Chapter 3. Poetry translation webs
differences in religious heritage had been absolutized into mutually exclusive
markers of identity, other areas of culture were drafted into this rhetoric of differ-
ence (cf. Campbell: 88–92; Wachtel 1998: 173–226). Skender Kulenović, for exam-
ple, whose poetry features in Chapter 7, was born into a Bosniak family but worked
in Belgrade. Hence both Bosniak and Serbian ethnonationalists claim him as
‘their’ poet, though Sarajevo critic Ivan Lovrenović argues that this shows the ab-
surdity of ethnonationalist claims over culture (2002a).
The conflict between ethnonationalist and cosmopolitanist models of culture
and society, however, was no less fierce. Cosmopolitanists regard Bosnian culture
as interlinked with that of neighbouring ex-Yugoslav states, but distinct in its ex-
perience of interaction between the Muslim/ Ottoman, Catholic/ Western and
Orthodox/ East-Slavic heritages. Hence they oppose the ethnonationalists’ use of
culture to construct and justify absolutized inter-narod differences (see e.g.
Mahmutćehajić 1998/2000; Lovrenović 2001, 2002a).
Both culture wars were waged primarily by ex-Yugoslav players. However, the
second also had an international dimension. On the ethnonationalist side, some
non-Bosnian commentators revealed a ‘Balkanist’ ideology, which pictures the
Balkans as chaotic and riven by age-old hatreds, and hence unsuited for modern,
cosmopolitanist models of society (Todorova 1997; Campbell 1998: 90; Bjelić and
Savić 2003). This matched a Serbian ethnonationalist self-image, which was pro-
moted by Serbian ethnonationalist leaders to deter foreign intervention (Lovrenović
2002b). Opposed to this concurrence of views were the cosmopolitanist interest
networks of Bosnian and non-Bosnian intellectual and cultural players mentioned
in Chapter 2, which sought to halt ethnonationalist war and defend Bosnia’s
emerging civil society (Jones and Arsenijević 2005: 84–86). These were ‘transna-
tional’: that is, involving “cross-border linkages that foster cooperation despite
persisting national differences” (Basic 2006: 217).
Though these debates formed a background to poems written during the
war, they rarely figured explicitly in poems themselves. Overtly, poems covered
the themes tackled in any European poetry, with one crucial addition – that of
wartime witness and protest. An example of this poetry of witness is Ferida
Duraković’s Georg Trakl on the Battlefield Revisited, 1993 (tr. Antonela Glavinić
and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: Agee 1998b)^3 :
On high, above the planes, dwells God, the beloved,
eyes gleaming gold above the Sarajevo gloom.
Fruit-blossom and mortarshells both fall beyond my window.
Madness and me. Alone. We are alone. So alone.- Georg Trakl was an Austrian poet driven to suicide by his experiences in World War I.