" What's in a name ": Danilo Kis

If you are summoned to a questioning with the Secret Service of Writing, you' d no doubt spill out the most likely truth known to you:

They: "Who's writing would you like to emulate? "

You (breathless):" Danilo Kis, Danilo Kis,Danilo Kis. Yes, no doubt: Danilo Kis. "

They: "You know this is an answer that does you no favor. If there is a trial, your answer will do you no favor".

Danilo Kis was the most unpredictable literary meeting at a time we were reading mostly the 19th century heavies.  A name vaguely familiar, but in a way that didn't do him any justice. Maybe you read it on the door of one of your friend's neighbors, or involuntarily recorded it while browsing  in the downtown bookstore  the dusty shelves of realist-socialist literature that nobody had ever read, or heard it in a long tale of bureaucratic  frustration always denouncing a chain of gatekeepers of the day. You couldn't quite explain the sense of familiar, but when you two met he came in the form of a tired, little used book, with a sprig of dust and mold incense, discolored pages yet glossy cover revealing a somewhat unattractive title: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. That's pretty much how the beach literature of my generation looked like. That's what we were circulating among us, as bookstores still sold "good" books faster than discounted tenderloin, and the surest way to read "a very good book" was to get it from a friend or the friend of a friend of a friend...  You've often wondered how is it that a tiny book can teach you everything you absolutely needed to understand about your life, loves, and perils, about history, man, and their demons in a few dozen pages of simply beautiful prose. You have no answer other than that was the day I knew I was no writer and I would never be one. About a year after, you translated for  a literary anthology a fragment from his " Encyclopedia of the Dead" and it was your first published literary translation.