Žarko Radaković
Scott
Abbott
Žarko Radaković
is the author of Tübingen (Belgrade, 1990), Julije Knifer (Belgrade, 1994; Zagreb, 2018), Ponanvljanje / Repetitions (with Scott Abbott; Belgrade, 1994; Brooklyn, 2013), Emigracija / Emigration (Belgrade, 1997), Pogled / The View (Belgrade, 2002), Vampiri & Razumni rečnik / Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary (with Scott Abbott; Belgrade, 2008; Brooklyn, 2014), Strah od Emigracije / Fear of Emigration (Belgrade, 2010), Era / Era Milivojević (Belgrade, 2010), Knjiga o muzici / A Book about Music (with David Albahari; Belgrade, 2013), Kafana / Tavern (Novi Sad, 2016), Krečenje / Reparative Painting (Novi Sad, 2018); Putovati (Traveling, Novi Sad, 2021), Knjiga o fotografiji (A Book about Photography, with David Albahari, Belgrad 2021).
He has translated twenty-seven of Peter Handke’s books into Serbo-Croatian and has been traveling companion and translator for Handke during repeated trips to Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo.
He collaborated on three performances with performance artist Slobodan Era Milivojević (1971, 1973, and 1974). His work with Serbian/German artist Nina Pops includes collaboration on a series of collages that feature his manuscript translations of Peter Handke’s novel The Loss of Images and Pops’ “translations” of the text into images. In conjunction with his "Book about Art," he and Pops mounted an exhibition in Cologne: Gegenüber / vis-à-vis (2021).
He edited an edition of the German literary magazine Nachtcafé on the theme of “walking” (1998/89), and an edition of the German literary magazine Schreibheft on “Literature from Serbia” (in collaboration with Peter Handke, 2008). He lives in Cologne, Germany.
David Albahari described Radakovic as “one of the few absolutely isolated, independent, creative personalities of contemporary Serbian prose. . . . He deals with our language like a foreign language in the same way Beckett uses the English language and Handke the German language. . . . I think I will not be wrong when I say that Žarko . . . is the most radical Serbian writer of the present time.”
He lives in Cologne, Germany.
Scott Abbott
is the author of Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel, of Immortal For Quite Some Time (University of Utah Press), of Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger (By Common Consent Press), and of three books with Žarko Radakovic:
Ponanvljanje (Repetitions) and Vampiri & Razumni recnik (Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary)—punctum books, and Knjiga prijateljstuv (We: On Friendship) Elik Press.
He was the jazz critic for the Salt Lake Observer and co-author, with Sam Rushforth, of the series “Wild Rides, Wild Flowers: Biking and Botanizing the Great Western Trail” which appeared for four years in Catalyst Magazine (then as a book with Torrey House Press—Wild Rides & Wildflowers: Philosophy and Botany with Bikes).
He has translated Peter Handke’s A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (Viking), Handke’s play Voyage by Dugout, the Play of the Film of the War (PAJ), Handke’s To Duration, A Poem (Lost Books), and, for the subtitles, the film Peter Handke: In the Woods, May Be Late.
Abbott has published reviews of books and art inThe Bloomsbury Review, Open Letters Monthly, and Catalyst Magazine .
He is Professor of Integrated Studies, Philosophy and Humanities at Utah Valley University and has published literary-critical articles on Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Grass, and Handke.
With Lyn Bennett, he published on a book about how barbed wire was given meaning in late 19th-century advertising and then in literature
of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (“It was a nun they say invented barbed wire,” James Joyce, Ulysses ) The Perfect Fence: Unravelling the Meanings of Barbed Wire (Texas A&M Press). For a book to be called “On Standing: Variations on the Standing Metaphor,” he is analyzing the metaphor in literature and philosophy (Herder, Humboldt, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Derrida; Goncharov and Dostoevsky; Kleist and Döblin; Rilke and Knausgaard; Faulkner and Morrison; and in the poetry of Dickinson, Eliot, Norris, Jarman, Hass, and Ashbery).
He lives in Woodland Hills, Utah.