way another set of stairs angled downward, intersecting with the first, under the sign of LADIES. A staircase X, he thought, reciprocal values, the numerators GENTS and the numerators LADIES (cross multiplication), the denominators ending up downstairs in majolica and porcelain, where the denominators keep a respectful silence; the only sound
s are the muffled whisper of water, the hiss of valves, and the whirr of ventilators. Like being in the bowels of an ocean liner. Smooth sailing. Passengers make their cheery and noisy way downstairs as if going to the ship’s bar for a shot of whiskey. Afterward, they return to the promenade deck, spry and well satisfied, and sip the fresh evening potion from MAAR’s air.

  MAAR conquers all. When the darkness falls, it unfurls its screen high up on the rooftop of a palace and starts yelling, “MAAR Commercials!” After it finishes tracing its mighty name across the screen using a mysterious light, MAAR’s letters go into a silly dance routine, singing a song in unison in praise of their master. The letters then trip away into the darkened sky while giving a parting shout to the dumbstruck audience, “MAAR Movietone Advertising!”

  Next there appears a house, miserable and dirty, its roof askew, its door frame battered loose, wrinkled and stained shirts, spectral torsos with no heads or legs, jumping out of its windows in panic. To danse macabre music, the ailing victims of grime proceed to drag themselves toward a boiling cauldron bubbling with impatient thick white foam. With spinsterish mistrust, wavering on the very lip of the cauldron (fearful of being duped), the shirts leap into the foam … and what do you know, the mistrust was nothing but foolish superstition, for here they are, emerging from the cauldron, dazzlingly white, one after another, marching in single file and singing lustily, “Radion washes on its own.” Next, a sphinx appears on the screen and asks the viewers in a far-off, desert-dry voice: “Is this possible?” and the next instant a pretty typist shows that two typewriters cannot possibly be typed at once. “And is this possible?” the sphinx asks again. No, it is also not possible for water to flow uphill. It is equally impossible to build a house from the roof down, or for the Sun to revolve around the Earth … “but it is possible for Tungsram-Crypton double-spiraled filament lightbulbs to give twice as much light as the ordinary ones for the same wattage …” and on goes a lightbulb, as bright as the sun in the sky, the terrible glare forcing the viewers to squint. Then a mischievous little girl in a polka-dot dirndl prances her way onto the screen and declaims, in the virginal voice of a girl living with the nuns, “Zora soap washes clean, cleaner than you ever saw … you’ve ever seen,” she hastens to correct her mistake, too late, the viewers chuckle. The little girl withdraws in embarrassment. She is followed by a traveler carrying a heavy suitcase in each hand, the road winding behind him in endless perspective. The sun beats him with fiery lashes from above, but his step is spry and cheery; with a sly wink at the audience he whispers confidentially, “You go a long way without tiring thanks to Palma heels” and displays the enormous soles of his feet: sure enough, Palma heels! Next comes a mighty horde of cockroaches, fleas, bedbugs, and other horrible pests, afforded air support by dense formations of moths and flies and escorted by speedy mosquito squadrons … but suddenly there is a clatter of heavy hooves and a Flit grenadier comes galloping into the fray, armed with the dreaded Flit spray can. Before long the battlefield is littered with dead bodies (of the pests). From the platen of a Remington grows the legendary portrait of the great Napoleon with a curl of hair, drunkard-like, down his forehead. As Napoleon grows so does the Remington, and when the two have covered the entire globe the Remington types across the equator the historic words “We have conquered the world” “… and ended up on St. Helena,” muttered Melkior, “don’t give yourself airs.” Afterward a Singer uses Eurasia and America to stitch a many-colored coat for portly Mr. Globe; it fashions black trousers from Africa, and a white cap from Greenland, and Mr. Globe chortles with glee. Bata asks a passerby tottering along with lightning bolts flashing from his corns, “Is that necessary?” “No,” replied Melkior, “not if you buy your shoes at Bata’s. Shoes are an Antaean bond with Mother Earth, the pedestrian’s secret power …” And there is Brill kissing human footwear with its polishes, two long-haired brushes curling and cuddling like two sly cats around a pedestrian’s feet; he walks on tall and proud, his shoes shining!—Kästner & Öhler’s, the Balkan’s largest department store, has spilled unbelievable and magic objects, “even the kitchen sink” out of its horn of plenty, and the viewers’ imagination pecks away among the luxuries. Julio Meinl desires to fill everyone to the brim with Chinese, Ceylon, and even Russian tea; as for coffee, Haag is the brand—it caters to your heart. Sneeze if you can after a Bayer aspirin! Darmol works while you sleep, and Planinka Tea has the patriotic duty to cleanse Aryan blood. Elida Cream looks after your complexion. Intercosma swears to afforest your denuded head sooner than possible. Kalodont is the arch enemy of tartar, while VHG asks you, rather saucily, if you are a man. Finally, First Croatian Splendid Funerals Company takes the respectful liberty of reminding you of your dignity and … well, see for yourself: black varnished hearses with baroque gold angels, horses with glossy black coats, a comfortable coffin, attendance of ideally sober personnel in admirals’ hats, making your death another success and a thing of almost poetic beauty …