The other day my old friend Gligor Stojkovski wrote me an e-mail. He is the editor of a publishing house "Kultura" and wants me help him get the translation rights for the latest John Updike's novel, "The Terrorist", a title he very much would like to be the first to publish in Macedonia. He sort of had figured it out that Updike or his agent might be willing to respond to my request faster than to his own since I was, many years ago, the first who had translated, to great Updike's satisfaction, "Rabbit, Run" (his first novel) into Macedonian. I felt both flattered and sad.
My eyes were still painfully closed and I had neither read nor written mail, a sad situation for anybody in the business of communicating. Once I have heard of the contents of the mail I felt as if doctor Eijpe had eventually applied the correct gel on my wounded, bloody, sore eye. So many years (nearly 30) and somebody still remembered my first essay with Updike. He had said it was a formidably difficult text to adequately switch into such a different culture.
I loved the Rabbit, Run and i did my best. The book sold out and there was no reprint. The novel was an instant success. Updike became an American modern classic no questions asked. I had already translated Harper Lee's one and only To Kill The Mockingbird and had finished with the scalps of the two top American novelists tucked in the belt of my Macedonian language prowess. None of them was previously translated into Serbian (a very, probably the most important fact for the real value of both the publisher's and the translator's endeavor when keeping pace with the world literature. There were academics who would sign "translated from English , or French" despite they would use the Serbian texts and would not distinguish good morning from bon jour.
Translating at the time was important: few people spoke foreign languages and even Serbian or Croat, not to speak Bulgarian which was politically so badly relegate to unacceptable means of communication that even German appeared a "friendly" language. Reading or holding any book in Bulgarian would be tantamount to brandishing an "Osama Bin Ladden Handbook on Terrorist Techniques and Materials" in a Heathrow Cafeteria. Those were the stupidities of the period. Otherwise revolutionary people, individuals gazed in the future of humankind, personally courageous and modest, even humble, imposing ignorance, ethnic hatred and prejudices with malice of which some of them, like a certain Jordan Cekic-Cekov took great pleasure and sickening satisfaction which helped them tick to this very day.
There were no books in Macedonian and people, herded, like cattle, into reading Serbian, found the titles in their native Macedonian awkward, which was sad. Even the obligatory "Short History of the SKPB" (the acronym SKP(B) stayed for the Soviet Communist Party (Bolseviks) and some new it by heart, was in Serbian not to speak of the classics of the world literature.
So, I felt I have contributed to the Macedonian culture. It was so much hard work and so much genuine search for an authentically Macedonian word that translation was agonizingly slow and, like everything else, miserably rewarded. But I was very proud with my work on the first Updike. Rabbit, Run is a marvelous piece of art.
Now comes The Terrorist.
Some reviewer wrote that Updike's latest was a poor text. That not even him can bring freshness
which any more and that even his admirers approach his every new title with fear to find him gone empty, that he does not smell fresh as the bottom of a pale just taken out of a deep, cold, clean well.
Will plunge soon into this new Updike. I have so much confidence in him...But first of all - need to cajole him or his agent into signing me a concent to translate the title into Macedonian...

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