Miljenko Jergovic’s “Sarajevo Marlboro” (Archipelago Books) relies on minute details, such as a dead cactus and a grandmother’s ring, to distinguish individuals’ numbed reactions to the devastation of the Bosnian war. There’s a melancholy, dreamlike sameness to Jergovic’s war stories that recalls Alan Lightman’s use of time in “Einstein’s Dreams” and Italo Calvino’s meditations on place in “Invisible Cities,” but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three.

What can a person learn from a graveyard in a valley? Very little, suggests the narrator of “The Gravedigger,” one of the 29 stories in Miljenko Jergovic’s outstanding collection Sarajevo Marlboro. Looking at a graveyard in a valley, one sees nothing but stones. These stones indicate that certain people have died; yet, they do not provide any knowledge of the people, any knowledge necessary to understand what these deaths mean. That is why it is important that a graveyard be built atop a hill: From such a vantage point, one can look over the countryside and map out the lives of the deceased—the hospitals where they were born, the schools they attended, the cities their spouses came from, and so on, right up to the houses where they died. By looking out at the events of each person’s life, it is possible to understand the significance of their deaths. It is also possible to see that, no matter how large a country’s graveyards may be, there is always much more to it than a cluster of tombs.

Seeing beyond the graves is a good piece of advice for an American reader to keep in mind when approaching a book of short stories about Sarajevo, a city that, for many of us is, in a way, a graveyard in a valley. During the Serbian siege—which lasted from April 1992 to February 1996—approximately 12,000 people died in Sarajevo. As a result, we identify Sarajevo almost exclusively with death and the humanitarian crisis that brought it. We see the city’s tombstones clearly enough, but we know little about the names of the people written on them and have almost no idea of whether there is much else in Sarajevo, nor of what there used to be in the city before.

Fortunately for us, Milkenko Jergovic is not a man to stare at graves. His concern is for the living and in this collection of stories about Sarajevo and its inhabitants he writes about them with the seriousness, sensitivity, quirky intelligence, and gentle humor of a master of the short story. In fact, Jergovic is a master of many crafts, known throughout Europe and the Balkans as a poet, novelist, and journalist of the highest caliber. Published in 2004, Sarajevo Marlboro—fluidly translated by Stela Tomasevic, published in this elegant edition by Archipelago Books—is the first of his works to be made available to American readers. It is a book that takes readers to the hilltop graveyard overlooking Sarajevo and invites them to gaze out onto the past lives of not only those buried in the ground below, but also the lives of the residents still bustling in the city in the distance.

This is not as easy as it sounds. The only analytical tool that most American readers have to contextualize the lives of the city’s residents is our knowledge of the political circumstances that brought about genocide. As a result of the extreme nature of these circumstances, we tend to see each individual life that comes to our attention as an allegory for them, a symbol of the greater political tragedy. This is well intentioned and, to an extent, unavoidable; however, it is deeply insufficient and suffers from the fundamental flaw of treating the political circumstances that destroyed a person’s life as if they constituted that life. Rather than view the city’s residents as individuals, we reduce them to nothing more than the connotations (victim and victimizer, good and bad, etc.) that their ethnicities and political affiliations carry for us, ignoring or downplaying the importance of any characteristics or quirks that spill out of our simplistic framework. We level them. Even when confronted with an individual life, we tend to see it as a sort of tombstone, little more than a reminder that things can go wrong. This prevents us from feeling a true sense of empathy or pathos for the residents of Sarajevo who have suffered as a result of the siege and, indeed, prevents us from having any lasting understanding of just how the siege affected the city.

Take the book’s first story, “The Excursion,” in which a young boy in Tito’s Yugoslavia looks at the wreckage of a car crash and fantasizes about what it would be like if his own “bus or car or whatever were to become the object of morbid scrutiny by palefaced onlookers.” At first glance, this scene clearly appears to be a sort of national allegory: The “whatever” the boy is hinting at is his country (or at least his city), and the reader knows full well—though the boy does not—that it will indeed become an object of morbid scrutiny to millions of palefaced onlookers throughout the world. This reading is very smooth; so smooth, in fact, that it is easy to gloss over just how lazy it is. In itself, there is nothing particularly Bosnian about this boy’s fantasy. Any child in any country on Earth could easily have it without it being a symbol of a national tragedy. An American can have it and it could mean a million things. Why is it that a Bosnian boy can have it and it can mean only one? After all, the boy is having this fantasy well before the siege of Sarajevo in 1992. He knows nothing of what is to come; the reader, however, is only able to process the scene through his or her knowledge of what came after. Thus, a gap is created in what Ammiel Alcalay, in his excellent introduction to the collection, refers to as the “terms of knowledge” with which the reader understands the boy’s experience and those with which the boy experiences it himself. This gap not only prevents the reader from seeing the crash through the boy’s eyes; it threatens to lead him or her to misread the story entirely. For there are many elements in “The Excursion” that simply do not fit into a reading of it as an allegory centered on the siege of Sarajevo—elements that speak more to Tito’s Yugoslavia than Milosevic’s, elements that, more than anything, have to do with the boy’s burgeoning adolescence.

The reader’s reliance on the siege of Sarajevo as an analytical tool to understand the story—a reliance that will be particularly strong in a foreign reader—leads to an obfuscation of much of the story’s actual content, as well as a hindering of any pathos that he or she might have felt for its central character. It turns what could have been a vibrant reading experience into a stale intellectual exercise of connecting the dots. The story is about a vivid, humorous, and appealing young boy. The reader—eyes still nailed to the tombstones—sees nothing but the coming genocide.

Such discrepancies in terms of knowledge and perception are common in Sarajevo Marlboro. The collection’s characters frequently confront two tragedies: first, that of the siege, which ruins their lives; second, the tragedy that comes after their lives have been ruined, when they find themselves set upon by foreigners who, though perhaps well-meaning, force them into ethnic or political categories that do not fit. Although there are several offenders in this regard—including the Czech doctors of “A Diagnosis“—the foreign journalists covering the siege figure high on the list. In Sarajevo Marlboro, foreign journalists—many of whom are American—are generally depicted as pesky, misinformed, and pompous characters who rarely help the city’s residents, frequently annoy and misunderstand them, and on occasion are as concerned with their own vocational success as they are with doing anyone else any good. Discovering some of the misconceptions of these foreigners helps to form an empathetic bond with the Bosnian characters being judged by them. After all, there is nothing particularly Bosnian about being misunderstood.

In “The Letter,” a stranger gives the narrator—a cynical ex-resident of Sarajevo now living abroad—a letter to deliver to someone back in the city. With the siege still underway, communication with Sarajevo has been cut off. The sender hopes that the narrator—whom he believes to be more connected to the city than is actually the case—will be able to get the letter to its intended recipient. Instead, the narrator happens to know that the letter’s intended recipient has recently been killed. Unable to break this news to the stranger, he buries the letter in a drawer and hopes it will just disappear. One day, when he is sufficiently emotionally distanced from the recipient’s death, he decides to open it, reading it “as if it was a work of literature, cut off from reality like the dead man, another distant memory.”

The letter’s sender is unexpected: He is a black man, presumably an African (he describes himself as coming from a “non-aligned country”), who came to Sarajevo 15 years ago as a student and identifies himself only as “M.L.” Beginning his epistle with an apology to his friend for leaving Sarajevo without saying goodbye (“I didn’t have the courage”), M.L. quickly launches into a recollection of his own time in the city, a tale about how Sarajevo, the peaceful and relatively tolerant city where he enjoyably spent a significant portion of his life, became “Sarajevo,” the world’s graveyard, the city of death and intolerance that, as far as those on the outside were concerned, had always been the land of “the one-hundred year hatred.” He writes with outrage about this transition, movingly recounting how the inhabitants of Sarajevo resigned themselves to believing the lies that the world was telling about them; how, hearing nothing more than these falsehoods, they came to inhabit them themselves. M.L. describes the residents’ attitude of surrender upon his departure from the city: “If the rest of the world had failed to acknowledge what was good about the people of Bosnia, let them see what was evil.”

M.L. refuses to resign himself to this, and his letter—far more than just a criticism of the outside world—is an attempt to reconstruct the city that he knew and loved. It is infused with a choking sadness at the loss of this city, as well as a need to remind himself that the city he left just a short while ago ever really existed at all. It is a great credit to Jergovic’s skill as a writer that, in a few short pages, he actually succeeds in bringing back the Sarajevo of old. Reading the letter, the narrator comments that he understands its pathos, particularly because its writer is distant and unknown to him: “Letters are probably the last means by which you can talk about such things. Everything else that has been written about Sarajevo is just an attempt to create a framework for a new existence or to find the least painful way of dividing up life: the one that has already happened and should be forgotten and the one that’s coming, in which people will live comfortably and happily until death, as in a fairy tale.”

A letter—private rather than public, focusing on individual experience and not political generalization—is almost the exact opposite of a journalistic dispatch. Sarajevo Marlboro should be read as a letter. The reader who appreciates it as such—turning away from the graveyard that has constituted much of the international discourse about Sarajevo—will be rewarded. Jergovic is a writer uncommonly talented at portraying these characters while they live, not to mention the lives of those left behind to mourn them. Jergovic never gives the reader the sort of gray-hued, grisly victim that we might come to the collection expecting to mourn. In fact, in “The Cactus,” one of the collection’s best stories, the death that most moves the story’s narrator is not that of a human being but, rather, that of a cactus. The narrator nurses the cactus throughout the siege, right up until the moment when it dies from the cold. Precisely because of its seeming insignificance, the plant breaks through the narrator’s defenses and triggers the surge of emotion that he had made such an effort to repress. Reflecting on the sadness he feels whenever he thinks of a cactus dying, the narrator advises the reader: “It’s not important, mind you, except as a warning to avoid detail in life. That’s all.” It is often said that detail is the hallmark of a great writer, but it is rarely specified why. The answer is simple. Looking over an endless field of tombstones, detail is the one thing never seen. Thankfully, in this beautiful collection, Miljenko Jergovic does not heed his own narrator’s warning.

Meng Hao-jan (689-740 C.E.) is one of China ‘s greatest poets during the illustrious T’ang Dynasty. A man who was deeply influenced by Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism and provides unique insights encapsulated by succinct language. Now expertly and deftly translated into English for the first time by David Hinton, the poetry of this esteemed elder in the pantheon of China ‘s greatest poets is readily available and accessible to a greatly appreciative American readership. Adrift at Wu-ling: Wu-ling’s river thinned out, my long-ago/boat glides on into peach-blossom forests//where headwaters harbored such quiet/mystery: immortal families so deep away.//Water meanders, blurs into blue cliffs,/darkens green beneath a crossing cloud.//I sit listening. Idle gibbons cry out, mind/sudden clarity far beyond a world of dust.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: A book of verse by an eighth-century Chinese poet, translated by a master and published by a small press as devoted to the beauty of the page as to the beauty upon it. And, hey, it’s only 14 bucks.

The book is The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan. The translator is David Hinton, who knows philosophy as well as he knows poetry, having translated the Tao Te Ching and other major works of Chinese thought. The publisher is Archipelago Books, a relatively new press on the scene that is based in New York and determined to do things right — even its paperback editions, such as this one, are sturdy in their construction and artfully designed.

But enough of that noise. Listen to the words of Meng, so simple in their power and so eloquently lovely, flowing down to us, via Hinton, through the centuries: “Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen,/and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder,/summer’s blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still./At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers.”

Many writers have tried to capture the atmosphere of the season that comes at last to free us from summer’s humid tyranny; few have succeeded so well, or especially with such concision. The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jin is filled with such charms. Not a one of the poems here is more than 24 lines long, and many are much shorter. According to the publisher, this is the first English translation of Meng’s work. Sometimes, 1,200-plus years is a very, very long time.

Meng’s stanza never varies much: It is always two lines, though those lines can stretch into double-digit-syllable range. And his subject matter displays little change; he writes of nature, of humans’ place in it, of observations that bring to the individual some sort of clarity or appreciation of splendor.

Certainly there is an element of sadness in these poems, bound up, as such melancholy often is, with intimations of mortality — which Meng at one point refers to as “the inevitable dark.” For the most part, though, these are poems of great serenity, great satisfaction, great joy. The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jin can be read in an evening, revisited for a lifetime. Find time for it.

The ancient landscape poetry has an exemplar in The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan, in a new edition by acclaimed translator David Hinton (Archipelago Books, 2004). There’s a gentle lyricism to Meng’s words, a pleasing oneness with rivers and mountains that transcends the centuries: “I guide the boat in, anchor off the island mist. / It’s dusk, time a traveler’s loneliness returns.”

From Bankim Chandra Chaterjee (1838-94) in the nineteenth century to Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay (1898-1971) and Buddhadeva Bose (1908-74) in the midtwentieth, the three books under review straddle the golden age of Bengali writing; from “one of the fathers of the Indian novel” to two modernists, contemporaries, whose writings exist in fascinating contradistinction to one another. Buddhadeva Bose gave voice to the twentieth-century urban Bengali sensibility in an oeuvre that ranges from poetry to short stories, novels, plays and insightful literary criticism; his translations of Baudelaire, Rilke and Hölderlin into Bengali were in keeping with his own obsession with the city and the individual subject in modernity. My Kind of Girl is a wonderfully fortuitous phrase for Moner Mato Meye, capturing the idiomatic resonance of colloquial usage as no other could have. Arunava Sinha and Radha Chakravarty are among the more proficient and prolific translators from the Bengali language today, and are to be commended for their engagement in large translation projects; that one should sometimes still miss the luminosity of the original words on the page is therefore strange. In Sinha’s English version of Moner Mato Meye, phrases such as “So long have I been there” to mean “I’ve been there for such a long time” are infelicitous, as is “Her voice struck the chords in Nabokumar’s heart” in The Forest Woman. That My Kind of Girl – a classic modernist tale of four passengers stranded in a railway-station waiting room at night, recounting stories of lost loves – is engrossing is thanks not only to Sinha’s abilities, but to the quality of Bose’s narrative, which, unlike his earlier, Calcutta-based masterpiece, Tithidore (1949), inhabits a lighter, more Maupassant-like manner instead.

Buddhadeva Bose. My Kind of Girl. Arnuava Sinha, tr. Brooklyn, New York. Archipelago. 2010. 138 pages. $15. ISBN 978-0-9826246-1-6

With Buddhadeva Bose’s My Kind of Girl, Archipelago Books adds a prominent Indian Bengali author to its unique catalog of “classic and contemporary world literature,” which already includes translations from twenty-five other languages. Arunava Sinha’s agile version of this short novel, originally published in india in 2008, makes it accessible to a wider audience, both in its native country and abroad. The classically simple structure, consisting of a framing narratie punctuated by four flashbacks, is highlighted by cinematically sharp and sparing prose, visually poignant and tersely apt to convey the moral of the tale. Four middle-aged men–a contractor, a government official, a medical doctor, and a writer–are forced to spend a winter night together in the waiting room of a railway station, when an accident along the line blocks all train traffic until the next morning. While the four strangers are trying to figure out the best way to adapt to the circumstances, a young couple opens the door, stands on the threshold for a few moments, and then leaves. Clearly newlyweds, they are lost in their love for each other and oblivious of everything else. Their sudden appearance and retreat prompts the four men to comment on this blissful yet short-lived condition, “the most amazing part of this amazing illusion”–in the writer’s words–that is life itself. As the discussion takes a more confessional turn, the four travelers engage in teling their own stories of youthful love, illusion, and delusion. Predictably enough, each one of them concerns a woman, and the teller’s particular relation to her–or more precisely, the relevance and significance that such a relationship acquires in retrospective. Each of these relationships, in fact, represents a turning point in the narrator’s life (although we hear the man’s version only), often disguised as a failure, a defeat, or a loss.

Although encouraged by one another, the four men quickly become their own audience, while the waiting room, first described as a “comfortless island,” morphs into an underground cave, an otherworld where the men are taken by their own recounting, and where they seem to remain in a trance fo reminiscence and regret until, released from this spell, they reemerge to the surface of their ordinary life. Caught in a sort of cathartic process, they strive to decipher “the invisible writing of the past,” and what comes back to haunt and illuminate each one of them is not the memory of a long-lost love, but the way in which such an event changed their lives forever. The question is not what did or did not happen, but what could have happened, and why it happened this and not another–any other–way. It is a classical question, and one that nurtures anxiety and obsession, the twin vultures of middle-aged man.

By the time the fourth and final story ends, it is dawn and the station is stirred back to life by the news of an approaching train. The four men, walking out of their trance, leave the room and board the train as perfect strangers. Only the writer remembers the fateful young couple and, suddenly recognizing them huddled together on the busy platform, tries to retain a glimpse of this illusion as the train rolls out of the station. More significantly, perhaps, by the time the reader emerges from the cave of confession and deception, the writer has become the Writer, and his auctorial voice is what eventually guides us through the bustle of the platform and out of the story. And in this subtle transformation lies perhaps the simplest truth of this finely tuned little novel in whcih Bose, writing at a critical moment in the history of his country, clarifies and claims the indispensable role of art and iterature in society.

Graziano Kratli

Yale University

The simplest of endeavors can spiral into an epic tale. Plants Don’t Drink Coffee follows young Tomas and hs family as their lives unfold and tells the story of Bilbao, a region of Spain. Told in an assortment of short stories, Unai Elorriaga’s narrative is expertly translated from the original Basque by Amaia Gabantxo, bringing this beautiful piece of fiction to the world stage. Any who appreciate foreign literature will very much enjoy Plants Don’t Drink Coffee.

Gate of the Sun

2006-10-01

Elias Khoury was born in Beirut in 1948 so he grew up in the midst of the long Israeli conflict. In this extremely moving and challenging book, he gives the Palestinian side of the story. I am not aware of any other fiction written in or translated into English that has done so. As in other translated literature, I found reading it slow going. The storytelling was like an Indian raga, circling round and round a repeating theme, speeding up and slowing down.

Two men are holed up in a makeshift hospital which is fairly well deserted, inside a refugee camp outside Beirut. Yunes, a leader of the Palestinian resistance, is in a coma from a stroke. He is being cared for by Khalil, a poorly trained doctor, who reveres Yunes and hopes to bring the man out of his coma by talking to him. Khalil was born in the camps and as he tells the story of Palestinians expelled from the villages in Galilee, he seeks to make sense of what has happened to their country.

This is the story of the 20th century on Earth. War, death, clash of cultures, displaced peoples and political confusion. In Gate of the Sun, that story is made intimate and personal, showing how men, women, children, families and villages are affected; showing the utter disruption of love, religion, daily life and tradition.

I felt at the end of the book that Khoury had lifted this horror above and out of any political polemics and given us a look at what we humans do to each other. He shows how useless, sorrowful and destructive it is and also how individuals continue anyway to create life and community. Quite an achievement.