BOSNIA AND HERCEGOVINA IN THE LIGHT OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION Debates held at gatherings to discuss the political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina all too often involve abstract theoretical reflection, without taking into consideration the reasons the country is stuck in an impasse from which it can neither move ahead nor go back. Real understanding and an objective and informed view […]
Pictures Of Stecaks With Quotations From Literary and Other Works
When spring arrives Moja krv se ugrije My blood warms up Neke misli idu Some thoughts go A neke ostaju And some stay Moje riječi My words Nisu dobre Are not good Ni na jednom jeziku In either language I moj identitet And my identity Čeka da poleti Waits to fly away Jer ustvari to nepostoji Because, actually, it doesn’t […]
as we walk through a forest tunnel above us hangs the unmoving December sky the stars squint through the braided treetops at seven o’clock in the evening cold needles on the ends of a hornbeam’s branches they fall off and break on the aqueous foliage the southern wind blows I remember The Damned Yard the dementia of ghosts in the […]
in Sarajevo April is truly the cruelest month where fantasy and horror mix in the test tubes of the bodies ghosts hang in the air, ghosts of literary schizophrenia you only have to pick them, those sad bunches of universes for which you will pay with your own blood at Bistrik and Kovači the houses are fenced by high walls […]
I live on the other side of all things I am not of isms, nor did I come out of anybody’s uniform I hate most the literary evenings and festivals There I feel all the sorrow as it builds up within people useless sediment, except in art I live on the other side of all things beside Saturn’s ring on […]
that is my river in her I have recognized myself there where the reeds are the braids of travertine nymphs who in August, when the water level lowers, show their thighs on which walk incandescent swimmers while the summer sun sprays the air that is my river swift as a thought of one’s beloved capable like opal of changing shades […]
During the past five years, the International Forum Bosna has held, alone or in cooperation with others, a number of international gatherings to discuss key issues for the modern world and the ways in which they are present and reflected in Bosnia. In each case, the discussion involved the premise that it is impossible to understand the world if any […]
In their conciseness and formal characteristics, marginal records are comparable to inscriptions, which appear on stecaks but also church buildings, judicial chairs, mausoleums, and chastisement inscriptions. Just as authors of marginal records, whether with their own or others’ works, had to follow, to some extent, certain rules regarding composition, proportion, and content, authors of epigraphs had to consider a set […]
The British writer Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) was a press attaché at the British Legation in Belgrade from 1949 to 1952. To Anne Ridler British Legation, Belgrade [1949] Dear Anne, A brief note from a troubled spot to wonder how you are and what you are writing—despite the patient motherhood 5 year plan. We have been traveling rather hard all this […]
Bosnia. November. And the mountain roads Earthbound but matching perfectly these long And passionate self-communings counter-march, Balanced on scarps of trap, ramble or blunder Over traverses of cloud: and here they move, Mule-teams like insects harnessed by a bell Upon the leaf-edge of a winter sky, And down at last into this lap of stone Between four cataracts of rock: […]
Already I had planned to tramp out into unknown eastern Bosnia in the short New Year holiday. I copied from my school-map the features of the mountains, sparse townlets and villages, a devious thread of road, between Sarajevo and Višegrad on the upper Drina. All else was temporarily displaced by excitement at starting at last an inland exploration. On the […]
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, […]