who came back from war?
who actually came back?
a horse in a field, dandelions-cum-parachutes
did the horse come back from war?
his mane, his eyes—tell nothing,
hoofs twitch, pestered by green bottle flies
(you know, i once saw a dead man
with flies nesting in his eyes
a corpse we sold to the other side
for some oil and sugar)
did the man come back from war?
asks the earth, asks the grass
which man came back from war?
what is his name?
how tall is he?
what color are his eyes?
(so no maggots)
is he right- or left-handed?
and the horse, an army horse, did he not
tumble into the ravine, of his own accord?
wild horses wander the mountains above
the surrounded city like refrains
who came back from war?
who actually came back?
asks the chernozem
asks the humus, the forest floor, the peat
the roots of a wild saffron
where does he live, this man who came back from war?
are his wife and children joyful?
did his door brighten?
does the brook by his house babble, like it once
babbled in childhood? has it waited
for the man to come back from war?
have the golden spoons awaited his return?
and the golden morsels?
for life to begin after war
ask the things decades decaying in the razed house
did the burned house come back from war?
the scorched mirror casts a ghastly reflection,
houses without roofs, the white bark of birch saplings in living rooms,
yellow leaves, purple leaves the color of worms, of an emperor’s cloak
did the cloak come back from war?
if he did come back, where does he live?
is his life comfortable or bare?
he was given a medal, a war pension, a prosthesis
does he dream of revenge?
does he dream of a world bereft of wounds?
bereft of scars?
if the man came back from war,
did war leave him in a different form?
the man, who came back from war,
does he carry a smile,
hold it like a rifle slung over his shoulder?
how many lives does a person forced to start over live?
did the house, did the city come back from war?
down the chimney the fire returns and
the smoke turns into a dry tree
who asks?
does the victim ask death what they tasted like?
did the mass grave come back?
its pharynx, the slumber of afternoon dreams
too must have a domain?
the warmth of home, the miraculous valley, the greenery of home turf . . .
if the mass grave came back, then the wolf is sated
and all the victims accounted for
where and how does the mass grave live if it came back from war?
how deep is it, or how high?
how far it extends, all the way to the slope where
the forest begins, where boletes grow, white mushrooms,
mycelium of peace
is it a good life?
or merely one of survival?
come night, when the razed city sinks into sleep,
does the criminal croon love songs beside the mass grave
or do they both lie low, shielding their love
with an oath of silence?
who came back from war?
who actually came back?
a bone came back
tibia or fibula?
a marble came back in the pocket of a corpse; pocket watches
came back en masse from mass graves
knit sweaters came back?
Seiko made no everlasting ads though
many a model 5 came back whole,
shooting for the stars,
the star of marketing: Seiko Eternal—Mass Grave Edition
when did recovery begin?
healing, when did it begin?
maybe no one came back from war?
maybe the leaves
maybe the weeds
maybe the cobwebs
maybe the dew
maybe it swells, shines, grows
maybe the clouds
maybe the tracks in the mud
maybe the shrapnel holes in the walls
maybe the tattooed stump
a rose and snake
an i love you to the sky and beyond
crossed swords and other people’s fate
someone must have come back from war
sleep through the violence of peace
sleep through the vulgarity of recovery
someone stirred awake by poor recovery
bad seams
someone knew the body was fine more or less, but the soul rotten
and how can a single particle of light be fixed?
set the mechanics straight
no one could say
the simple truth
that no one ever
out there came back
out of the crystal pharynx
out of the dark night where the Moon’s teeth reflect on the bayonet
how do you feel?
do you feel real?
i feel good, i’m real
or seem so to myself
but, what about the dead?
well what about them?
you think we should keep living despite them?
well what should we do with them?
not mention them, use stock phrases
not first or last names!
or nicknames
pretend they don’t exist
pretend in double measure
first when they were killed
again when forgotten
whoever first comes back from war, let them send
a postcard from that city of glass
we’ll wait
you’ll wait
they, the dead, will certainly lie in wait
send us an IBAN when you get back
so we can send you real money
so you can treat yourself and enjoy
as befits that foreign place
whoever first comes back from war
must forget the dead
and comb the grass over the graves
to hide the tumuli.
who came back
Faruk Šehić
translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović
It isn’t easy to capture the contradictory tensions of war, let alone survive them. There are silences and blares to account for, precarity and gnawing certainty, hypervigilance and utter carelessness. Faruk Šehić is among a select group of writers who do capture this ambivalence, as demonstrated in this poem, which commemorates thirty years’ passing since the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia.
The line “ko se vratio iz rata?” (“who came back from war?”) met me on a day I had particular trouble facing my father’s suicide. Three years on, I had worked through many a memory and feeling, and each time landed back on the war. Yes, indeed: “who actually came back from war?” Wars never end when they do. The first translation challenges, then, were what the poem conjured up. Faruk and I both survived war at two very different times in our lives (he as a man in his early twenties, I as a child).
As a translator of prose, I remain awed by colleagues who work exclusively with poetry—and I say this as someone who only reluctantly acknowledges the rigid walls separating prose and poetry. But for this poem, I had no need to (fail to) find the courage to translate it. I just—and this as the same someone, but with chronic anxiety—faced it. I wanted to understand. I wanted a collocutor, a salve. When I sent him a message a day after he posted this poem on his website, Faruk immediately responded.
As to form: poetry is rhythm, and in the first stanza alone, there are these sonic booms: ko, konj; vratio, rata, zaista; maslačci, padobranci; govore, dosadne. For those rhythms lost in translation, I hope you’ll find others gained.
The line “ko se vratio iz rata?” (“who came back from war?”) met me on a day I had particular trouble facing my father’s suicide. Three years on, I had worked through many a memory and feeling, and each time landed back on the war. Yes, indeed: “who actually came back from war?” Wars never end when they do. The first translation challenges, then, were what the poem conjured up. Faruk and I both survived war at two very different times in our lives (he as a man in his early twenties, I as a child).
As a translator of prose, I remain awed by colleagues who work exclusively with poetry—and I say this as someone who only reluctantly acknowledges the rigid walls separating prose and poetry. But for this poem, I had no need to (fail to) find the courage to translate it. I just—and this as the same someone, but with chronic anxiety—faced it. I wanted to understand. I wanted a collocutor, a salve. When I sent him a message a day after he posted this poem on his website, Faruk immediately responded.
As to form: poetry is rhythm, and in the first stanza alone, there are these sonic booms: ko, konj; vratio, rata, zaista; maslačci, padobranci; govore, dosadne. For those rhythms lost in translation, I hope you’ll find others gained.
Faruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihać, Yugoslavia. Until war broke out in 1992, he studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb. The then 22-year-old voluntarily joined the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina and led a unit of 130 men. After being gravely injured, he turned to literature at war’s end. Critics consider Šehić the leader of the “beat-up generation” of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia. His books have achieved cult status across the region. His debut novel Quiet Flows the Una (Knjiga o Uni; Buybook, 2011), translated by Will Firth (Istros Books, 2016), received the 2013 EU Prize for Literature. His collection of short stories Under Pressure (Pod pritiskom; Naklada Zoro, 2004), translated by Mirza Purić (Istros Books, 2019), was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize. His writing appears widely in translation. His latest book is a memoir titled Zelenac (Buybook, 2025). Šehić is based in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist for the acclaimed political magazine BH Dani and radiosarajevo.ba.
Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her latest full-length translation, Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie (Sloboština Barbie; VBZ, 2008), was published with Sandorf Passage in 2025. Her translation of Tatjana Gromača’s novella Crnac (Black; Durieux, 2004) won Trafika Europe’s Prize for Prose in 2025. She holds a PhD in comparative literature.
