Psalm 44, a work of youth
“I wrote this short novel in less than a month, at the age of twenty-five, for a competition held by the Jewish Association of Belgrade1,” Danilo Kiš specifies in an interview. Written in 1960, it is in fact the second text he wrote, The Attic being dated 1959-1960. The two novels were published in a single volume in 1962, since Kiš’s editor considered the text of The Attic too short to be published separately.
According to Jovan Delić’s classification2, the two novels correspond to Kiš’s first period, that of the short novels. The Attic and Psalm 44 already illustrate his major interests: “metaphysical obsessions on the one hand, and on the other, historical, ‘documentary’ reconstructions3.” There follows the period of the family trilogy, marked by the fictionalization of the family history (Family Circus, in three volumes: Early Sorrows, 1970; Garden, Ashes, 1965; Hourglass, 1972). Born in 1935 to a Hungarian Jewish father and a mother originally from Montenegro, Kiš fled the city of Novi Sad with his family after the 1942 massacre, and his childhood was then spent in the Hungarian countryside. The family lived there in hardship, and in 1944 the father was sent to Auschwitz, from which he did not return4. The three panels of Family Circus draw on this period, each book recounting the same story from a different point of view. In the last period, called the short-story period (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, 1976; The Encyclopedia of the Dead, 1983; The Lute and the Scars, 1994, posthumous), the theme of the camps is not abandoned. With the short-story collection A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Kiš treats the Stalinist camps, relying on documentary sources and privileging the historical and political aspect. The short-story collection The Encyclopedia of the Dead thematizes the imbrication of love and death, while not for all that abandoning his favorite subjects, such as writing, history, and the danger of ideologies. Devoted to formal research, obsessed with the malady of history and worked through by existential questions, Kiš’s work today forms an integral part of the Serbian literary canon. Psalm 44, which stands at his beginnings, is nonetheless a lesser-known text. Judged severely by its author, published less often than his other texts (generally within editions of selected or complete works), this novel of youth makes the reader discover another face of the writer renowned for his “ironic lyricism.”
The novel tells the story of a young Jewish woman, Marija, who flees the concentration camp shortly before the arrival of the Allies, together with her infant son born in that same camp. Kiš defends this “strange” plot by explaining that it was inspired by a document, “a short journalistic report (a couple with a child visits the camp in which the child was born in the last days of the war)5.” Vuk Krnjević finds that the documentary aspect derives above all from certain episodes recalling documentary prose: “very steeped in the commonplaces of literature (B. Schulz, for example, who paints the destiny of the Jews in the Nazi era),” Psalm 44 is at the same time “interesting on account of certain narrative sequences that give the impression of being taken from existing non-literary sources6.” The documentary concern is only one facet of the approach, for Kiš also draws on the biblical text in order to treat contemporary history, as the two epigraphs drawn from the Old Testament attest. The first quotation is the annunciation made to Hagar, the second a verse from Psalm 44 that gives the novel its title (“Thou makest us a byword among the nations”). The choice of quotations is highly significant: in Psalm 44, precisely, the birth of the son redeems the violence of history.
This “lyrical novel of a monological and associative type7” is dominated by Marija’s thoughts and perceptions. The plot is rudimentary: from the first to the tenth chapter, during the night when the young woman prepares for her escape, her past is progressively reconstructed through a series of flashbacks. Thus the reader learns more about her family, the way she discovered antisemitism, her life in the camp, and her encounter with Jakob, a Jewish doctor forced to work for the fascists, who will become the father of her child. The narration becomes more objective and dialogue replaces introspection in the two short chapters that recount the aftermath of the escape, enough to trace the destinies of Marija and Jakob and to set up their reunion. The thirteenth chapter functions as an epilogue: six years after the end of the war, the couple visits the camp with their son. There is no clumsiness or hesitation in this novel, in which one can already discern Kiš’s stylistic virtuosity. Moreover, although he would later reject the psychological characterization of the character, here he renders a feminine existence in an extremely credible manner. It is this capacity that misled the members of the jury, leading them to believe that the author of the anonymous text they had received could only be a woman. Indeed, the verisimilitude of the character and the finesse of the psychological analysis go hand in hand with the precision and accuracy of the descriptions of physical sensations, especially when it comes to the way the young woman experiences her body and her maternity.
Historical reconstruction and fine psychological analysis, this novel is also a book about inheritance and transmission. In this context, the comparison imposes itself between Psalm 44 and the family trilogy, in which Kiš examines paternal and maternal inheritance within his own family. Indeed, certain traits of the father in Psalm 44 already prefigure Eduard Sam, the father of Family Circus: his name — Edi; his accessories — iron-framed glasses; his propensity for alcohol; and even the manner of his elocution. The figure of the mother remains vague, for maternity is here embodied above all by Marija. One must, however, return to the ambiguity of the maternal figure in Family Circus noted by Jovan Delić8. A positive and protective character, it is paradoxically the mother who makes the boy discover death, and this dawning awareness is the cause of an anguish that never again leaves him. In Psalm 44, Marija, who experiences love and maternity within the very confines of the concentration camp, is the maternal figure par excellence, the incarnation of the life drive. Although the character has no shadow, Kiš confronts her with her double: Anijela, a young woman who hides at a coffin-maker’s to escape persecution, sleeps in a coffin from which she barely emerges and takes drugs to remain asleep, with no desire to leave this sleep of death. During the visit to Anijela, Marija is terrified by the physical appearance of this “sleeping doll,” similar to a mummy, and by her cadaverous existence. Anijela’s survival is another form of death, insofar as her isolation is total and the life drive annihilated; to the paralyzed mind corresponds a mummified body, incapable of procreating. However, maternity is not only a form of individual flourishing that historical circumstances ought to render impossible; it is also the guarantor of a transmission that takes place through the body and the word at once. During the few hours that separate her from the escape from the camp, Marija feels not only the passing of time, but also the specific weight of the moment when time no longer means life or duration, but the survival of the individual as well as of the lineage. And the recognition of the paternal word takes place precisely in such a moment:
And she now understood — not without anguish — those dark prefigurations through which her father sought to explain to her the meaning of those moments when one feels “the eternity of blood and of the instant.” It is this same feeling that profoundly imbues her while her child is nursing, nestled against her, and the instant has the density of eternity and of blood; the great instant where the courses of past, future, and present cross9.
Marija finds an interpretation and a meaning for the moment she is living thanks to the memories of her father’s words, which she can now understand in the light of her own experience. For this inheritance to be understood, internalized, and activated, for the symbolic transmission to be effected, the young woman must become a mother and her very body must be able to serve as an instrument of interpretation. The end of the novel once again confirms the importance of transmission. Marija is “proud of her mission: to pass on to Jan the joy of those who, out of death and love, were able to create life. To offer him the bitter joy of a suffering he has not felt and will never feel himself, but which ought to be present in him like a warning, like a joy: like an obelisk10.” Hence the importance of the memories that are strewn throughout the novel.
The cold days of 1942
Among Marija’s memories, one of the most vivid is that of the “cold days.” The euphemism designates the massacres of Jews and Serbs that took place in Vojvodina in January 1942; in the city of Novi Sad, where the Kiš family lived at that time, hundreds of Jews and Serbs were killed11. Kiš’s father, arrested by the Hungarian gendarmes, was brought to the edge of the frozen Danube, where the victims waited in a line to be executed. Danilo Kiš was old enough to remember12, and the testimony he was able to give of it is completed “from documents and shreds of survivors’ memories13.” He presents the mode of execution thus: “Near the municipal beach, where the wooden cabins stand, a large hole was bored in the ice, as if cut out of glass; above the hole, a springboard was placed. (…) The soldiers push them onto the plank of the springboard, fire a bullet into the back of their neck or run them through with their bayonets. The victims fall into the dark-green water of the Danube. A civilian armed with a gaff pushes the bodies under the ice14.” Danilo Kiš’s father nonetheless escaped this death already certain and assured, for the execution was halted on account of a technical problem: the piled-up bodies had blocked the hole, and it was no longer possible to push new corpses under the ice. Another explanation is also evoked by Kiš — news of the massacre had reportedly already spread, and an international intervention reportedly caused the execution to be interrupted. The Novi Sad roundup and the massacre at the edge of the Danube marked Kiš’s memory and influenced his entire work. Yet only once, in Psalm 44, does he relate the event directly, without seeking to veil the representation of violence or trying to introduce a distance between the narrative instance and the events represented.
The memory of the cold days returns three times in Psalm 44. The first time, in the first chapter, it is only a brief and vague mention. Marija and Žana realize that the third woman sharing the barracks with them, sick and dying, will never be able to leave the camp. Marija’s nocturnal waiting is thus marked not only by the anticipation of the escape and the recollection of the past, but also by the present, the site of Polja’s slow agony, which she must push away from her thoughts in order to try to survive. Marija then makes a conscious effort to avoid thinking about it; she strives to “push aside and under the ice” the corpse of Polja, “as they had pushed under the ice the corpses of those women, back then, at the beginning15.” The second time, in the fifth chapter, Marija recalls her discussion with Jakob bearing on the necessity of hope in the camp. Unable to answer him whether she has lost hope, the young woman interrogates her past: the memory of the waiting at the edge of the river emerges once more in the course of this introspection, the phrase “at the edge of the Danube” recurring several times, like a refrain. For Marija, it is the initial event, the beginning of her story and the only moment when she could have lost all hope, even though she understands that a form of unreason which she identifies with hope had never left her, even at the instant when death seemed imminent.
These two memories, the one at the first and the other at the second degree, function as indices, designating the experience without for all that making it explicit. In the ninth chapter, however, the massacre becomes the object of a detailed and structured recollection. It is triggered by external facts: sensing the presence of Polja’s corpse makes the past resurge in Marija’s mind, while another sensation, the dampness of the child’s diapers, marks the return to the present and to the preparations for the escape. Let us note that the horror of the cold days is first given in the form of an indirect memory, for the young woman remembers not what she experienced, but the testimony that was given of it. After the execution was halted, Marija found her aunt Lela and Solomon Rozenberg, another survivor of death. As she listens to the account of the massacre that Mr. Rozenberg gives to aunt Lela, she sees again and relives the past, and her memory follows and doubles Rozenberg’s discourse. The same scenes are thus evoked by the two characters, the man’s oral testimony and the young woman’s inner discourse crossing and intertwining. Marija does not go so far as to bear witness herself; nevertheless she constitutes herself as a witness, since she takes the floor to affirm: “I saw all of it myself, aunt Lela. I remember everything16.”
In fact, she first sees an old man humiliated at being no longer able to hold himself back, as his body betrays him and reacts in an animal way to danger: “This one stinks like cholera,” and she sees that the soldier, with a cynical politeness, almost in the manner of a lackey, helps the old man free himself from his greasy trousers, his old black waistcoat, and his shirt with a stiff straight collar. One could see only the corneas of the old man’s eyes as he whispered, “Forgive, forgive,” as if he were saying “lama, lama…”17 From the humiliation arising out of the rupture between body and consciousness, out of the reduction of man to body, her gaze passes to a scene pathetic in a different way, the one in which a young mother, holding her child in her arms and covering her nakedness in this way, approaches the gendarmes to ask them to hasten their execution: “Finally the woman, with a slowed and hesitant movement, lifted her red and livid leg from the snow, but before taking a step she turned with her whole body as if on a revolving stage, and still holding the child clutched against her, protecting it with her arms, she said in a thick voice that nevertheless did not tremble: ‘Please, when… will it be our turn? my little one… will catch cold18.’” In another scene of violence, situated at the end of the analepsis, the father, wanting to prevent the rape of his daughter, has his mustache torn off by a soldier, while another, after raping the young girl, cuts open her mouth with a bayonet to extract the gold teeth. The description of the massacre is conceived as a mosaic in which each image already contains the terror of the whole. Kiš insists on the images of the bruised body, of physical suffering and moral humiliation; through the individualization of the victims, the choice of the physical torments and human attitudes represented, he reinforces the pathos and the cruelty.
Paradoxically, the most worked-over and most naturalistic scene of the series is the one the young woman could not witness, for Rozenberg’s account allows Marija to see even what was outside her field of vision. It is the scene where the flayer Kenjeri and his son set upon the corpse of a young woman; the account, of extreme violence, is finally interrupted by the aunt’s imploring. The destiny of this “almost dead” young woman, in the process of being transformed into matter, whose body the executioners handle as if it were a corpse even though she has not yet been killed, represents the acme of cruelty. To the impossibility of individualizing the victim, who loses her personal characteristics and becomes unrecognizable, almost inhuman, and to the details of the manipulation of this bloody, dismembered, and torn body, is added the cynicism of the executioner:
She could see, where the face had once been (a face she no longer remembers), a hideous stain of horror concentrated in the place of the eyes and of the features of the face petrified by the frost, as when bronze pours forth its green patina over wrinkles; and all of it she could feel as if she knew it from her own experience: how the young man (by his wolf’s jaw, the flayer’s son) held the almost-dead woman by the legs, and the woman who thrashed like a beheaded hen when the teeth of the saw pierced the flesh of her flank, and how the man said “prrr,” then to his son, in a dry tone, “hold on, dimwit!”, and how the young man clenched his teeth and tightened his grip on the woman’s legs, and how the man then drew the saw back a little, then forward, and then how he pulled the toothed tool forcefully toward himself when the steel forced its way between two vertebrae of the spinal column, and how, sparkling and pouring out streams of blood on both sides into the snow, the saw began to glide softly, tearing the intestines and the flesh. Then how he snapped at the young man again, “Leave her, the shrew, her legs aren’t going to run off without a head,” and how Kenjeri junior kept pressing on the woman’s legs and her body tensed and trembled, and how the man eyed him, dumbfounded, and once more bared his filthy horse’s teeth, with disapproval: “What’s the matter with you, idiot? Aren’t you used to blood, or do you pity the girl19?
Traces of the first narrative
Certainly, the reader will find in Hourglass the evocations of the cold days, certain naturalistic details, as well as the famous catalogue of the dead that E.S. remembers; and the stories of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich relate the destinies and executions of Stalinist victims. However, no other narrative by Kiš contains descriptions of extreme violence as meticulous as these: the brutality of the scenes of Psalm 44 remains an exception, as does their pathetic charge. Thereafter, naturalistic and pathetic description will no longer have a place in Kiš’s poetic universe. His poetic evolution leads him to criticize this work of youth, by the criteria of an accomplished writer who has found his own way of approaching the violence of history: “But the weakness of this youthful book lies not so much in this plot, too strong, too pathetic, as in the fatal absence of the slightest ironic distance — an element that would later become an integral part of my literary procedure20.” After Psalm 44, pathos is possible only if it is mastered and balanced by irony; as a result, the narration becomes less explicit, but gains in complexity.
Although the procedure employed in Psalm 44 is rejected, the Novi Sad massacre is never truly absent from this fictional universe where the violence of history and the malady of the camps remain inescapable subjects. The cold days become the unspeakable horror that is the substratum of the novelistic world in the texts dealing with the Second World War. Thus, in the family trilogy, although war and the camps are present as a backdrop, and although there is no longer any question of life in the camps, the reader can still discover traces of the earlier narrative. Such is the case with the motif of the body’s betrayal at the hour of death, which gives rise to a general reflection on the body’s reaction in Psalm 44:
(…) for when consciousness accepts death and consents to nothingness, according to a complicated, almost mathematical calculation of its own, then the naked and abandoned animal begins to struggle for its survival and its rights to life (using its own means, of course), and to prevail, since consciousness has already capitulated before death, once again according to its logic, which is not that of the animal: the animal does not know the complicated laws of probability, and death does not interest it — it simply wants to live, and that is all21.
In Early Sorrows, we find this same motif; the generalizing reflection is, however, impossible, for the narration is most often taken up by the child. The boy tries to read in aunt Rebecca’s eyes the destiny of his father, which he wants to be tragic, “advancing among them and at their side (…) like a shepherd with his flock, like a rabbi among his faithful22.” But he lulls himself with illusions only briefly, and the initial image withdraws to make way for a more probable scene, in which the father, struck, groaning and falling, “wept like a child, while around him spread the odor of his body, the terrible stench of his treacherous intestines23.” Referring directly to the reflection on the animal reaction of man before death, this description proves that Kiš always keeps in memory the imaginary of his earlier text, even though he has changed his perspective and his writing strategy.
But it is in Hourglass, the last novel of the trilogy, that the cold days acquire a central place in the fictional dynamic. Whereas in the first two volumes, told from the point of view of the narrator-son, the father remains a mysterious and incomprehensible being, mad, prophet, and comedian, in the last volume this narrowing of the field is abandoned in favor of a heightened objectivity. The four types of fragments that make up the novel show the father as the object of almost neutral description or of probing interrogation, as a witness at a hearing or as the author of writings that unveil his interiority. This last type of fragment, titled “Notes of a Madman,” gathers E.S.’s notes. Fragments 53-55 relate one of his crises, in which he sees himself doubled, a stranger to himself, conscious of the existence of another who is nonetheless himself, and who is the bearer of an intense and dangerous thought, of a nightmarish and terrifying experience. Reconstructing the crisis of his “divided self,” E.S. begins to recount, for the one and only time, his experience at the edge of the Danube:
This feeling of being abandoned by my own self, this image of myself seen by another, this relationship with myself as with a stranger […] [24] on the edge of the Danube, while I stood in the line. It was that same feeling (…)25
In the version presented, it is only a single sentence; of the description in Psalm 44, so rich in naturalistic details, there remains only this single statement, “on the edge of the Danube, while I stood in the line.” The father’s discourse immediately passes to the analysis of the inner doubling, but the lack and the failure of the narrative are noted and made explicit. The missing page would then be the one describing the horror of imminent death, of death all but lived. This page is nonetheless absent, because, a dozen years after the writing of Psalm 44, the massacre can exist only as this central void, the abyss where the narration stops and is transformed into silence. Kiš’s art has evolved; he now privileges distance and litotes, refusing the representation of violence if it is not counterbalanced by the narrative strategies of his choosing. The text still faces violence and evil, but it no longer does so directly, like a mirror that faithfully captures the horror. The sources demand respect for the facts, but the writing maintains a more oblique relation to the event.
In 1986, in the interview conducted by Gabi Gleichmann, Kiš once again treats the subject of the cold days explicitly. The procedure he chooses is the exact opposite of the one he used for the description of the massacre in Psalm 44. Indeed, when he wants to reconstruct what happened to his father at the edge of the Danube, Kiš presents the facts as if they were recorded by a camera. Marija’s memory already resembled a recording of everything that was happening around her, but her proximity excluded the objectivity of the gaze. By presenting the scene as if it were filmed, Kiš fictionalizes the description — not in order to modify the facts to which he holds, but in order to manage to present an objective point of view, placing “the camera that does not tremble” at such a height that one “cannot make out the faces,” and this precisely with the aim of “avoiding the temptation of detail, the description of naked bodies, the humiliating scenes26.” If the memory of the cold days is ineffaceable, such is also the case with the memory of this youthful text that tries to render an account of them. Twenty-four years after its publication, Psalm 44 is implicitly evoked by Kiš when he describes the cold days; it is present in negative, in the very refusal of its images and its writing strategies: a writing abandoned, but never forgotten.
Notes
Bibliography
Delić, Jovan, Kroz prozu Danila Kiša, Ka poetici Kišove proze II, Belgrade, “Posebna izdanja,” BIGZ, 1997.
Halpert-Zamir, Lily, Danilo Kiš: jedna bolna, mračna odiseja, trans. from the Hebrew by Ana Šomlo, Belgrade, Ateneum, 2000.
Kiš, Danilo, Psalam 44, Sabrana dela Danila Kiša, vol. 2, Belgrade, Prosveta, 2006.
Kiš, Danilo, Le résidu amer de l’expérience, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, Fayard, 1995.
Kiš, Danilo, Chagrins précoces, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, in Le cirque de famille, “L’imaginaire,” Gallimard, 1989.
Kiš, Danilo, Sablier, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, in Le cirque de famille, “L’imaginaire,” Gallimard, 1989.
Krnjević, Vuk, “Kišov porodični ciklus,” Književnost 2-3, Belgrade, Prosveta, 1990, pp. 333-346.
Radovanović, Miroslav, “Nadgrađeni dokument: o romanu Psalam 44 D. Kiša,” Savremenik plus: književni časopis, no. 137/138/139, Belgrade, Apostrof, 2006, pp. 77-83.
Danilo Kiš, “Life, literature,” interview with Gabi Gleichmann, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 21.08.1986, Le résidu amer de l’expérience (The Bitter Residue of Experience), trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, Fayard, 1995, p. 191.↩︎
See: Jovan Delić, Kroz prozu Danila Kiša, Ka poetici Kišove proze II, Belgrade, BIGZ, “Posebna izdanja,” 1997. In Delić’s work, an entire chapter is devoted to Psalm 44 (pp. 39-61).↩︎
Danilo Kiš, “Life, literature,” interview with Gabi Gleichmann, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 21.08.1986, op. cit., Le résidu amer de l’expérience, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, Fayard, 1995, p. 192.↩︎
“I would say that what is Jewish in me is more my destiny than my culture. I underwent the sufferings of a child from a Jewish family, during the war and after, although half-Jewish and baptized in Orthodoxy at the age of five. But practically my entire family disappeared, and that prompted me to come back to this, to read and to study this Jewish tradition. It remains bookish, if you will. Or rather: there is something involuntarily Jewish in what I write, almost cabalistic at times…” Danilo Kiš, “Baroque et vérité,” interview with Guy Scarpetta, Art Press, Paris, April 1988, op. cit., p. 253.↩︎
Danilo Kiš, “Life, literature,” interview with Gabi Gleichmann, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 21.08.1986, op. cit., p. 192.↩︎
“Psalm 44, however, besides having an objectivist prose intonation, although it is strongly steeped in the commonplaces of literature (B. Schulz, for example) that describe the destiny of the Jews of Europe in the Nazi era, is interesting on account of certain prose units that seem to be taken from existing non-literary sources and introduced, through the technique of ‘documentary prose,’ into the narrative fabric of this short novel.” Vuk Krnjević, “Kišov porodični ciklus,” Književnost 2-3, Belgrade, Prosveta, 1990, p. 335.↩︎
“[A] lyrical novel of a monological-associative cast.” Miroslav Radovanović, “Nadgrađeni dokument: o romanu Psalam 44 D. Kiša,” Savremenik plus: književni časopis, Belgrade, Apostrof, no. 137/138/139, 2006, p. 77. Our translation.↩︎
Jovan Delić, op. cit., pp. 210-211.↩︎
Danilo Kiš, Psalam 44, Sabrana dela Danila Kiša, vol. 2, Belgrade, Prosveta, 2006, p. 91. We translate all quotations from the novel.↩︎
Ibid., p. 126.↩︎
See the thesis of Lily Halpert-Zamir, Danilo Kiš: jedna bolna, mračna odiseja, trans. from the Hebrew by Ana Šomlo, Belgrade, Ateneum, 2000 (Danilo Kiš, a Painful and Dark Odyssey, trans. from the Hebrew by Ana Šomlo). In the chapter “Jugoslavija u vreme holokausta” (“Yugoslavia in the Time of the Holocaust”), pp. 29-39, concerning the number of victims at Novi Sad, she gives the following figures: “more than eleven hundred Jews, eight hundred Serbs, and seventy members of other nations” (Ibid., p. 32). The number of victims in Vojvodina ran into the thousands.↩︎
“In 1942 I witnessed the massacre of Jews and Serbs by the Hungarian army; I saw death up close and I was afraid of it.” Danilo Kiš, “J’écris pour relier des mondes éloignés,” interview with Sandro Scabello, Corriere della Sera, Rome, 26.05.1988, Le résidu amer de l’expérience, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, Fayard, 1995, p. 257.↩︎
Danilo Kiš, “Life, literature,” interview with Gabi Gleichmann, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 21.08.1986, op. cit., p. 188.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Danilo Kiš, Psalam 44, Sabrana dela Danila Kiša, vol. 2, Belgrade, Prosveta, 2006, p. 14.↩︎
Ibid., p. 102.↩︎
Ibid., p. 97.↩︎
Ibid., p. 98.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 99-100.↩︎
Danilo Kiš, “Life, literature,” interview with Gabi Gleichmann, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 21.08.1986, Le résidu amer de l’expérience, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, Fayard, 1995, p. 192.↩︎
Danilo Kiš, Psalam 44, Sabrana dela Danila Kiša, vol. 2, Belgrade, Prosveta, 2006, p. 96.↩︎
Danilo Kiš, Chagrins précoces (Early Sorrows), trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, in Le cirque de famille, “L’imaginaire,” Gallimard, 1989, p. 70.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Incomplete. A page is missing. (Author’s note.)↩︎
Danilo Kiš, Sablier (Hourglass), trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, in Le cirque de famille, “L’imaginaire,” Gallimard, 1989, p. 379.↩︎
Danilo Kiš, “Life, literature,” interview with Gabi Gleichmann, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, 21.08.1986, Le résidu amer de l’expérience, trans. from the Serbo-Croatian by Pascale Delpech, Fayard, 1995, p. 188.↩︎