TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

TRAFIKA EUROPE 17 —Mysterious Montenegro EDITOR’S WELCOME Literaturecontinues, in this timeof pandemic.With this, our seventeenth issue, we’re pleased to offer a modest focus with fiction and poetry from mysterious Montenegro – and elsewhere in Europe. Milovan Radojević ’s Dominik is a novel set in the late 12th and early 13th centuries in Dioclea—a principality on the Adriatic that roughly encompassed the territories of present-day southern Montenegro. With fabulous digressions, constructed manuscripts, and like fancy, Dominik is about the friendship between twoclerics of theDioclean Church, which was under Roman Catholic jurisdiction. This tale may serve as a mirror for wider historical events, then and now. Lena Ruth Stefanović is a Montenegrin poet who, in her living and in her work, has explored broken systems and political epochs, and who is never far from the spiritual as she leaves a generous record of her thoughts in poems. In her award-winning novel, Catherine the Great and the Small , author OljaKnežević takesusonan intimate journey, via thepowerful character, Catherine, through Tito’s Yugoslavia and its aftermath. Poet Tanja Bakić ’s interests range wildly, from scholarship and poetry inspired by William Blake to a non-fiction bestselling book on Jimi Hendrix.

[ For an extra treat, check out our video of Tanja Bakić’s poem, “Together We Started Crying”, right here. ]

Rounding out our Montenegro focus, Aleksandar Bečanović ’s novel, Arceuil , has won the European Union Prize for Literature. On Easter Sunday, 1768, Marquis de Sade promises an ecu to a beggar by the name of Rose Keller if she follows him to Arcueil. So the novel unfolds…

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