For Croatia, I read Baba Yaga Laid An Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson. Although I don’t speak Croatian, I can tell the translators did a first class job because they included a lot of rhyming verse that flowed beautifully in English. How did the translators capture the spirit and language of this book and also get the verses to rhyme in English??? Obviously someone struck a deal with the devil.
Or maybe they struck a deal with Baba Yaga.
I only recently became acquainted with Baba Yaga when Pippa and I read The Door By The Staircase by Katherine Marsh and wow, that mythical character is WILD. Baba Yaga is a crone/hag/witch who lives in the woods in a hut with chicken legs. Sometimes she is childless but sometimes she has a daughter and still other times she has forty-one daughters. She might be helpful to children or hapless heroes searching for their princess loves. Or she might cook the children in a stew.
She also flies around in a mortar.
When I was searching for my Croatian book, and this title came to my attention, I thought, Ooooh. I love witch stories. When I read a little more about the book, and learned that it is part of The Myth series, which challenges authors to retell a myth in a contemporary and memorable way, and that this particular Baba Yaga retelling had a feminist bent, I was 110% in because I am obsessed with feminist retellings of old mythical stories.
The story is structured as a triptych. In part one, the story is told from the first person by a character who is the author of the book. She is dealing with her aging mother and then goes on a trip with Aba Bagay, a young folklore graduate student who annoys the crap out of the author. In part two, there is a story of three older women who visit a spa turned wellness center. Finally, the third section is a letter from Dr. Aba Bagay to the editor of the book, explaining the symbolism and imagery of the story in Part 2.
This was a chewy intellectual read that would make for the subject of a very interesting college essay. If I had encountered this book during my college days, it might have tempted me to abandon my history major and find a way to study folklore instead. Perhaps as a minor in our women’s studies department? (At the time I attended Dartmouth, we were not allowed to major in women’s studies.) (And as you can see, I’m giving this tangent a lot of serious thought, as if in an alternate dimension, there is a Courtney who pursues graduate studies in folklore.)
But as I was trying to say in the last paragraph, this book would make for an interesting discussion in a college essay, but it’s hard to pin it down in a blog post. I feel as if I should be explaining all the imagery and symbolism and the way Ugrešić put the reader on high alert because the novel is called Baba Yaga Laid an Egg but we are immediately thrown off balance by the absence of an obvious Baba Yaga, so we become determined to spot Baba Yaga’s appearance, not quite certain if the author’s mother is an iteration of Baba Yaga, or if the three older women at the wellness center combine to be a single Baba Yaga, or if they each stand alone as her own version of Baba Yaga. Then, in regards to the final part of the triptych, I kept flip-flopping between thinking (1) the author is taking the piss out of academia and (2) the author is deadly serious and this analysis is sincere and intended to challenge our understanding of folklore. In the end, it was probably a bit of both.
At least I can make this point: this book made me think and ponder and ruminate, especially about the ways that folklore influences our sense of self and culture, and how the stories of hags lurking the woods were told to tame women into dutiful wives and mothers. I’m still thinking about it weeks later as I try to tame its plot and characters into a blog post. But perhaps I’m missing the point. Instead of trying to tame Baba Yaga Laid An Egg into a concise analysis, I should let it be the wild creature it is. Let the story trample the woods, evade an easy analysis, and be gloriously wild and free as all women should be.