White Dogs

Abstract

After helping alert the country to a serious earthquake (Montenegro is seismically very active and suffered a severe quake in the year Mandić was born), the protagonists leave the country to live in Vienna for a time, hoping the change of scene will revitalize their relationship and allow Koko to get pregnant. It should be added that Montenegro has a very low birth rate, in addition to an exodus of the young and well-educated population. The latter issue is also a theme in the story “Leaving ,” by Slađana Kavarić (b. 1991), in which two young people are torn between wanting to immigrate and find a perspective abroad and not wanting to lose the modicum of security and familiarity they have at home, despite the mess the country is in. We are glad to present this piece by a young woman writer because Montenegro’s literary scene is heavily male-dominated. Among the female voices that have gained a degree of attention in recent years are two novelists, who also translate their own work into English: Ksenija Popović (Boy from the Water and A Lullaby for No Man’s Wolf) and Olja Knežević (From London, with Love). The poets Tanja Bakić and Lena Ruth Stefanović have received attention at home and abroad and also deserve mention in this context. Having followed Montenegrin writing closely for the last ten years, I still find it hard to put my finger on a common, unifying feature. Given the turmoil of the past and present as well as the ethnically diverse reality most Montenegrins live in, perhaps it is precisely a certain openness, eclecticism, and variability in perspective that characterize many of these writers. My impression is that they are less inclined to dwell on narrowly national themes and trends than their peers in Croatia or Serbia, for example. Together, the three pieces in this issue of WLT give a diverse insight into contemporary Montenegrin prose writing. Will Firth (www.willfirth.de) was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has lived in Berlin, where he works as a translator of literature and the humanities (from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croat). His best-received translations of recent years have been Robert Perišić‘s Our Man in Iraq, Andrej Nikolaidis’s Till Kingdom Come, and Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una. photo : barn images ift . tt / 1 phxbx 2 30 WLT MARCH–APRIL 2017 White Dogs by Milovan Radojević S ince you intend to kill yourself anyway, why don’t you fit your death into our plans? We need heroes, and it’s all the same to you, he thought about a character from the novel as he rocked to and fro in the packed streetcar. “Slow down, why don’t you. We’ll all be killed!” yelled a fat woman with a bun on her head, and Matija’s ears rang painfully from her piercing, shrill voice. One of his reasons for being an avid reader was to detach himself from his vacuous clerical job. So he also read on the way to the office, fifteen stops from the building where he lived. He was standing in the stuffy streetcar once more, hemmed in by puffy-faced people and trying to focus on the print of his paperback. And then, as if he suddenly remembered something, he looked out the window. There’s the “Three Brothers” bakery, so it’s the fourteenth stop, he realized, and then he noticed a familiar female figure among the passengers. Maybe I should try to write some short stories, he mused and made his way to the door, which opened with a hiss. Big, melancholic eyes watched him as he descended the metal steps. Once I used to drown in those eyes, he thought and nearly stumbled. Yes, I’ll try, he resolved, and turned to look back into those black vortexes, as if to thank them for their silent encouragement. Their owner stared at him, holding on to the bar in front of her with both hands, as the streetcar moved away from the fifteenth stop. special...