Bedbugs

Holed up in her Zagreb apartment, reeling from the sudden death of her husband— whom she had married only days earlier— Gorana sets to writing a letter uncovering everything that has happened in her life that has led her to penning this confession to her friend: from discovering bedbugs to workplace romance and familial fallouts. An architect by trade, not even her many professional successes have saved her from constantly feeling like a lonely outsider, even when it comes to her family on the coast. Gorana’ s attempt to find closure, and connection, is delivered in a delicately braided story that introduces English-language readers to Martina Vidaic’ s impressive eye for detail embodied in prose that stands apart from so much contemporary Croatian fiction in how the central trauma is not related to war, but the intrinsic, and often isolating, difficulties of the human condition.

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including Daša Drndic, Dubravka Ugrešic, Ivana Bodrožic, and Robert Perišic. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer won the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, in 2006. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, she has taught at the Harvard Slavic Department and Tufts University, and spent over six years at the ex-Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as a translator.

Martina Vidaic has published four books of poetry, including Mehanika peluda (Pollen Mechanics, 2018; Ivan Goran Kovacic Price for the best poetry book written in Croatian in two-year period). She has also published the novels Anatomija štakora (Anatomy of the Rat, 2019) and Stjenice (Bed Bugs, 2021; European Union Price for Literature), and the hybrid book Trg, tržnica, nož (Square, Market, Knife, 2021; Janko Polic Kamov Award for the book of the year by Croatian Writers Society).