Dear Sasha,

Liked the peasant/pheasant story very much. Heard something similar but set in Detroit and the punch line went like this: "What I meant was a half-pound of Alaskan crab legs."

No choice in the matter, there is only to answer your letter first as reader and then as writer. I think it's safe to say that reading saved me. I wouldn't be dead now if I hadn't started reading, but if you took the me I would have become and sat that me next to a dead body, I think you would have been hard pressed to tell the difference. And if you were invested in making the right choice, if you'd bet money on it, you'd have asked for help and hints and said, "Can I poke them both with a stick?"

Without getting too romantic about it, reading allowed me to change, fundamentally, my direction in life.

But I don't think literature is supposed to facilitate such things. I think it does, and I think it has many other wondrous powers when functioning on certain levels. And I think all the people who've banned books and burned books throughout history understand this secondary side of literature and fear the things literature inspires. But I don't believe in treating literature like snake oil. It doesn't have to promise any curative effects or to help us lose weight or reawaken dormant hair follicles. I think, very simply, that literature's purpose is to be read.

In the writing of stories, even that claim falls apart for me. I do my very best to concentrate only on telling the best story that I can. It's really not about anything else, not to educate, or enlighten or entertain. It's just about the story that I'm working on, what that story needs and how to make it work.

I'm not trying to be Zen or wizened or pretend that I'd be happier if I lived in a tree and wrote my stories for the birds. As for resisting the urge to make great claims on behalf of literature, I could go on forever telling stories about stories that have changed people's lives, about where books fit into the food chain of knowledge and inspiration, and how a book's subversive form--its physical dimensions--allows whole worlds to be smuggled beyond borders that they then erase. I could share my own teary-eyed testimony about the ways in which a certain Dinesen story affected me over my morning coffee this very week. But I really, truly think all that muddles. It can't be the goal for the writer and it can't be the weight set on top of the not-yet-read book.

So why stories? Because it's a joy for me to write stories, and once I get started I even forget that. Then it is about the work, about the story itself. And the same happens with the reading. Sometimes I open a book with the intention to get smarter or to be entertained or even to get myself to sleep. But once I'm reading, if everything is in place, then, once again, it's only about the story and nothing more.

It is rumored among short story writers that you learned your horrifyingly, annoyingly good English while changing planes at Kennedy airport on the way to O'Hare. Further, it is said, that you finished the Sunday Times crossword puzzle your very first week in America, in ink, and while reading only the clues for Across. I have a question for you about language. Having already mentioned coming to the states from a book tour in Spain, I crack open my English-language copy of Don Quixote for his take on the subject of translation. He compares reading in translation to "viewing a piece of Flemish tapestry on the wrong side, where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads, that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured." I'd say that more than half of my favorite books were originally written in languages that I don't read. What I want to ask you, oh Nabokovian switch-hitter, is what you think is the nature of a story. Is there something lost in translation? Why do you write in English? And finally, is your book being translated back into your mother tongue?

Best,

Nathan

I sure am glad that you are not dead, for that would make communication much harder, though not impossible. And if you feel you might be going down, keep reading them books. I am ever ready to recommend a few.

And yes, yes, yes, no snake oil. I absolutely agree. I cannot stand consciously "engaged" literature. There is always something programmatic and dangerously predictable, whether it is a socialist-realism novel or a Newt Gingrich novel (yes, such thing exists, God help us), or even, in my book, someone like Henry James, who had his own boring psychological agenda. Writers--in fact, people--whom I cannot stand could be described, as a category, as those who take themselves too seriously.

But having said that, all literature--indeed, writing--is engaged, because it involves a lot of people, all kinds of readers, and it exists within a language, perhaps languages, connecting a lot of people. So what I perceive as important--politically and historically--is not the content of stories as such, but the act of telling a story, the public space it creates. This is why there are states that burn books: they cannot stand people talking behind their backs, and they think there should be only one voice, which they claim is the voice of the people. Danilo Kis wrote, in a story involving burning of (Jewish) books: "Many books are not dangerous. One book is dangerous."

You say that it is just "about the story itself," which I understand perfectly, for I enjoy the same loss of selfhood when writing. Nevertheless, there are choices that we make and those choices are significant, regardless of our intentions. The fact that you chose to tell/write the story of "The Twenty-seventh Man" or "The Tumblers" (my favorites), stories that are embedded in a particular historical time--as opposed to writing yet another story about a writing teacher's midlife crisis--shows that you have interest in how literature/ art functions in a historical-political context.

Nabokovian switch-hitter!? I am not a baseball fan, so it took me a while to decode the compliment, and I thank you.

As for translation, Robert Frost said that poetry is what is lost in translation. I suppose that is true, at least to some extent. But I also think that something is gained, or might be gained, in translation. The idea that a book could truly exist only in its original language is related to the (dangerous) idea that a language is always tuned to express the transcendence of the nation that speaks and writes it. It is one of the axioms of nationalism, therefore repugnant to me. And most of the books--all but six or seven--that I like were written in the languages other than my native language. Thank God I can read English.

I write in English, because I live in the English speaking world. My experience is closer to the English language now, than to the Bosnian language. When I got here, as the war was blooming in Bosnia, I realized that I had to write in English. It was a hard realization, because I was brought up to believe that a writer's fate is his or her native language. I had a minor writerly career in Bosnia, so I had to forget about it and start from a scratch. But it was so much fun, this is a great language, and I enjoy the perpetual, slight discomfort that I feel in it--it keeps me alert. There always might be a lovely new word, or a loose article, coming around the corner to smash me in the bemused face.

I translated about a half of what is today The Question of Bruno into Bosnian and published it in Sarajevo a few years ago. I translated my stories into my native language, and the weird thing was that the translation was slightly off--the stories are much better in English, what can I do?

I think--indeed, believe--that to be a good writer, or to be a writer at all, one has to be a good reader. I know that the stories I am happy with I wrote the way I did because I was able to imagine how they would be read. How important do you think it is for a writer to be a good reader?

And I also think that the downside of being a writer is that you can never be an innocent reader of your own stories. I fantasize about stumbling upon my own book and reading it, knowing nothing about it. That is impossible, of course, which is why I am addicted to readers--I need them so I can read my book vicariously. The trouble is that they don't always read it the way I would, if I could. But I also think exactly that is the great thing about writing: I participate in an exchange and I can control only one end of it. Do you think it is possible at all to write without having a readership in mind? What kind of readers do you imagine?

This is fun. Hence I am babbling.

Best,
Sasha

P.S. Looking forward to seeing you in New York.

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