A philosopher by training, Relja Dražić founded the publishing workshop "Futura Publications" in 1991, and in 2008 he launched the edition "Nojzac", which he edits and in which he publishes works of literature in the German language written in Austria. Between 2007 and 2025, he translated dozens of novels, about fifteen theater plays, as well as a certain number of short stories into Serbian. A few days ago, he received the annual main prize of the Republic of Austria for literary translation work from German to Serbian.
"WEATHER" Awards are a very ambivalent phenomenon, including the most important (Nobel, Booker, NIN...). What does this award mean to you?? What do you think about awards in the humanities in general??
RELJA DRAŽIĆ: It seems to me that the distinguished major literary awards are not of the same variety as those that happen to translators. When you read, for example, what Robert Musil wrote more than a hundred years ago about the position of the author, you realize that things have changed quite a bit since then: the writer is better protected today, and literary prizes today really seem like the main lottery prize in some cases. But something hasn't changed: as much as they mean to a writer, they mean even more to a business. Namely, as Muzil saw it, the writer starts a business chain, of the performance of which he usually only has a very small part left. Major literary awards encourage this in many ways. And as it always happens in a politically polarized political space, it also happens that the atmosphere around literary awards becomes electrified and there is a natural discharge, often in the form of scandals - writers return the awards or not (I don't think they ever return the money), but this never bothers the business, it only benefits it.
What's different about translation awards?
In terms of effects, they are purely personal. The translator is only a part (albeit perhaps the closest part to the author) of the business chain that the author started with his work, he (the translator) does not start anything himself. In that sense, those awards are mostly consolatory. To put it bluntly, they're zitflash awards. Gratuities given by a generous master to his faithful servant (the author as the master in that case is represented by the appropriate institution). However, this one State Prize it does not fit into that order - to stay within the same comparison - it is more like the case when a grateful master "remembers" a servant in his will and thus provides him with a more or less peaceful old age. That award looks like a real award and I see it as a great recognition, encouragement and satisfaction for years of hard work.
The vast majority of people have no idea what translation is, they often believe that it is "transcription" from another language. What is, therefore, translation?
For some reason your questions evoke speech in pictures for me, I guess it's because I want to be as concise as possible. Therefore, I will compare translation with the act of playing an instrument. At the same time, I need classical music for the picture. In order to produce music from a musical text, you must have a whole range of skills: first of all, you must know how to read notes, you must have a technical command of the instrument, know the laws of harmony, counterpoint, etc. And only when you have all these skills and knowledge will you be able to interpret the composition. Namely, it will sound different from performer to performer. It is also a requirement that each performer knows which musical era the work belongs to and adapts his approach accordingly, but even within that, small differences in the choice of tempo and dynamics will make the interpretations different. Some will delight you, some will leave you indifferent, and some may even make you angry due to gross mistakes.
For now, it is completely clear that the machine (Chat GBT) it is not able to translate more complex text. Do you believe they will ever be able to?
Are you sure the best modules can't do that already? I'm almost convinced that for a large percentage of contemporary literary production (which still partially rests on the foundations of old humanism, which is currently exposed to merciless attacks everywhere in the world), AI is already able to do that. She might not yet be able to correctly translate Walter Benjamin or Thomas Mann, but haven't they already been translated? Wasn't the AI already trained on those translations? Gro texts of contemporary production no longer have the complexity you mentioned. What will happen when the humanities are totally Bolognized? And when you look at how Homo sapiens it leaves lightly to voluntary servitude to capital, the outcome of the interaction/struggle between artificial intelligence and natural stupidity is predetermined. Because it's as if Helderlin's truth, which has comforted us for 200 years, is no longer valid: "Because in danger, the saving also grows." Allow me to quote Branko Čegec: "We have entered the phase of civilizational reach with completely new mechanisms of domination, control and enslavement, while the mechanisms of resistance have not evolved at all." The man may be becoming redundant.
Through "Nojzac" you focused on Austrian literature. For our circumstances, this is a rather unusual undertaking. Where did that choice come from??
When I look back as old as this, it might seem to me that that choice was fateful. My first literary translation was two short stories by the Austrian Hugo von Hofmannsthal. And then, after a two-decade break without translation, by sheer chance in cooperation with two Austrians, the Neuzac edition was launched, opened with my translation by another Austrian, Marlene Haushofer. Life soon took those two outside of Novi Sad, and it was up to me to keep the fire going. It turned out to be something very demanding and therefore very beautiful. The closer I got to the boulder of Austrian literature, the more it attracted me with its gravity. When you remember that this literature includes Adalbert Stifter, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Eden von Horvat, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfride Jelinek (to mention only the most prominent), you will know what I am talking about. It is an immense field of work and I only occasionally take a short escapade away from it (like when I was dealing with the German Klaus Mann and recently the Swiss Robert Walzer). And maybe I'm just as monogamous in work as in love, like Paja Patka.
And the name of your publishing house is "Nojzac"(Neusatz), German name of the city of Novi Sad.
The Petrovaradin fortress as a symbol of Novi Sad, after which the aforementioned edition is named, was built by Austria. In my formative years, I watched her every day for a decade from my apartment on the Danube quay. That fortress used its only opportunity to act offensively with cannons to bombard the city in 1848. Maybe even then I could identify with Austria, because as Lou Reed said about the small town (I'm paraphrasing): There is only one good use for a small town, you hate it and you'll know that you want to get out. However, I still returned to that small town to watch it slowly grow and become more and more architecturally beautiful and destroyed. This time it is not being destroyed by a foreign power, but by an internal invader, a domestic investor occupier who acquired part of the "first million" by looting in a civil war in which "Serbia did not participate". Then, threatened, I loved him again.
Let's go back to Austrian literature.
Austrian literature holds me in its gravitational field with its courage and aesthetically extraordinarily powerful ability to productively confront the myth of itself as "Hitler's victim". By translating the works of Hermann Broch, Thomas Bernhard, Gerhard Fritsch, Hans Lebert and Robert Schindl, I try, probably in vain, to encourage our writers to come to grips with the horrors for which we are collectively responsible today because we were not able to exterminate from our midst the evil seed that has in the meantime chosen power and does not intend to let it go.
I know you've already translated it. Wolf skin Hans Lebert. What else can readers expect??
Without Wolf skins I translated Hans Lebert "for the drawer" and his second, no less exciting novel Circle of Fire, perhaps it was a reaction to the opinion of the great Hungarian writer Sándor Marai, who wrote in his diaries that what a writer writes for a drawer may be better than what he writes for a contracted order. In his case, it was very likely true, so I thought that even a translator could imitate such, in his case, completely unwise behavior. In January, a book will appear in the "Neuzac" edition Hermelin in Chernobyl Gregor von Recori about the last "man with qualities... which offers a poetically fascinating and, all in all, historically valid glorification of the Habsburg world, whose most charming and most haunted corner is the Southeast European one" (Claudio Magris). Who loved Radecki-march Josef Roth and who was sorry that the reading of the 400-page book lasted so short, will find solace in this novel, which critics once rated as its counterpart.
As for younger Austrian authors, the following have already been given space in "Neuzac": Werner Schwab, Karin Peška, Norbert Gštrajn, Ljuba Arnautović... The last-mentioned author, especially so young, is represented by two books, and most likely we will publish the third part soon. The problem is her apparently Serbian first and last name, and that she has nothing to do with Serbian descent. Because she is Arnautović due to some administrative problem that hit her grandmother, her mother is Russian, her grandfather would otherwise be Kafka, although not related to Franz Kafka, but a jackdaw (Czech kafka) is a jackdaw.
