Magic Dead of Winter
For Petr Hruška Short days of a long winter, the sun blinds you worse than in midsummer. On the white snow, dotted with raccoon pawprints, falls the dark shadow of a pine trodden down by […]
Articles
I Find it Harder and Harder
to give a final shape to something. Not a single cup I scoop up water in, not a single jug I carry it in attains the balance between full and empty. Today I dare not […]
Ectopic Pregnancy
There are things known and unknown, Between them there are, they say, doors. And while I stand and wait Before one such door Between the one that exists And the one who could not be […]
Selected poems of Milorad Pejić in Czech translation
Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature has been translated to Czech more than to any other language. However, the poetry translations are so rare that each constitutes a special cultural moment. From 1911 – when the first Czech translation […]
The Sky is Dark
and the wind is driving a flock of tiny clouds, like sheep. Still, I’m not sure it will rain. You can’t rely on the sky, so I’m watering the tomatoes with extreme effort. They are […]
If You Look Back
you don’t know what you’ll step on in a dark alley, behind the school, where someone was leaving someone, where a small betrayal announced big defeats. If you take a wrong step, you’ll be blinded […]
HOME AGAIN
Although it’s still summer the surrounding peaks are white with clouds of snow. The creek by the road is springing like a goat. You think, here it’s more beautiful than in heaven but that overpowering […]
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOPE
Looking for who knows what, I stumbled upon a set of silverware sunk to the bottom of the last box with things no longer needed. It does not fit in with anything in my kitchen […]
NO NEED
to balance one’s accounts, friend, for every grain in the hourglass falls in its place anyhow. What used to hurt is now foreign: it had gone by like a movie on the screen while we, […]
THOSE DAYS
it was such a winter that swans’ webbings were getting stuck to the frozen Vltava. And they could never fly away from my memory. Just like you. In such cold – it no longer hurt […]
MARGITA
She’d pull a blanket over her head. She’d say: Although I see buds on branches, spring will not come again. Sometimes she didn’t have enough strength even to answer the phone. I’d wait outside the […]
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
To Dana and Anna Redford and Newman, in the famous movie from ’69. The idols of generations. And why wouldn’t they be when they look good, shoot with precision and, in the most dramatic of […]
White Field
New Year’s Day. Snow overlaid the minefield. Adin Ljuca Translated by Keith Doubt
Christmas in Prague
Street lamps were burning on all sides and the decorated trees were shining bright. Petards, rockets, fireworks. The celebratory shooting made the atmosphere relaxing, almost home-like. I told her about a Dane to whom, over […]
An Essay: From Nowhere with Love
When the famous 1985 New York Times Book Review polemic between Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky (the latter, a poet; the former, a novelist—but I like them both more as essayists) came again into my […]
Cinema Liberty
“Hello?” Saša answered. “Hello, it’s Adin, hello . . .” From the phone booth, I raised my voice over the clattering of a passing streetcar. “Adin, man! You’re alive? Alive, damm, you’re alive! Where are […]
Far, Far in the North
To Milorad Pejić You who are said to have tracked the reindeer’s scent, I couldn’t follow you. Not because, where you live, images are sharp as razors, nor because entering a warm place would dim […]
Critique of Pure Reason
They taught us about the climate of Ethiopia, the sheep population of New Zealand. They taught us the area of the USSR and the countries we have borders with. When my next-door neighbor showed up […]