Sasha Skenderija

Why the Dwarf had to be Shot

Translated from the Bosnian by Wayles Browne and others 1)

Foreword by K. E. Bättig von Wittelsbach Afterword by Wayles Browne

(Illustration on the cover by Sasha Skenderija)

Table of Contents

Foreword by K. E. Bättig von Wittelsbach /5

NOTHING'S LIKE IN THE MOVIES (1990-1993) I. EYE OF THE NEEDLE

1. Images from which he lives /13

2. If he falls asleep /14

3. Only possible things happen /15

4. We live in darkness /16

5. The war is on, the lines are broken /17

II. ON THE ONE-WAY STREET

FAMILY, SPRINGTIME /18

FAMILY, SUMMERTIME /19

A PLACE FOR THE PHOTOGRAPH /20

ON THE ONE-WAY STREET, GIRL WITH A DOG /21

DEEP BLUE /22

FIRESIDE /23

TELEPHONE /24

FACE /25

BILLIE HOLIDAY /26

WINTERTIME SCENE /27

FAMILY PORTRAIT /28

WEATHER FORECAST, MARCH '92 /29

III. WHY THE DWARF HAD TO BE SHOT

4TH OF JULY 1991 /31

SUNDAY /32

THE OCCUPATION IN TEN SCENES /33

BLACKOUT /34

TREATISE ON TAILORS /35

VENTRILOQUISTS /36

SYMBIOSIS /37

WHY THE DWARF HAD TO BE SHOT /38

PARROT /39

SUBLIMATION /40

PICTURE POSTCARD /41

GUERNICA /42

MASTER CRAFTSMEN /43

IV. MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

Landscape chained in the lenses of your sunglasses /44

PRAGUE FRACTALS (1993-1998)

l /46

A sunny winter afternoon, a woman in a blue /47

Waking up Sunday morning /48

Almost nothing. But just because of that /49

There are the empty zones in the city /50

The smell of your perfume catches me on the street /51

In Prague you can see a tour group of the blind /52

A late Saturday afternoon in Prague, November 1993 /53

I saw a girl with a broken leg /54

On the table a spoon, a radio, The Key to Heaven /55

The sickness condenses in the head, the lungs /56

A girl in the subway. The irrevocable clap /57

Coming back from an all-day walk, the first day /58

Giraffes live in an airplane hangar, because where else /59

It's snowing. Two girls try to start an old Škoda /60

The woman on the bench is waiting for someone /61

A teenage girl and two boys at the next /62

Lonely, determined to change that /63

I took little Denis for a walk. Right behind /64

Derailed from life: how can I find my way /65

The city is shut down. Coated with ice, fog, smog /66

I assure her that I am on her side. She /67

This drunk Saturday night's running on too long; I feel /68

As you talk, your face sheds the fragile /69

The rain emptied out the outdoor restaurants /70

Was it worth it, I say to myself, as I watch /71

You (& I) /72

My three-day friend from Slovenia /73

When you leave, I go to the movies /75

Spring comes into the beer cellar, turns to gold in the mugs /76

A sign in the beer cellar that says PRICE CATEGORY III /77

The kind of unease that strikes you when you find in your pocket /78

To stay different, never to be like them /79

LOCI COMMUNES (1999-2003) Common Places /80

Fourth of July /82

Cape of Good Hope /84

Afterword by Wayles Browne /88 About the author and translators /93

Endnotes /95

Foreword by K. E. Bättig von Wittelsbach

In one of his final writings, the late Palestinian-American critic Edward Said wrote:

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best,

they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are “off” and

may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think [...]. With so many dissonances in my life I have

learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.1

Like Theodor Adorno before him (―the whole is the untrue‖), Said saw

the contrapuntal self, a self never quite at home, as a conditio sine qua non for any intellectual existence and vitality. Both thinkers were familiar with exile as a physical and a metaphorical condition - the state of geographical and intellectual dislocation, of remaining outside of the mainstream, of never being fully of any place, but ―being unsettled and

unsettling others.‖2 For Said, exile was indeed a space of boundless

privilege, granting to the exiled a potential for immensely rewarding intellectual productivity, the unique position of a decentered observer, free to experience the pleasures and rewards of the constantly shifting ―eccentric angles of vision,‖

3 beyond the reach of those belonging to the mainstream. Its rewards await in the unexpected, the provisional and the risky, the never-being-at-home, where the exiled can discover freedom precisely through their displacement from the usual and the expected. The condition of being removed, then, the in-betweenness, becomes the privileged site of daring and self-invention, granting the decentered subject a singular capacity for perception, self-reflection and creation. Although he never met the Palestinian-American Edward Said, Bosnian poet Sasha Skenderija shares Said‘s experience of exile and loss of home due to the redrawing of ethnic and religious boundaries in the country of his birth. For both of these exiles, literature became true

home, and a final place of freedom and discovery. Like Said, who was born in the British Mandate of Palestine, now part of Israel, Skenderija comes from a country that no longer exists – Yugoslavia. He began publishing in Yugoslav literary journals in the 1980s, and in 1993, at the age of twenty-four, after having completed his first university degree in comparative literature and library science, and lived through the first six months of the Bosnian war, he left Sarajevo for the Croatian capital Zagreb, and then Prague in the Czech Republic. There he enrolled in Charles University‘s doctoral program in information and library science, worked as a librarian at the State Technical Library, and continued to write poetry. Shortly before completing his doctorate, he was named assistant professor in the Institute for Information Studies and Library Science at Charles University, where he taught until his departure for the United States in 1999, and where he is still a visiting lecturer active in supervising graduate research. In Ithaca, a small upstate New York university town, Skenderija accepted a position at Cornell University‘s law library, pursuing his two

lives as a poet and a librarian, in two languages – Bosnian and English. Cornell University, acting through its highly supportive Institute for European Studies, was the first university outside of Bosnia to offer a course in Bosnian literature, and that course attracted a great number of students, with academic interests as diverse as comparative literature, linguistics, law, and peace studies. After reading through a long-established canon of Bosnian prose (Ivo Andrić, Isak Samokovlija,

Meša Selimović), our students turned their attention to the works of the

new generation of Bosnian writers, all living in North America: Aleksandar Hemon, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Goran Simić and Sasha

Skenderija, and were delighted to have the opportunity to discuss their readings - in person - with the adoptive Ithacan Skenderija. The poetry of Simić, Mehmedinović (―Semezdin‖ in ―Cape of Good

Hope‖) and Skenderija have in common a number of themes: survival

of the individual and the community through daily experiences of death and destruction in the besieged city; struggle to maintain human bonds and intimacies amidst the brutality, violence and loss of life; burdens and discoveries of survival, and the feeling of disconnectedness in a life lived in exile; displacement, memory and glimpses of a different, fractured and perhaps newly constituted self; echoes of a new identity in a new, unfamiliar place of being, and - perhaps even more importantly for a poet - in a new language (or in Sasha Skenderija‘s case, in new

languages: Czech and English). In a 1993 letter from Prague, sent to

Cornell University‘s Slavic linguistics professor Wayles Browne, and

inquiring about the possibility of having translated into English his collection of poetry Ništa nije kao na filmu (―Nothing‘s like in the

movies,‖ published in Bosnian in Prague, but composed mostly before

and during the siege of Sarajevo and revised during his exile in Zagreb and Prague), Skenderija wrote:

[this book] seeks to be a book about love as such and about the city as such. It is highly intimate, and thus I hope a little universal as well. It was written amid a complete collapse of values and meaning, when man was left without the slightest possibility of making sense of his own suffering and death. It is an attempt to give dignity to the existential paroxysm I was (we were) caught up in.4

Nothing’s like in the movies, now the first part of this collection of Skenderija‘s poetry, begins by opening a door to the world of familiar tensions between lovers, parents and children, promise and expectation, longing and fulfillment, memory and utter uncertainty. In a city poised at the edge of war, small spaces of pleasure are still possible: Twice in one day the plane flew across the front / line. [...] Unplanned, at the airport she’s there to meet me / [...] A flash of unexpected joy, a little evening / celebration: welcome home (“Deep Blue‖). With the

mounting danger of annihilation, the everyday objects almost unnoticed before - telephones, electric heaters, television sets, cars – now become an anchor and a barometer of survival for the besieged, the last point of navigation in the inventory of battle against savagery, their presence a condition and witness of life in the city, their breakdown a glimpse of the final undoing of the ―we‖ subject: go over the inventory once again / in my notebook with numbers of people that were dear. / [...] The phone is a dead shell in my hand, it gives back / the echo of empty homes of friends (“Telephone”), or This crumb of the world tamed / around the glowing room heater / is my home (―Fireside‖), or again The car broke down / along the road. Everything we did was doomed (―Weather

Forecast, March ‗92‖), and Here on the terrace, last summer / there was a huge video screen. Now it’s just / an empty steel square. / [...] your own eye‘s gravity / and the empty steel frame / are all that keeps your

country in one piece (―Wintertime Scene‖). Visiting Western

intellectuals and politicians do not bring relief. Instead, they form grotesque cameos in the media spectacle the Bosnian tragedy has become, salesmen in the dehumanizing race for the images of the war. The images turn into a commodity destined for the sensation-thirsty mass audiences of the world in “Why the Dwarf had to be Shot”:

Horrified starving old women sobbed beyond consolation, while confused passersby and children hurried toward international television cameras, behaving like pandas born by Caesarian section in a zoo in Indianapolis....

In ―Master craftsman‖ this commodification is taken further when the

figures of the killers and the image-makers merge into one, reducing human life to an anonymous visual effect on the other end of the magnifying lenses of their guns, or of their cameras: A sniper and a photo reporter / [...] in the same way make an abstraction / of my fate. Prague Fractals, a collection of poems written during Sasha Skenderija‘s seven-year stay in the Czech capital and published online in 1998, opens with images of ordinary domesticity - a woman drying laundry on a Prague balcony, her movements evocative of the life left behind in pre-war Bosnia: A delicate seam on the transplanted day, somehow so close. / Like it could have been yesterday, a few years ago. (―A sunny winter afternoon, a woman in a blue‖). The brief pleasure of

involuntary memory that this image brings is later on replaced by the feeling of oppressive alienation surrounding the protagonist/poet in the new city, whose streets quickly turn into a labyrinth of anxiety and fear for the loved ones left behind (―There are the empty zones in the city,

gaps‖):

All around the unloved, unhappy, lonely people stagger, walk their dogs, prepare their revenge. And I'm afraid. Sometimes in the morning I'm so afraid, mama.

Later, in ―The smell of your perfume catches me on the street,‖ this

sensation grows into the feeling of terror before the life lived in the in-between zone, in a no-man‘s-land of two incomplete existences, the one of long ago and of deep attachments, the other of the quotidian and mere physical survival:

The smell of your perfume catches me on the street and I think: you're still there. Then I drink till I feel the saving heat of beer coming over me. The way a diver rescuing victims from a flooding

A bum comes up and asks: Yugoslavians? No, we answer in unison, Vietnamese.

a chain strung with house keys from Vitez, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Prague. Locks might still exist that remember the codes of their teeth. I might use them one day to open some possible doors.

Something / should happen soon. For it is too void when you leave. That feeling of attachment can sometimes be regained in the company of ―... grotesque males‖ whom the poet meets in the beer cellars

of the city (―My three-day friend from Slovenia‘):

My three-day friend from Slovenia is suddenly going to Berlin. He's leaving. We got drunk in some bar, confided some painful masculine things to each other.

The final poem in the collection announces, in its opening verses “To stay different, never to be like / them”, the motif of existential ambiguity and irony, a sharpened awareness of always remaining in the zone of in-betweenness:

Everything is a matter of faith, hope, and love. And, of course, of iron lungs – that’s the Freedom I always have been dreaming of. Now I can finally see it all around me, for the taking, like a confection.

The theme finds its final rearticulation in "Common Places" in the first poem Loci communes (1999-2003), composed in Ithaca and closing the collection ―Why the Dwarf had to be Shot”: I've stayed the same: I live / in constant change. The poet‘s feelings of ambiguity and decenteredness have

not waned: they have only been reawakened in a different space. In ―Fourth of July‖ the “immigrant destiny” that “came to an end” in the neighbourhood of “state-subsidized housing” and “dreams / too too easy

to achieve,” and just blocks away from the edge of the mortgaged American middle-class complacency of the “Donald Duck City,” signifies the return of the hesitant, interstitial existence of the “confection‖ of

“Freedom [...] / [...] all around me, / for the taking.‖ It takes the reader to

the final pages of this book, and the poem titled ―Cape of Good Hope,‖

written during a 2003 trip the poet took to ―the edge of the world‖ in South

Africa:

It seems to me that There’s a certain point On the life map of each of us And when you reach it

Every trip becomes a return And every mile takes you further and further From your travel companions And closer and closer

Ithaca, N.Y., May 2008 _________________________________________ END NOTES 1) Said, Edward. Out of Place. 1999. New York: Vintage, 2000. 295

2) Said, E. Representations of the Intellectual. 1994. New York: Vintage, 1996. 53.

3) Said, E. ibid. 59. 4) Skenderija, Sasha. Letter to Wayles Browne. 16 December 1993.

NOTHING'S LIKE IN THE MOVIES (1990-1993)

I. EYE OF THE NEEDLE 2) 1. Images from which he lives. Tobacco delirium. Spots in the dark of the room after midnight, when he shuts his eyes. All the images that he remembers, that are left over after his long escape into freedom: These are the best years of his manhood.

2. If he falls asleep, he dreams only possible things: She steps up into a tram, behind her enter three ticket checkers. Or the next night: He’s smoking at the stop, déjà vu, his palms sweat as he waits for her. When she arrives, he kisses her cheek, eyebrows and neck. So clearly loved in the dream, he is so strong… On this frame he regularly wakes up.

3. He knows - only possible things happen. Like in the movies. Lately, he often recalls one film. Donald Sutherland plays a German spy, waits for a submarine at some lighthouse, screws the wife of a crippled ex-RAF pilot, falls in love, hesitates and is lost. He can't help her, can't help himself, it’s not within his power: Those are the best years of his manhood.

4. We live in darkness, in the blinding immersion of the moving pictures. We talk, we think of things that may not exist, of this film that may be happening to us. In the movie theater, only the darkness is real.

5. The war is on, the lines are broken. Since I've got out, since you were left behind in the city, any phone call, any frame on the TV news can mean your death to me. For possible things have happened and now I live with only one thought, one prayer: for you to survive– before the disarming analogy with the movies makes us into pure fiction.

II. ON THE ONE-WAY STREET FAMILY, SPRINGTIME In the Botanical Garden in Zagreb, between two spring showers: she wants me to move in, to have a child together. We walk. I don't know what to tell her, but if I were to live somewhere, it would certainly be here. And if I had a child, I'd certainly take it here to walk. In spring in the Garden, a boy spells the long Latin names on the metal labels, a sudden sunbeam trembles on her cheek. I don't know what to tell her. We walk.

FAMILY, SUMMERTIME We are fighting to extinction, to the last shot of brandy, my father and I. A warm night, a family picnic in the backyard of our summer home. The futile effort to convince, to subordinate the other as always. And mom's resigned sadness. (Before going off to bed, she clears away our meat-bones, the glasses and bottles, an overfull ashtray and the tablecloth, soiled.) We are fighting to extinction, leaning back in the yard chairs, numbed, silent, each staring into his own half of the starry sky. My father and I. This is the sound of mother sleeping, I utter, of muskmelons ripening in the dark. Just so I can have the last word.

A PLACE FOR THE PHOTOGRAPH The first day of summer has begun without you. You've left for Zagreb. The photograph you gave me yesterday is a new item in this apartment. Snapped in the lobby of a youth hostel in Catalonia, squeezed among your fellow tourists' shoulders at Lloret del Mar, August 1990, you smile for the lens. The unease awkwardly hidden by your smile makes your loneliness positively irresistible. And I have such a weakness for you while I try to find the right place for the photograph. The first day of summer without you is interrupted by a sudden storm. It filled the room with the smell of wet cardboard boxes and bits of chicken from the street. The smell takes me back to Partizanska St., to the grassy field behind the poultry store; the soccer game is tied 2 to 2 and mothers are just beginning their oratorio from the balconies: "Gogo-o! Sasha-a! Mirsa-a-ad! It's raining! Come in this minute!" You're not in that picture, but it doesn‘t exclude you.

ON THE ONE-WAY STREET, GIRL WITH A DOG Asja P, the girl with a dog: sometimes I meet her walking her beautifully trained Irish setter. Her father was a philosopher, a well-known university professor, so I suppose he named his only daughter after Asja Lacis, who used to be the director of the theater in Riga. It was passionate love for Asja Lacis that made the Jewish mystic Walter Benjamin leave his wife and take an interest in the idea of radical communism. He dedicated to her his ONE-WAY STREET, a melancholy treatise about liberating life, discovering health and body, and finding peace with nature. Asja Lacis - a reference point in the sensibility of a whole generation, who set out along the one-way street in search of their lost youth. They set out, alas, went along the street of no return. The father of the girl with the dog, Professor K. P., was a prominent member of that generation, which makes my supposition quite possible. And shattering. Asja P, we must mention, is very beautiful. The last time I saw her was at a stand with video games that her dog had taken her to. I felt a tenderness for her, so unready, so embarrassed, and wanted to write her a love letter, to test my hypothesis, but her friends wouldn't let me have her address. Idiots.

DEEP BLUE Twice in one day the plane flew across the front line. Nothing but a slight disturbance of the clouds and the unpleasant soprano of the jets on the trip, then a rushed business meeting, chasing around Ljubljana and sweat on the collar under my necktie. Coming back we land a little behind time: framed in the elliptical window - the Sarajevo salto mortale into an early fall evening, into the deep blue. Unplanned, at the airport she's there to meet me, in deep blue, in the remaining vertigo of the previous scene: I came for you to take me out for sweets. I start the car and we head for the city. A flash of unexpected joy, a little evening celebration: welcome home.

FIRESIDE Suddenly it's got cold. This crumb of the world tamed around the glowing room heater is my home. And the coffee, before I can get it from the kitchen, is already cold. Unready for winter, I hesitate to leave my modest electrical fireside.

TELEPHONE Renew acquaintances from before the summer, go over the inventory once again in my notebook with numbers of people that were dear. Are we still dear to one another? The phone is a dead shell in my hand, it gives back the echo of empty homes of friends. Hello, I say, hello, hello

FACE At noon she starts from her apartment, when she gets here it's already dark. And her beautiful face is filled with shadows in which I recognize the beginnings of future quarrels, painful misunderstandings. Freezing, wrapped up in blankets, we watch TV we love each other in silence. And her face narrows, and the shadows that I know too well multiply.

BILLIE HOLIDAY The subtle soul of my old love is poisoned with nitrogen. Mia Z, the jazz singer and first lady of Lent in Maribor, working from 7 to 3 in the local nitrate plant, used to love my skinny body, washed it that summer in cold water from the broken waterheater. On surviving photographs her form seems unreal, hovering on curls of sandalwood smoke, staring at the big black-and-white Billie Holliday poster, as if there were acid spilled along her curves. Her voice on cassettes is the same way: it has begun to howl. The dull spleen of the double bass and the desperate spell she cast, the mezzosoprano eaten away by nitrate fumes. In the autumn of our love, despairing at my youth, my leaving, she took some pills, had an abortion... Loneliness. Bitchy fall and melancholy.

WINTERTIME SCENE It rained all night and the first snow showed up in the morning. But the café is cozy. You can sip hot coffee and look out the window at the street. The whiteness emphasizes shapes, movements, the day's subtle mechanics. Here on the terrace, last summer there was a huge video screen. Now it's just an empty steel square. Quite by chance it frames the winter: a cloud of steam from the hotel kitchen, a VW backs up, its exhaust scattering a flock of pigeons, an old woman with a red market bag slides along the sidewalk, streetcars cross paths before the army barracks, and over there in the corner, a lonely child. The movie of the day winds on, all by itself, without apparent effort, affording you a chance to forget for a moment that your own eye's gravity and the empty steel frame are all that keeps your country in one piece.

FAMILY PORTRAIT My big brother used to develop pictures in the bathroom so on the line above the tub, with socks and underwear, photos often hung like crows with dripping wings. Sometimes I'd be let in to the darkroom: deft fingers and shamanic enthusiasm on my brother's face shining with red and dark green color filters, would bring out the figures on the white glaze of paper: Mama, a beach, a birthday, a bike... When he went off to the army, brother passed on the equipment with touching trust. Well, I did my best, I tried, but all my pictures always came out yellow, muddy, I broke the red filter, messed up the chemicals and stained the freshly hung-out washing. Brother moved out long ago. Then so did I. Boris was born in the interim. Came the war. On one surviving picture Mama is pregnant, Father tipsy, my big brother and I crouch. A scrawl on the back of the photo: May 1, 1981, Gradina

WEATHER FORECAST, MARCH ‗92 We washed the curtains and windows, cleaned the car. At the end of the winter - we'd thought so many times it would never go - we set forth on a trip to a friend's summer house up in the mountains. A bright morning, an empty road, we sing o sole mio. That same day an unprecedented storm coated the town with fine Sahara dust and turned our windshield red. The car broke down along the road. Everything we did was doomed.

III. WHY THE DWARF HAD TO BE SHOT

4 OF JULY 1991 I bought my little brother a plastic flute for his birthday, the same kind I once got for my tenth, but orange-colored. There's a war and news from the front on Channel 1, the Wimbledon semi-finals are on Channel 2. Every little while Army transports shake the windows, where they disappear on the horizon is Slovenia, I guess. This isn't screwing around, This is not screwing around, guys... repeats the old man. In the next room my little brother practices the notes of the national anthem on the flute; flies stick to the remnants of the birthday banana-cake.

SUNDAY Friends come over on Sundays. They bring smog on their coats, coffee, brandy, snacks. In the city they say it's so foggy that pigeons collide in the air; inside it's warm and cozy. And we play chess and cards on Sundays. Wonderful guys unseduced by any party except this card party of ours. We each have something we don't talk about, something we don't get into on Sundays. - There'll be war this very week, says Mario. - No there won't. - There will too! - Bullshit. What's trumps? - Clubs. - I pass.

THE OCCUPATION IN TEN SCENES The birds are leaving us. They mass in flocks, upon the sound of sirens they fly - and disappear. Telephones keep ringing. When it hits, dogs and car alarms howl mournfully in answer. Kids pick up bits of shrapnel, housewives in makeup drink coffee in the cellar; Bo a, Kljuja, Franca and I play rummy. The elevators stall, the water tap stops running. The old deaf Spanish Civil War vet stands outside the house door, leaning on his cane, clothed in his best, surveying the horizon - no doubt seeing Spain. We huddle close around the radio news. We wait: Our President tells us not to worry: ―It takes two sides to have a war.‖

BLACKOUT We've doused all the lights, stuck three layers of wallpaper on the broken windows (last night a patrol came because the ON light on the VCR was showing). We‘re cut off from people, from neighbors hiding in the cellar, by fourteen storeys of fear. Cut off from the sons of bitches cannoning us from the hills by a sound-screen of Ramírez‘s Missa Criolla. It lends our love-making on top of the punctured skyscraper a note of the astral, of almost divine epiphany.

TREATISE ON TAILOR‘S DUMMIES As he was coming back to the Drohobych ghetto with a loaf of stale bread under his arm - November 18, 1942, after he had finished the portrait of the Gestapo officer Landau - he was shot down by pistol bullets: Bruno Schulz, an introverted provincial art teacher and the author of a dozen stories that are among the most glorious pages I have read (including the marvelous Treatises on Tailors' Dummies, an esoteric apologia for sadism upon material and young seamstresses). The bullets were fired by Gestapo officer Gunter, just to spite his personal enemy the abovementioned Landau: "Ich habe seinen Juden erschossen." Bruno Schulz's biography was just as phantasmagorical as his programmatic prose realism, and its climax truly invokes the space of the possible - something he insisted on in his stories, though his contemporaries questioned it, treating him as a childish and obscure fable-teller. In this last Schulzian phantasm 4.5 million Polish Jews and 2.5 million Poles were killed, which made him a national writer par excellence and one of the leading representatives of pre-World War II Polish realism. In the second month of the Sarajevo ghetto, while the telephones were still working, an acquaintance from Belgrade called me and assured me, almost with pity, that what I was telling him was the fruit of my unbridled imagination and Moslem propaganda. I banged the phone down. After sufficient time every horoscope, even the most banal, is bound to come true. Anyway.

VENTRILOQUISTS Let's talk, Igor. Baroque rhetoric contains something of the ancient art of ventriloquism. The purpose of both of them is the same - to free us from images, from the dictates of their literalness. Truisms catch up with us even before we've pronounced them. How else to explain the slaughtered child, the riddled bus, the city set afire? How can we reconcile them, turn them into knowledge? Let's keep talking, Igor. It is midsummer: the Gypsy woman from the press photograph runs from a tank, smokes and carries a huge picture of Tito under her arm. With a razor, Corto Maltese3) cuts a line of Fate into his empty palm. We talk. The tyranny of images goes on.

SYMBIOSIS Last night the eight-story building across the street was hit by a shell. Blew the roof and the top floor right off. Glance through the window this morning: between two burned-off beams somebody's hung out their fresh washing.

WHY THE DWARF HAD TO BE SHOT

On June twenty eight, Nineteen hundred and ninety two, in the basement of the Sarajevo Military Hospital we sat with professor D evad Karahasan and his wife, who were serving as hospital volunteers, since the city had been massacred day after day. They were devastated by their family tragedy, her mother murdered in her apartment by a grenade, and we came to console them with conversation, with desperate hope that military intervention was on its way. But instead, along with pomp and unprecedented measures of security, Mitterrand came, to give us and our slayers a lecture in morals and mutual understanding. Horrified starving old women sobbed beyond consolation, while confused passersby and children hurried toward international television cameras, behaving like pandas born by Caesarian section in a zoo in Indianapolis. The whole world applauded with praise the French love of justice, the French courage, French altruism — while Mitterrand senilely smiled at the decor of a destroyed building which had been, in his honor, renamed L' hospital France. Murderers did not shell us for a few hours, taking their time to shake his hand, and all went smoothly, almost like an ecumenical colloquium somewhere in Paris. A local TV crew came to the basement asking for an interview with D . K. What did he think about the surprise visit of Mitterrand, they asked. He said, "Disgusting filth." They asked him what he thought, in his opinion, ought to be done. He said, "to shoot the dwarf dead." They asked if he would do it. He said, "If I had a weapon at hand, for sure." TV crew: "Would you do it, professor, to go down in history?" D . K.: "History, friend? I would do it in order to restore sense." No weapons were at hand, and the interview, unfortunately, has not until now been published.

/Translated by Aaron Tate & Sasha Skenderija/

PARROT Yesterday afternoon, after falling silent, traumatized by constant explosions, the parrot suddenly plunged down from his perch - like a painter struck by a heart attack on his scaffolding - dead. On the radio: 19 civilians killed, 96 wounded in the city. I threw the parrot away. It is the eighth day of August and the hundred and twenty-third of the siege. This morning the phones were cut off. The skyscraper is a blast furnace without electricity and water. On the kitchen wall the cage still hangs, dirty, with stagnant water and birdseed, with cuttlebone and a mirror. The cage door, deliberately left open, has the same symbolic intention as the drawn longbow on the Bogumil tombstones.4)

SUBLIMATION

I dreamed I was squeezing a boil on my left cheek and a huge hunk of mortadella came out. I woke up with a frightful sense of emptiness in my head, magnified by the morning's shelling. The final proof that I've gone out of my mind, that I'll end up in a straitjacket, evaporates at the sight of moldy food in the dead refrigerator, of dried-up faucets and at the news from my neighbor's radio. I run down from the thirteenth floor to the street, where women are cooking outside the entranceways, between bewildered children and snipers, among old men playing chess in the shelter of ruins, the starving, the maimed. I am joining the Red Cross line for bread, unbearably healthy, wide awake. Fuck Freud and mortadellas.

PICTURE POSTCARD A nighttime panorama of Sarajevo caught by the light of shellfire, gunpowder flashbulbs, by the dance of silhouettes in which only the persistence of vision can make out the former shapes (calling up flickering skyline lights, orange neon canyons, evening crescendos of headlights tracing their fluorescent snakes on a time exposure). But only this possible postcard can literally catch the passing of time, so the city seems to float in an intermezzo of decay, in the irreversible approach of things to their dark antitheses, my building seems to float, the City seems to float, we all seem to float, I seem, too

GUERNICA A gap in the wall, a sudden exploded view of the inside of the apartment where a shell blew to pieces a man and his daughter; an emptiness that does not reveal, evokes nothing but a cracked whirlwind of hollows, which are all around, which ache, whose name is Bosnia. Hollows swallowing themselves, gunfire holes in the air, holes in the morning the morning immersed in smells of elder bushes, of cinders, linden blossoms and hospital wastes. Our high-rise is a home, and the cemetery is a home, and the city is a home, or they could be. Sarajevo is a burning home, an inexpressible, inexhaustible home. Even when Igor's grandma says: "I just hope the lights come back on before I die," even when you are leaving it forever, even when it is leaving you forever. Sarajevo like any other city, Like Carthage, like Guernica.

MASTER CRAFTSMEN For Susan Sontag

The analogy of photography and dying, the death of the moment, or freezing it The analogy is all too obvious, even banal. A sniper and a photo reporter on the corner of Marshal Tito Street and Maxim Gorki in the same way make an abstraction of my fate, reduced to a dozen metres of street I must traverse. The craftsmen, skilled in their trades, are waiting. My hesitation fills them with a professional nervousness which, certainly in my favor, increases my chances. Here we are at the heart of the matter: murderers, like artists, are prone to romantic exaggeration, to mutual glorification, striving for effects. They shoot past the mark. The sniper and the photographer. The cross is the same in the center of their sights.

IV. MIDNIGHT EXPRESS 5) Landscape chained in the lenses of your sunglasses, thought given rhythm by the even rattle of the speeding train, your hand in my groin. This is a joy, sweetheart, this is my love, the best that’s left of me. The outcome came out of the blue, where we least expected it. I no longer remember how, or why, just that you’re here beside me. Emerging too slowly, the scent of your skin, fractals of perception in the lenses of your sunglasses. Traveling. How can we keep our cool, sweetheart, how can we hold out?

/Translated by Francis Jones/

PRAGUE FRACTALS (1993-1998)

I had always wondered how it would feel to survive an airplane crash: chosen

A sunny winter afternoon, a woman in a blue housedress hangs out diapers on the balcony. Through the open balcony door behind her a colorful helium balloon makes its getaway. For a moment she stares after the receding golden point, shading her eyes wistfully with her palm like a cop at the May Day parade envying the Air Force parachute jumpers. Then she sighs, picks up the washtub and disappears through the white windblown curtains. New Year's Day. Requests and dedications on the radio. A delicate seam on the transplanted day, somehow so close. Like it could have been yesterday, a few years ago.

Waking up Sunday morning, shattering scattering of consciousness. Labyrinths of Czech declensions. The whiteness of the wall. Confession. A hand of solitaire that never comes out.

Almost nothing. But just because of that - incomparably more than nothing. A day tamed in the raster of my window: boys with hockey sticks, passing by, tractors loaded with wilted Christmas trees. A stuffed puppy dangling its head in the back windshield of a Trabant - it passes by too. Tedium stupefied by the subtle thrill of a sudden phone call: almost nothing, but already unimaginably more than nothing. If I had to explain it to you, this would all decay into a thousand specks: let‘s leave it as it is, my love, please call me tomorrow again.

There are the empty zones in the city, gaps in the city landscape, all those spaces void of architecture, void of events. Seen from an airplane coming in to its landing corridor, they are desert islands, panoramic intermezzos. I wake up early, around 4:30. Before the city's morning acceleration gets going, the dawn spreads out in my window like a huge amoeba filled with the bustle of degenerating pet dogs and the moonwalkers‘ solitude of their half-awake owners. All around the unloved, unhappy, lonely people stagger, walk their dogs, prepare their revenge. And I'm afraid. Sometimes in the morning I'm so afraid, mama.

The smell of your perfume catches me on the street and I think: you're still there. Then I drink till I feel the saving heat of beer coming over me. The way a diver rescuing victims from a flooding river feels the warmth of piss when, frozen with horror, he wets himself in his diving suit.

In Prague you can see a tour group of the blind testing the guide's eloquence with their white canes: Gothic portals, Baroque vaulted spaces. You could almost reach the gold of Prague - the afternoon sun reflected in the elation of the blind men's faces as they stumble round the city. I bet you would write about it. We misunderstood each other, Toma . In the Latin American night club, with drunken Quechuas lying on the tables at 3:30 A.M., Prague girls fall into hopelessness like Bosnian cities on the radio news. Fascinated by the lethargy in their gazes, I stay on until the sobering lights of closing time, until the barmaid drives us out with a broom. Stay home, Toma , finish the things you've started. You're fifty years old. For once in your life, do something properly, to the end.

A late Saturday afternoon in Prague, November 1993. A deserted street. Laborers in an orange cage come down off a new building's roof. Unmoving. Gray. It's hard to miss a certain pathos in their coming down.

I saw a girl with a broken leg in a miniskirt, mama. Full of touching self-confidence, she crosses the street, climbs on a tram: one leg in a cast, the other in garters. She made me so sad, she reminded me so much of someone. There are some days here, mama, whirlpools of melancholy: a trip to the supermarket, my poorly washed underwear on the radiators. The days when the calendar goes wrong: winter, pea-soup fog, deserted city and Ex-Yugoslavians, mom. Just Ex-Yugos and shadows roaming around.

On the table a spoon, a radio, The Key to Heaven by Leszek Kolakowski; a chain strung with house keys from Vitez, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Prague. Locks might still exist that remember the codes of their teeth. I might use them one day to open some possible doors.

The sickness condenses in the head, the lungs: that must be how a chick within an egg solidifies. Just take a deep breath, shut your eyes and dive; the moment you touch the other end of the pool, you‘ll forget everything. There is no escape for us from here: asylum cases, émigrés - old and new –selling knickknacks on the street, writing nostalgic verses, or exalting to the skies our young republics. Above all we drink, just like those five fat jolly women in the beer cellar last night, long after last call, who wouldn't even give us the time of day. In the morning the city shakes with blasting: it's the new subway tunnel--sturdy Ukrainian guestworkers are achieving a breakthrough for all of us - digging down, inside, in the depths.

A girl in the subway. The irrevocable clap of the film slate: the bang of closing doors dispels the moment of sudden, almost painful nearness. A surgeon fracturing a joint that healed askew. A stroke of fate that quickly passes, turning into the greenish light of the operating room, into the neon frame of her face that has dissolved with the departing train, into something altogether different.

Coming back from an all-day walk, the first day of spring, I bought a kilo of tangerines and went into the phone booth. I call: Alenka is writing her thesis, Nives is making soup for her husband and child who has a cold. Both recount yesterday's events in the same words, with the same excitement: new lovers, a party last night, a trip out in the country. Where have I been, what have I been doing, why haven't I called? I've been here in the telephone booth, I say, I'm just now holding the receiver in my left hand, peeling a tangerine with my right and swallowing it whole.

Giraffes live in an airplane hangar, for where else could they fit in a city? You bet I'll find you, baby. I'm totally crazy, don't expect me to give up so easily, I stick my nose in everywhere. A street quintet pours out be-bop on the square, I listened to them for a whole hour - they were so damn good. Somehow you‘ve disappeared from my sight again with your green poncho, with your sad moist eyes. I know what you need, I'd take you to the movies. I can't find you. I know you live somewhere, for everybody must live somewhere in the city. But I just can't find you. I can't find you. Seek me out, I have a heart like a giraffe's, baby.

It's snowing. Two girls try to start an old Škoda on the parking lot. We join them, push it hard, with all our might. When the engine catches, we hover an instant or two in the void with arms comically spread out, drawn by the inertia of love, the blowing of the car horn which the girls must be doing to thank us. If we were the right kind of guys, I say to Adin, they would take us with them. Aw, if we were... It's snowing. Some dirty old tugboat slides along the Vltava. The clock on the traffic light counts the seconds for the blind.

The woman on the bench is waiting for someone, that someone is late. I come back from the swimming pool, have nowhere else to go, wouldn't want to just leave. I sit down beside her, smoke, leaf through a book. I don't want to look silly, definitely not to seem ridiculous. A kid comes up to us holding a car-racing magazine, asks me for a cigarette. He'd like to talk to me, wouldn't want to just leave. I know I'm ridiculous, I know I look silly: I stub out the cigarette, shut the book and go.

A teenage girl and two boys at the next table drink Fanta and take turns kissing. While she is in the toilet, the boys are tensely silent. There is some kind of subtle dread in it. Then the girl returns, brings back the smile, balances the legs of the triangle. And they are already at the point where one can predict with high probability the further course of their destinies.

Lonely, determined to change that. College educated brunette, 34, 5'4", Prague. Please write to BK8875.

I took little Denis for a walk. Right behind the building we find a forest, a merry-go-round, a pond. Denis keeps stopping, collecting pine cones, chasing sparrows. I lose myself, can't think straight. Denis brings me back, Denis cheers me up, tells me: "Let's keep going, Sasha."

Derailed from life: how can I find my way back to you? The mailman stuffs the box with bills, junk mail, setting his morning traps - like you when you wake me up with your love, your suffocating devotion. A day that begins with colorful flimflam generally turns out badly. Why don't we try it differently this time? I'm ready to believe everything you say, I'm ready to follow you wherever you want, to bed, to the end, just say it, but please don't start listing all you've done, all you've given up for me, don‘t make me feel humiliated all over again. I'm totally derailed, revolted by everything – remind me just once more what a rat I am and you'll never see me again, my dear.

The city is shut down. Coated with ice, fog, smog. That's just as well. I can leave your room unnoticed at 4:30 A.M., before your family get up, before your child awakes. That's just as well. Your scent will stay on me till it dissolves in the smell of the detergent that they wash with at the hospital where my friend, a doctor, gets me bedding. (I never told you that I sleep in sheets with hospital nametags and I often don't know where I am when I wake up. That's why I'm so on fire, why I'm so sucked in, that's why I call so often to tell you I love you, baby.)

I assure her that I am on her side. She knows it: maybe that's why she sometimes gives herself so entirely, maybe that's why she's so often on my side. She wants to have fun, she would go to bed with both of us, I don‘t think I could stand that, it might wreck me totally. (I take her out of the crowd, I take her aside - she objects, but finally yields to my melancholy.) I'm terribly frightened of her and I want and wait to see her defeated, subdued, uncertain.

This drunk Saturday night's running on too long; I feel that it's gotten out of hand again, heading the wrong way. And not meaning to at all, I fall into babbling on and on, and she tells me to shut up already, she's feeling sick, high time we were getting out of here. She says the night's gone the wrong way. Tereza and Michael are taking us to their place out in the suburbs, they say they've got a full bottle and chickens there. We're freezing, we cross the bridge. The girls run ahead, fool around, stop a taxi, and Michael whispers to me all aglow, Just watch our lovely ladies, man! I haven't got the heart to ruin his speed high, I haven't got the heart to tell him that it's all gotten out of hand, that we are out of tune, we're heading the wrong way.

As you talk, your face sheds the fragile three-day gilding of my infatuation, like the hair coming off the temples of your aging lover when he‘s squatting in the sauna, full of touching self-assurance. And I think with regret of how we'll probably never again... but the very next moment my needless desire shifts to the waitress's thighs. Disrupted from my unflattering comparisons by your question "Do you still love me?" I answer: Sure, sure... Then like ashamed kids we avoid each other's gaze. Empty. Used up. Null and void.

The rain emptied out the outdoor restaurants, drove the tourists to their hotel rooms, to the sanatoria. Only some strange characters on the street and my happy American girl: she‘s coming to meet me. She has no destiny, what I have none of is hope.

Was it worth it, I say to myself, as I watch the girl at the mirror try to put herself together into one of her MTV-ish images of the world, of herself in the world - after our sex - artificial, affected, superfluous in the world, in the room, in the mirror. Was it worth it, I say, as I look down at her through the curtains: she might be any passerby in the crowd, any informer, any murderer anything at all along the street where she departs, disappears from the rear-view mirror of consciousness, the mirror-image time, the stage of fractals like a traffic accident as you drive past.

You you have plans for tonight for tomorrow and the afternoon and you've got your style your sensibility your job your friends from work from school from summer vacation you've got good taste in fashions in films in books (lots of good taste) and you're in touch with what's happening all around and in you and you're on top of why everything is just the way it is and you've got passions and memories and a mom and a dad (divorced) and mild traumas from that and you've got your spy network your informant network your boyfriend network all over and you're totally cool all in all and totally consistent and you've got IT which I‘m in desperate need of And I I am totally cool (all in all) and totally consistent and once I shook hands with Havel and once I was friends with Teno 6) and I'm not entertained by what I see around me and in me and not at all entertained by entertaining you and not entertained by pouring myself out before you or belittling or denouncing myself because of THIS or THAT or something else which I‘m in desperate need of

My three-day friend from Slovenia is suddenly going to Berlin. He's leaving. We got drunk in some bar, confided some painful masculine things to each other. At 2 AM we're saying goodbye at the railway station, it lasts too long, we fall silent in the boundless intimacy of people who are sure they won't meet again. A bum comes up and asks: Yugoslavians? No, we answer in unison, Vietnamese. O.K., my Vietnamese brothers, how about a beer for me to say goodbye with?

Unconditional childlike trust in the world as the train speeds into the haunted house. Or when appear the majestic zodiac figures in the dome of the planetarium, or the devotion I give to finding an escape from the labyrinth of mirrors. Cotton candy, popcorn, circus pleasures—enchanted moments of joy, rare, at ease. Another day bound by its own limits, seams. Exhausting confabulations: the transvestite in the telephone booth, twisting the ends of his platinum-blonde hair, how he turns his body, holding in his hands a military magazine with images of the tanks of the world's armies. Or, say, an American student of creative writing, with his video camera on the monstrous communist city square: trying to record something, to embrace it, soon he withdraws, leaves—it is too difficult for him. (In recent times I dream only commonplaces: I dream of childhood, sailing, how I fly, how I make love with the heroines of Krzysztof Kie lowski's movies.)

/Translated by Aaron Tate/

for Zelkida When you leave, I go to the movies. I drink down the mental content of the main character just like a can of beer. So here we go: there is the gloomy house with the cannibal tenants and two boys on the roof; the butcher and his daughter are also there.7) Something should happen soon. For it is too void when you leave. The shop assistant at the hair dresser's, she sweeps cut hair into ugly small piles with absent-minded broom swings. Some opposites are attracting each other in the incomprehensible analogy between cinema and hair salon. Actually, it is all about inertia: the hair that continues to grow after you leave; the nails, beard and mustaches—nothing else but a mere transcendence all the way from point (0,X) to point (0,Y). That's the time assigned to the main character to undertake something, to kill the cannibal-butcher and marry his daughter. And then the movie stops. The film runs out. Nothing more to be told. The corpse is being washed, shaved, and taken away from the home. The End. When you leave, I kick empty beer cans down the street. And it is so void. *

Spring comes into the beer cellar, turns golden in the mugs, leaves a taste of honey on the palates: Krušovické beer. The drunken old waitress in her touchingly mismatched black waiter's uniform and bleached hair performs pirouettes among the tables, stands on ceremony to amuse us. I sit with some old men, we retell nasty stories about long-ago women: grotesque males, death in the springtime, superfluous memories. Nothing can stop it anymore, nothing at all.

A sign in the beer cellar that says PRICE CATEGORY THREE,8) my friend, the last failed attempt to standardize the world, the only remaining signpost you can still be sure to find me by. Prague's towers like broken high-tension lines (the last image I recall from my old home), revisions of the streets, address books and phone directories, kaleidoscopic statelets, hours of curfew or months, or years... You know the commonplace how, at the end, Lassie always finds her way home. But fuck a home that's no longer there. Lassie remarried, had pups, swapped passports and married again. A dog's total lifespan, my friend, fits into a handful of our years.

The kind of unease that strikes you when you find in your pocket a left-over ticket from the horse track that you, keeping it from yourself, bet on a complete outsider: if you dared trust yourself entirely to the devastating feeling, you might, while there's still time, realize something of the final things. But daring comes when it's all too late. It's just that all this has lasted too long; I don't know how else to put it across. The smell of fruit trees flowering in the air, matchless moments when her breasts seem bigger than my horrors and it seems there may be some point in surviving. A long street is in front of you, you come home from work in the crowd: to someone, to someplace. As if nothing were happening. As if nothing had happened.

To stay different, never to be like them. Because, as always, the worst is behind us. So, here I am now: after the fifth morning cigarette, I start sweating; after the tenth, I literally faint. Everything is a matter of faith, hope, and love. And, of course, of iron lungs – that‘s the Freedom I always have been dreaming of. Now I can finally see it all around me, for the taking, like a confection. The time has come to drop everything that is superfluous. Because the worst, as always, is yet to come. Until then, I slide my hands into my pockets, I hit the street cheering myself up cheering myself up

LOCI COMMUNES (1999-2003) Common Places We've changed? Hardly, not significantly. The world has changed. I've stayed the same: I live in constant change and I know all about you, all that can be known, all but your address, the city you live in, your children, the language you fill out forms in, where you go in the morning and who you come back to in the evening, that I don't know but I can guess (I can see it all with frightening clairvoyance). You live unchanged, a witness to changes. And you know almost all about me, all that you need to know. We have not changed. And those of us who didn't make it? But how can we talk at all about what they've changed into?

It is the world that changed by their not being around, we have stayed the same. Far from each other, obsessed with the same world. Small as we are, insignificant.

Fourth of July I Orange fire hydrant, iron dwarf, into which the police car crashes often in silent movies, turning the thing into a stunning water palm tree, and the housefront mailbox metal-flags whose sole meaning I have for a long time grasped (since the dwellers of Donald Duck City gave with them a sign that it is time, for the postman to retrieve) –in America, in state-subsidized housing, beneath my window turned to the warehouse of furniture, here is where the immigrant destiny came to an end, and the future began, dreams too too easy to achieve: You need only move two blocks further and already you are eighty six payments closer to the cocksure neighborhood foyer, white-skinned purgatory of an American heaven. In the American dream, in broad daylight, as if when water-calm comes, to lay–so easy it is, to remember everything that has happened, as when through sunglasses you look at the sun, it is that easy, so easy not to have desire.

II As I carry Mirna on my shoulders she asks, Why are there fireworks, daddy? "Because it is my birthday today." And where do all the rockets fall? "Nowhere, honey, they vanish, just burn away." And suddenly, finding its way, the song comes into my head, an old forgotten gem: "When the cities will burn one day, the smoke will rise to heaven, a magnificent firework display, just as it once used to happen, on the good old First of May, when they would take us to the parade." And I pause to consider, without horror, how the singer then could have known, how slight is the visible difference between a celebration ignited by matches and a capital city by grenade, and I wonder whether Mirna herself will ever have to discover such a completely unnecessary matter. - Daddy, she says, is it that fireworks melt like ice cream in the sun? - "Oh yes, my sweetheart, exactly. It is exactly like that."

/Translated by Aaron Tate/

Cape of Good Hope I promised Zelkida To bring a poem From the edge of the world From the Cape of Good Hope Though she hadn't Asked me to Unfortunately But when one's written A few poems Good poems He doesn't write poems just for nothing Or make promises I was flying from Johannesburg To Cape Town A masculine-looking woman On the seat next to me Asked me What language that was That I was reading a book in I answered like a shot BOSNIAN Aha she said Uncomfortably She said We have Bosnians here too In South Africa I know But tell me, how many kilometers is it From Johannesburg to Cape Town? About 1400 Aha Like Atlanta to New York I said The book I was reading Was by Amir B.

The Bosnian The man who Unlike me stayed And put up by himself A grave marker to his father He wrote a poem about it What a poem! I had never met him But Adin My old friend Got him to write dedications in two books And send them With Fatima On to me in America One he signed In friendship And the other With respect Reason enough To take his books With me to the edge of the world (I'd never had a better friend Than that old buddy Adin Other than Zelkida And maybe Teno) The plane landed in Cape Town At dusk The most dizzying sight I have ever yet seen I thought Maybe only the descent into Rio Is comparable with this Thanks to Cendrars But who knows Even Rio isn't out of the question Now that I have landed at the Edge The hotel room was cramped In a one-time prison for one-time bank robbers But the furniture was OK A window part way open and a storm every little while Then calm again I left the TV on

Since I was frightened alone at the edge of the world In the dark of the cell Soft-core porn on Channel 6 In the middle of the night I woke up and shut it off: ―I went out into the world to rest a Body confused by the fear of disappearing But my courage left me in the first gloom‖

9) - And then I remembered That Semezdin hadn't gotten in touch Ever since I asked him To send me an invitation letter In the name of the Voice of America For Teno To get a visa What crap It's strange It seems to me that There‘s a certain point On the life map of each of us And when you reach it Every trip becomes a return And every mile takes you further and further From your travel companions And closer and closer To those who stayed at home In the morning In the coach The guide told us How the First Voyage of Bartolomeu Dias In fact was a failure And how the Navigator returned broken and embittered To tell the King about the Cape of Storms At the edge of the world Beyond which nothing lies But the furious sea And the fatal shoals hidden in fog Sharper than Levantine sabers

Later the King changed this detail In the log of the voyage And rewarded the Navigator with riches and glory For The disheartened homeland was in need of Places of good hope New horizons Words of comfort And encouragement

Afterword by Wayles Browne A group of poetry translators flourished in Ithaca in the 1980s and early 1990s under the name OSIP. The name could be read as "Organization for the Singing of International Poetry" or as a tribute to Osip Mandelstam, a translator himself, who said with good reason "Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed." Several of my fellow OSIP members were professional translators. They were capable of taking a whole book of a Greek or Korean author's poetry or prose and providing English versions of all of it. As an amateur, I felt, I need not do that. When helping people with their foreign-language marriage certificates, business letters or architectural monographs, I have rendered what was set before me; but when sharing verses with my OSIP colleagues I chose only pieces which I liked and which I saw a satisfactory way to put into English. "Satisfactory" here meant to me that the version should sound like the original. A proper phrase for an amateur, perhaps--"sound like." My version can never come out like the original in all respects. But as a linguist, this time a professional linguist, I am ready to make a try at saying what the respects are in which the one can sound like the other. Poems are made by taking clever advantage of the material which a language offers, as when a gardener trims a boxwood bush into the shape of a poodle. The result conveys a message--"poodle." But it also inspires appreciation of its maker's deed--"Look, they made it out of a bush." A language has more layers to its make-up than a bush--speech sounds, word forms, choice of words, sentence structure, semantics. All are fair game to the poet, and any can contribute to what I called the way a poem "sounds." A poet may make patterns with the single vowels or consonants of a language; Poe did that with English in his "Bells." The accents or the syllables of words may recur to make rhythms. But so may the forms of words. The refrain to Rubén Darío's "Song of Autumn in Spring":

¡Juventud, divino tesoro, Ya te vas para no volver! Cuando quiero llorar, no lloro,

Y a veces lloro sin querer. "Youth, o divine treasure, Now you leave to come again no more! When I wish to weep, I cannot, And sometimes I weep though not wishing to." starts out with nouns in the first line but from then on they disappear and the rest of the verses make do with negatives, adverbs, prepositions, and infinitives. They make do ... but they make patterns as these "subordinate" parts of the sentence come back over and over again, in the second grammatical person and then in the first. Next, we may find patterns made by recurring items of vocabulary. Poe's "Nevermore" comes back in every stanza of "The Raven," and "bells" even more often, since one of his refrains goes "Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells." As I translate, I am not likely to find English words with the same distribution of vowels and consonants as the foreign words before me, and if that's what a particular poem is built around, I do best to admire it but let it alone. Rhythm with syllables or accents can sometimes be reproduced in a new language, though English words have a nasty habit of being shorter than anybody else's in Europe. Grammatical forms can often carry over (but it depends--the language I'm working from may have a richer spectrum of them); recurrent vocabulary still more readily, especially since English stylistic doctrine doesn't insist as strongly as do some languages on avoiding repetition of a word. The easiest pattern of all to put into English, at least for a linguistics-minded renderer, is artful deployment of ideas in sentences. My chosen group, the Slavic languages, are accustomed to putting the new and vital information at the end of their sentences, and I find my English sentences "sound like" their model when they, too, progress from preamble to a denser center--and save the punch line for last. If I were trying to translate Pushkin's title "Ja vas ljubil," I might make it "I loved you" or, if I think the past tense of "ljubil" is worth reinforcing a little, "Once I loved you." But when I look at the rest of the first line of the poem and its continuation in the second line: Ja vas ljubil; ljubov' ješčë, byt' možet, V duše mojej ugasla ne sovsem;…

I can see that ljubil "loved" is carrying extra weight as the end of the first sentence, just as ne sovsem "not entirely" is at the end of the second. So my translation should begin: "I loved you once" with "once" in a position of heightened contrast. I then need an English rendering of "not entirely" which can not only bear an accent on its last syllable (the verse rhythm needs this), but bear the strongest accent of its sentence. Not every English adverb can! Words of similar meaning don't have to have similar accentual capabilities. I propose:

I loved you once; perhaps that love has not yet burned out in my soul for good...

*

While working in Yugoslavia (as it was then) in the 1970's, I made several visits to colleagues in Sarajevo, the capital of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Every Sarajlija seemed ready to discourse on the esthetics of his city, proud of its cobblestoned Main Market whose craftsmen's shops came straight down from Turkish Empire days, of its mosques, churches and synagogues, of its architecturally distinctive neighborhoods stretched neatly out along the shallow river and climbing the hills on each side. I acted as guide for an even-more-foreign scholar, a sociolinguist from India, on a visit to a publishing house, and there we met my first Bosnian poet acquaintance, Izet Sarajlić. He had come to Sarajevo as a boy in 1945, though his surname suggested family connections with the city. Critics seek to discover a writer's "poetic world." Sarajlić's poetic world,

less hidden in its expression than most, is peopled with all the poets of Europe and the globe. I was pleased to find poems of his that I could translate, and which served to introduce me to an Italian poet and a Harlem poet. My second Bosnian poet was Sasha Skenderija. Born in 1968, he was a free-lance writer and editor, and a graduate in comparative literature from the University of Sarajevo. He had lived in Sarajevo for the first spring, summer, and fall of the war and then became a graduate student in library science in the Czech Republic. His first book reached me in late 1993 through a mutual acquaintance, with a letter inquiring about the possibilities for translating it for an American readership. (My answer was, in true amateur style: I see how to do some poems, I don't see a way to do

others.) Skenderija authorized me to pass on some excerpts from his letter by way of commentary to the first two poems I translated, "Blackout" and "Master Craftsmen."

"Prague, December 16, 1993. ...My little book, Nothing's Like It Is On Film, was printed here in Prague in 220 copies as a Christmas gift for the Bosnian refugees housed in Czech refugee centers. Most of the texts (some 80%) originated in Sarajevo right before and during the siege of my city, and the collection ripened and took shape in Zagreb and Prague in 1993. It makes no journalistic claims..., does not interpret or verify the TV pictures and reportage from Sarajevo. Nor is it a diary of the siege. Essentially, it seeks to be a book about love as such and about the city as such. It is highly intimate, and thus I hope a little universal as well. It was written amid a complete collapse of values and meaning, when man was left without the slightest possibility of making sense of his own suffering and death. It...is an attempt to give dignity to the existential paroxysm I was (we were) caught up in. It seeks to answer the 'grammatical' questions, 'Who? What? To whom?...' and oppose the 'tyranny of images' and the 'dictatorship of their literalness' [from 'Ventriloquists,' one of the poems]. I will paraphrase the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who writes that the zeroes at the end of a total of casualties make their suffering into a pure abstraction. Or Sartre, who when asked if literature could change the world, answered that it could not, but without literature the death of a child from hunger somewhere in Africa would be a mere piece of statistics. 'Literature,' he said, 'makes the death of a child into a moral problem!' I would add that in today’s world, where moral is a very problematic and relative category, literature should at least make a child slaughtered in Bosnia, Somalia, or Israel into an esthetic problem. The hundreds of thousands of people dying senselessly in Bosnia can no longer believe in any sort of morality proclaimed and prescribed by the civilization of the West, by your country above all. Now it is only a problem of good taste, which the world's TV networks and humanitarian and other institutions have violated by their actions. Most of what the world has undertaken in Bosnia is at the very least repulsive and perverse. And most of all cynical! Therefore, if I have sought here and there in 'Nothing's Like It Is On Film' to make my family's suffering, my girl's, my friends', my own into an esthetic problem, I think I have succeeded. But others must judge. If there are no more people in the world with refined moral senses (are there any?), I hope there are some with refined esthetic senses. This book would wish to communicate with them. And so I send

it to you, to the United States, for I believe that the liberal American tradition has given rise to the largest number of freedom-loving individuals, capable of communicating honestly with the world around them. Unfortunately (or is it fortunately?) my book, written in Croatian about Sarajevo (Bosnia), cannot expect understanding or support from either the Croatian or the Bosnian state, for the monstrous policies of both have led the victims of this war, the Bosnians and the Croats, to try to exterminate one another. My voice has now become even more lonely, but, I hope, added one more note of universality.” “I know Mr. Sarajlić indirectly. We lived in the same neighborhood in

Sarajevo. I know a shell made a direct hit on his apartment and he was slightly wounded, but recovered. So he is alive, in the special Sarajevo sense of the word.”

*

The above was written for publication in The Bookpress, a literary magazine/newspaper which also flourished in Ithaca in the 1990s. I have continued my collaboration with Sasha Skenderija, both by e-mail and face to face in Ithaca, where he has lived with his family since 1999. With constant input from him I have been able to translate the book of poetry which you have before you (apart from a few versions by other hands). Perhaps I have become a professional! At the least, I can say that I have a more reliable acquaintance with his poetic world and his patterns. His world has only a few fellow writers in it, but many films and film-makers. His patterns are made with ideas and scenes. I have not needed to reproduce rare words to achieve rhymes and assonances, or archaisms to get a patina of old bronze and lichens. He uses everyday but forceful words to frame the present day, and it is these that I have sought to render in the new medium of English. This book contains the result of my work with Sasha on his poems in Nothing's Like It Is On Film, those in his second compilation Prague Fractals (Prague, 1998), and those from his Ithaca period (1999 - ). It reproduces the content and ordering--as well as the title - of his book of collected works in Bosnian, Zašto je patuljak morao biti ustrijeljen (Tešanj, Bosnia: Centar za kulturu i obrazovanje, 2005).

About the Author

Bloodaxe Books, UK, 1998);VISIONS International, Black Buzzard Press, VI, #48 - 1995, and #72

– 2005Like a fragile index of the world : poems for

David Skorton / written by Cornellians, past and present ; selected by Alice Fulton (Cornell, 2006); in Prague Tales: A Collection of Central European Contemporary Writing / (New Europe Writers, 2007); and in Spirit of Bosnia (

About The Translators

Wayles Browne studied Slavic languages and linguistics at Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, Mass., and the University of Zagreb in Croatia. He now teaches languages and linguistics at Cornell University, and is an editor of Slavic journals in several countries. Recent translations include a scholarly obituary; e-mails for Amnesty International; birth, marriage, divorce, and death certificates; and a humorous book about cheese. W. B. has been Sasha Skenderija's principal English translator since 1993. (Web: http://ling.cornell.edu/index.cfm/page/people/browne.htm) Aaron Philip Tate is a lecturer at the Classics Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (Web: http://ithacaexperimental.blogspot.com)

Francis Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the School of Modern Languages, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. (Web: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/staff/profile/f.r.jones)

END NOTES

the drawn longbow on the Bogumil tombstones

6) Senad Had imusi Teno, leader of SCH, the cult alternative noise-industrial band from Sarajevo.

Inspired by Caro & Jeunet‘s film Delicatessen from 1991.

8) (Page 77) ―The war years and the post-war period were ones of shortages in all areas. The Czechoslovak state reacted to this situation with a shift to a planned economy and the introduction of a massive amount of regulation. Restaurants were forced for many years to have a ―meat-free‖ day during the week. Standardized

recipes were issued for all types of food setting out precise amounts of raw materials needed to prepare each item. Restaurants and pubs were divided into four price based categories. The fourth (lowest) group consisted of smoky dives with no tablecloths, where besides beer and rum, about all that was available were bread rolls and salami. The third price group was the most widespread. Here, the waiters would sometimes even wear white shirts, the food was cheap and not all that bad but very uniform. In larger towns and cities, people looking for a more refined atmosphere would go to an establishment from the second price group. Here you could (after the sixties) even get Coca Cola and the most popular meal here was veal medallions. The first price group represented real ―luxury‖ and there were only a few such restaurants outside of hotels.[…]‖

(Source: The Heart of Europe, Vol 1 2006, pg. 27. ISSN 1210–7727 online at http://www.theo.cz/pdf/2006/Theo_2006_01_EN.pdf).

; translated with preface by Ammiel

ISBN-10: 0938872397

ISBN-13: 9780938872399

LCCN# 2008931963 Published by Black Buzzard Press, a subsidiary of Visions International Arts Synergy, a non-profit 501C3 world art organization.

Black Buzzard Press 3503 Ferguson Lane Austin, TX 78754

http://www.poetshouse.org/publisher.asp?p

ublisher=Black+Buzzard+Press

First edition, 2008

Two of these poems: The Occupation in Ten Scenes and Master Craftsmen appeared in

Balkan Visions, issue # 48, and The kind of Unease… and A Sign in the Beer Cellar…

appeared in Silver Visions, issue #72 of Visions International.

We are grateful to the Cornell University

Department of Linguistics and Department of Russian Literature for their financial support

for the publication of this book, and to the Cornell Institute for European Studies for the

presentation of this book to the public. S.S & W.B.

Copyright © 2008 by Sasha Skenderija

Translations copyright © 2008 by Wayles Browne, Aaron Tate, & Francis Jones