Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
government territory became increasingly Bosniak-dominated, though the official
ethic was still cosmopolitanist.
International media reports from wartime Bosnia helped foster international
sympathy for the conflict’s civilian victims. Underlying this awareness were two
mutually-opposed narratives. One constructed the war as a flaring-up of age-old
inter-ethnic hatreds, which outside forces were powerless to combat. Following
this, the Western powers refused to intervene militarily. Instead, they imposed an
arms embargo (which the Bosnian government saw as entrenching the rebel forc-
es’ military superiority), whilst encouraging peace settlements which allowed ter-
ritorial separation between nations. The other narrative constructed the war as a
brutal attack by ethnonationalist forces on an emergent civil society. As this narra-
tive grew in strength, covert and finally overt support by Western and Islamic
countries for the Sarajevo government brokered an alliance between Croatian na-
tionalists and the Sarajevo government, and led to NATO military intervention in
1995 in support of this alliance. Late that year, war ended with partition between
the largely Bosniak and Croatian ‘Federation’ and the Serbian ethnonationalist
‘Republika Srpska’ within a notionally unitary Bosnian state.
In 1994, the UK-based Croatian writer W relayed to me a request to copy-
edit an English collection of essays by Sarajevo-based essayist, politician and phi-
losopher E. After a satellite-phone conversation with E, I agreed. The essays had
been selected by Sarajevo-based publisher P, and translated into English by BCS
native translator T1. The preface, with the final title Bosnia, supreme archipelago,
argued that inter-nation tolerance formed the basis of Bosnian society: see Figure 3
for the copy-edited first page. It was prefaced by two quotations. One was a verse
from the Qur’an telling how God empowered people to protect all religions’ places
of worship, because all religions worship Him. The other was an extract from Stone
Sleeper in which the dead heretic beneath the stone taunts the heretic-hunters that
they cannot destroy spiritual strength by physical violence.
The BCS source lines and an English interlinear (with minor word-order and
article^3 adjustments) for the latter extract are given below:- Pa tajno ćeš kao vješt uhoda sa zapada
and/then secretly you’ll as/like a skilful spy from the west - Moje žilište sažeći
burn down my home [ARCHAIC] - Do samog dna
to the very bottom - I pada
and [to] the fall - BCS has no definite or indefinite articles.