Bright Side of the Balkans

22nd August 2011. at 11:26 
Charles Simic: Bright Side of the Balkans 

By: Charles Simic for the New York Review of Books 
Translation: Ferida Durakovic for radiosarajevo.ba 
(Published with permission) 
1st 
This spring I went to Sarajevo to participate in the poetry, to receive the award and that promotes book of his selected poems just published in Bosnia. This was my first visit to the city famous for the terrible suffering during the siege by Serbian forces led by Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, which lasted from April 1992. until February 1996. year. I arrived by plane in nice weather so I could see how Sarajevo is surrounded on three sides by mountains and hills, so it became easier to understand the destructive effect of which they had artillery, mortar, machine-gun and sniper fire had on the population that has been painstakingly defended. I saw the Serbian siege as it has really been: a deliberate effort to collectively punish a city that is terrorized and starved to death, its residents and to also enjoy shooting with a secure and inaccessible heights. 
When the plane landed, I felt even more fiercely, how close to the mountains, dominated every aspect, ap-peared at the end of every street, in peace time, she decorated the city with their green and red roofs scattered on the slopes. 
Sarajevo is a combination of spas in which a man will go to health, the Ottoman town with mosques and minarets as could be found on postcards from the 19th century, the Austrian provincial capitals with razmeđa ever public buildings that are visible wherever the empire entered a foot in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, as well as the city with high business-housing buildings as well as in many other European cities. 
Shocking is the fact that virtually every building in Sarajevo suffered a degree of damage during the siege, and 35,000 buildings have been completely destroyed, including najčuveniju - National Library, with thousands of irrecoverable old books and manuscripts. Much of what was destroyed was rebuilt, so I thought that the city thrives, for my visit the weather was warm and sunny, I watched all these people walking the streets or sitting in cafes friendly chatting, and everything that happened here fifteen years ago it seemed quite unthinkable. 
Soon I was skolili people, I gave interviews, I was having dinner with a Bosnian poet, whom I met recently in Berlin, and after that I went to the casino to hear a group of wonderful poets to read their poems on a small stage with sound chips from gaming tables and slot machines in the background. Sarajevo Days of poetry, so called events, gathered poets and poets from Austria, Montenegro, Armenia, France, Croatian, with Cyprusheld, Kosovo, Malta, Hungary, Macedonia, Morocco, Germany, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Serbia, Sudan Švajcarske and Turkey, as well as poets and poets from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such meetings tend to be as great as exhausting as the days and nights spent on drinks and conversation, not just about literature but about everything else, in addition to listening to songs in a dozen languages ​​and get to know the work of the poet that you never knew existed and would like to that is. 
Many of the songs Bosnian poet, which I have heard or read of my time there talking about the war. I know that this issue is very rare in modern Serbian and Croatian poetry; from it can not find out what the mass slaughter of innocent people took place in close neighborhood. This fact is sobering effect on me. The songs I heard are not just moving depiction of what someone experienced in this horror, in them was some jobovske eloquence and an inability to understand why people, and God let that happen, evil and injustice of so many dimensions. 
I always wondered why our American poet does not interest those who are killed in wars that we take. But now it has become clear. If you saw a child or an elderly woman lying on the pavement in a pool of blood, and you hear them calling out a shriek, you can not understand fully what is actually happening when they mistakenly pripucamo or drone strike on their weddings, funerals, or the shepherd boy who collect branches that went to a fire somewhere in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya and the United States and Yemen. It's not enough just to read about them. 
I had to get used to the language that I do not speak often. Although I left Belgrade, fifty-eight, when I was fifteen, although I returned there a few times in a short visit, I have retained its specific focus. As I gained confidence and began to speak freely, local residents were able to guess the exact origin, although my dress and behavior were consistent with the language spoken by so I had to ask about it. In the interviews I was also asked about his childhood in Belgrade, about life in America, about poetry, but did not press the open political issues, as happened in Serbia seven days later.(Mladic's arrest occurred a few days after I left.) 
It surprised me, but also bring relief, because when I was in Belgrade five years ago, every other question that journalists are asking whether their open or hidden position on what they called my failure to defend Serbia in the last ten years. In Sarajevo, my attitude about Serbian atrocities during the war in Bosnia is well known, but I nevertheless got the impression that no one yearns for that worrisome theme and prefer to speak about something else. 
Two people who survived the siege of Sarajevo were described in a very calm, factual way what life was like without water and electricity, with the constant fear that someone in the family could die as soon as it enters into the street. They both knew Karadzic and his nationalist some friends before the war, and had no bad premonition that they will become monsters in what turned. It was hard to find words for the collective tragedy that happened. With all those killed and mutilated, many lives have been destroyed, many had fled and never returned, a city where they lived with others and who loved too has changed. In Sarajevo, I was told, not much is left of the Serbs, and almost no Croats. These people, with three different faiths, who are able to live harmoniously alongside one another - and indeed it sometimes was - they were hateful nationalist and religious hypocrites, of which it had to be recovered. 
After two days in Sarajevo, I traveled by bus with another thirty poets and poetry in Mostar, one of the most beautiful cities in the Balkans, where the organization arranged twelve we read. Late morning we left Sarajevo, and an hour later we stopped at a restaurant along the road eating lamb with delicious slices of freshly baked bread. Everyone was smiling because the company was good and the weather is great. In Mostar hotel we arrived after several hours of traveling the narrow winding road with two lanes, through a landscape of high mountains and river canyons of indescribable beauty. 
Bosnians with whom I spoke did not have much hope for the future. Two political entities (Serbian Serbian Republic and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina) apparently operate under the leadership of the tripartite presidency, which represents Muslims, Croats and Serbs, but the system fails. Serbs are not interested in co-ordination between the two economies, nor any meaningful cooperation, even if they are to provide greater opportunities to export its products and to attract foreign capital. And after a visit to Mostar, a city that was divided between Muslims and Croats after another nasty siege, and after I seen so many ruins along the lines of separation, I could not imagine that the Federation could function effectively with the tensions that can still be felt in the air . We heard that some Croatian mothers forbid their children to cross the bridge and visit their Muslim neighbors. 
We read poetry in a theater on the Croatian side of the city. Hall was full of young people, some of them wanted after finishing the evening to talk about poetry, but we were rushed to go to dinner at a Franciscan monastery, which dates from the library of the fifteenth century. With us was a great musician from Slovenia, which was played during our gigs and not be separated from the guitar, he and two others were at dinner Bosnian sang songs, they continued to sing until late at night in a hotel, expanding the repertoire of Serbia, Hungarian and Russian songs. Despite their bad blood and mutual suspicion, the various ethnic groups in that part of the world love the music of others. 
The next day we toured the old city and the famous bridge, which destroyed the Croats during the siege and was restored, and we visited and Počitelj and Blagaj, the cities of Oriental appearance. Adriatic Sea from where it is only an hour, and the vegetation, to the sun and the atmosphere is quite the Mediterranean. Bosnia is a beautiful and Herzegovina is a spectacularly beautiful. After a fresh trout, grilled, with a view of the high cliffs where the river Buna flows and the dervish order monastery in the sixteenth century, recalling the gleeful young Croatian who last night proplesala celebrating graduation, it was easy to forget the bloody past of this region and to leave aside afterthought to be repeated. 
2nd 
I flew from Sarajevo to Belgrade - the one promoting his poetry that was published there - and Serbia's plane landed at seven in the morning. At the airport there greeted me two of my cousins, who remained the only one who remembers me when I was a boy, we went by taxi to my hotel. We drove through the morning traffic jam in the new part of town - which was built in the 1950s and recently decorated and trimmed with a broad new boulevards and a massive building with lots of glass in which are placed by companies and banks, even a shopping mall with brand Zara Mark and Spencer and Esprit - and then crossed the Sava River in the old part of town, which lies before us in a few hills at the confluence of the Sava and Danube. 
Although rarely travels to Belgrade, it can manage in his old neighborhood, my youth I spent running away from school whenever I could wander the streets until it comes time to odšuljam home. The city is now cleaner and looks more advanced than five years ago. The only exception is my old neighborhood, once an elegant small residential buildings that survived World War II and the recent NATO bombing, are completely neglected, the facade they badly damaged the terrace were about to burn, and approached the buildings collapsed, and unattractive. But, as is typical for Belgrade when the weather is nice, and ten in the morning's coffee shops are already full of the world drinks coffee, and Caska. At lunchtime, they are full and restaurants - that have proliferated since my last visit, they converted the old and new strutting with its modern interior. 
I do not know what to think about it, because Serbia, as almost all its Balkan and Eastern European neighbors, in a terrible economic situation, with almost one million unemployed and a million and a half of those living with a small pension in a country that has only six and a half million inhabitants. It is obvious that Serbia has considerable wealth, because it has great farmland, some industry and foreign investment. Willian, Archbishop of Tyre, who was traveling to Constantinople in the 1179th years, described the Serbs as the rich herds and flocks, and well supplied with milk, cheese, butter and meat. It still applies. However, they told me that, for the first time in modern history, an open kitchen for hungry folk. 
Serbian Orthodox Church appears to have piles of money with which to build a new church, of the contributions that they say that they are coming from domestic Russian oligarchs. Churches are often massive and poorly attended, because the Serbs, in spite of what I can tell you if you provoke them, not just religious. Go through baptism, weddings, funerals, but not in church on Sundays. As for Bosnia, where Saudi money built the mosque, even a luxury hotel where they do not serve alcohol, such efforts to increase religiosity among the people and that do not pay attention to local customs is likely to fail. 

As for politics, my friends here are dismayed and disgusted as well as my Americans when talking about our politicians in Washington. Foreign policy of the coalition government of President Boris Tadic in all a very modest results. Even in the case of Kosovo, he tries not to bring the situation up to fever pitch because he knows when he did, he would receive the support of most Serbs. In domestic terms, it is not reformed a corrupt political system, and there lies the danger, as in many other places in Europe, the worsening economic situation, voters will listen to a nationalist demagogue who will do both nationalist demagogues usually do: you will find another culprit for all troubles of his country. 
If I was in Belgrade at the time of the arrest of General Mladic, would be witness to an ugly side of Serbia. As it was easy to imagine, except the extreme nationalist parties, those in power are pretty firmly decided that he surrender to the tribunal in The Hague.What was not expected was the incredible support he received from the common people, who brukali calling him a national hero, and a nasty streak of television and newspapers, not only that his crimes are not listed but are given the space to his defenders, who minimize or even deny that he and his forces tortured and massacred their enemies in Bosnia. War criminals will find how to live happily all over the world, but the Serbs are particularly proud to be so vain to defend one of his only because he was a Serb, and even go so far as to glorify the crimes committed in their name, and doing so offer themselves as people cruel murderer. 
It is a defense mechanism known each tribalnog society that comes into play when a member of the tribe or family is being charged with a crime. "He was a good boy," says the mother of the press every time a mother when some murderers get caught up in Brooklyn or Palermo. When the archaic instinct combined with intense nationalism, you get a human being who admires and despises boastfulness heartless helpless and weak. The main feature of this type of mind is the inability to see himself the eyes of those people who are tortured. Everywhere you nationalists who do not touch the suffering of people who were hurt. You'd think the Serbs can remember how often in their history they were victims, some of them can really remember that. Serbia has always had a small, brave and articulated opposition, and perhaps even more countless people who deep in their hearts they know that the Serbs were not angels. 
Belgrade is likely najmultikulturalniji city in the Balkans. I watch men and women on the street, I see all the ethnic types of the former Yugoslavia. This ever-quarreling tribes are nice people. Boys and girls are dressed just like their peers in Sarajevo and New York. Articulated are determined, entertainment, and youth in all major cities.However, judging by the poll that I saw in the newspaper while I was there, two of the three of them wants to go when they finish school here because there is nothing for them. More they do not need visas to travel to other parts of Europe, but since neither they nor their parents have enough money, flee the country - as it was for thousands of others in the past - there is no such option. 
Belgrade's Culinary Paradise. Serbian cuisine combining Greek, Turkish, Austro-Hungarian and Mediterranean influences, and menus in restaurants are much more exciting and fun to read than local politics in the newspaper. Like every former inherent who had for years been deprived of their favorite dishes, complemented my culinary memories as I recalled the friends of other foods and some people who have long gone. I always knew: that it was not Hitler and Stalin, my parents would never have left the city in which they were born. They certainly did not know that they were the first wave of what will in the coming fifty years to become a major political and economic migration of Serbs. I walked the neighborhoods I know, I saw the building in which my mother as a boy led him to visit, and I began to remember the names of families and their children who disappeared from Belgrade, which in my eyes Belgrade made a ghost town. 

Passing by the house where I was born, I remembered the toy box that is our only wealthy cousin stored in the attic of our building after the Communists kicked him out of his vile 1945th year. Toys were purchased from the best shops of London, Berlin and Vienna before WWII, and remained in the attic for years, much to the displeasure of my mother and her sisters, who had hoped that the self-seeker and his wife finally invoke wisdom and distribute toys their poor relatives. Would not it be great if the toys are there? I thought. Perhaps in this building are still living an old man or old woman who knows about this hidden place and visiting toys from time to time, little support pljesnjivu rag doll in their hands, or clay British soldiers in khaki uniforms, and shorts, and he set the winding smiling ape large intelligent eyes. On the way to the hotel I was happy thinking about it. 
© The New York Review of Books 
18th August-28 September 2011th The 
Dusan Simic Charles US-Serbian poet and writer. Born in 1938 in Belgrade, and currently lives in New Hempshireu, where he teaches at the university. In May, Charles Simic is awarded Bosnian tombstones and the occasion was written this article on the visit to Sarajevo and Belgrade. 
radiosarajevo.ba