Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
Dizdar has replaced the expected biti (‘be’) by the ‘rhyme-companion’ sniti
(‘dream’). Because it marks grammatical relationships by word-endings, BCS
word-order is relatively flexible, unlike English. Hence my English transla-
tion used a different deviation, adding the alluded-to be directly (and un-
grammatically) after dream.- Associative and register-specific meaning. Examples are the pejorative associa-
tions of BCS crknut (‘die [like an animal]’) and English cur (‘[unpleasant] dog’)
in Lines 7–9:
Crknut će taj pas pseći This cursed cur
Od samih Will be slain
Jada With pain- Reference to implicit background knowledge. In Line 11, for example, badac
(translated as watchman) means a guard from the medieval Serbian court,
thus marking watchman from the East as a guardian of the Serbian Orthodox
Church and hence a persecutor of the Bosnian heretics. Dizdar explains this
term in an appendix to the 1973 Kameni spavač, showing that not all back-
ground knowledge is necessarily shared by the source reader. - Ambiguous or multiple meanings. It is not quite clear, for instance, whether
studenac and its literal counterpart spring in Line 14 is being used just literally
(a source of water) or also metaphorically (a source of faith):
Sasut ćeš otrov You’ll pour poison
U moj studenac Into the spring
Iz koga mi je From which
Piti I drink- Image and metaphor. For example, the extract’s daily-life imagery can be seen
as an extended metaphor for the heretics’ existence after death (home = tomb,
town = necropolis).
Poems, however – particularly those written in the last century or so – may have
few if any of the intrinsic features listed here or for Yù jiē yuàn (e.g. its fixed sylla-
ble-and-line patterning). An alternative approach is to define poetry in terms of its
function: how the “texture, rhythm and resonance” of poems typically go beyond
“abstractable meaning” (Eagleton, quoted in Matterson and Jones 2000: 13) or give
heightened experience. These two functional aspects were mentioned for Yù jiē
yuàn, and almost certainly led E to choose Poruka/Message rather than a prose text
to head his Preface. The reference to the heretics’ spiritual world, the links between
medieval and mid-twentieth century massacres, and the suggestion that all