Daša Drndić’s Canzone di Guerra: New Battle Songs, first published in Croatian in 2019, is now available in an English translation (by Celia Hawkesworth) from Istros Books. Described as “a collage of different genres […] from (pseudo) autobiography to documentary material and culinary recipes,” Canzone di Guerra is set mainly in Toronto, among expatriates from the former Yugoslavia, who have fled the violence of the Yugoslav Wars of the late 1990s. Most have left everything behind—their homes, their friends and family, their possessions, their careers—and must start afresh. They speak of their past and of their new life in Canada with a mix of bitterness and resignation. Here is Marko, talking to a Canadian radio reporter while selling sausages on Toronto’s streets: “First I taught literature at a secondary school, later I was a lecturer at the university. I also worked as an editor for a publisher and wrote literary criticism. Then, I’m a poet. Yes, I’ve had books published. Excuse me… Hi! Spicy Italian or Polish? Three dollars please…” The narrator observes Canadian society with acerbity, finding it “a land of thick, rich forests, which are cut down in order to turn them into paper,” and “a land of very thrifty people.” A land of bureaucracy as well, with forms mediating every transaction, from an application for social support to the adoption of a cat. She also discovers that the old ethnic prejudices and animosities, suppressed in Yugoslavia for so many years under Tito, have simply migrated to Canada, where they live on among the expatriate community. She provides a helpful list: “What Do (Some Other) Immigrants Do In Canada After the Break-up of Socialist Yugoslavia?” Item #8: “They say that all sides in this war are equally to blame, and when they are told that yes, they are to blame but absolutely not equally, they stop speaking to you”; Item #19: “If you speak the Ijekavian dialect they ask you where you’re from so they know how to place you.” It seems that Tito’s vision of a united community of South Slavs has disappeared forever.

—Michael Hayward