Sunday, February 25, 2018

Meet the collaborators: Damir Šodan

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.