Sarajevo Blues [Paperback]

Semezdin Mehmedinovic (Author), Ammiel Alcalay (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

From one of Bosnia’s most prominent poets and writers: spare and haunting stories and poems that were written under the horrific circumstances of the recent war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Semezdin Mehmedinovic remained a citizen of Sarajevo throughout the Serbian nationalists’ siege and was active throughout the war in the city’s resistance movement, as one of the editor’s of the magazine Phantom of Liberty. Sarajevo Blues was originally published at the end of 1992 and was the first book in the Biblioteka “egzil-abc” series, published in Ljubljana, which provided a forum for Bosnian writers and translators under siege or living in exile. Semezdin Mehmedinovic says that “writing is, finally, quite a personal thing that doesn’t make much sense unless you are practicing for the last word.” For those Bosnians emerging from the siege or still in exile, these “last words” remain intimate possessions, one of the last bastions left against the commodification of tragedy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For American-born Agee, now a teacher and journalist in Belfast, the height of postmodern sensibility is the West's passive response to televised Serbian war crimes, a sentiment echoed by poet Ferida Durakovic: "I declare?this is not the calm and distant face of History/ And a little pool of blood." This anthology of Bosnian poets?defined in Agee's introduction as those committed to multi-ethnic democracy?is the first available in the U.S., and includes searing prose accounts of Serbian-run death camps. But the stance of most poets found here is to find refuge from war in anecdote and imagination. As the journalist and poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic?the most satisfying writer in the collection?observes: "Everyone in Sarajevo, accustomed to death, lives through so many transcendental experiences that they have already become initiates of some deviant form of Buddhism." Here, life under siege combines a sense of doom with an absurd inner freedom. Often, as in the confident and expressive poetry of Marko Vesovic, life and death undergo difficult and intricate inversions: "It's not a thirst shooting up,/ But a growth toward the dead, spread sideways," he writes of a white hawthorn tree. The collection as a whole is of uneven quality, and the number of extravagant lines ("AS I PASS THE SO-CALLED STREETS BY THE SO-CALLED BUILDINGS/ OF OUR SO-CALLED CITY") seem at times strangely clubby and arrogant, especially when the editor juxtaposes concentration camp narratives with travel logs of foreign-born writers. Still, as Faruhdin Zilkic writes of the mark left by a passing bullet, "it's when a year later/ you recognize the scar on the stone/ where your life went on again" that survival can become poetry, and this collection lets us give thanks to its power and joy. (Dec.) FYI: Also in December, City Lights will release Semezdin Mehmedinovic's full-length U.S. debut, Sarajevo Blues ($12.95 128p ISBN 0-87286-345-X). The same month, the prolific Sarajevan poet Mario Susko's second U.S. release, Versus Exsul, is due from Yuganta (6 Rushmore Circle, Stamford, Conn. 06905, $12.95 128p ISBN 0-938999-12-5).
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Just when you think you've become "immune" to one of the greatest calamities of the century?the merciless war in Bosnia?a writer like Mehmedinovic comes along and "slaps you in the face" all over again. This collection of short stories and poems is far more than just the reminiscences of a man who not only witnessed but lived the war. Yes, perhaps we've heard this before, but how often do we really "see" this wretched, surreal, yet all too real picture of someone else's misfortune? This ability to masterfully delineate even the simplest moments but somehow remain tactfully indifferent is Mehmedinovic's most invaluable attribute?notably vivid in the short stories. It is as if you are being "pulled" into this world, where the vigor of his words and the sharpness of his eye lead the way. The next you know, you've not only read a memorable literary achievement, but it educates you about the war in a way countless journalistic accounts never could.?Mirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 122 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087286345X
• ISBN-13: 978-0872863453
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #801,368 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Slavic

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most important books on the recent Balkan wars, April 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sarajevo Blues (Paperback)

A pearl of insight that should be read and reread by anybody interested in the recent Balkan wars appears on page 115 of "Sarajevo Blues." There we find, in an interview between translator Ammiel Alcalay and author Semezdin Mehmedinovic, the latter's comment that "Bosnian culture is inclusive, it includes the Bosnian Franciscan tradition (of Catholic mysticism), the Muslim Sufi tradition, and the Sephardic Jewish tradition; this is all part of my culture." This sheaf of poetry and prose sketches offers a modern transformation of such transcendental currents. "Sarajevo Blues," as it was called even in the Bosnian version, is legendary in the stricken city of Sarajevo, serving as a local souvenir for those who survived the brutal siege that struck the city beginning in 1992.

One of several disparate and more or less hurried editions, printed on the roughest newsprint and selling in the bookstores of Marshal Tito Street, retails for only three marks, or $1.80 -- a major investment for Sarajevans, who have few jobs and less money.

Mehmedinovic is a Muslim Bosnian living in the United States. Born in 1960, he was no longer young when the Bosnian conflict commenced, but his writing still bears the marks of the youthful American style -- brief but eloquent notes and comments -- that swept the world with the Beat revolution. With considerable effectiveness, Mehmedinovic has synthesized the sentimental traditions and idealistic illusions of the Sarajevans, the horrors of the war and the disillusionment of its victims with an indifferent world.

He writes of the prayerful burial of a Muslim martyred in the fighting: "Sorrow gathers in circles under the eyes; the men pass their open palms across their faces. As the rites continue, I feel the presence of God in everything; when this is over, I will take a pen and make a list of my sins." The one-paragraph text ends, "A cat jumps across the shadow of a minaret."

Elsewhere he describes how Serb terrorists expelled the mental patients from a suburban asylum, driving them into the city: "One of them -- holding the body of a dead sparrow by its claws -- came up to someone walking along King Tomislav Street and said, `You'll be dead too, when my army gets here.' " The combination of poignant and surreal details is characteristic not only of Bosnian war narratives but also of contemporary Bosnian writing in general, a field of literature unknown in the outside world until the war, but featuring great achievements of perception and lyricism.

If the war has had a positive aspect -- aside from the shutdown of old, polluting indus tries, which has allowed fish to reappear in the country's rivers for the first time in decades -- it is the introduction of Bosnian authors to foreign readers. (Recent volumes issued in English include an outstanding work, "Death and the Dervish" by Mesa Selimovic, a Muslim who wrote with great delicacy in the Serbian dialect, and who died in 1982. That book, published in 1996 by Northwestern University Press, describes the dilemma of an 18th century Bosnian Sufi dealing with governmental injustice.)

Mehmedinovic's sharp eye allows him to summarize three years of genocide in a few lines. He describes a Serb woman at an artillery post, whom he watched through binoculars as she sunned herself in a bathing suit. "She lies like that for hours," he writes. "Then she gets up, goes to the rocket launcher, pulls the catch and lets a shell fly at random toward the city." After the explosion, "she goes back, rubbing her body in suntan oil to fully give in to her own state of well-being."

He is devastating in his comments on foreign observers, voyeuristic correspondents and other spectators of Bosnia's torment: "I'm running across an intersection to avoid the bullet of a sniper from the hill when I walk straight into some photographers; they're doing their job, in deep cover. If a bullet hit me they'd get a shot worth so much more than my life that I'm not even sure whom to hate: the Chetnik sniper or these monkeys with Nikons."

Mehmedinovic's book is an incisive answer to the claim by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz. Poetry survived Auschwitz, and poetry has survived the atrocities of Bosnia, but it is a grim genre of verse. As Mehmedinovic says, "When a ten-year-old kid asks if he's a Muslim and after getting a positive answer says, `I don't want to be expelled,' " -- from his home, not his school -- "then you know something horrible has happened to this people."

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You don't want to read this book - so do, July 1, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sarajevo Blues (Paperback)

Sarajevo Blues is poetry and prose of the war in Sarajevo. It is written with the realism that one associates with Ernaux or Duras. As the author says in an interview at the end of the book: "We were completely attuned to the exterior world ... We had a real need for precision, with some belief that if we could put on paper precisely what was in the outside owrld that, in itself, would convey the emotional potential indispensable to poetry."

Thus this book makes its points simply - the cigarette wrapped in a death certificate, the recognition of the enemy in the same sweater that you wear, the pear eaten with the iman of the mosque ... the result is a book that will not permit you to view war in the abstract but rather forces you to look at war in the eyes of individual people who matter.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Soul touching words that have helped me understand., April 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sarajevo Blues (Paperback)

This is the first book I have read in years that I have been unable to put down. I had to get online with Amazon.com and see if his other works were available. My soul has been reawakened. I subconsciouly forgot what I saw in Bosnia in January of this year. This book has helped me understand what I saw. The translation keeps much of the power that I believe was intended. This is a must read for anyone who cares about what is going on in the Balkins right now.