My Rivers by Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by S.D. Curtis, Istros Books, 2023
In his native Bosnia, Faruk Šehić is known for his poems and the regular opinion pieces he writes for the weekly magazine BH Dani [Bosnia-Herzegovina Days], but he first came to the attention of English-language readers with a novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in 2016. A second fiction work, Under Pressure, followed in 2019, and both books were widely reviewed and praised for their poetic narratives—a difficult task when writing about the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. He achieved this by participating in, witnessing, and describing those events, restoring human dignity to the neglected living and the memory of the dead.
My Rivers is Šehić’s first collection of poetry to be translated into English, in an excellent rendering by S.D. Curtis. Here, the imagination and the presence of dignity continues simply and powerfully through his subjects and settings, crafting a postwar future shared by the survivors of all sides. The resulting collection is an act of amazing meliorism and reconciliation that summons the strength of the “Mangled Generation,” as they are known in former Yugoslvia.
In addition to its shared historical context, a preoccupation with rivers runs through Šehić’s work. Under Pressure opens with idyllic scenes of childhood romps along the banks in Šehić’s rural hometown, where summer was swimming in the river, nothing else. The “Una” in Quietly Flows the Una retains that same dreamy setting. Derek Walcott had famously reduced the Caribbean to “the sea, it goes” in his epic poem, Omeros; for Šehić, his “home river” can be similarly elusive, but in My Rivers, the titular waters act as vehicle for an exploration of history, anger, love, reconstruction, creation, and peace. While his prose is a treasury of allusion and metaphor, describing his participation on the “government side” of the Bosnian conflict, Šehić’s poems provide a masterclass in the acts of witness, hope, and the restoration of nature.
The collection is divided into four sections, with the first three named after rivers. Water, an easily applied and understood metaphor for life, creation, and faith, can take on a local aspect when it comes in the form of a river, recalling the past but also promising a place in the present and the future. Yet, also while acting as messenger, water also erodes, washing away the stains and pain of history. In My Rivers, Šehić’s “home” water takes on the role of a very active but sympathetic witness:
only the Drina understands the dead
for you do not float in her waters,
she flows through our veins, as cold as death
This sentiment is cemented even more profoundly in an earlier poem, “The Waste Industry,” where he describes the Drina as “not a river but a flowing memorial.”
Šehić has been very open in naming the authors whose work inspires him. They range from Hemmingway to Kadare, with further nods to Erasmus, Henry Miller, and the soldier-author’s favorite, Jean-Pierre Melville. In My Rivers, the source of his inspiration is the early work of Giuseppe Ungaretti—in particular the poem “Rivers,” a meditation on his experience fighting for Italy in the First World War. Ungaretti first published during World War I, during which he fought in the trenches on the Kras Front; incidentally, that region extends into what is now southwest Slovenia, once a part of the Yugoslavia that Šehić was born in. In a recent interview, Šehić described his experience of discovering Ungaretti’s work as a student, and how it led him to understand the disillusion of Italy’s “Lost Generation” writers—a sentiment that he extends and evolves in My Rivers.
Where the Una was described in the first few pages of Under Pressure with intimate and beloved knowledge (like swimming in the waters at the edge of Eden), Šehić now broadens his reach here to less travelled geographies. My Rivers begins with Šehić walking along the beach where the Loire meets the Atlantic on Liberation Day “as if nothing had happened / all wars briefly forgotten.” He then travels to the Spree in Germany, pondering the notion of the displaced in a poem called “Émigré Soul”: “If I could afford to / I would post myself to Berlin.” This sense of whimsy continues later with: “I’m hooked on the odour of the Berlin Underground / promising speed and good times.” As for The Spree itself, he finds a “[d]ark and turbid river / flowing slowly like melting anthracite”—an apt description of a river that, even in bright sunlight, looks like it is flowing in the dark.
But it is upon his return to the Drina in Bosnia that a even more resonant empathy with the displaced appears, such as in the poem “My House is of Star Tufa”:
It’s 22 years since I first
became a refugee, I say first
because you never know when
you might be left once
again, with only the shirt on your back
The Drina River arrives third in the collection like a guest in an unholy Trinity, and through it, the poet offers us an alternative reading of Genesis. After a tour of bitterness and suffering, he observes that “we return to where we were exiled from.” He wishes that humans could be more like snails, carrying their homes on their back.
Throughout, Šehić continually juxtaposes the sacred and the profane, but such contrasts are especially evident in the final section. “Beyond the Rivers” begins with a lament on the meaning of little things: “I shouldn’t have thrown away the old things / pressed petals from creased notebooks.” In the penultimate poem, “The Last Judgement of the Ant,” Šehić moves from the pathos of the mass graves that litter Bosnia, to the perspective of an ant on the white granite of a memorial, a “lord of the universe”:
That ant will decide, he knows it all
he is incorruptible, in this I believe
as sure as I believe in the soul of the world
From these unlikely pairings emerges a soul-shredding collection that is nevertheless immensely hopeful. Šehić takes his mastery of convergences to show how the soldiers of World War I met similar fates, regardless of which side they were on—and puts that irreparable ending with those who fought in Bosnia in the 1990s, threading the Lost Generation of Italy with the Mangled Generation of Bosnia. As the poet tells it, neither group fought for the past, but for ideas of peace in a future which they themselves would never know. Within the enormity of that idea, Šehić offers his readers something smaller, human, and more comprehensible: a personal reflection on the soldiers being absorbed into the landscape in which they fought.
It is clear that S.D. Curtis had lived with these poems for a very long time before attempting to translate them into English, and such fine work is only made possible by her own poetic prowess in English. Her translation of “A Return to the Garden of Eden” reads like a mission statement and an exaltation for others doing the same. One could memorise the whole poem out of the happiness that such lines exist in this world:
If the persuit of love is not the secret meaning of life
a fundamental colour is missing from the spectrum
There is something deeply satisfying and articulate about a powerless generation holding power to account with poetry, articulating optimism against nihilism. In Bosnia, the Mangled Generation now conducts a continuing dialogue of truth-seeking with the multi-state kleptocracy in the former Yugoslavia, a pivotal dialogue that emblematises this determination towards brighter days ahead. My Rivers continues this necessary conversation, offering up a method of articulation that imagines a better version of our common world, with all the strength that it will take to build it.
Michael Tate is the founder of Jantar Publishing, a London-based publisher of European Fiction. He is a graduate of the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies and also studied at Univerzita Karlova in Prague.
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