Sarajevo Blues
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
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 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 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.
"Sarajevo Blues is widely considered here to be the best piece of writing to emerge from this besieged capital since Bosnia's war erupted in April 1992."—Washington Post
"A Supreme masterpiece witnessed and redeems with total detachment. I have experienced this only twice in my life: with Zoran Mušic's drawings from Dachau and Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues. This book will be a classic."—Tomaž Šalamun, The book for my brother
"Sarajevo Blues is at once a battle report and a philosophical investigation. In poems, micro-essays, and prose vignettes, Semezdin Memedinovic charts the collapse of a world with heart-breaking clarity and precision. His book conveys the same clear-eyes passion for the truth that one finds in the young Hemingway, the Hemingway of in our time."—Paul Auster, Book of Illusions
Semezdin Mehmedinovic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1960 and is the author of four books. In 1993 he was cowriter and codirector, with Benjamin Filipovic, of Mizaldo, one of the first Bosnian films shot during the war. The film was presented at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994, and won the first prize at the Mediterranean Festival in Rome the following year. He, his wife, and their child left Bosnia and came to the U.S. as political refugees in 1996. His collection of poetry Nine Alexandrias is Number 56 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series.
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. FYI: Also in December, City Lights will release Semezdin Mehmedinovic's full-length U.S. debut, Sarajevo Blues ( 128p 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, 128p ).
