Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Faruk Šehić

Reflections from Bosnia and Herzegovina on war and the modern world

die young and leave a beautiful corpse

 

thus spoke rockers

but this is another planet here

on Padež hill

eleventh day of duty goes by

the first after Smajo’s death

we’ve smoked a bag of industrial weed

Sadmir was firing single shots over the breastwork

blew off the front sight of a rifle that lay

on the logs with which we’d fortified the trench leading to the dugout

a few small sight shrapnels

hit him above the left eyebrow ridge

Hajrija bandaged the wound with field dressing

it wasn’t enough for a day’s leave

 

die young and leave a beautiful corpse

thus spoke rockers

I shat on a shovel in a hollow behind the roof of the burrow

and tossed hot shit over to no man’s land

pissed into an empty tin of Icar beef, contracted in the trench like a worm

watering the mould of the forest floor

and I said to myself:

I won’t wash my hands

or my face

or shave

or clip my fingernails

does it matter what my corpse will look like

––––––––

I’ll gift my ribs to god for some future Eves

my earlobes will become mushrooms

tangles of my nerves will develop into mycelia

of a better man

 ***

Passing by the Markale market, I stopped for a second

 

I saw an angel at the market

on the tin roof of a stand he sat

below, in wooden crates

peppers, tomatoes, early potatoes

cabbage, onions and greens were arranged

his feet were dangling from the roof

gently touching the passers-by’s hair

he took a hat off a shopper’s head

a breeze was blowing, mixing the scents

of vegetables, fresh fruit, flowers and fish

he was getting into people’s faces

eyeing the vendors who worked the scales

he stared at their swollen, cracked hands

and burst out crying as he saw an old lady

gathering rotten vegetables from under the stands

it had started to drizzle

down the petals of a painted margarita

pale blue ink trickled

the flower looked like a whore with a pound of makeup

tears running down her cheeks

the cherub spread his wings and soared to the sky

and I was thinking, if there is poetic Justice

the angel, cloaked in night, will

rip out the heart of the vendor who cheats on the weight

but I don’t think so

for angels mostly pose

and freeze nude on the frescoes

***

Deliverance

 

I live beyond all things

I don’t belong to any -isms, nor did I come out from anyone’s overcoat

readings and literary festivals I hate the most

there I sense all the sorrow deposited in the people

a useless sediment, except for art

I live beyond all things

by Saturn’s ring

on Paradise Islands, in the amber houses

the last century has aged us prematurely

we’re a hundred years old

I live beyond all things

I learn from the spider and the red snail

I study the venation of the leaf

I try to be pleasant and glad

but that inner pulsation

strikes a different beat

a prophecy execrable and bitter

this act of facing the world —

the shepherdless meadow

where god sobs with shrugged shoulders

and there is no place for human life

Christ is a lucrative mannequin

and nightingales are grilled on McDonald’s flat tops.

***

Faruk Šehić (1970–) was born in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb until the outbreak of the Bosnian War. At age 22 he voluntarily joined the Bosnian Army and commanded a unit of 130 men as a lieutenant. After the war he studied literature and wrote and published his own literary works. His 2011 debut novel Knjiga o Uni (The Book of the Una) won the 2011 Meša Selimović prize (awarded by the Cum Grano Salis Festival in Tuzla, Bosnia) for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Croatia, as well as the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature. His works have been translated into English, German, Bulgarian, and Macedonian. He lives in Sarajevo.

Mirza PuricAsymptote Editor-at-Large (Bosnia and Herzegovina), was born in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1979. He studied English at the University of Vienna, and has translated novels, stories, essays, and poems by Michael Köhlmeier, Chris Abani, Rabih Alameddine, George Orwell, Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn, Joan Lingard, Khaled Hosseini, Nathan Englander, Alan Warner, Agnes Owens, Bill Douglas, and others. He plays baritone guitar and Bass VI in two noise bands.

Photograph by Dženat Dreković