Transnational Series: Ellen Elias-Bursać with Jim Hicks

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with translator Ellen Elias-Bursać to discuss and honor the release of Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah by Miljenko Jergović. She will be in conversation with writer and translator Jim Hicks.

From award-winning writer Miljenko Jergović—candid tales that reprise and embroider Bosnia’s rich folklore.

Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah begins from a point of listening—turning up the radio, dragging a cafe chair closer to the man with the saz, dropping a record needle. In the Sarajevo of Miljenko Jergović’s childhood, folk songs permeated life. Their dusky melodies filled car rides, scored television programs, and echoed down alleyways, hummed drunkenly as daybreak glazed the city’s steeples and minarets.

In these nineteen stories, Jergović imagines what might have inspired such wistful tunes, crafting a catalog of source material. The reader is loosed from her contemporary seat as relics of an old world arise. Time slows to an ancient cadence. Here lives become totemic, fate hangs like a scarf over the shoulderblades of heroes and scoundrels alike, while misfortune, hubris, and luck transform individuals into a collective cry. Like an accordion which unfolds to fill a room with sound, the book expands and compresses—by turns bawdy, brutal, funny and wise.

Drawn from deep wells of folklore and collective storytelling, Jergovic weaves together an extraordinary ethnography that manages to both critique the imperial domination and strife that has marked the Balkan region for centuries, and to display, carefully and tenderly, the lives of individuals, be they Christian or Muslim. Lives that (inshallah) seem to never end, in that boundless space of myth.

Born in Sarajevo in 1966, Miljenko Jergović is one of the most prolific and widely translated ex-Yugoslav writers. His poetry, fiction, essays, and columns grapple with the legacy of the 1990s Bosnian war, Balkan history, and the tension between personal and official historical narratives. His landmark collection of stories Sarajevo Marlboro received the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize. He currently lives and works in Zagreb.

Ellen Elias-Bursać translates from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. Her translation of Ivana Bodrožić’s novel Sons, Daughters was given the EBRD Literature Prize in 2025. She taught in the Harvard Slavic Department and was also the president of the American Literary Translators Association. Between 1998 and 2010, she worked in the English Translation Unit of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and is the author of Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal.

Moderator Jim Hicks is the former executive editor of the Massachusetts Review and former director of the Comparative Literature Graduate Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His recent translations include Sami al-Ajrami’s The Keys to My House: A Gaza Diary and Federica Marzi’s My Home Somewhere Else. His Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. The working title for his current book project is “The Interpreter’s Tale: Stories from the Frontlines of Postwar Sarajevo.”

Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah was also translated by Mirza Purić, a literary translator, editor, and musician. His recent book-length translations include Marko Pogačar’s Neon South and Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure. He has published essays in Agni, Asymptote, Literary Hub, EuropeNow, The Well Review, and elsewhere.

The Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith

The Transnational Series focuses on stories of migration, the intersection of politics and literature, and works in translation and is supported by the independent bookstore Brookline Booksmith. Subscribe to the Transnational Series newsletter for information on upcoming events, book recommendations, and more.

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Livestream!

Barring technical difficulty, this event will be livestreamed to our store YouTube channel.

Event Accesibility

This event will take place at street level. If possible, the event will be livestreamed to YouTube. ASL interpretation may be provided (based on the availability of interpreters) but must be requested at least 2 weeks in advance of the event. Seats are limited. Please email ticketing@brooklinebooksmith.com as soon as possible if you require ASL interpretation, guaranteed seating, or other accommodations. We will do our best to serve your needs!

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Please note that any Brookline Booksmith in-person event may be canceled by the bookstore, publisher, or author based on concerns about health and safety around the time of the event. Wherever possible, any in-person appearance canceled due to COVID will be moved to the Brookline Booksmith Zoom as a webinar at the same date and time, and all tickets and registrations will be transferred to the online event. Book signing details may change. Refunds may be requested in the case of a virtual pivot or event cancelation.