Žarko Radaković
Scott
Abbott
This book describes a friendship, or, better said, it explores a friendship, or perhaps one should say it documents a friendship, celebrates it and performs it, a friendship that began in 1984 in Tübingen, Germany, a friendship that deepened when the authors crossed the Austrian/Yugoslav border to follow a character in Peter Handke’s Repetition for their book Repetitions, that matured when they traveled up the war-troubled Drina River with Handke and drove through south-western American landscapes for their Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary, a friendship informed by relationships with Marina Abramović, Era, Julije Knifer, Nina Pops, Alex Caldiero, Sam Rushforth, and above all Peter Handke—“the hero of our books,” they write, “and the author of works we have translated and that have translated us.”
Žarko’s genre-stretching stories assert that their realities, including space and time, are narratively constructed, and that narration itself, along with gender, Aristotle’s unities, and even punctuation! are, subject, to, authorial? whim. Scott writes an “approximate biography” of his friend Žarko and offers “An Amicable Correspondence” between Žarko, Sonosopher Alex Caldiero, and himself. Letters by Goethe and Schiller augment the correspondence and when Schiller, approaching the end of his life, hopes that he and Goethe “can walk together down as much of the road as may remain, and with all the more profit, since the last companions on a journey always have most to say to each other,” the authors understand him well.
Two dear friends augment this book about friendship:
Nina Pops, Serbian/German artist (Cologne) whose work was featured on the covers of Scott’s and Žarko’s first two co-authored books and who has colaborated extensively with Žarko, contributes two portraits of the authors.
Alex Caldiero, Sicilian/American (Utah) poet, sonosopher, musician, and visual artist, is featured in the amicable correspondence that comprises one section of the book and contributes an Afterword.
Aleksa Đukanović, for Politika:
This book about friendship is not only a history of personal friendship composed of biographical fragments from the lives of Abbott, Radaković, Caldiero, Pops, and Handke, but also a realistic story about Yugoslavia as a spiritual and cultural space, a story rich with shocking, interesting, and sentimental realities, memories, and projections. The authors have created here a suggestive lyrical ode to a now non-existent world.
Jasmina Vrbavac, for Belgrade TV’s “Cultural Center”:
One of Radaković’s key artistic obsessions is connecting with twin souls, artists of similar poetics and attitudes whose work in collaboration with his creates bridges between interests, tastes, and poetics beyond language barriers. This third collaboration with the American, Scott Abbott, a further manifestation of a friendship begun when they were pursuing German studies in Tübingen, draws on the uniqueness of personal experiences to embody them in a joint work of art.
Aleksa Đukanović
“RESURRECTION” OF THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL
(Book of Friendship, Žarko Radaković / Scott Abbott, Laguna 2022.)
Review in Belgrade’s daily newspaper POLITIKA
Translation by the well-known wizard: google translate
A book about friendship: a joint prose achievement written in two voices – by Žarko Radaković and Scott Abbott. It was recently published by Laguna Press. It is a classic autobiographical novel according to most general genre literary criteria. But, when we see in detail and more closely all the artistic elements built into this complex prose work and when we interpret and recognize them in detail, we realize that it is undoubtedly Radaković’s well-known multi-genre (or “non-genre”) prose. Thus, the mixture of memoir-biographical and narrative-novelistic thread that harmoniously and constantly, even “hereditarily” continues his earlier prose works: Emigration (1997), Pogled (2002), Fear of Emigration (2010), Kafana (2016), Krečenje (2018), Travel (2021) and which is qualitatively the most extensive in this case.
This time, readers can see a kind of phenomenon in the co-author: Scott Abbott, writer, translator and professor of German studies at the University of Utah Valley, USA. Abbott, painting (pseudo) biographical fragments from the life of his friend Z. Radaković, uses an impressive literary-documentary technique which, with its descriptive exuberance and “memoir” ambiguity, is almost indistinguishable from the mentioned vision and the well-known literary technique of Ž. Radaković, which is, therefore, an additional curiosity. So, we have here an excellent prose book, written by two authors, and with the undoubted impression that it was written by one! This skillful mix of conceptual literary art and very clearly recognizable features of the postmodern, extends to two hundred pages and in six long chapters whose authors, with the quantity of texts, are almost equal, Abbott and Radaković. A. Caldiero writes a short epistolary piece and Nina Pops finishes the book with her masterful portraits of “Žarko Radaković and Scott Abbott”.
The book contains an almost Proustian gallery of approximately fifty literary and “real” characters: starting with John Zorn, Bob Abbott, Andrić, Era Milivojević, David Albahari, poet Alex Caldiero, Julije Knifer, through Krleža, Svetislav Basara, Matija Bećković, Novak Djokovic, Momo Kapor, Goethe, Schiller, Marina Abramovic, including Dragan Velikic, Rasa Livada, Zlatko Bocokic, Jacques Tati and unnamed “waiters”, “cooks”, “students”, “hairdressers”, “taxi drivers”, etc. and finally, of course: Peter Handke. Handke, who is the central theme but also one of the main reasons for the creation of this book, is in a way, in fact, the “fourth” and “unnamed” co-author of this multiple novelized biography (besides Abbott, Radaković and Caldiero).
The book is written in a very suggestive, emotional, sentimental and sensitive style, which gives the work an undoubted stamp of novelized biographical and memoir prose. By inserting a short correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, the authors skillfully give symbolism to their book, creating a special historical impression on readers, a line of clear connection and uninterrupted continuity of a single human literature, no matter in which languages it was created in world history.
The book fittingly, symbolically, ends with portraits by the artist Nina Pops, as a seal of multi-genre definition of this great prose that resembles former adventure novels – and which is certainly masterfully “adventurous,” adapted to today’s moment of reading, understanding, thinking and living. The book about friendship is not only a mere history of personal friendship and biographical fragments from the lives of Abbott, Radaković and Handke, but it is also the most realistic story about Yugoslavia as a spiritual and cultural space, a story full of shocking, interesting but sentimental realities, memories and projections. The authors are creating here a suggestive lyrical ode to a now, non-existent world. The book about friendship is in a special way a kind of “reincarnation” or resurrection of a sentimental novel that completely died out in Europe in the nineteenth century.
Finally, the Book of Friendship is a faithful testimony of many social and historical realities in the last forty years, which include and closely touch our literature and social realities in the Balkans and Serbia, because every personal life, including the life of a writer, is inseparable from society. and reality. If there is a purely literary work derived and created on the basis of absolute realism – it is, in fact, Radaković’s and Abbott’s mixture of biographical-novelistic and postmodern elements.
Review of the book on Belgrade TV, Jasmina Vrbavac
[... translation courtesy of google translate, minus some fascinating visual elements. The section about our Book of Friendship begins at 18:06. Besides or behind or with the generous and illuminating review, a fascinating set of animations emerge showing two persons in conversation, rooted in and holding on to a common concern for friendship.]
Mr. Vatreni and Mr. Ništarija write the Book of Friendship in four hands. This is their third joint book, and the nicknames hide Serbian synonyms of the personal names of the authors – Žarko Radaković and Scott Abbott. [fiery and worthless… “skot” doesn’t serve me very well in Serbo-Croatian]
One of Radaković’s key artistic obsessions is connecting with twin souls, artists of similar poetics and attitudes whose work in collaboration with his will form a whole, creating mutual bridges between similar interests, tastes and poetics beyond language barriers. Some of them are writers like Albahari, Miodrag Vukovića and Peter Handke, others are artists like Era Milivojević, Julije Knifer and Nina Pops. With Albahari, Radaković has already written two books about the passions that connect their friendship – about music and photography. And through the collaboration with the American, Scott Abbott, before this Book of Friendship, two more titles written in four hands were created – Repetitions and Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary, as a pledge of friendship over four decades since they became acquainted pursuing German studies in Tübingen. Since then, the two of them have shared the passion of writing books as literary duets, as well as the fact that they are both translators of the works of Peter Handke.
The book is divided into four unequal works, the last two of which belong to another pair of their artistically related friends – the poet Alex Caldiero and the painter Nina Pops, whose contributions lend justification to the whole idea. The first part, “On Friendship,” is written by Scott Abbott, whose intention is to compile an approximate biography of Žarko Radaković through three chapters. In the style of free jazz, Abbott integrates his memories of time spent together, events, insights into Radaković’s artistic views, with his own angles of observing concepts inspiring for himself. Going to concerts, listening to music together, hanging out with Handke, introducing the reader to the facts of Radaković’s acquaintance and work with Era, Marina Abramović, Knifer and others, then getting to know Serbia and Serbian writers, reading Žarko’s untranslated books in a language he does not understand as a special act delving into the mystical otherworld of friendship and art at the same time, it is all part of a biographical collage that speaks as much about a friend as it does about the writer himself. Abbott also transmits parts of their correspondence, enclosing the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller, inviting the reader to understand and compare the extent of the relationship between the personal and the artistic.
The second part of the book belongs to Žarko Radaković and is entitled “We.” Through three chapters, Radaković develops a different strategy, starting from the pseudo-detective and adventurous search motive. At first, he meets Abbott in an unknown city in hopes of meeting Handke, a mutual friend. The issue of the missing Handke soon turns to the story of the missing Abbott, and Radaković is fully open to all possibilities for literary mystification and the search for authentic experience, experience without narration, without context, with consistent breaking and deconstruction of the plot, as well as any other unity of time, actions, characters … Radaković puts Experience on the pedestal of personal poetic thought, “the logic of writing” is for him “transfer of experience into text,” i.e. balancing on the border “between life and art, between direct and artificial experience of the world.” As in conceptual art, as in Eliot — the present, past and future are in a single, present moment, at the moment of the event and Radaković does not stop looking for ways to convey this uniqueness in the text, as do all his artistic friends present in this book.
This book is another in a series of proofs that the idea of the uniqueness of personal experience and ways to transfer it into an art form can be fruitful. And that one of the possible ways in which the idea is spread and connected includes this one as well – to express and embody it through a joint work of art.
The man waiting for him was a translator from a foreign country who for some days had been tracing the itineraries of a book set in the region and now wished to ask the author a few questions.
~Peter Handke, The Afternoon of a Writer
In 1994, after following a character in Peter Handke’s novel Repetition into what is now Slovenia and after traveling in landscapes of Handke’s youth, Žarko Radaković and Scott Abbott published a two-headed text in Belgrade, Ponavljane (now published in English by punctum as Repetitions). The possibility of narration in two voices, complicated by the third voice that is Peter Handke’s own narrator, is the main focus of deliberation while traveling and reading and writing. Repetitions begins with Abbott’s text, a fairly straightforward travel narrative. It ends with Radaković’s account of the same events, much less straightforward, more repetitious, more adventuresome.
Two aspects make the double-book unique. First, it represents experiences shared by two authors whose native languages are Serbian and English respectively (German is their only common language). The authors’ perspectives contrast with and supplement one another: Radaković grew up in Tito’s Yugoslavia and Abbott comes from the Mormon American West; Radaković is the translator of most of Peter Handke’s works into Serbo-Croatian and Abbott translated Handke’s provocative A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia for Viking Press and his play Voyage by Dugout: The Play of the Film of the War for PAJ (Performing Arts Journal); Radaković was a journalist for Deutsche Welle in Cologne and Abbott is a professor of German literature at Utah Valley University; Radaković is the author of several novels and Abbott has published mostly literary-critical work; and so on. Two sets of eyes. Two pens. Two visions of the world.
Further, the years 1994 and 2008 (publication dates for Repetitions and its follow-up Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary in Belgrade, respectively) bracket a horrendous period in the history of Yugoslavia. The authors changed during that period as well — divorces, new partners, new jobs; and Peter Handke, while metamorphosing into the bête noir of the press after his attacks on media portrayals of the Yugoslav wars, became the authors’ friend and entered their second text as a fellow traveler.
Vampires is Radaković’s fictionalized account of a Serb living in Cologne, Germany while his former country disintegrates. He travels in the American West, ostensibly looking for the vampires causing chaos in his own country, and then returns to Europe, having found no vampires. It is a dark text, a story of destruction told in a narrative that refuses all the solaces narrative has traditionally afforded. A Reasonable Dictionary is Abbott’s personally troubled account of his and Radaković’s trip up the Drina River between the civil wars, a journey made with Peter Handke himself, a trip during which some of Abbott’s specifically American stories lost their moral structure.
As described by the publicists for Belgrade’s Stubovi
kulture, Abbott and Radaković’s collaboration gives us
a four-handed intimate artistic witness to the worlds
we no longer belong to and to which we never belonged,
to being foreign, and to the power of creative friendship
in the work of interpreting a real and historical space
that we understand less and less the closer we are.
Undertake an exploratory journey through the
para-regions of the literature of Peter Handke,
through the labyrinths of translated originals and
of original translations, through the realms of thought
whose borders are the Rocky Mountains, Višegrad,
Cologne, and Belgrade; allow this two-seater without
steering to show you these borders in a way only you
can experience!
