Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
all upon it as created by the devil, and Christ as pure light rather than crucified
flesh – and that the stećci were the tombs of the heretic faithful, who had been
persecuted for their ‘impure’ faith. Then came a third captivation: the masterwork
of Bosnian twentieth-century poetry, Kameni spavač (‘Stone Sleeper’, 1973) of Mak
Dizdar (1917–1972) – a dialogue between the poet, the heretics, and the heretic-
hunters of the established church.
On winter days in the neo-Orientalist gloom of the Bosnian National Library,
I began translating Kameni spavač, surrounded by the work’s various editions, by
dictionaries of modern Serbo-Croatian and Old Church Slavonic, by anti-heretical
tracts and compilations of South Slav folklore. Over the following 15 years, while
living in the Netherlands, Greece and then Britain, I continued to work on Kameni
spavač between translation jobs for living poets.
Ethnicity was central to citizenship in late-socialist Yugoslavia^2. ‘Nations’
(narodi) were the main officially-designated ethnic groups; BCS native speakers
Figure 2. Stećak (Radimlje necropolis, Bosnia)
- For histories of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, see Woodward (1995), Malcolm (1996), Silber and
Little (1997), and Campbell (1998).