Kresimir Vukovic (LMU Munich)
The influence and reception of Ovid’s works spans many world literatures from South America to China (Miller and Newlands 2014; Liu 2021). However, one area that remains to be fully explored is Ovid’s reception in the work of Bosnian authors, which may be said to represent a sort of continuation of Ovid’s exile in the Balkans. This paper offers an intertextual reading of two Bosnian poets (who wrote at the beginning and at the end of the 20th century) in order to show how Ovid’s verse shone a light on some of the darkest corners of world history and connected disparate cultures across time and space.
Ivo Andrić (1892-1975, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1961) wrote a series of poems in the aftermath of the First World War. Entitled Epistuale ex Ponto, Andrić’s first collection is a continuous meditation on the theme of loss and longing in the lands ravaged by war. Confined in the isolation of a prison, the poet muses on the meaning of life in so much suffering but finds his consolation in writing and the creative use of his imagination that takes him to old and familiar places (like Ovid in exile). He also finds some comfort in the realisation that ‘we are all tiny pieces of an endless mosaic whose meaning I cannot even begin to fathom’ (Andrić 2003), recalling Pythagoras’ statement (Metamorphoses XV) on the interconnectedness of the cosmos across space and time. Andrić’s repeated efforts to return to nature recall Ovid’s ecocritical focus in the Metamorphoses while his characters resemble the marginalized and immigrant figures that populate the Fasti (Heyworth 2019).
On the other hand, the poet Abdulah Sidran (born in 1944) describes the experience of people caught in the siege of Sarajevo (during the war in the 1990s) engaging with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in surprising and novel ways. Sidran (1997) compares the violent aggressors to animals who have lost their humanity and are unable to return to their old selves. The poem takes the form of a prayer repeatedly begging God to ‘remove all animals from the world’ and yet protect all the ‘real’ animals, dogs, cats, birds, cattle, etc. Despite the heavy themes (suicide, rape, death) that Sidran closely explores, a glimmer of light shines through many of his poems in the appearance of gentle love, in both its erotic and familial form. Much like in Ovid’s exilic verse (Ex Ponto 3.3) Amor finds a way into the world of suffering caused by war and irreparable trauma and reconnects humans lost in the turmoil to many others that suffer(ed) a similar fate in other times and places.