Ivo Andrić

A Stormy Night

Night goes by.

Dark wings strike with the icy wave

A black sky and the mountain crests.

Night goes by. And with her the prodigious children disappear.

The distance booms.

The boom of the distance finds this night

A strange reverberation in the soul. —

The boom of the distance it is a whisper of the dead,

The voice of love which they did not answer,

The voice of happiness which they brought into bud.

The boom of the distance is the history of great ideas

(Oh! wretched people) that sprang during the dawns

Wandered by the firmament not acquainted with the zenith

And disappeared suddenly in the sumach of their blood

As the sad sun.

The boom of the distance is the distant greeting

Of dear faces, with whom desires bind us always

But destiny separates.

The boom of the distance is a loud reverberation

Of the quietest soul’s conversation,

The tumultuous expression of imperial dreams

That were born, blazed, extinguished,

As degrees of fires,

But the human eye did not see them.

The boom of the distance is the sound of harmony,

Which on earth we seek in vain,

That only of a stormy night

The soul announces in the face of a foreboding.

The boom of the distance is a strange announcement

And fiery breath of God’s breathing,

The noise of an invisible world, the speech

Of unclear nocturnal promises.

The boom of the distance is the solitary kiss

Of the hard earth and a lofty sky.

The sound of reconciliation of cosmic forces.

The boom of the distance is black knit,

The darkness of the mystery of spirits’ depths:

Life and death.

The boom of the distance is (deep in the night)

A question that gets lost and dies

In the dregs of spirits’ vaults,

A painful, painful question.

Maribor, 1915

A Land

Of all my love this?

Oh! the long years

full of the sun’s blaze,

full of thoughts and sacrifices

from cursed native rock! —

Well of all my love

that nothing at all is left for me,

not even a little flame

to warm a frozen soul

and this heart wretched.

Of all that love of mine

Nothing remains in me,

just these thoughts gloomy:

dregs of doubt and repentance

at the other end of a tired spirit.

Of all my love—this

1919

Thirst

One summer day craving I left you,

O, silver water from an unknown spring.

That was long ago. —

Every path is lit for me today

With sun and beauty. Happiness met me.

From a hundred springs my thirst now drinks,

But peace I found not anywhere, for never me

Did the fire of the first thirst leave.

1920

Weimar 1932

Here is the lilac that late blooms,

The green bud of stubborn lips,

And a veil still not free,

And the torrent a wanderer.

Easter morning of a sun gone astray.

It is that life. It is the destined hours.

And it is the dreamed dream

Under a breath of oblivion.

Letter to Nobody

On the heights, where it is fresher

And light and clean and wide,

No thoughts reside, while here

Below, where I write these words,

The contaminated air constricts the chest,

The vigilant eye has no rest.

Fettered I live and with difficulty breathe,

For me it is all the smaller, all the baser am I,

It is all the darker and harder and harder.

But in me, like a wounded falcon,

The melody soars

On the heights, where it is fresher

And light and clean and wide.

Here, I write you this so it is known,

That miserably dying I sang.

1940

Night Conversation 1941

Why do belts of fog hover around our mountains, which block the view to people and poison the souls of children with premature fear?

--For there is no love nor camaraderie between brothers having the same blood and the same language.

       Why above our towns and villages does there constantly hang, like an aureole of damnation, the atmosphere of fear and distrust, the malignity of silence, that frightens?

       --Because between citizens with different religions there does not reign brotherhood nor frank cooperation, but perfidy and venomous hatred.

       Why do our evenings fall so rapidly and painfully, that they wound the spirit, why are our nights unnaturally long and like the darkness of the last day, why are the days full of shame and anger and bloody stains on walls and sidewalks?

       --Because we serve a malevolent foreign country and our wounded evil instincts and misconceptions … only not the high principles of Freedom, Brotherhood, and Unity.

       Why do foreigners lower their eyes and change the conversation when the speak about us, why is our country mentioned first when there is talk of fratricidal madness and grave incomprehensible catastrophes?

       --Because we did not repulse evil in time, because we did not listen to the best among us and all unite without differences in the resistance against the foreign conqueror and the domestic brute.

       Why in spite of all this, and against everything, does something like hope shine behind every, even our blackest mountain, and all the

people who still bear a living soul in themselves feel that liberation from ignominy must come, and prepare to aid it as best they can and know how to?

       --For evil, violence and imposition cannot rule this world permanently, because in the most out-of-the-way forests of the land her best sons prepare to light the flame of resistance not sparing themselves, to save the people from servitude and shame; with them in time, the entire nation will join and with them will, after victory, all under one flag, start on a new road of harmony, work and renewal.

Andrić’s last poem:

Neither gods nor prayers!

Neither gods nor prayers!

But it sometimes happens that I hear

Something like a whispered prayer within myself.    

That is my old and eternal longing

Rising from somewhere in the depths

And in a soft voice asking for a little place

In one of the endless gardens of paradise,

Where I would at last find

What I sought here in vain from the beginning:

Space and expanse, an open view,

A little free breath.

1973