the damned yard

14
Ivo Andrić Edited by Celia Hawkesworth Beograd 2012 DERETA

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Page 1: THE DAMNED YARD

I v o A n d r i ć

THE

DAMNED

YARDand other s tor ies

Edited by Celia Hawkesworth

Beograd2012

DERETA

Page 2: THE DAMNED YARD

© Zadužbina Ive Andrića, Milutina Bojića 4, Beograd

© of this edition Grafički atelje DERETA

The acknowledgments on page 19 constitutean extension of this copyright page

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out

or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consentin any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition including thiscondition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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THE DAMNED YARD

Ivo ANDRIĆ was born in Travnik, Bosnia on 9th October1892, attended schools in Višegrad and Sarajevo, andstudied at the Universities of Zagreb, Vienna, Krakowand Graz. He was imprisoned for 3 years during WorldWar I for his involvement in the Young Bosnia Move-ment which was implicated in the assassination ofArchduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo. A diplomatfrom 1919–41, he served in Rome, Geneva, Madrid,Bucharest, Trieste, Graz and Belgrade, ending his careeras Minister in Berlin on the eve of World War II. Althoughrichly influenced by his foreign travels, most of Andrić’sfiction is set in his native Bosnia. He wrote 6 volumesof short stories and 5 novels, including Na Drini ćuprija(The Bridge on the Drina), Travnička hronika (The Daysof the Consuls) and Gospodjica (The Woman from Sa-rajevo), as well as poetry and reflective prose. His greatcontribution to twentieth-century European writing wasrecognised in 1961 when he was awarded the NobelPrize for Literature. He died in March 1975, and hisBelgrade funeral was attended by 10,000 people.

CELIA HAWKESWORTH is Senior Lecturer in Serbo-Croat,School of Slavonic and East European Studies,University of London. She graduated from the Univer-sity of Cambridge in 1964 with a degree in French andRussian, then took an M.Phil in Serbo-Croat Studies atthe University of London in 1969. Amongst her recenttranslations are The Damned Yard (Forest Books) andConversation with Goya (Menard), both by Ivo Andrićand In the Jam of Lift by Dubravka Ugrešič (Virago).

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CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Note on the pronunciation of Serbo-Croat Names . . . . 18

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

TH E ST O RY O F T H E VI Z I E R’S EL E P H A N T . . . . . . . 21translated by Celia Hawkesworth

TH E BR I D G E O N T H E ŽE PA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79translated by Svetozar Koljević

IN T H E GU E S T-HO U S E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93translated by Joseph Schallert and Ronelle Alexander

DE AT H I N SI N A N’S TE K K E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111translated by Felicity Rosstyn

TH E CL I M B E R S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129translated by Svetozar Koljević

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A LE T T E R F R O M 1920 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183translated by Lenore Grenoble

IN T R O D U C T I O N T O TH E HO U S E O N IT S OW N . . . 203translated by Celia Hawkesworth

AL I PA S H A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209translated by Felicity Rosslyn

A ST O RY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227translated by Felicity Rosslyn

TH E DA M N E D YA R D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237translated by Celia Hawkesworth

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For Dušan Puvačić,

and all our friends in Bosnia

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INTRODUCTION

This selection of Andrić’s short stories and the novella TheDamned Yard highlights a number of recurrent themes fromhis work. Their primary setting is Bosnia, where Andrić spentthe formative years of his life: he was bom in Travnik on 9thOctober 1892, he spent his childhood in Višegrad, near theborder with Serbia, and his secondary school years in Saraje-vo. Travnik, which was the seat of Ottoman power in Bosnia,is the setting of Andrić’s novel, The Days of the Consuls (pre-viously published as Bosnian Story), while Višegrad providesthe context for numerous short stories and the novel TheBridge on the Drina. While Andrić’s work includes some ti-meless stories and some set in a neutral post-Second WorldWar urban context, much of it is set in Bosnia and is closelydependent on this setting.

A leitmotiv of Andrić’s work is the material nature ofhuman experience: wary of abstraction, he roots his stories ina specific geographical and historical context which has theeffect both of qualifying the statement and, more importantly,of stressing the fact that all universal truths that may beabstracted from human experience are lived through in a

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specific context. Andrić suggests that there are recurrentpatterns of behaviour and a number of essential truths, whichform the core of legend and myth, to be rediscovered in newforms by succeeding generations.

This approach may be seen illustrated in ‘The Bridge onthe Žepa’, where the Grand Vizier who has the bridge builtleaves it to stand on its own, without further comment, as acomplete statement: ‘Seen from the side, the bold span of itswhite arch ... took the traveller by surprise like a strangethought, gone astray and caught among the crags, in thewilderness.’ The ‘thought’ is not articulated, but what iscommunicated by the stone bridge are such abstract conceptsas: harmony, beauty, reconciliation, the surmounting of obstac-les. In ‘The Damned Yard’, the rivalry between the two conten-ders for the Ottoman throne at the heart of the work is describedas ‘the age-old story of two brothers’ and the way in whichthe younger brother, Cem, is thwarted and manipulated byforces beyond his control is echoed in a different form in thestory of Kamil.

‘The Damned Yard’ represents a concentrated statementof some of Andrić’s central themes: the survival of the imagi-nation in face of the all-engulfing encroachment of time, thenotion that stories of all kinds should be heard for every storyis ‘true’, the endurance of essential patterns of experience innew forms in different ages, the arbitrary nature of powerand social organisation, and above all the notion of the ima-gination as providing a means of escape from constraint.

Imprisoned at the outbreak of the First World War forhis involvement in the Young Bosnia Movement which wasimplicated in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinandin Sarajevo in 1914, Andrić returned to the prison as a setting

12 • Ivo Andrić

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for several stories. In essence, however, the prison emerges assimply a more intense and obvious form of the various kindsand degrees of constraint to which all human beings aresubject. And it is the experience of constraint that creates theimpulse to escape. For the inmates of the Damned Yard, theonly means of escape is through the telling of stories.

The novella is, then, above all a story about story-telling:the kinds of stories people tell, the way they tell them and thereasons for their telling them. There is a hierarchy among thestory-tellers of the Damned Yard: some talk to dramatise andglorify their own lives, some to gain vicarious excitement bytalking of the more colourful lives of others. Such narratorsmay be seen as representing the function of popular literature.The more serious story-tellers, Fra Petar and Kamil, are ‘pro-fessionals’. Kamil is a biographer or historian whose capacityto enter into the life of his chosen subject dominates his senseof self, while Fra Petar is the archetypal self-effacing, reliable,balanced narrator who lets history speak for itself withoutcomment or intervention. He is the artist who brings a specialindefinable quality to his story-telling, a distinct and unre-peatable ‘style’. Nevertheless, Andrić the ultimate narratorseems to suggest, all these different kinds of narration shouldbe listened to, for there is something to be learned from every-one and we would know far less about human life if we selec-ted solely according to our personal taste and affinity.

The business of story-telling is the subject also of thevolume of short stories published after Andrić’s death. TheHouse on its Own. Two of them are included here, ‘Alipasha’and ‘A Story’, together with the introduction to the volumewhich offers a concentrated statement of the strategy of theartist in creating in himself the ideal conditions in which a

THE DAMNED YARD AND OTHER STORIES • 13

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story may ‘tell’ itself. The device used to link the variousstories in this volume is that they are all the tales of individualswho ‘visit’ the narrator and draw his attention to themselvesin various ways: some are importunate and demanding, someunobtrusive, but all have something to say and should beheeded, each in his own way.

Story-telling is the theme also of ‘The Story of the Vi-zier’s Elephant’, presented as an illustration of the Bosnian loveof story-telling and particularly of stories which are clearly‘untrue’ but which nevertheless convey much about the truthof the human condition. The focus of this story is the experi-ence of living under occupation and the abuse, humiliationand severely limited choice of action this entails. This is theessential experience of the South Slavs, under 500 years of fo-reign rule, expressed in their rich oral tradition as the choicebetween ‘pure’ tragic heroism, i.e. martyrdom, or compromise,‘comic survival’, embodied in the defiant but ambiguous hero,Marko the Prince. This stark choice is clearly revealed to thecharacter Aljo in this story, as he finds escape from the cons-traints of occupation through his imagination, in the same wayas do the oral singer and the inmates of the Damned Yard.

The kind of ‘truth’ that can be conveyed by symbolssuch as the bridge, legend and myth, is distinct from ‘fact’ andmore enduring. ‘Fact’, indeed, has no reality, unless it is con-firmed by others. This proposition is illustrated by the story‘The Climbers’ where ‘reality’ depends on how it is perceived.The power of language is here vividly apparent. The maincharacter, Lekso, performed a remarkable feat in climbing ontothe dome of the church, but unless others can be found to saythat he did, it is as though he had not done it In The Bridgeon the Žepa’ the altered perspective of the Grand Vizier’s fall

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from power enables him similarly to understand the power oflanguage for good or evil and therefore to avoid the possibilityof misinterpretation or misuse by leaving his creation to‘speak’ for itself.

Two other stories in this collection are concerned not somuch with the experience they relate, but with the way it is‘processed’. ‘In the Guest-House’ introduces the engagingcharacter of the Franciscan, Brother Marko. The story is con-cerned with the potential for conflict between organised reli-gions – here Christianity and Islam – and hints at the destruc-tive power of bigotry. Its focus, however, is the clarity of visionwith which the clumsy, awkward Marko cuts through suchdistortions of the religious impulse to a timeless absolute ofcommunication with divinity. ‘Death in Sinan’s Tekke’ offersa mirror-image of this experience. In Marko’s case, learningthe liturgy did not help him come nearer to his God, whilestanding in a muddy field planting out cabbages did. The der-vish Alidede, on the other hand, led a deeply satisfying spirituallife which was a source of inspiration to many. And yet, at theend, he could not slip as easily as he had thought out of thematerial world. For all that he had tried to distil his existenceinto a pure essence of spirituality, at the end he was obligedto acknowledge that he owed his life to the laws of nature andto some extent to repay that debt

Andrić lived through the turbulent first half of the twen-tieth century, with its two world wars, and extremes of revolu-tion and totalitarianism. The wisdom that informs his workis tempered from that brutal reality. It was in Bosnia that heexperienced the destructive power of the arbitrary divisionsbetween people and their potential for violent conflict He wit-nessed the way in which neighbours who had hitherto lived

THE DAMNED YARD AND OTHER STORIES • 15

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peacefully side by side could turn overnight into deadly ene-mies and whole communities be wiped out by the irrationalpower of communal hatred.

At its best, such a mixed society offers the most positiveimage of conciliation and cooperation: the sense of real peacethrough the reconciliation of difference communciated by themixture of styles in the Sarajevo house from the introductionto The House on its Own. In many of Andrić’s works it is thisaspect of Bosnian society that dominates. In others, however,Bosnia stands as a stark image of the violent divisionsbetween human beings. The story ‘A Letter from 1920’ readspainfully in 1992, the centenary of Andrić’s birth, when thehatred stirred up between the different groups in the Yugoslavlands by power-seeking politicians and the media has broughtso tragically violent an end to the experiment in consensusand cooperation represented by Yugoslavia, the countrywhich Andrić himself helped bring into being. The successwith which the politicians were able to pursue their campaignof division and mutual antagonism depended to a very largeextent on the power of language to create a reality people areready to believe in without reference to fact. The ‘truth’ ofmyth as an expression of communal perception and aspira-tion was a process Andrić understood with singular clarity. Itis just this kind of mythic ‘truth’ that is the material of his art.

In one of his other stories featuring Brother Marko,Andrić uses the image of a coin portraying a saint in a stateof beatitude, of which Marko is suddenly reminded as hewatches the face of a Turk in the firelight: it seems to him thepersonification of evil. The narrow edge between the two facesof the coin suggests the thin dividing line between good andevil. If language may bring evil, the truly disinterested concen-

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tration of the artist described in the introduction to the Houseon its Own works always on the side of good. The GrandVizier Jusuf’s motto, ‘In silence is safety’ is echoed in theunambiguous commitment of the craftsmen portrayed in the‘Bridge on the Žepa’ and ‘The Climbers’ and in the balancedpatience of Fra Petar’s narration.

It is precisely this kind of timeless wisdom to whichAndrić aspires in his work. In this endeavour, his clear-sightedacknowledgement of the human capacity for evil gives hisvoice authority and, in the catastrophic conflict afflicting hisnative Bosnia in his centenary year, a new urgency.

Celia Hawkesworth

THE DAMNED YARD AND OTHER STORIES • 17

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NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OFSERBO-CROATIAN NAMES

With the exception of some Turkish words andnames (e.g. Cem, the younger son of SultanBeyazit II, whose story is told in The DamnedYard), Serbo-Croatian spellings have been retai-ned. The language may be written in either theCyrillic or the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabetincludes a number of unfamiliar letters listedbelow. Serbo-Croat is strictly phonetic, with oneletter representing one sound. The stress normal-ly falls on the first syllable.

C, c – ts, as in catsČ, č – ch, as in churchĆ, ć – tj, close to č, but softer i.e.

t in futureDž, dž – j, as in justĐ, đ – dj, close to dž, but softer i.e.

d in verdureJ, j – y, as in yellow (Jugoslavija)Š, š – sh, as in shipŽ, ž – zh, as in treasure