While James Byrne and I were creating the Croatian poems of
Martina Markovic for
Twitters for a Lark:
Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors, James was in contact
with the real Croatian poet and translator
Damir
Šodan, who was taken by the project and who (back) translated one of our
poems into Croatian!
Since Croatia had joined the EU (and thus the EUOIA it
seems) after Rene Pelikan Van Valckenborch had drawn up his original EUOIA
list, I placed Croatia
at the head of his list, thus making Martina our youngest poet, appropriate for
the newest member. This also meant that her poems were at the start of the
book, and meant we could place the translation at the front, thus giving a
bilingual flavour that lasts for long enough to feel that the reader is reading
translations (I hoped).
 |
| Martina voting |
Damir Šodan is a Croatian poet, playwright, translator and editor, who
graduated from the Zagreb
University with a BA in
English Literature and History. He has published several collections of poetry
and plays, as well as an anthology of contemporary Croatian ‘neorealist’
poetry, Walk on the Other Side. He has translated Carver, Cohen,
Bukowski, Simic, O’Hara and many others into Croatian. Having worked for over
twenty years as a translator for the United Nations, he is now a freelance
writer and literary translator residing in the Hague,
Netherlands and Split, Croatia.
He is also the guitarist and
singer of the blue band The Downsizers, whose CD Sitting on Top of the World is on my desk as I write this account.
It combines some blues standards with some self penned work by the Hague-based
band! He is the second of the contributors to the project who I've not met. Yet...
Read more about the European Union
of Imaginary Authors here and here.
More on
Twitters for
a Lark here
and
here.
See also
A Translated Man ( an early
account
here;
the book is also available from Shearsman
here.)
All the collaborators are introduced at links available here. 
