THE BURNING PRIMER
for Dubravka Ugrešić
I have a fever. The numbers on the digital thermometer read 39.7 and the decimals keep climbing. When I retrieved the thermometer, it recalled the last temperature taken some six weeks back. It was you it remembered, on the mend from strep throat and cooling to a pleasant 37 degrees. At that point we could finally breathe a little easier and stop taking your temperature at every step. The ruby-colored antibiotic coursed through your veins and, like a beautiful poison, killed everything it needed to kill. Nice how the thermometer calls up only happy days. At the height of your illness, your temperature was just shy of 41, and you were hot as an oven. Your joints, your forehead, and your neck could fry an egg. Shame we didn’t try that instead of all those mind-numbing science experiments you had to do for homework (like bringing water to a boil and dissolving sugar in it). Now my temperature’s sure to catch up to yours—hey, maybe I’ll break our household record. I won’t be getting any medals for that. No one will even know my insides are charred, my pyres burn so softly. Besides, all the longevity experts would say that it’s perfectly logical I got sick, that it’d be a medical miracle had I not. Since you’ve been gone, I don’t keep track of the days, I barely leave the apartment, and rarely eat any produce. Lettuce and chard don’t twirl their lavish little green dresses on my plate, and I can’t remember the last time I sliced into and ate a piece of fruit, my chin dripping with its healthful, vitamin-rich juice. I go through the motions, eating enough to keep myself alive. I appease my hunger with frozen food. Bright orange fish sticks, all of equal size, pastries baked, frozen, then baked again, reheated chicken nuggets that once made up a chirping chorus boiling in oil, sauces that only needed to be thawed, and let’s not forget the frozen fries made from a powder of some sort… All the things I’d absolutely forbid you to eat—and I’d throw in a free lecture on nutrition too. But look at me now. I consume the worst of the worst, with the hope you’ll never find out. All of it removed from its plastic packaging, quickly reheated, and eaten with no appetite. Packaging covered in names of artificial additives piled up, while my stomach turned into a waste incinerator. It doesn’t even matter: you came out of there long ago. And, well, there’s now an imposing tower of recyclables in the entryway. Once I muster up the energy, I should destroy all traces of evidence that could discredit me in your eyes. I trudge through the apartment in the flames of my fever like some Jan Palach and my tottering brings the obelisk of recyclables down—an apocalyptic shower of packaging with still lifes of burnt-through pastries, of fish carcass mannequins for processed fish sticks, of chicken nuggets round and shiny like Olympic gold, of abstract pizza shapes, down to wrappers that once contained Jaffa cakes, which you crumbled in your mouth just weeks ago, making a purée of chocolate, cracker, and orange jelly. Everything was now level with the parquet floor like a building flattened by a powerful missile. The cascade uncovered your school primers, which you slipped into the recycling bin at the school year’s end—only now apparent to me. You hastily buried them lest the primers’ pages grab a hold of you like spine-chilling tentacles while your brain’s on summer vacation. Instead, your mind’s safe to keep in rhythm with light Dalmatian melodies while your peers are being dismembered in Gaza. This morning I was woken by a synthetic version of the Fifth Symphony: it was the cry of your forgotten Tamagotchi. An ominous start to the day. O primers, long forgotten, I know you all would join me on the highway moving at a snail’s pace, eager to reach the Island where you are, cooled by the ocean currents like an expensive champagne. The Tamagotchi would run to greet you, jumping on you and licking your knees, scraped up in some game, while it blared the notes of “Ode to Joy.” But I can already see us all, primers dear and forgotten: our insides scattered and shredded past the first intersection. You primers, too, remember only happy days, when innocent little hands filled your pages, the same hands that, soon as school was out for the year, wiped you all from the face of the earth. Good morning, primers! Good morning, Mommy!, the primers answer. Good morning! Good day! I’m in the sky, come outside! My little sunshine! Here’s some vitamin D, Mommy! You’ve just been eating junk, Mommy—bad Mommy! How beautifully the apples in your primers multiply! How heavy the trees are with oranges and bananas—all carefully tended by your little hands like a diligent farmer, all neatly arranged across the page like an unending production line. If you remove on from orange, you’re left with rage. If you remove ana from banana, you’re left with ban. But why wouldn’t you remove that stupid ban instead, leaving you with a cheery Ana? Ha-ha, silly primer, you remember only happy days and everything’s just nice and peachy in your pages! Words written together: isn’t, aren’t, amiss. Oh, how I miss you! Separated: not letting, not allowed, not going. My parents, you add, scribbling dejectedly. You draw a sad face with a teardrop. My little cloud. If only your rainy little hand could rest on my burning forehead and heal my soul. In solitude, I’m reading your primers and burning up. Like a raging blaze. The thermometer doesn’t have the numbers for this fire. Even Anders Celsius is petrified. How nice it would be to slip into the sea and surrender all my supercharged worries. You’re there now, floating gently on the surface without a care. And without me. There was a time we’d take a dip together in that blue expanse. I, treading cautiously, avoiding sea urchins, and you, safely tucked inside my stomach like in a submarine. The ocean here and now! The farmer and the plow! Airplanes fly by night like owls! Underline the rhymes, children dears: lineage – pillage, flood – blood, humiliation, fortification, annihilation… Good morning! Good day! I’m in the sky, come outside, I’m not the Sun, guess who I am, ha-ha-ha! An airplane dropping bombs on the city! When rooster loses er, you get roost. When Germany loses Ger, you get many. When school loses sh, you get cool. When the school loses its roof, you get a school without a roof. When the school loses its roof and walls, there’s no more school. Wounded students carpool to the hospital. I’m burning like a torch. The smart thermometer smolders. It’s of no use now. I need to lock it away in a drawer to rot and remember only the happy days, together with your Tamagotchi, until their batteries die. My brain’s succumbing to fever, my head shoots off sparks, I can no longer read properly! Vitamins, Mommy! Tan Mommy Ivy! Bring the vitamins! Stain the bin! No—aim at ban! Not the van! I’m rescued by your oranges. Calm down, Ana, ban’s out to sea, calm down, Mommy, take some vitamin C! the Jaffa oranges tell me. They’re juicy, they’re sweet, with thick peels, and no seeds. The seeds sow shadows, masks hide disgrace. Seeds recede, the fruit seized, the children count their last days. They, corpses, while death curtsies. Little Jaffa oranges in the clutches of sadness turning their sweet juices to salt. Mommy, what are you talking about? Mommy, who are you talking to?, the letters of the primer ask. The reheated food steams, the walls have ears! I’m talking to the wall, primer dear! I’m talking to the wall! Appealing to a pale glimmer! I’m prattling on, this damned fever! You’re burning up, Mommy! When grazed loses red, you get Gaza. G like grim. G like genocide. And you, how you cling to me when it thunders. When fireworks go off, you spring awake and ask, soaked and disoriented: ’at was that? Yes, what was that, my little baby, you hold your blanket tight, sweating in mortal fear. P like pyrotechnics. Definitely not P like plush flamingo, innocent little baby! There was pleading, panic, peril, pillage, pandemonium, prelude to the Fifth, Palach, Palestine… I scorch your primer with my fiery pen. Silence strolls along the empty street, no one thinks of poor Pete. Even god has abandoned Pete. On the staff I compose a lullaby for pleading babies. Heavy notes. Help! Babies! Help! Burning babies! Chuck slices of cheese at them like in those viral videos, ha-ha-ha. That should calm them. Pour sugary water on them! They’ll be soothed by the sweet flavor, P like predatory behavior. You’re burning up, Mommy! My forehead glows, my eyelids droop, the cheese on my head melts. The olive tree burns. The orange tree burns. People burn. Danger: Fire! We’re fading, fading in silence. We’re dying, dying in solitude. Performers play, politicians piss pyrotechnics! Is this a primer or a school restroom?! I’m shaken by fiery ice. I shake off the ice and the fire still consumes me. You’re burning, primer! You’re burning, little house! You’re delirious, Mommy! The grenade thunders, thunders! ’At was that? Little girl, quick, hide under the blanket! People die in solitude! People die in solitude! Can anyone hear?! Ears have walls! Ears have walls! Ears have thick walls.
Translator’s Note:
This piece is Maša through and through: it’s packed down, like a late-capitalist landfill exploding with word play. There’s heat, trash, synthetic music, a sense of distance and of distancing. Even the recycling becomes “imposing,” requiring energy—from you, from others, from the earth—to process this “shower of packaging” that once contained processed goods. All this makes it a companion read to her short story “Konzuming,” which also appears in ANMLY.
Generating word play is one thing, and it’s a method Maša and I both love dearly in our writing. But translating word play is a different ballgame: by the end of the first few lines, I wanted to translate the piece; by the end of the first page, I wondered why I would ever wish such a translation project upon myself. The initial wall turned out to be a moveable partition: I spoke with Maša and asked whether she’d be okay if I replaced the apple in Croatian—“jabuka”—with an orange. She told me I could write it however I wanted, a trust I never take for granted. “If you remove on from orange, you’re left with rage.”
By the time I got to “Underline the rhymes, children dears,” I knew I was in trouble. Maša writes:
brat – rat, vrvi – krvi, stid, zid, genocid…
And I eventually wrote back:
lineage – pillage, flood – blood, humiliation, fortification, annihilation…
Although the line was notably longer in English, I was happy what came out of rewriting words (over and over and over) that were renditions of “brother – war, boiling – blood, shame, wall, genocide,” a barer translation of the original. Here’s another example:
Kad gazda izgubi d, nastaje Gaza.
Which, in more literal terms, could read “When landlord [or boss, or manager] loses d, you get Gaza. G like thunder. G like grenade. G like genocide.” I quickly recognized how few Zs there actually are in the English language, and how fewer still scramble to “Gaza.” (Translation can be a salve: those moments grant you time to focus on doing justice to the language of witnessing.) After an hour of saying words out loud, sometimes in alphabetical riffs, I came up with “grazed,” which embeds “razed,” and also stretches to “Gaza.” The word “thunder” doesn’t start with the letter G—even AI knows that. But “grim” had the sound, and then I eventually saw it as the best option. So:
When grazed loses red, you get Gaza.
A note about the dedication to Dubravka Ugrešić. It honors the central role Yugoslav primers played in Ugrešić’s work. You find lines from those first readers as epigraphs to essays in The Age of Skin, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, and visually represented in exhibitions, like The Red School, given new life by Vlad Beronja for harlequin creature’s final issue. Ugrešić died in 2023.
Maša Kolanović is a prize-winning author best known for her fiction and poetry. Her books include the poetry collection Pijavice za usamljene (Leeches for the Lonely, 2001), the novel Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie, 2008), the prose poem Jamerika (2013), and the short story collection Poštovani kukci i druge jezive price (Dear Pests and Other Creepy Stories, 2019). The latter received the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, the Pula Book Fair Audience Award, and the Vladimir Nazor Prize for Literature. She is an associate professor in Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb.
Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her latest full-length translation—Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie—is out with Sandorf Passage. Her translation of Tatjana Gromača’s novella Crnac (Black) recently won Trafika Europe’s Prize for Prose in 2025. She holds a PhD in comparative literature.
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