I love books, and I want my main occupation and my work to be all about them!
I fell in love with them by reading, again and again, the handful of books in my village school library. I fell in love with books by reading “Hajduk Stanko”, a Serbian classic, once (sometimes twice) a year. My sister had been given it as a reward for helping to clear out the damaged books from the school library in the next village.
I fell in love with books by reading Sidney Sheldon with my mum and my sister on the lawn in front of our village house that had no roof yet, waiting for each other or hurrying each other up so we could turn the page. I had so few of them, and I loved them so much.
Some kind of magic happened whenever I picked up a book and dived into it, escaping (at least in my head) from the hard everyday work on the farm…
When I met my Mima, we had a lot in common, but perhaps most of all our love for those bound sheets of paper. We talked for hours and days about the books we had read and the ones we hadn’t, and so my love for books grew together with my love for Mima.
What could be better than sharing the same interests with the love of your life?
To this day I have never felt ready to write a book myself. I don’t think you can fake that. You need to have something to say before you take that step. That moment may never come! None of us can know and do everything! Wanting to know something doesn’t necessarily mean you are able to do it!
Nor do I think that this “something” just comes along or can be dreamed into being. Everything takes an enormous amount of work, effort and practice. Nothing comes for free and nothing happens overnight.
Never enough books: part of our home library.
However, something else connected to books, something I felt I could actually do, is bookbinding and translation. Honestly, I don’t know which of the two came first. I suppose I started doing both at the same time. My love for translation began about ten years ago, when during my studies I discovered that translating texts into my mother tongue (despite my enormous lack of language skills) was something I truly enjoyed.
Whenever I could choose between writing a seminar paper and doing a translation as a requirement for certain exams, I always chose the translation. Then I started offering to translate my fellow students’ texts too, for a fee. That was sweet money. I could stare at the screen for hours without blinking…
I was fascinated by the creative process and by how intensely you learn. You learn the language, you learn the content, you learn to find solutions, you learn to think, you learn to concentrate, you learn discipline…
And so, after my bachelor’s degree in Serbia, I set off for Germany with one goal: to learn the language, to study and, after plenty of practice, to start translating books. And believe it or not, after only a few months of learning German, while I was still at B1 level, I translated a short article from Der Spiegel. Just for myself! At B1 level hardly anyone can speak properly. At best you can manage in a shop. I found my voice, at least on paper 😊
After three years (two years of learning the language and one year of studies) I translated a book. Thank God it wasn’t published straight away. Another year passed before a way was found to publish it, and then I spent another year revising my translation and also translating additions to the same book. So the whole process took about two years.
On the one hand it took a long time, but on the other hand it was a necessary and painstaking process, and I came out of it incredibly enriched. I then managed to bind that first translation of mine into a book with my own two hands.
Do you know what matters most in all this work? What matters is having someone who supports you, even when everything seems hopeless! Do you know how hard it was for me when I finished the first draft of that translation and nobody wanted to publish it? You put two months into something and then it just sits in a drawer… If Mima hadn’t encouraged and comforted me the whole time, I would probably have deleted that text and burned it.
As soon as the first book came out, I started asking around and looking for the next project. I didn’t wait for someone to offer me work. I went looking for it! I translated the second book much faster and more easily than the first. The goal: five pages a day. No getting up until the quota is met. In a month and a half, 150 pages were translated. About eight months later, after several rounds of proofreading and polishing, this translation will be printed too.
I, who generally have little patience and like to get things done in one go, am ready to wait, work and polish for a long time and patiently when it comes to books… Do you know why??? Because I love books! Because I love everything connected to them. And because I am ready to keep improving until I drop, so that I can spend my whole life working with what I love and on what I love: BOOKS.
I am immensely grateful to God that I have found work, or rather several kinds of work, that I love and that will never feel like just a job. I know that many people never manage that.
That is why I am immensely grateful to my sister Jeca, who taught me to read, to my mum, who got us interested in books through her own example, to Mima, with whom I finally started building our home library and who supports me endlessly in my translating and bookbinding work… And of course to my little rascal Sofia, who is my reason not to wait for things to happen, but to take the initiative and find a way to earn a living from what I love doing.
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