Duško Trifunović’s collection of poems Tumač tiranije (The Interpreter of Tyranny) is a new bilingual publication in the edition Slavic South for the Czech Friends. The collection is edited by Stevan Tontić; the editor of the Czech issue is Sandra Vlainić; translator: Matej Matela.

 

Duško Trifunović is one of the most important Yugoslav writers, poets and TV show authors. Born on the 13th of September, 1933 in Šijekovac near Bosanski Brod, he came to Sarajevo in the age of 24 as a young locksmith. The very next year, he wrote and published his first book Zlatni kuršum (The Golden Bullet). The same year, the book was awarded by Branko’s Award at Stražilovo. He belonged to the wave of the new urban poetry circle of Sarajevo, where he remained for the longest part of his life. He wrote twenty books of poetry, four novels and several plays.

 

He was an author of TV Sarajevo show for children "Šta djeca znaju o zavičaju" (“What the Children Know About their Homeland”). He was one of the creators of so-called Sarajevo rock and roll school. He cooperated with the most known rock band from former Yugoslavia “Bijelo dugme” in writing their songs. Until that time, it was unimaginable that one renowned poet cooperate with the rock band. But, out of that cooperation, the hits like "Ima neka tajna veza", (There is some secret bond), "Šta bi dao da si na mom mjestu" (What would you do to be on my place?), "Glavo luda" (You silly), and many other where born. On that phase of his work, he wrote:

 

“These are not the songs of high literary greatness. They were born because some young boy or a girl from my surrounding needed them. Then I wrote the best I could, as it was my need, and that youth was singing. These songs lighten up the 1970s. Jadranka Stojaković, Neda Ukraden, Indeksi, Bijelo dugme, Kamen na kamen, Ambasadori, Teška industrija, Zdravko Čolić, Željko Bebek, Vajta, Kemo... Beautiful youth that was singing my verses..! What a generation! The fragile messages of these songs were shared by the best musicians of 70s, in their lovely, unpretending knowledge. The lyrics of these songs, strained in the melodies, disassembled into syllables, have been heard far away; this music made young people gathering around love everywhere – from small cultural hubs and city squares to stadiums crowded by funs.”

 

Trifunović‘s “singing and thinking” is a kind of modern sequel of our people’s spirituality and wisdom that were best articulated not only in poetry, but also in the linguistic paradoxes and sentences; witty but also metaphysically profound word “tangles”; in the linguistic plays and turns; in uncanny and mysterious, semantically unlimited and rich statements and wordplays. On the one hand, usually in the most important segments of the poem, he uses the verses rooted in one, by people’s spirit saturated metaphysics of human survival – those obscure whirls of gnomically sublimed and prophetic language. On the other hand, there are also the paragraphs of the entirely clear text, the words that make so-called ordinary speech, the language of streets, newspapers, conferences, declarations…

 

Although Trifunović developed – in defense of own language from interpretations that “translate” it (transmit it in less obscure semantic levels) – the entire small theory of literal reading and reception of poetry as the only correct reading (“there is nothing between lines in my texts”), it is obvious that the language of his poetry is not the language of lyrical naiveté; neither is it the language that innocently expresses what is, in the collective experience, already mediated.

 

“I was afraid of the interpreters. I knew that no one can suppose what I think, to know ‘what the writer wanted to say’. I have turned all my wisdom to an auto-censure. And I have performed this auto-censure so masterly, that I could be writing about the real occasions and real people, but that it referred to someone else, or to everyone. And then, the interpreters come and start talking nonsense…”

 

In his early writings, Trifunović is much more lyrical than in his mature works: the world of childhood and homeland is adorned by the aura of beauty and innocence; by the images of the first early discoveries, flooded by that boyish mindset and melancholy, still nourished by the faith in the myth of Heaven in the Earth and of the utopia of one better world. But, Trifunović’s cantilenas from the collection The Golden Bullet (1958) and My Father’s Bad Heritage (1960) does not belong to this kind of pathetic-sentimental poetry; to the lethargic lyric; in them, the “underground” language of ambiguities and bitter riddles already anticipates his suspiciousness.

 

Duško Trifunović published the majority of his best works in Sarajevo, where he encountered the breakdown of Yugoslavia. Trifunović used to take war as a natural, thus unavoidable phenomenon. The poem “Topography” refers to the basic instincts of unrealized existences who have the drive to violate the vulnerable others.

 

The poet was otherwise criticized for avoiding to side with any of the parts in the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s. However, he followed his anthropologically-pessimistic, or even opportunistic theory, namely to keep out of being involved in dangerous affairs of “Madam History”.

 

“When war started, I was still living in Sarajevo. It was not the town where I could recognize the signs of war. No! Sarajevo was the most beautiful town and also the least dangerous one because, right before the war, it was the only Yugoslav town of the World. I have had already got enough. I was already so unhappy that I welcomed the war. I was not glad, but I was personally relieved by the fact that I could leave everything, because I was already cluttered by the ideas, papers, and manuscripts; by the furniture, paintings, and so on. (…) I have given up from everyone. I left there everything and I do not owe to anyone. I have no need to answer to their stupid questions like “Where have you been?” I haven’t been anywhere. I am already among the stars for long ago.”

 

(The fragments from the Postscript of Stevan Tontić

and from the Trifunović’s sayings about himself)