A man of conversation

Recently, a trilogy was promoted in Belgrade, after Berlin, Sarajevo and Zagreb What do the ashes say? Dzhevad Karahasan. Its publisher is Bulevar from Novi Sad. What do the ashes say? is a tribute to one of the most important people of the Middle Ages, Omar Hajjam, a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet who lived between the 11th and 12th centuries in Persia, and above all it is a tribute to Sarajevo's National and University Library, the famous City Hall, which was destroyed by phosphorus shells burned in August 1992.

Dževad Karahasan was a playwright in Zenica, Sarajevo and Salzburg, he taught at universities in Sarajevo, Salzburg, Göttingen and Berlin. He is the author of a novel Eastern Divan, Shahriyar's ring, Sara and Serafina, Night Council, stories House for the tired i Reports from the Dark Vilayet, and a book of essays On language and fear, Moving diary, Garden book. Dzhevad Karahasan's books have been translated into 15 languages, and have won him numerous international awards. Belgrade promotion of the book What do the ashes say? she was in the UK "Steamboat".

"WEATHER": How did you discover Omar Khayyam?? It is known that it was introduced to Europe by the British poet Edward Fitzgerald in 1860. years.

CEVAD KARAHASAN: My personal history with Hajjam looks like this. As a second-year student in Sarajevo, I accidentally came across a rendition of Hajjam's rubai made by Safvet-beg Bašagić, a Bosnian poet and intellectual from the end of the 19th century. And I was speechless. Rubaiyya are short poems of four verses. To express such deep, literally bottomless despair, with so much humor, I think is truly a feat. This led me to begin a manic search for everything Khayjam, and everything about him. And that went on for years. That, of course, is how I came to Edward Fitzgerald. Somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, Hajjam was completely unknown as a poet in the East. He is celebrated as a mathematician and astronomer. Fitzgerald accidentally bought a book in the bazaar and started reading in his apartment. These were the Rubai's of Hayyam. He quickly packed up and rushed to London to learn Persian better. He translated them, and it became a worldwide hit, clubs of admirers of Omar Hajjam were founded throughout the English language. Edward Fitzgerald was a good poet. Not great, but really not bad either. His highest poetic achievement is the rendition of Hajjam. The story repeats itself in Sarajevo, fifty years later. Safvet-bey Bašagić is going home from work. He sees how the estate of a man who died without descendants is being sold. He has to, he is obliged to buy something there, because everything he earns goes to the kitchen for the poor. His eyes fell on a stream. The things that are offered there have no price, you give as much as you can from your heart. He comes home, starts reading, and remains speechless. He sings those songs. Safvet-bey Bašagić was not a great poet. It wasn't bad, but it really wasn't great either. The best thing he did as a poet were those songs. I got carried away with the idea of ​​writing a text that would be a combination of an essay and a short story under the working title Khayyam and his translators. About Hajjam as a conversational artist. Because if one poet enables other poets to achieve great poetic results by translating him, then he is a man of conversation. I did not succeed, I tried many times, but it was not good. But the obsession with Hajjam remained, and I continued to read everything I could find about him, and about him. It is one of those diseases, bordering on insanity. I have several writers that I would rather call my diseases than my great loves. And that's where Hajjam belongs.

Did you come across Bešagić's songbook in the City Hall?, in the Sarajevo Library?

I didn't, I found it in an antique shop that is also gone. And of course, this is precisely why my novel about Hajjam is a tribute to the library where I found many texts about him. A fortunate circumstance for the Town Hall, as we call the Library, is that Bosnia was, in a way, the Siberia of the Ottoman Empire, where undesirables were sent, a lot of things that orthodoxy did not like. And all that reached the City Hall. And Hajjam was always somewhere on the edge of what can be tolerated, his deep skepticism, his need to know and understand, his poems which are often conversations with God. He asks God - why did you give me the need to know, if you do not allow me any of what is important, how can you challenge my ecstasy, if ecstasy is the only way to you? In the times of fundamentalism, Hajjam was always an undesirable person, so it is no coincidence that this book of Bašagić with Hajjam's poems remained in Sarajevo, and it is no coincidence that there were so many articles about him in that library.

Trilogy What do the ashes say? you end with a note in which in Norway, 2008. years, Juso Podžan Livnjak explains that he wrote a book about Hajjam in order to save part of the treasure burned in the Town Hall. Books, therefore, even though they are gone, they live in people.

That's right. In the novel Master and Margarita, which I have read at least fifty times, the sentence "Manuscripts do not burn" is obsessively repeated. And everything that is once spoken remains, everything that is written once remains. Because you cannot burn the spirit. There are still thousands of young people who gained their first reading experiences, their first love experiences, and their first human experiences in the City Hall. I think that it was precisely this dream about the indestructibility of the spirit that opened this book for me.

What is Khayyam's world like?? Why would a modern reader be interested in a story from the 11th century?. veka?

The era in which Hajjam lived was shockingly similar to our era. It is the time of fundamentalists and fundamentalism. Let's define: for me, a fundamentalist is a person who wants to erase everything unclear, uncertain, incomprehensible, confusing from religion, the world, human life. A fundamentalist is a man who no longer has faith and has little knowledge, and tries to compensate for faith with that little knowledge. A fundamentalist is a man who takes only his own interest seriously out of everything in the world. It is the era of Khayjam, it is also our era. The Crusades begin in the West. St. Bernard de Clairvois, a saint of the Catholic Church, says in a sermon that "a Christian seeks his glory in the death of an infidel." No hater of Christianity has uttered a graver insult to Christianity. You have on one side the fear of everything unclear, the unknown and the desire to remove it, and on the other side you have a lot of militarism and jurisprudence. Literally like today. That astonishing similarity of our epochs opened up to me Hajjam and all his confusion before the world. Surrounded by people who have only answers, he has only questions.

You stated that you found an interlocutor in Hajjam. How?



If one can compare the small with the large, I will give you one example: in 1804, I think on June 7, Goethe received Hafez Shirazi's cantos and discovered an interlocutor in him. All around him, people are foaming at the mouth with arrogance, anti-Islamic hysteria, it is said that Europe must finally civilize the barbarians, and Goethe recognizes in Hafez Shirazi a man who knows that the question of what holds the world together is much more important than the question of who will occupy whom. Who will rule. That's how Hajjam is my interlocutor. It is a great benefit for someone to have an army, when love defends us from evil much more effectively than all power! And Hajjam knew it. That's why in this book about him, in which almost all the figures are historical figures, I added fictional characters of Hajjam's family in order to give him protection from the world through love - I literally wrote a book about the saving power of love. Hajjam knew that questioning is the beginning of knowledge, that we study for the sake of understanding better how much we do not know. When we lose the ability to wonder, we have stopped knowing. When we lose the ability to be naive, we stop rejoicing. When we lose our questions, we are dead until we discover it. And in that sense, Hajjam is my interlocutor. Because literature is a conversation. I am writing from a dream, from the desire to find a good interlocutor. The book lives, it became real, if you projected your experiences, feelings, questions into it. You are a co-author.

What do the ashes say? draws attention to Islam, at a time when Muslims, and the rest of the relationship with them in Europe and America did not go well. How are you doing in that situation??

There is a poem by Vasko Popa that goes something like this: "Time flows on one side, time flows on the other side, and I am standing on dry land." This poem comes to my mind more and more often when I try to explain to people my situation today, a Muslim living in in the west, he was educated in high schools and universities of the western type, so he feels the western culture as his own. If I were to try to misuse Popa's great song to describe my situation, I would say something like this: "East of me fear spreads, west of me spread fear, and I cluck double." And that insane deep fear of the West is also of Muslims. a manifestation of fundamentalism because, above all, they are confused by the fact that they are religious, what they believe. What about the man who believes today? On the other hand, Muslims are afraid of the West, and they do not agree to see that if you want to know the classical culture of Muslims, you have to go to the West. What about this game of misunderstandings that someone may deliberately cause, or they are produced by themselves - I don't know, it's not for me to interpret, but in any case it hurts us tremendously. There's a great line by Goethe where he says, “Orient and Occident can no longer be separated.” That's certainly a living truth. If you'll allow me a hunch, this book of mine is an attempt to introduce people to an interesting political topic that we don't deal with at all. Hasan Sabbah, a Gnostic thinker, but also the founder of political terrorism and a philosopher of capitalism, talks about a state without territory in several places in the book. Which would function as a network. He says you can't destroy the net, you can destroy one mesh, but not the net. Venice was literally a huge empire without territory. Because the power of that state was enormous. Today, large international companies have that structure, Apple and Microsoft can overthrow countries as they please, with the push of a button. That foreboding is in this book.

Could the European Union be based on culture?

I think that there are three possible answers to that question, and that all three are correct. I am, to tell the truth, a Southern nostalgic. I deeply believed in Yugoslavia, in the possibility of the existence of a Yugoslav space that would live off the differences between individual groups. And because of that dream of mine about Yugoslavia, I cannot help but dream of the European Union as the realization of an unrealized Yugoslav dream. Because a man of language, a writer, is cramped in small communities. I need interlocutors who will be different from me, who know more, who will refute me. I dream of the European Union as a realized community of culture. But at the moment the EU is much more of a shareholder society.

society than a community of culture such as Yugoslavia, unfortunately, was and remains much more a political project than a living cultural reality. If we had succeeded in integrating Yugoslavia more culturally, I am sure that its immune system would have functioned much better. That is why I insist that the European Union will certainly survive if we manage to shape it as a common culture. Can that culture be as deep as national cultures are? It can't - for sure. Because national culture is by definition rooted in time. And you see that in literary production. On the one hand, you have globalized literature: a sweet cozy story, characters for whom it is perfectly natural to have breakfast in Tokyo and dinner in New York. At the same time, there is a literature that celebrates regional culture, which is often written in dialects, because man is a being of time and man desperately needs to be rooted in time and memory. This relatively speaking regional, ancient literature often looks like nationalism to us because it holds a lot to the local, concrete. But at the same time, she reminds us that a meal is not just about taking food, a meal is an important form of culture. When we forget the beautiful rituals that accompanied meals, when we forget that we should express gratitude to God for those gifts, that you and your husband achieved a special game of love during meals together, when we forget all that, we have lost too much. So: as much as I look forward to this globalized literature, I admit that I also love this one, which reminds me of how people dined in my city three hundred years ago, how people spoke six years ago, how people believed. So, one of the possible answers to your question is this, a uniophile answer. The second is Eurosceptic: I'm afraid not, and if we succeed in constituting it as a community of culture, it will be superficial. And then the third: let's hope, we'll see.

Your book is full of archaisms. However, considering that, except in Sarajevo, also read in Zagreb, obviously your language was not a barrier - as one might think.

May I spoil you with an anecdote? In August 1993, I left Sarajevo. I find out that nobody recognizes Serbian-Croatian and Croatian-Serbian anymore. I went to professor Radoslav Katičić, the head of Slavic Studies in Vienna, and told him: "Colleague, I came with a question that is very important to me." From which language are my books translated?" He says: "I would say from Bosnian." How come those books are read in Zagreb and Belgrade without translation - I ask. He says: "Simple. The name of the language refers to the standard, and the standard of a language is not a linguistic, but a political issue. Each community has the right to adopt a standard for itself, that is the official language, and to call it whatever it wants. So if you ask me as a quiet, humble servant of my language, I think that Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian are really one language." That's what Professor Katičić told me. I would not dispute anyone's right to create their own standard and call it whatever they want. I admit that I dream of the moment when we will agree to find a politically neutral name for these languages ​​of ours and we can look forward to it again. Because I think that what was connected by language, was also connected by dear God. But I'm not worried about that, let anyone do what they want. It is important to me that we preserve the desire for conversation and cultural exchange. The only thing that really bothers me is that we have been using language to create misunderstandings for a long time. Instead of understanding each other. Tell me, while you were reading the book, did any of the archaisms I use bother you? On the cover page of the German edition, they printed Hajjam's rubaya in Arabic script in a beautiful calligraphic rendering. Intentionally, to emphasize that surprising archaic dimension of the book! The book does not accept the dictatorship of the moment. The book wants a conversation. We have believed these technical fundamentalists that we can express our spiritual content through SMS. We can't! SMS can convey information, but it cannot convey knowledge, nor express your spiritual content. Conversation is when we opened up, when we listened to each other, when we confirmed to each other through silence that we were there. I'll repeat: we stopped talking, and it kills painfully. We are creatures of conversation. That's what they say in Sarajevo - 'nako'. We talked when we talked to each other for an hour 'how, without aim, without intention. I listen to you and by listening to you I tell you that you are here, I know about you, I accept you. You listen to me and tell me the same with your silence. We part ways, and what we said to each other - we confirmed to each other that there are us, we confirmed: there are us. Well, that's dramatic, that's real life.