Interview
Ivana Sajko is the author of Every Time We Say Goodbye.
L’Esprit Literary Review: We’d love to hear a bit about yourself and your writing background. How did you come into literature? What are some of your literary influences, styles, tastes, and philosophies?
Ivana Sajko: If I were to begin with the prehistory, I think I actually wanted to paint. The dream of a girl who doesn’t feel comfortable in the crowd, and so searches for some inner space of her own where she can do whatever she wants. But then it turned out that I ended up writing, because the space I conquered through language was bigger and wilder than the one I was able to draw. Later I enrolled in the Academy of Dramatic Art, and so it started. The inner space of freedom turned itself inside out into a stage.
During my studies at the Academy, everyone who took themselves seriously was reading Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault. We watched the performances of Jan Fabre, Needcompany, and followed the contemporary dance scene, which was tremendously exciting in the ’90s. Feeding on all this material, I was constantly asking myself: how do you write for this?
How do you write for a theatre that actually dances, or for the performances which break the illusion of the fourth wall, or for the acting which is raw and confessional, or for the dramaturgy that deals with duration and repetition? That is how my style came into being. And only once I had established myself as a (post)dramatic writer who breaks the frameworks of classical drama, with texts such as Woman – Bomb, that literally performed all over the world, did I actually enter literature with the novel Rio Bar. That was my return inward, into the inner space.
LLR: Tell us about how Every Time We Say Goodbye came to be. It’s written in a series of single-sentence chapters, which of course is very distinctive but also really works well compositionally to allow the novel to explore its topics and themes in such an engaging manner. Can you talk about how you came to this style and why you felt it worked for the book?
IS: Part of the search for this book is described in the novel itself. I was looking for a voice that was calm, with which I could write about departure and loss, a voice that makes peace with the consequences. The novel came into being during a particular moment of loneliness in Berlin, after I had separated from my partner and continued living alone with my son, hesitating to begin rebuilding my social circle and my professional network from scratch.
Those long sentences and the rhythmization of the textual score had already been part of my world. I wrote theatre plays for my own voice and for musicians with whom I would perform, so I always approached the text as a score, as a musical material that has solos, interruptions, shifts, that sounds jazzy and dirty and sexy, because it has that deep inner beat which pushes it forward.
The decision to write this novel in sentences that meander through an entire chapter therefore came partly from the music. But partly also from the need to find that subtle voice that follows a traveler who is leaving, a voice that knows absolutely nothing about the future that awaits, but instead falls into the past, collapses backwards, and in a single breath moves from one time and space into another.
LLR: An especially successful aspect of the book is the way you’re able to imbue this character and his story with a sense of place and history, particularly around the Yugoslav Wars, which the narrator ironically refers to as “a war which never happened,” regarding the sense that it’s been somewhat overlooked in Western Europe and the rest of the world. This is mirrored by the way our narrator, although he talks a great deal about the trauma and violence that resulted from these conflicts, never quite refers to it explicitly; the reader has to bring in some outside understanding of their own. Tell us something about your decision to write a novel orbiting this topic, and maybe particularly why you decided to approach it in a somewhat more indirect, rather than direct, manner, if that’s the correct way of putting it.
IS: The final part of Rio Bar begins with the sentence: “One war like all wars,” meaning that a war as a barbaric event doesn’t belong to one certain region or people, but it is spread equally through histories and territories. With Rio Bar (which was my private Apocalypse Now) I said everything I needed to say about it. Afterwards I consciously avoided lingering too close to this subject. Partly because I did not want to exploit this trauma and partly because I did not want to exoticize myself as a survivor or a victim. I just wanted to be a good author. Preferably, without an origin. That is why the war in the novel can be any war; the one in which Yugoslavia disappeared or the one that destroyed Syria and brought hundreds of thousands of desperate people to the ramparts of Europe. It functions like a muffled noise in the background. That noise simply reminds us of the violence of the world, of the destruction we can follow on livestream and the responsibility we feel as witnesses. An empathy without consequences.
But on the other hand, the fact that I know what it is to be a young person in a war triggers a sarcastic comment you’ve quoted, because the European boasting about the 70 years of peace on the European ground denies the very fact of my private experience — which is the war. Not only were cities being destroyed on European soil, but war was being exported from European soil, and that export continues, unhindered and uninterrupted, to this day.
LLR: In his review of Every Time We Say Goodbye, LLR Editor Dan White mentioned a connection between your book and Mathias Énard’s Zone, which is also written in a single sentence, following a man on a European train, and deals with the aftermath of conflict in the Balkans. Was that a novel you were familiar with in writing yours, or is it instead simply one of those magical literary happenings?
IS: I suppose we just took our trains along the parallel tracks. I had completely forgotten Énard’s Zone, and it was only the review in LLR that brought it back to my memory. Why, I don’t know.
I have a habit of reading several books in three languages simultaneously. I bury words beneath the words, and the texts often remain in my mind more as a hazy memories than as books I can analyze at any given moment and step away from. Reading is life, like walking the dog. A beautiful everyday experience. Yet, I think I would place closer to my own world endless singing sentences of László Krasznahorkai. I once heard him read from his text Animalinside in Hungarian. The decision to write that text in long sentences revealed itself as self-evident only once the music produced by the original could be heard. In this sense, I feel closer to the literature that works with sound, because some texts ask for music more than others, sometimes to express the duration and sometimes to reveal the emotional charge.
LLR: Tell us a little about having your work translated, and what that experience is like, especially for a writer as focused on style and language as you are.
IS: A translator is an intimate friend. I have lived in Berlin for eleven years now, but my relationship with the German scene began much earlier, when my early plays were being performed in German theatres. All that time, the same person accompanied me, my translator Alida Bremer, and thanks to our relationship, my books and theatre pieces in German became the second original. I am building a similar relationship with my English translator, Mima Simić. I also have the same translator for French and Italian, and for Polish as well. That continuity is important.
I remember my first translations into German, before I was able to understand it, when I could do little more than listen to the rhythm and melody of the text, and I would try to recognize which sentence it was from the musical sequence expressed in the way the actor would read the text. It may sound unbelievable, but a good translation really can produce music similarity with her translation. That is why I adore translators. They are shifting the cultural and political consequences of the words from one language to the other, they are rewriting the score, but they are also dealing with the haunted space between the sentences, space that belongs to the very intention, to the author’s idea which was there before the word itself. That is why, I think, it is so crucial to have your translator close.
LLR: The narrator of Every Time We Say Goodbye is a man, and a fair bit of the book explores issues of masculinity and topics such as father-son relationships, all done very deftly. Can you talk a little about that process of writing “cross perspective,” so to speak? Was there a challenge in that at all?
IS: The transition into a male perspective in Slavic languages (such as Croatian, in which I write) begins with a grammatical transformation. Namely, in Croatian, words change not only according to seven cases and tenses, but also according to one of three genders. Croatian grammar makes it necessary to choose and speak from a grammatical gender. So if we narrate from the position of a woman, of a man, or of a chair (for the neuter), the text changes completely. Slavic languages do not have articles like der, die, das in German, but literally change every word according to gender and case. Thus, this transition into the perspective of a male character was profound and tectonic already as it happened on the grammatical level. In that sense, I was not so much concerned with thinking like a man as with speaking like a man, and that act pushed me forward. I am not saying that this linguistic experience is identical to a transgender experience, but the decision to slide away from the grammatical codes I utilized my whole life into the male codes that, with each new word, break the habit of speaking as a woman — that was nevertheless an intense experience.
LLR: Having been published both in Europe and North America, how do you feel each respective literary market has responded to your work? Are there distinctive challenges or opportunities that come with each?
IS: Absolutely. North America and Europe are quite opposed scenes and perspectives. Europe is a rather claustrophobic territory sorted by categories arranged in hierarchies. The categories consist of the symbolic values of regions and cultures, proximity to a certain tradition or heritage, etc. Once the book crosses the Atlantic, that pettiness of the national literatures magically disappears. The book is being read in the context of world literature and that is truly liberating.
LLR: What’s next for you and your work?
IS: I hope that the plans to translate Rio Bar and have it published by Canadian publisher Biblioasis will soon become concrete. I would be really happy to present that book in English. It has the necessity and the fury of the first novel, but strangely, although I wrote it 20 years ago, it depicts the chaos and conflict that is very similar to the chaos and conflict we try to understand today, but from the intimate perspective. In that book war is equal to a journey, a bit like a train that travels from point A to point B in Every Time We Say Goodbye. At the point B, a person is not the same. My Berlin reality, on the other hand, is currently reduced to writing for theatre. I have just finished a play, and I have commissions for two more ahead of me. It is a sort of marathon.
Ivana Sajko
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