Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

Preface

Preface This is a work in two parts. The first is ‘‘The Text beyond the Text: Stone Sleeper (Kameni spavač) in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy ,’’ and the second is ‘‘Across Water: A Message on Realization.’’ Part I is a much-expanded version of an essay entitled ‘‘The Text beneath the Text: The Poetry of Mak Dizdar’’ that was published in 1999 as the Afterword to a bilingual edition of Dizdar’s Stone Sleeper / Kameni spavač. Part II explores another of Dizdar’s masterworks , the poem ‘‘Blue River,’’ and was originally published separately in 2007 as Preko vode: Uz pjesmu Maka Dizdara ‘‘Modra rijeka.’’ Mehmed Alija ‘‘Mak’’ Dizdar is known to many readers as the author of Kameni spavač, written and revised between 1967 and 1973. It marked the beginning of a new era in not only Bosnian literature but that of the entire Slav south. The narrator of Dizdar’s poetical revelation is a Sleeper under the aegis of the Bosnian mystery. In Bosnia, a country on the dividing line between worlds, independent interpretations of the Word of Christ have survived through the centuries, attracting and repelling people both within the country and outside it. These interpretations have been described as a pestilence, a corruption , and a danger, but those who adhered to this ‘‘religion without a x / Preface name’’ never submitted to an external religious system. This enduring independence of interpretation was perpetuated in oral literature that, to the world’s astonishment, has lasted to this day. Aspects of perennial wisdom are to be found in the fragments of this ancient insistence and living oral heritage and particularly in Dizdar’s relation of the Sleeper’s questions on roads, man, heaven, and earth. Dizdar related them at a time of communist utopianism, turning, in his post-traditional poetry, to spiritual regions of the self that ideological violence had denied and laid waste. From the very outset, Stone Sleeper was welcomed as a liberation from the ideological disciplines of communism, nationalism, and scientism. Indeed, it was seen as an anti-ideological turning point. Few, however, were able to understand or expound the traditional content of its post-traditional form. And the book has, in its life since then, remained important and challenging, both for Bosnia and further afield. The first part of this book was written as an introduction to the traditional content of Stone Sleeper. In his anti-ideological sea change, Dizdar’s Sleeper speaks out of a sequence of ‘‘death-dream-waking.’’ Man, heaven, and earth are raised to a metaphysical level, refusing the ideological dogma that sees the quantifiable world as the only one. The first readers of Stone Sleeper sensed rather than understood this, lacking as they did any comprehensive knowledge of traditional intellectuality , which had been almost entirely obscured by the ideological projects and movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reflections in both parts of the book derive from the perspective of the perennial philosophy, because Dizdar’s poetic revelation in Stone Sleeper shows a harmonious interplay of prophetic wisdom and poetic discovery, which has also been the aim of the interpretation given here.1 As the crucial source and substance of the perennial wisdom , prophecy is higher than poetry. Wherever there is a prophetic tradition, there is poetry, and almost every form and instrument of poetry can be recognized in prophetic discourse. Poetry is frequently opposed to prophecy, as a distortion or denial of it. There are times, though, as shown in this interpretation of Stone Sleeper, when it is inseparable from prophecy and the wisdom at its heart. Preface / xi A Note on the Translation This translation was made by Saba Risaluddin. It incorporates considerable quotation of Francis Jones’s translation of Mak Dizdar’s masterwork Kameni spavač/Stone Sleeper, as well as his translation of Dizdar’s poem Modra rijeka / Blue River. At the author’s request, the text was reviewed by Francis Jones, who suggested corrections. The author and Desmond Maurer have since comprehensively revised the text of the translation. While grateful for the crucial contributions made by all three translators, the author takes full responsibility for the resulting text and any infelicities within it. A number of issues of translation come up time and again through the text. Some of these are due to the nature of the relationship between Bosnian and English as languages, while others relate to speci fic...