It was rather obvious in 1991 that Bosnia and Herzegovina, then one of the six Yugoslav republics, was not going to survive the collapse of Yugoslavia without plunging into violence. The question, which was discussed at several workshops in Sarajevo that year, still sounds pertinent: Could the 1992-5 war have been avoided and a relatively smooth transition to independence achieved […]
Everyone says that I’m a valuable witness. To what? Truth, you say? Truth is no longer naked. It wears designer clothes created on some Sunrise Avenue and stitched together in some Jamarta, San Singo, Getucipalga. Truth is no longer plain. It’s like sophisticated fake jewelry on a fabulously rich woman. You either know it’s fake but say nothing aware that […]
Beyond everything unreal Nothing is the only verity – finding a blind spot of a mortar shell lighting the pilot light as the sniper’s eye blinks – Crazed calculations Courting involuntary muscles – as if the body could absorb the blow and make the brain disown the pain when the entrails rise ethereal like batter dough and a salty crust […]
Thousand and one nights away In a city where all windows had glaucoma And hunger was a cannibal dancing in the brain, I stole voraciously candles and matches To copy the death-bed edition Of “Leaves of Grass” in minuscule letters Of another language and make it lighter In a battered vinyl case when lugged Across the powder bleached field. My […]
It is always possible to YES or NO. – Hannah Arendt When searching for an answer to why the question of civil courage had become so important for me, I came to the event in my own life which had been decisive for me. When I was six, my mother, who had been trying for sixteen years to find out […]
Where it is none knows We know little but it’s known Beyond forest beyond valley Beyond seven beyond eight Still worse still crazier Over weary over bitter Over blackthorn over bramble Over heat over strictness Over foreboding over doubts Beyond nine beyond ten Still deeper still stronger Beyond quiet beyond dark Where no cock crows Where no horn’s voice is […]
The modern-day Horsemen of the Apocalypse—death, destruction, ethnic cleansing and lies—ride over Bosnia today. Everything that the human spirit and labor of our greatgrandfathers created over thousands of years is being destroyed. Day after day, month after month, year after year, they leave behind devastated towns, torched villages, and dead bodies, fated only to become statistics. Every new figure in […]
Stay here!… The sun that shines in a foreign place, Will never warm you like the sun in your own; The bread has a bitter taste there Where one has no one, not even a brother. Who would find a better mother than one’s own, And your mother is this country; Take a look upon the limestones and the field, […]
Last night, returning from the warm hamam, I passed by the garden of the old imam, And lo, in the garden, in the shade of a jasmine, There with a pitcher in her hand stood Emina. What beauty! By my Muslim faith I could swear, She wouldn’t be ashamed if she were at the sultan’s! And the way she walks […]
I will approach the poem from the angle of language. If we listen closely enough, we will hear an arrhythmia in the language, i.e., an alternation of two opposing or colliding voices. In the first stanza, the language is clean, poetic, with a touch of solemnity: one balanced sentence stretches through four lines, with rhyming Turkisms, i.e., in the privileged […]
I know I am writing a letter that cannot reach its addressee, but my comfort is that it will be read by the one who loves us both. It is very late at night and I don’t feel like sleeping. In this time of night one can only talk to ghosts and memories, and I am thinking about the golden […]
I am crying Because of your love that made a slave of me Because of a love too feeble to free me You are crying Translated by Keith Doubt & Luisa Lang Owen – © 2006 Keith Doubt & Luisa Lang Owen
About you have all the songs been sung and there is nothing more about you to be sung About you has everything been spoken and there could be nothing else to be said about you Your linens have remained as mysterious as the night and your suitors as transparent as the morning And nevertheless I must still place you in […]
You are huge Terrible In your Immensity You are Strong Nearly a god But I am No one And nothing That is the key For you But Nevertheless You are mine I would not Be You The key is that For me A human Your Long arms Will never reach to My small frightened heart Translated by Keith Doubt – © […]
I wonder what I think of the phrase “Bosnian Spirit.” I admit that I seldom think of this phrase in itself, but then from another point of view it is even more self-defeating to believe that I will not be able to deal with it in any way, especially not reflectively, in the foreseeable future. Not for two reasons at […]
Consequences
from a green meadow, wounded, was staring at the sky. There was nothing for a million miles around. Yes, miles, as if the immense void that Roared around me was in fact the open sea. Stark and boundless. From everything, under the sky, Only a blind starkness remained that roared brutally. At first, to be sure, Serb frogs could be […]
It’s getting dark, and in the west someone’s foot Has knocked over a jug of wine, pouring it all over the horizon. The new moon looks like horns on a helmet in which, in films, Moses is shown. Pines smell of a mixture of lemons and incense A soldier, long and brittle like a rye stalk, is doing sentry duty. […]
After the Balkan War, the Turks suddenly left, but the hatred remained. Now it’s exploding in Bosnia. The hatred endures, although its subject has evaporated. The human soul has always lagged behind the world. The soul is a whirlpool mirroring in winter the cranes flown south in autumn. For five centuries the Turks were their guests. And they left overnight. […]
Can a people and its state be deprived of the right to their state insignia? The fleur-de-lis state insignia of Bosnia and Herzegovina (coat of arms and flag), used during the 1992-1995 war and several post-war years, was replaced by the international community with a new one that remains in use today. Instead of the golden lilies, which for centuries […]