Poems from the manuscript Songs in the Storm
by Admiral Mahic
Translated by Brian Fawcett and Slobodan Drakulic
Introduction by Brian Fawcett
I was introduced to Admiral Mahic and his poetry by the late Slobodan Drakulic, who asked me to help translate his work. Admiral had been brought to Canada by PEN and installed as a kind of informal poet-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s Massey College in the summer of 1995. Admiral didn’t do well there, for several reasons. Massey, I think, was expecting a scholarly Muslim poet, and Admiral, though ethnically Muslim, was a larger-than-life free spirit who enjoyed women and booze more than was wise or healthy in a country being traumatized by an ethnic and religious civil war. He was also the sort of man who couldn’t have a conversation with anyone—male or female—without putting his hands all over them, and this, at the height of the body-perimeter hysteria that was then sweeping the universities, had not gone over well at Massey. When Slobodan brought Admiral to my attention, he had recently “left” Massey under a cloud, and was in some danger of being expelled from Canada and returned to Bosnia, where his free spirit had also made him some political enemies, this time the kind who carry lethal weapons.
Slobodan had found Admiral a place to live off campus, and had, I think, come to some sort of arrangement with Massey that allowed him some of the funds PEN had put up for his accommodation. Slobodan’s question to me was this: Why hadn’t either PEN or Massey College done anything about translating Admiral Mahic’s poetry into English?
I got involved in the translation, partly as an act of cosmopolitan hospitality—I thought that Canada and its writing community had, to that point, treated Admiral rather badly—and partly because Slobodan presented Admiral to me as a kind of Bosnian Jack Kerouac. Slobodan put together a group that included himself, Admiral, at least one academic translator—sometimes Milica Babic and sometimes Ralph Bogert—both from the university of Toronto’s Slavic Studies Department, and me, as the English-language editor. We spent 1-2 afternoons a week at this at a table in Dooney’s Café on Bloor Street from October 1995 until mid-January.
The difficulties of translating the poems were three. One is the obvious one, that of transliteration between languages that operate by different habitual and syntactical rules. This turned out to be a difficulty surmountable by intelligence and labour, which I received unstintingly from all three translators.
The second difficulty we faced was the difficulty of translating across cultures that are radically different in custom, political and social experience, and theology. If Admiral was Bosnia's Jack Kerouac, he was a Jack Kerouac who lived in a city of stray bullets, indiscriminate artillery barrages, and senseless deaths. And he was a Jack Kerouac influenced not by Thomas Wolfe and Allen Ginsberg, but by the Koran and by Rumi.
The third difficulty was the inevitable effects of Admiral's exile. His home city, Sarajevo, had been shattered by civil war and ethnic hatred, his lover killed by an anonymous artillery barrage, his library lost and his family dispersed. Until PEN rescued him from Bosnia, he lived out of suitcases, sometimes as a houseguest, other times as a borderline vagrant. A key element of the translation process—in which Admiral enthusiastically and courageously participated—was to reclaim a degree of order to his thought and experience from the psychological and intellectual effects of his exile. Translation wasn't quite enough. We had to revise—rigorously, and frequently in invasive ways—the poems in their original formulations. This is a procedure that few poets find pleasant, and many can't handle. Admiral didn’t flinch from it.
He also brought an astonishing and unexpected gift to the process. No matter what passage we examined, took apart, asked for clarification on, or demanded more physical articulation of, he was always able to tell us precisely where his materials came from, and he always knew what it was he had seen, felt, or heard that generated it. I suspect that this is the quality of mind that allowed him to survive as a poet and as a human being through his ordeal. For me, as editor, it made it utterly fascinating, more like detective work than conventional editing. Admiral knew where he'd been and what he’d seen even if, at times, it was nowhere but the dual prisons built by civil war and the terror and grief of exile.
These qualities of his also establish the value of this work in political and artistic terms. The poems, and other works that have come from writers exiled from the former Yugoslavia (Dzevad Karahasan's luminous Sarajevo, Exodus of a City comes to mind) carry a uniquely dense blend of reportage, interpretation, and metaphorical and philosophical searching for solid ground in the midst of civil chaos, war, and private trauma.
Admiral, the translators, and I easily agreed that his poems were songs in the storm, and that was the working title of the collection of translations we made. I think the unsuppressible instinct to sing is at the root of poetry, and this is not the idle twitter of birds with too much time on their hands, but each being’s duty to make sense of the world in the face of injustice and the absence of compassionate thought.
Ancient Sephardi
(Toronto, September 1995)
It's noon over Sarajevo, acrid wasteland.
The beasts, past and present, are in the hills,
but the City remains.
In Sarajevo, the living have drunk coffee
with the dead since time immemorial,
in peace or war.
There is a tide that runs between the living and the
dead here because both sing of the sea.
But now, Sarajevo has become
merely an island amidst their storm.
I meet a friend in the street, David Kamhi,
a violinist, a Sarajevo man.
He invites me to his shelter to drink coffee and talk about poetry.
No clairvoyant birds fly across our sky,
the signpost of the sun offers no clear directions.
Everything is under arrest:
The bees are afraid to leave the cover
of the rose,
the young grass does not know how much
time it has left –even the trees do not move for fear
Neither the candles blazing
behind the cellar windows, nor the glimmer of candles
on these ten thousand graves knows the hour
And I don't know how I managed to get to David's shelter
But here I am.
I step into the walled-up horizon where David plays his violin.
I sip his coffee and ask him this (well-intentioned) question:
"David, why don't you take your wife and kids and leave Sarajevo?
Can't you see a new kind of death has emerged here,
more terrible than natural death?"
As if to answer my question,
a chunk of shrapnel bursts through the window
of David's shelter. He has another answer no
explosion can blow apart:
"I have 200 years of family roots in Sarajevo.
Sarajevo's soul is not treacherous.
Sarajevo Moslems hid partisans from the Gestapo.
Sarajevo's soul is not treacherous!
Thus he plays his violin and
sings this song:
Lovely Hanukka is here. Eight candles for me.
One candle, two candles, three candles, four candles, five candles, six
candles, seven candles, eight candles for me.
l shall celebrate with joy and pleasure one candle, two...
I shall eat sweet cakes of almond and honey...
Romeo and Juliet and Sarajevo
(Toronto, December 1995)
Warplanes poisoned the city with napalm
(Verona, perhaps, but Sarajevo)
broke the wave of our kiss,
Oh Juliet
in the mowed grass!
In Sarajevo, any child who respects its father
and mother, will be cut in half
by shrapnel!
In Sarajevo, every two-month
old baby will be attacked
with rockets!
A man waiting behind
a blackened wall to run across the street
will fall, dead,
into our stewed fruit!
A young woman and her lover,
carrying their bedding,
fell at sleep's starting line and ended up
in the other world.
With no compass and no maps.
Harmony
(Toronto, December 1995)
In each sigh
a divine cry lives.
Fear puts on
a thousand and one faces.
The throne of eternity echoes
within each and every existence,
from which beauty
grows in the mind ...
Harmony is greater than any mortal.
Sanity is greater than madness.
God has invented both the
twilight zone of labour,
and its single delight:
Celebration!
If my senses can still hear,
if these hands can see,
I unite two worlds:
the visible and the invisible
suffering, the violence of the roots
and the compassion of the blossom
SHOWER
(Galicia, May/June 1995)
The shower of a blossom's
light falls on the valley of
Santiago. A young woman,
a student,
lights a cigarette at a traffic light as if watching a
lover depart while everyone around her
rushes to get out of the rain.
Suddenly,
An old woman lowers an iron blind over the front of
her store. Old people dance,
Dcdalus' sons and daughters who've
approached too close to the sun of
suffering.
One should change oneself freely and
often speak and sing resolutely,
willful Jove, Jove made of light
saves us from being imprisoned by ourselves.
Here, Galician children play the accordion of sea waves for me.
You are alive only in the multiplicity of images,
they seem to say.
The world of indifference is over;
it has played out its
role, lover,
It has nothing more to say and do,
it has finally frozen itself.
The skies do not close
to those who love wisdom
and knowledge but will grow beneath
their armour
like a pearl within an oyster.
The late Admiral Mahic was a Bosnian poet and literary activist. He co-founded the PEN Center of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the nineties and published twenty books of poetry in various languages including French, English, German, and Slovenian. Admiral had a number of foreign literary scholarships from Austria, Canada, and Slovenia and was awarded the “Slovo Gorčina,” a famous Bosnian literary award, as well as the “Hvaropis” award in Croatia (2012).
Brian Fawcett is a Woodrow Wilson fellow and founder of the website news service www.dooneyscafe.com to which he remains a regular contributor. He has also taught cultural literacy in maximum security prisons and is the recipient of the Pearson Prize (2003) for his book Virtual Clearcut: Or, the Way Things Are in My Hometown. Brian was born in Prince George, B.C. and now lives in Toronto.
by Admiral Mahic
Translated by Brian Fawcett and Slobodan Drakulic
Introduction by Brian Fawcett
I was introduced to Admiral Mahic and his poetry by the late Slobodan Drakulic, who asked me to help translate his work. Admiral had been brought to Canada by PEN and installed as a kind of informal poet-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s Massey College in the summer of 1995. Admiral didn’t do well there, for several reasons. Massey, I think, was expecting a scholarly Muslim poet, and Admiral, though ethnically Muslim, was a larger-than-life free spirit who enjoyed women and booze more than was wise or healthy in a country being traumatized by an ethnic and religious civil war. He was also the sort of man who couldn’t have a conversation with anyone—male or female—without putting his hands all over them, and this, at the height of the body-perimeter hysteria that was then sweeping the universities, had not gone over well at Massey. When Slobodan brought Admiral to my attention, he had recently “left” Massey under a cloud, and was in some danger of being expelled from Canada and returned to Bosnia, where his free spirit had also made him some political enemies, this time the kind who carry lethal weapons.
Slobodan had found Admiral a place to live off campus, and had, I think, come to some sort of arrangement with Massey that allowed him some of the funds PEN had put up for his accommodation. Slobodan’s question to me was this: Why hadn’t either PEN or Massey College done anything about translating Admiral Mahic’s poetry into English?
I got involved in the translation, partly as an act of cosmopolitan hospitality—I thought that Canada and its writing community had, to that point, treated Admiral rather badly—and partly because Slobodan presented Admiral to me as a kind of Bosnian Jack Kerouac. Slobodan put together a group that included himself, Admiral, at least one academic translator—sometimes Milica Babic and sometimes Ralph Bogert—both from the university of Toronto’s Slavic Studies Department, and me, as the English-language editor. We spent 1-2 afternoons a week at this at a table in Dooney’s Café on Bloor Street from October 1995 until mid-January.
The difficulties of translating the poems were three. One is the obvious one, that of transliteration between languages that operate by different habitual and syntactical rules. This turned out to be a difficulty surmountable by intelligence and labour, which I received unstintingly from all three translators.
The second difficulty we faced was the difficulty of translating across cultures that are radically different in custom, political and social experience, and theology. If Admiral was Bosnia's Jack Kerouac, he was a Jack Kerouac who lived in a city of stray bullets, indiscriminate artillery barrages, and senseless deaths. And he was a Jack Kerouac influenced not by Thomas Wolfe and Allen Ginsberg, but by the Koran and by Rumi.
The third difficulty was the inevitable effects of Admiral's exile. His home city, Sarajevo, had been shattered by civil war and ethnic hatred, his lover killed by an anonymous artillery barrage, his library lost and his family dispersed. Until PEN rescued him from Bosnia, he lived out of suitcases, sometimes as a houseguest, other times as a borderline vagrant. A key element of the translation process—in which Admiral enthusiastically and courageously participated—was to reclaim a degree of order to his thought and experience from the psychological and intellectual effects of his exile. Translation wasn't quite enough. We had to revise—rigorously, and frequently in invasive ways—the poems in their original formulations. This is a procedure that few poets find pleasant, and many can't handle. Admiral didn’t flinch from it.
He also brought an astonishing and unexpected gift to the process. No matter what passage we examined, took apart, asked for clarification on, or demanded more physical articulation of, he was always able to tell us precisely where his materials came from, and he always knew what it was he had seen, felt, or heard that generated it. I suspect that this is the quality of mind that allowed him to survive as a poet and as a human being through his ordeal. For me, as editor, it made it utterly fascinating, more like detective work than conventional editing. Admiral knew where he'd been and what he’d seen even if, at times, it was nowhere but the dual prisons built by civil war and the terror and grief of exile.
These qualities of his also establish the value of this work in political and artistic terms. The poems, and other works that have come from writers exiled from the former Yugoslavia (Dzevad Karahasan's luminous Sarajevo, Exodus of a City comes to mind) carry a uniquely dense blend of reportage, interpretation, and metaphorical and philosophical searching for solid ground in the midst of civil chaos, war, and private trauma.
Admiral, the translators, and I easily agreed that his poems were songs in the storm, and that was the working title of the collection of translations we made. I think the unsuppressible instinct to sing is at the root of poetry, and this is not the idle twitter of birds with too much time on their hands, but each being’s duty to make sense of the world in the face of injustice and the absence of compassionate thought.
Ancient Sephardi
(Toronto, September 1995)
It's noon over Sarajevo, acrid wasteland.
The beasts, past and present, are in the hills,
but the City remains.
In Sarajevo, the living have drunk coffee
with the dead since time immemorial,
in peace or war.
There is a tide that runs between the living and the
dead here because both sing of the sea.
But now, Sarajevo has become
merely an island amidst their storm.
I meet a friend in the street, David Kamhi,
a violinist, a Sarajevo man.
He invites me to his shelter to drink coffee and talk about poetry.
No clairvoyant birds fly across our sky,
the signpost of the sun offers no clear directions.
Everything is under arrest:
The bees are afraid to leave the cover
of the rose,
the young grass does not know how much
time it has left –even the trees do not move for fear
Neither the candles blazing
behind the cellar windows, nor the glimmer of candles
on these ten thousand graves knows the hour
And I don't know how I managed to get to David's shelter
But here I am.
I step into the walled-up horizon where David plays his violin.
I sip his coffee and ask him this (well-intentioned) question:
"David, why don't you take your wife and kids and leave Sarajevo?
Can't you see a new kind of death has emerged here,
more terrible than natural death?"
As if to answer my question,
a chunk of shrapnel bursts through the window
of David's shelter. He has another answer no
explosion can blow apart:
"I have 200 years of family roots in Sarajevo.
Sarajevo's soul is not treacherous.
Sarajevo Moslems hid partisans from the Gestapo.
Sarajevo's soul is not treacherous!
Thus he plays his violin and
sings this song:
Lovely Hanukka is here. Eight candles for me.
One candle, two candles, three candles, four candles, five candles, six
candles, seven candles, eight candles for me.
l shall celebrate with joy and pleasure one candle, two...
I shall eat sweet cakes of almond and honey...
Romeo and Juliet and Sarajevo
(Toronto, December 1995)
Warplanes poisoned the city with napalm
(Verona, perhaps, but Sarajevo)
broke the wave of our kiss,
Oh Juliet
in the mowed grass!
In Sarajevo, any child who respects its father
and mother, will be cut in half
by shrapnel!
In Sarajevo, every two-month
old baby will be attacked
with rockets!
A man waiting behind
a blackened wall to run across the street
will fall, dead,
into our stewed fruit!
A young woman and her lover,
carrying their bedding,
fell at sleep's starting line and ended up
in the other world.
With no compass and no maps.
Harmony
(Toronto, December 1995)
In each sigh
a divine cry lives.
Fear puts on
a thousand and one faces.
The throne of eternity echoes
within each and every existence,
from which beauty
grows in the mind ...
Harmony is greater than any mortal.
Sanity is greater than madness.
God has invented both the
twilight zone of labour,
and its single delight:
Celebration!
If my senses can still hear,
if these hands can see,
I unite two worlds:
the visible and the invisible
suffering, the violence of the roots
and the compassion of the blossom
SHOWER
(Galicia, May/June 1995)
The shower of a blossom's
light falls on the valley of
Santiago. A young woman,
a student,
lights a cigarette at a traffic light as if watching a
lover depart while everyone around her
rushes to get out of the rain.
Suddenly,
An old woman lowers an iron blind over the front of
her store. Old people dance,
Dcdalus' sons and daughters who've
approached too close to the sun of
suffering.
One should change oneself freely and
often speak and sing resolutely,
willful Jove, Jove made of light
saves us from being imprisoned by ourselves.
Here, Galician children play the accordion of sea waves for me.
You are alive only in the multiplicity of images,
they seem to say.
The world of indifference is over;
it has played out its
role, lover,
It has nothing more to say and do,
it has finally frozen itself.
The skies do not close
to those who love wisdom
and knowledge but will grow beneath
their armour
like a pearl within an oyster.
The late Admiral Mahic was a Bosnian poet and literary activist. He co-founded the PEN Center of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the nineties and published twenty books of poetry in various languages including French, English, German, and Slovenian. Admiral had a number of foreign literary scholarships from Austria, Canada, and Slovenia and was awarded the “Slovo Gorčina,” a famous Bosnian literary award, as well as the “Hvaropis” award in Croatia (2012).
Brian Fawcett is a Woodrow Wilson fellow and founder of the website news service www.dooneyscafe.com to which he remains a regular contributor. He has also taught cultural literacy in maximum security prisons and is the recipient of the Pearson Prize (2003) for his book Virtual Clearcut: Or, the Way Things Are in My Hometown. Brian was born in Prince George, B.C. and now lives in Toronto.
