Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

1. The Poet

1. The Poet Mehmed Alija ‘‘Mak’’ Dizdar, the most famous Bosnian poet of his age, was born in 1917 in Stolac, a town in the heart of Hum, the southern province of Bosnia. Few of Dizdar’s readers know him as Mehmed, the first name given him by his father, Muharem, and his mother, Nezira, née Babovic ́. Rather, they know him by his pseudonym of Mak, or Poppy, the code name he used as a member of the antifascist movement during World War II. (Mak’s mother and his sister, Refika, were killed in 1945 in the Jasenovac concentration camp—the Nazis’ way of taking their revenge on the elusive Mak.) Although he wrote and published poetry from his early youth to his death in 1971, Dizdar is best known for the volume of poems entitled Kameni spavač (Stone Sleeper), which was a milestone in twentieth -century Bosnian and southern Slav poetry. The first edition of Kameni spavač appeared in 1966. Shortly before his death in 1971, the poet submitted to the Mostar-based publishing house known as the First Literary Commune a manuscript revision that still more explicitly reflects the mystery of Bosnia’s destiny .1 This edition of Kameni spavač was published in 1973, two years after the poet’s death.2 8 / The Text beyond the Text Dizdar’s Sleeper poses perennial questions of the origin, way, and purpose of our being in this world through the krstjani, the followers of the distinctive medieval Bosnian Church, who lie beneath the great tombstones known as stećci (sing. stećak), awaiting the Day of Judgment .3 In lonely isolation or grouped in cemeteries, the stećci continue to define the spatial, cultural, and religious image of Bosnia4 and remain central to the discords and debates that arise over the origins and future of Bosnian plurality. Kameni spavač was originally received as a finished poetic work. It was welcomed with delight and amazement, as its readers found in it a treasure they had lost. Few viewed the work in the light of perennial wisdom, as traditional intellectuality and the forms of culture associated with it had been harshly rejected in the modern age. When the Sleeper was first published, its discourse was more felt than understood . Under communism, people were expected to renounce whatever could not be quantified and bow down before the promised ‘‘end of history,’’ which was within the grasp of the revolutionary elite. Indeed , not just to bow down but to sacrifice themselves and others for that earthly goal. Communist rule was established in Bosnia in 1945, when the country became part of the Yugoslav communist federation. The ruling elite imposed its own image of the world as the absolute truth. Everything contrary to this ideology was regarded as an imperfection to be either altered or eliminated. The future was presented as the earthly paradise, while whatever lay beyond the sensible boundaries of space and time was declared not to exist. Seen from the outside, Mehmed Alija Dizdar was a consummate insider in that tale of man, society, and the world. He had grown up before the second World War in a time that harshly rejected his entire collective heritage, a time of almost indescribable misery and poverty during which the communists peddled their promises of a happier future . Other ideologies were in the mix alongside communism—those of nationalism and liberalism, of Nazism and fascism, all, however, based on the premise that the drama of self-realization is played on The Poet / 9 the stage of society, not in the self as the focus of the visible and invisible cosmos. Almost every account of Dizdar’s life presents him, like most of his comrades, as engaged in the social reconstruction that, according to the ‘‘avant-garde of the working class,’’ would necessarily lead via revolutionary changes to the ‘‘classless society’’ and the ‘‘earthly paradise .’’ There was no apparent trace of traditional culture in either his private or his public life. He did not follow the dietary laws, nor did he advocate restraint in the face of temptation. But his Kameni spavač is perhaps the most resolute of discourses—thinking and poetry set in opposition to the modern worldview. There is probably no other discourse of his day in which Truth is so convincingly revealed as in the Sleeper’s poetic utterances. Everything in them is contrary to...