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Stone SleeperMak DizdarTranslated by Francis R. Jones![]()
Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (160 pages) (Pub. Nov 2009) 9780856463976 Out of Stock
Unwilling Warrior This old head has lived through many a war And glory wreathed it everywhere In a single battle I caught two wounds Until I lost my right hand in a final fight Glory like mist which rises into the skies To be given back my shilling is nothing new on earth They whispered round me Nowt that’s what his life were worth Nor do they know that I will deal my final blow To me alone Translated by Francis R. Jones Inspired by tombstones and their inscriptions, Mak Dizdar’s rich and haunting poems in Stone Sleeper, his most famous work, are a journey into the mysterious heart of medieval Bosnia. The poems form a three-way dialogue between the modern poet, the Christian heretics awaiting Judgement Day beneath their enigmatically-carved tombstones, and the heretic-hunters. Beneath the local and temporal, Dizdar explores universal issues: the value of resistance, though it might be futile; of faith, though it might be illusory; and of life, though it ends in death. His vision of life and death owes much to the Gnostic traditions, Christian and Muslim, depicting life as a passage between ‘tomb and stars’. |
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