Senadin Musabegović in translation: poetry and essay

Trag ženske kose na licu / The Trace of a Woman’s Hair Across My Face



We argue all night.
Only in the morning
with the shrieking of the birds
our thoughts
manage to recapture
the world.

The flock circling overhead,
confused,
bringing the movements of the night stars to the city.

You tell me that upon each star
someone gone
is watching us now.

The pointed beak hits against the windowpane,
in its sound, the blue sky
vibrates
between us

I dug trenches at Poljine.
A sniper started shooting.
I threw myself against the ground from which I could see Sarajevo.
The shadow of a bird flew over me,
touching me like a woman’s hair.
On my chest
beneath my white shirt
all the softness of death writhed.
I get up and think:

— The shadow of the bird always falls to the ground like an icy corpse walking in our wake.



Skupljanje malih figurica pred rastanak / Collecting Small Figurines Before Parting

In the sound of the cricket
your pupils
expand
and
contract.

We have told each other everything,
everything has already happened,
only the touch of your eyelashes
dissembles
and
assembles
figures of the world.

They demolish the city
in which someone has emptied all the streets.

In it everything has already happened.
Above the ruptured head
of a little girl
the red sky got its name.

In it everything has already happened.
On the colourful clothes strewn on the floor,
while we were penetrating one another,
in a sudden jerk,
we saw our dreams pasted together,
frozen in a glass moment,
more present than our body.

In it everything has already happened.
When the moon from the old locust tree was throwing out its
shadow,
in front of the mosque
people carried on their hands the white mejt. [1]
The murmur of the birch tree combined their breaths.
They carried it from hand to hand
it slid in the touches of fingers,
passing by,
becoming the white breath of a belle that separates from them.

In it everything has already happened.
When we were parting,
before your eyes you demolished my picture,
You said my name.
On the tip of your right canine
clung a red lipstick stain.



Translated from Bosnian by Ulvija Tanović


[1] A metj is a corpse that is wrapped in a white sheet, according to Islamic customs. 



Poet's Confession

In my poetry, I allow words to bind in the body that I discovered during war, during the perils of war.  In war, the body revealed in its own scream the multitude of forces that created a new relationship towards the past; because war not only destroys our present, it also negates and dissipates our past.  The past disintegrates into a jumble of details in which we find no whole, which we cannot patch up into anything meaningful.  In the vortex of the struggling body beset by the internal wounds of war, the past gapes like a depot with a disorder of images from our childhoods, our learned relationships with the world, our perceptions of ourselves, our expectations of a ‘better tomorrow’. 

            Andre Malraux talked about the internal imaginary museum everyone constructs and assembles patiently during his lifetime. But war destroys any notion of internality, of privacy where we can retreat to observe and meditate on the law of the world. We are cast out into a space where the boundary between the world and the body is torn down, where the boundary between life and death disintegrates, where our imaginary museum of internality becomes a depot of externality.  The scream of poetry is in creating meaning from that depot that does not seek to be patched up by false unity, false order.  That is why my poetry seeks to resemble the world dissipated into details, with a new world emanating from each detail.

            Psychoanalysis teaches us that the most authentic side of any personality is in the details.  For example, when we look at a portrait or image painted by Nicolas Poussin, Rembrandt, Manet, it is important to see the detailed work; how Rembrandt paints ears, the thumb of Manet’s Olympia.  Attention should be given to those aspects that are almost imperceptible for the artist himself and for the entire painting or figure.  It is through such marginal details that the hidden thoughts or repressed intentions of the artist are revealed.  That is why my poems do not aspire to wholeness, but to details, like the explosion of shells that do not merely destroy the world, but disintegrate consciousness.  The very ability to observe invisible, inaudible details is in itself explosive.  The connection between the world and consciousness is no longer achieved through the poetry of harmony, where the poetic subject is joined with the most remote part of the world, where his interior merged with his exterior. Instead communication between the consciousness and the world is achieved through an explosion, a fragmentation of details.  It is therefore difficult to talk about internal solitude in the context of my poetry, because solitude is in the scream, the explosion created not only by the body, but by the consciousness and the world.        


News

New Word Express participant Hywel Griffiths sent us English translations of three of his poems. You can read them here alongside the originals.
---

If you've been wondering what Word Express writers have been working on recently, you'll be pleased to hear that Owen Martell's novel 'Dyn Yr Eiliad' has been translated into Serbian by Milan Dobričić's Read the full story here.

---

Using photography and music from our multi-talented Word Express writer-travellers, we've put together this short slide show with music from Ivan Hristov's band Gologan.

---