Paperback Row - The Ministry of Pain

From this past Sunday's NYTBR Paperback Row

The Ministry of Pain, by Dubravka Ugresic.  Translated by Michael Henry Heim.  Ugresic explores the cultural and personal fallout from the disintegration of Yugoslavia in this searing novel about exiled Croats, Serbs and Bosnians.  Her protagonist, Tanja Lucic, a Croatian writer, teaches Slavic literature in Amsterdam to other young refugees.  ("I was naturally well aware of the absurdity of my situation," Tanja says. "I was to teach a subject that officially no longer existed.")

Michael Heim has translated the next original paperback in the Ecco7 series, Day In Day Out by Terézia Mora.  And his translation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice for Ecco won the 2005 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.  I was going to write another sentence with some version of the word "translation" in it, but I thought it would be one too many.

Translation.