![]() ![]() Mikasinovich’s belief that his selection “embodies the best that Serbian comedy can offer” begs some questions. The common thread in all these comedies, regardless of their time of composition or their particular plot, is Serbia’s precipitous, never accomplished transition from a staunchly patriarchal society, driven by bonds of family kinship and the sacrificial myth of Kosovo, to a modern nation-state, marked competitive entrepreneurship, where success is reserved for individuals. Likewise, the plays selected cover a wide range of comic plots: from a group of sycophants, caught in the whirlwind of the revolution of 1848, who support the Serbian or the Hungarian cause as the wind blows (Sterija’s Patriots ), to a veritable menagerie of petty-bourgeois careerists, matchmakers and home-wreckers in the Serbian and, later, Yugoslav kingdom (Nušić’s Suspicious Character, Mrs Minister, and PhD ), to the allegorical representations of mentality patterns tinged with graveyard humor and absurd (Kovačević’s The Marathon Family, The Gathering Place, Larry Thompson, the Tragedy of a Youth, Kumovi: (A Comic Look at an Everyday Tragedy), Hypnotized by Love ). The editor’s selection frames three playwrights from three very different epoques and cultural milieus: the Serb from the then Habsburg province of Vojvodina Jovan Popović Sterija (1806-1856), the Aromanian-born Branislav Nušić (1864-1938), and Dušan Kovačević from the plebeian Western Serbia (b. Regardless of the editor’s explicit goal, there is necessarily a broader context within which such a mission can make sense: why exactly have those plays been selected and what are they going to do there? In other words, what is seen as comic in a given source culture at a given point in time and how is this quality conveyed in another time and another, target culture?Ī remarkably ambitious endeavor, Mikasinovich’s anthology goes some way towards addressing these questions. Yet, dispatching a play (or plays) originally written in a ‘small’ language into a vast, largely self-centred publishing market is similar to sending a man or-more in keeping with the comic nature of the subject-a dog into space. The editor seems to have been driven by what Ondřej Vimr defined as supply-driven translation: the plays have been rendered into English purely for the sake of their being available to English-reading audiences rather than meeting an existing demand in those audiences. The selection builds upon Mikasinovich’s earlier pioneering anthologies of South Slav drama, Five Modern Yugoslav Plays (1977) and Selected Serbian Plays (2016). The latest compilation from the scholar and anthologist Branko Mikasinovich brings together nine plays by three Serbian playwrights.
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