Mato Zovkić

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Zovkić, Mato

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Vrhbosnensia XXI,1 (2017.)332ka Katančićeve Biblije kažu u predgovoru  da žele pridoni-jeti hrvatskoj biblijskoj kulturi i proučavanju Riječi Božje. Oni i izdavač zaslužuju podršku za sjajno obavljen posao. Nad-amo se da će kroatistima i bibličarima ovo izdanje pomagati u proučavanju povijesti hrvatsk-og jezika i napredovanja Crkve u razumijevanju Riječi Božje. Os-obno smatram da je ovo izdanje Biblije u jednom svesku rud-nik građe studentima teologije i kroatistike pri pisanju seminar-skih i diplomskih radova. Bilo bi vrijedno istražiti što su Katančić i njegovi suvremenici mislili pod „jezikom slavno-iliričkim izgovo-ra bosanskog“ te jesu li Katančić i Čevapović  bili u općeeuropskom i katoličkom kontekstu kada su priredili prijevod Svetoga pisma doslovno vjeran Vulgatinu tek-stu, bez dovoljnog uvažavanja književnog hrvatskog svojega vremena.  Današnji prevoditelji trude se, naime, biti sadržajno vjerni izvorniku, ali i čitateljima s njihovim duhovnim potre-bama i jezičnim ukusom. Zato postoje različiti tipovi prijevoda, ovisno o računanju na čitatelje i prihvaćanju u različitim slojevi-ma kršćana, jer su Bibliju pisali nadahnuti vjernici za vjerničku zajednicu a preko zajednice i za pojedince.                                   Mato ZovkićA BOSNIAN CATHOLIC’S RE-VIEW OF A UK NOVEL ON THE SIEGE OF SARAJEVOKevin SULLIVAN, The Longest Winter, Twenty7 Books, London 2016, 326 pp.Kevin Sullivan was born in 1957 in Glasgow, Scotland. He harmonizes dynamically his Scot-tish ethnicity, UK citizenship and living in Sarajevo with his wife Marija and their daughter Ka-tarina. He studied History and English at Glasgow University. He came to Bosnia for the first time in September 1991 on his way to Croatia where he intended to cov-er the fighting in the Dubrovnik area and returned in October 1992 as a correspondent for Unit-ed Press International. At the be-ginning of 1993, he visited Gornji Vakuf in Central Bosnia, travelling in an armored Land Rover, and drove over a land mine. He broke his left foot badly and his right leg and was transferred to the UK for medical treatment.  For three years he lived with his family in Singapore and worked there, then in Spain. In 2001 he returned to Sarajevo, where he worked for OHR until 2007.  He continues to live in Sarajevo with his fam-ily and, besides writing, works for the International Commission on Missing Persons.On page 2 of this novel, 333readers are offered a geographi-cal map of war-torn Sarajevo in 1992-1993 with a Government controlled section and a “Rebel” controlled section. In the map are clearly marked localities that are mentioned most often in the nov-el, from the Chamber Theatre and the Presidency to the village of Otes from which the young British volunteer doctor has to evacuate a seriously ill boy to London. In a two-page “Historical Note”, the 1992-1996 war for ethnic territo-ries in Bosnia and Herzegovina is depicted as a tragic consequence of the disintegration of Yugosla-via in 1991. Sullivan describes as “Rebels” the militia of ethnic Serbs who were assisted by profession-al officers of the Yugoslav Army in the ethnic cleansing of thousands of Bosniaks-Muslims and Croats from their centuries-old native places.  He points out: “This novel is set in Sarajevo during the first winter of the siege and is based on true events”.In the plot of the novel Sul-livan presents masterfully the young British volunteer doc-tor, Terry Barnes, in her mission to evacuate the sick boy, Miro Pejanović, from the suburban vil-lage of Otes to London for life-saving medical treatment.  Due to the siege circumstances, there is no one to meet her at Sarajevo airport, but American journal-ist, Brad, and his colleague, Anna, take her to the Holiday Inn in the center of the city and initiate her in the dangers of life in the city on the way. Once in the hotel, Terry meets arrogant journalist Michael Baring, and also Anna’s friend, Sanela, who takes her to the hospital where she meets Dr Dario Jurić, coordinator of Miro’s evacuation. The next morning, Sanela’s boyfriend Zlatko takes Terry to Otes, where a fatal battle between the Rebels and Govern-ment forces is taking place.  At UN military headquarters in the PTT building, they get papers to enter the airport and board a plane with Miro and his mum. On the way to Otes “there were abandoned cars and trucks everywhere, some of them overturned, the facto-ries fire-blackened and the walls with shell holes” (p. 95-96). On their way, they hear bullets some of which are targeting their car. Thanks to Zlatko’s extraordinary sense of orientation and courage they reach the building where Mrs. Edisa Pejanović and her son Miro are eagerly waiting for them, Terry examines Miro and promis-es to pick them up the next morn-ing. On the same evening, Zlat-ko, Terry and Dr Jurić attend the children’s song contest, which is taking place in spite of war cir-cumstances, as a form of morale-boosting for the performers and the spectators. That night, Govern-Recenzije - Book reviewsVrhbosnensia XXI,1 (2017.)334ment military authorities decide to evacuate the remaining 1,500 civilians from Otes and abandon the settlement to Rebel forces, who were armed with tanks. In the evening, during a party in honor of Terry, the building shakes from an explosion and Dr. Jurić orders all the guests to move to the hall of the building for safety. “They slept in the frail light of a winter moon. Terry closed her eyes. Be-fore she dozed she felt a curious peace, as safe as anyone could feel on such a night, sleeping with he-roes” (p. 265). Next morning two soldiers, provided by military commander Alija, escort Terry and Zlatko to take Miro and his mum. In a critical moment, Terry asks Mrs. Pejanović to take Miro out of the cot. “Terry was at that moment quite sure about what she must do. She hadn’t come to this place to bring medicine. She hadn’t come to ease Miro’s en-try into Britain. She had come to carry him across this street. His mother couldn’t do it. She would have crawled through fire for him, but now Mrs Pejanović wasn’t ca-pable” (295). Although the French military checkpoint recognizes the validity of their written per-mission to board a UN Hercules military airplane, they request additional written permission to enter the airport building. Only after threatening pressure from a British flight officer and his escort are the three last-minute Sarajevo passengers able to board.Several other parallel stories are developed in the novel. The first one concerns the assassina-tion of Hakija Turajlić, deputy prime minister of BH, on 8 Janu-ary 1993, travelling in a French APC on his way from the airport where he had met a Turkish dele-gation. The author does not men-tion the name of the murdered minister nor the date, but only his cruel death and the unsuccess-ful attempt by two foreign jour-nalists to find out who ordered the APC door to be opened, after which a Rebel soldier shot the victim. These two journalists ask representatives of the UN in the west section of the city and Rebel spokespersons at Pale, the small town about 16 km north-east of Sarajevo, then temporary capital of the rebel Serbs.  The impression the reader gets is that UN officers cannot be criminally prosecuted in a country where they serve as peacekeepers and may have per-petrated criminal acts. Another parallel story is the tragic destiny of Milena Ristić from Foča, a town in Eastern Bos-nia with a majority Serb popula-tion.  Her father left the family be-fore she was born and her mother ran away when Milena was 12 years old because of a debt she was not able to repay. Milena grew up with adoptive parents 335and married local boy Miroslav who succumbed in 1991 to his younger brother’s plans for the violent eviction of non-Serbs from Foča. Milena moved to Sarajevo where she worked in a bar and made new friends. On the night when Terry sleeps in the hall of the building with other citizens of war torn Sarajevo for the sake of safety, Milena walks through the same artillery barrage. She dreams of going to meet her fa-ther whom she never met alive. Her name appears on a casualty list the following day.The author does not mention the ethnic or religious identity of his heroines and heroes, prob-ably to avoid confusing or boring British readers. We readers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with other readers in neighboring countries that emerged from for-mer Yugoslavia, recognize their ethnic identity by their names. In the novel, Dario Jurić is a Croat of Catholic descent, the little boy Miro Pejanović is a Serb, but his mother Edisa is a Muslim who gave birth to her son in a mixed marriage with a Serb, and ac-cepted the husband’s traditional right to give ethnic identity to the children in such a marriage. The military commander in Otes, Alija, has a typical Muslim name, coin-ciding with Alija Izetbegović, the first democratically elected presi-dent of BH after the silent implo-sion of the communist regime. I conclude from this that Kevin Sullivan looks at the suffering population of Sarajevo with their scarcities and calamities as hu-man beings who share common needs, fears and joys.  By making ethnic Serbs, Bosniaks-Muslims and Croats work, sing and fear together he would like to remind them and his British readers that more elements unite them than ethnic and religious peculiarities. I acknowledge and appreciate this, although I helped to shape the Pastoral Letter of Archbishop Vinko Puljić in February 1992 to be proclaimed to Catholic church-goers on the eve of the indepen-dence referendum. The bishops of BH advised their fellow Catholics to take part in the referendum and to give their vote for the indepen-dence of BH because we had had a bad experience with Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1992. We did not expect that the consequence of the legally organized referendum would motivate our Serb fellow citizens to carry out the violent expulsion of non-Serbs from their ethnic territory and keep Sarajevo under siege for nearly four years. On 23 January 2014 Sullivan gave an interview to Emel Gušić Handžić on the publication of his novel Out of the West (Novem-ber 2013), which is set in Greece during World War Two. In that interview he said: “Two of the Recenzije - Book reviewsVrhbosnensia XXI,1 (2017.)336principal Greek characters in Out of the West are reluctant mem-bers of the resistance; they didn’t join it by choice, they had no op-tion. Two of the other characters are a British officer who goes to Greece and a woman who works for the War Office. The book tries to examine how the people in the UK and the people in Greece are both confronting moral issues. It tries to explore the fact that even if you’re not in physical danger, in everyone’s life people have to make moral decisions”. This kind of approach makes his novel writ-ing a kind of philosophical ethics in an entertaining way. He reflects and depicts his characters along the same lines in The Longest Winter which makes this novel worth reading. I enjoyed the English of the author, with short sentences, live-ly dialogue and often humorous metaphors.  For example, Mrs. Nurudinović, the Muslim neigh-bor of Milena in Sarajevo, knows that Milena “earned her living in a bar that [...] was an unsavoury place. She spoke with a country accent and kept to herself at the beginning” (122); another wom-an in the novel “had rouge on her cheeks to cover the paleness of winter and a poor diet, she had bags under her eyes and she wore too much mascara” (199);  dur-ing the children’s song contest Dr. Jurić explains to Terry:  “We have to do what we are accustomed to doing, and we are accustomed to holding our contest at this time of year. By being ordinary we resist! By singing we resist!” (222).In the abovementioned inter-view, Kevin Sullivan is described as “a Bosnian son-in-law” because he married a girl from Sarajevo and continues to live and work with his family in Sarajevo. They like going for walks in and around Sarajevo. He is a member of the Caledonian Society comprising Scots who live in BH and who or-ganize events from time to time. Among other things, they cel-ebrate the anniversary of Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scotland’s national poet. To the question, how does he find living in Bos-nia, he regrets that some positive things he had expected at the level of the whole country have not yet happened, but he has not given up his and our hope: “You can turn all the negatives into positives if you have the right approach and I don’t think that’s unrealistic. Bos-nia and Herzegovina can be a suc-cess; it’s like a football team that has lost a succession of games and it starts to think that it has to lose but I don’t think that’s the case”. By living with us and doing what he does he helps us all to support each other and contribute to the common good in our pluralistic society. This is why I believe that this novel should be read by his 337British audience and also trans-lated into Bosnian, to help us look for concrete ways of change for the better. Mato Zovkić(Translation: Mato Zovkić and Kevin Sullivan)  Recenzije - Book reviews

A Bosnian catholic\u27s review of a UK novel on the Siege of Sarajevo: Kevin Sullivan, The Longest Winter, Twenty7 Books, London 2016, 326 pp.

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