Mak Dizdar

Photograph of Mak Dizdar

Mak (Mehmedalija) Dizdar (born 1917 in Stolac, Bosnia-Herzegovina - died 1971 in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina) was a Bosniak poet, considered one of the greatest Yugoslav poets of the second half of the twentieth century.

Life

After having finished the elementary school in Stolac and high school (Gymnasium) in Sarajevo, Dizdar spent his World War II years as a supporter of Communist Partisans and, frequently, moving undercover from place to place in order to avoid NDH authorities' attention. His family was a typical traditional Bosniak family with Bosnian Muslim heritage. NDH Croatian soldiers killed his brother.

After the war, Dizdar was a prominent figure in cultural life of Bosnia and Herzegovina, working as the editor-in-chief of the daily Oslobođenje, head of a few state-sponsored publishing houses and, finally, as a professional writer and the President of Writers' Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina, until his death.

Work

Drawing of Mak Dizdar

Bearing in mind Dizdar's impeccably orthodox Communist behavior in the postwar years and his early social poetry, one could have rightfully expected a minor poet-apparatchik, a yessayer to everything the local political elite would deem appropriate and desirable in "laden years" of rigid authoritarianism, especially dominant in Bosnia and Herzegovina that was treated, particularly in the field of culture, as a Serbia's fief. On the contrarary, Dizdar had, in just a decade and a half prior to his death, produced a unique and powerful poetic oeuvre no one would have expected to appear.

As a poet, Mak Dizdar has in two poetic collections and longer poems, Kameni spavač/Stone sleeper (1966-1971) and Modra rijeka (1971) achieved magnificent fusion of seemingly disparate elements: inspired by medieval Bosnian tombstones ("stećci" or "mramorovi"/marbles) and their gnomic inscriptions on ephemerality of life, he produced exquisitely structured collection of pregnant verses saturated with his own, intimate, and yet universal vision of life and death that owes much to the Christian and Muslim Gnostic sensibility of life as a passage between "tomb and stars" — but not curtailed by any dogma. Dizdar's vision of life and death expresses, paradoxically, both Gnostic horror of corporeality and a sense of blessedness of the entire earth and Universe. Seems that as diverse strands as radiance of Bosnian pre-Ottoman cultural heritage exemplified in writings of Bosnian Christians (followers of the Bosnian Church), sayings of heterodox Islamic visionary mystics and Bosnian vernacular linguistic idiom that fully emerged in 1400s, rich with archaic and spiritual meanings, have fused in a remarkable poetic opus- firmly rooted in Bosnian soil and universal in aesthetic and spiritual eminence.

Mak Dizdar also fought against forced influence of the Serbian language on the Bosnian language, as Dizdar called it, in his article "Marginalije o jeziku i oko njega", Zivot, XIX/11 - 12, Sarajevo, 1970, 109-120.

After the collapse of Communism and following the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dizdar's poetic magnum opus has remained the cornerstone of Bosniak modern literatures.

Poetry

A text about time

Long have I lain here before thee
And after thee
Long shall I lie

Long
Have the grasses my bones
Long
Have the worms my flesh
Long
Have I gained a thousand names
Long
Have I forgot my name

Long have I lain here before thee
And after thee
Long shall I lie

My verzion is betterText about time

Long time i am laying you hereand for a long time i will lay you

so longthat grass my bonesso long that worms my flashso longthat i have gained thousend namesso long that i have fogot my name

Long time i am laying you hereand for a long time i will lay you

Rain

We need to learn again
to listen to the rain the rain

We need to disenstone ourselves
and eyes straight to walk unwavering through the city gate

We need to uncover the lost paths
that pass through the blond grass

We need to caress the poppies and ants
panicking in this plenty of plants

We need to wash ourselves anew
and dream in clean drops of dawn dew

We need to faint away
between the dark tresses of grassy hair

We need to stand a while beside our sun
and grow as tall as our shadow

We need to meet ourown hearts again
that fled so long ago

We need to disenstone ourselves
and eyes straight to walk unwavering thought this stone city's stone gate

We need to wish with all our mightand listen all night to the rain the rain the rigteous rainTranslated by Francis R. Jones

Source: Kameni spavač/Stone Sleeper, Mak Dizdar, Sarajevo, 1999

See also

*MAK, 1917-1997. , by Safet Plakalo, on the 80th anniversary of Mak's birth