Omer Pasha Latas

by Ivo Andrić

  IVO ANDRIĆ (1892–1975) was born to Catholic Croatian parents in a village in Austrian-occupied Bosnia. His father died when he was two, and his mother sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in Višegrad, a town on the Drina River near the Serbian border. In high school, he began writing poetry and joined Young Bosnia, a student revolutionary movement advocating South Slav unification. Andrić enrolled at the University of Zagreb in 1912, where he continued working with South Slav nationalist groups, then transferred to the University of Vienna, and later to the University of Kraków, all the while publishing poems in Bosnian journals and anthologies. Upon the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, Andrić, an associate of Gavrilo Princip, returned to Bosnia and was quickly arrested by Austrian police. Over the course of World War I, while in prison and later under house arrest, he wrote a number of prose poems that were published in two collections after the war, Ex Ponto (1918) and Nemiri (Unrest, 1920). In 1919, Andrić was appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the new Yugoslavian government, and served as a diplomat in the Vatican, Bucharest, Trieste, Paris, Madrid, and, finally, as the ambassador to Germany, a post he held at the outbreak of World War II. Refusing the German government’s offer of safe passage to Switzerland, he returned to Belgrade, where he spent the war under house arrest, writing his two best-known novels, Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina) and Travnička hronika (Bosnian Chronicle), which were published in 1945. The Bridge on the Drina would go on to become required reading in Yugoslavian high schools, and Andrić would become a celebrity in Communist Yugoslavia. He was named the president of the Yugoslavian Writer’s Union and in 1950 was appointed a deputy in the National Assembly of Yugoslavia. In 1958, he married Milica Babić, a costume designer twenty years his junior, and in 1961 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Babić died in 1968, and Andrić lived alone in an apartment in Belgrade until his death in 1975. His funeral was attended by ten thousand people, and his former apartment was converted into a museum.

  CELIA HAWKESWORTH has translated nearly forty books from the Serbo-Croatian, including Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić; The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić; Belladonna by Daša Drndić, which was short-listed for the Oxford Weidenfeld prize in 2018; and Adios, Cowboy by Olja Savičević.

  WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN is the author of three collections of stories, more than ten novels, and many more volumes of nonfiction. His novel Europe Central won the National Book Award in 2005, and he has won the Whiting Foundation Award and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for his fiction. In 2018, he published a two-volume investigation into climate change, Carbon Ideologies.

  OMER PASHA LATAS

  IVO ANDRIĆ

  Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by

  CELIA HAWKESWORTH

  Introduction by

  WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © by the Ivo Andrić Foundation, Belgrade, Serbia

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Celia Hawkesworth

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by William T. Vollmann

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the Serbo-Croatian language as Omerpaša Latas.

  First published in the English language in 2018.

  Cover image: Théodore Chassériau, Caliph of Constantine Ali-Hamed Followed by His Escort, 1845; Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, France.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Serbia.

  Photograph before introduction: Roger Fenton, Portrait of Omer Pasha Latas, 1855

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Andric, Ivo, 1892–1975, author. | Hawkesworth, Celia, 1942– translator.

  Title: Omer Pasha Latas / by Ivo Andric ; translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth.

  Other titles: Omerpaša Latas. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books classics.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018018405 (print) | LCCN 2018022413 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372532 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372525 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ömer Lûtfi Paşa, 1806–1871—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction | Biographical fiction

  Classification: LCC PG1418.A6 (ebook) | LCC PG1418.A6 O513 2018 (print) | DDC 891.8/235–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018405

  ISBN 978-1-68137-253-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Guide to the Pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian

  OMER PASHA LATAS

  Arrival

  The Army

  By the Shady Inn

  In the Evening Hours

  In Chains

  A Wine Called Žilavka

  The Audience

  What a Painter Is

  The Picture

  Saida and Karas

  The History of Saida Hanuma

  Kostake Nenishanu

  And Then

  Muhsin Effendi and Nikola

  Summer

  Wind

  Lying

  February in Sarajevo

  Departure

  INTRODUCTION

  The Turk and the Diplomat

  1

  “IF WE all had the opportunity, courage and strength to transform just a part of our imaginings . . . into reality . . . it would be immediately clear to the whole world and to ourselves who we are . . . and what we are capable of becoming. . . . Fortunately, for most of us, that opportunity never arises. . . . But if, by some misfortune, it does happen to someone, that someone finds that we are all merciless judges.” This passage from Omer Pasha Latas is a pretty clear summation of the eponymous protagonist, who lives hated and isolated in the prison of his self-made greatness. It also bears, quite sadly, on various pre- and post-Yugoslav nationalisms.

  2

  “I once asked him, ‘What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?’ ‘You know,’ he replied, ‘I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.’”

  The questioner was Milovan Djilas, who had fought the Nazis alongside Tito and afterward became a vice president of Yugoslavia. The answerer he described as “lanky and bony . . . the career diplomat . . . fettered by convention and tact”—thus a certain Dr. Ivo Andrić. In this context, tact may be defined in terms of what we refrain from saying. As it happens, Omer Pasha Latas is a work of brilliant evasion, in which most identities become bafflingly problematic. Who is Omer Pasha? “I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.”

  3

  “Right from the war’s end,” relates Djilas, “the government was well organized and firmly in the hands of the Communists. . . . Yet though the nation’s younger generation was fired with enthusiasm, its working class loyal, and its party strong and self-confident, Yugoslavia remained a divided, grief-stricken land, materially and spiritually ravaged.” In Djilas’s day, these divisions were most conspicuously ideological—although even then questions of nationalism could break through. After Tito’s death, their ethnic character predominated. In 1994 a Serb explained to me how to express them practically: “It’s easy. In my town all you’d have to do would be to go to where some Serb lived a
nd throw in a hand grenade, then shoot some Croats. A small group of professionally trained people could do it. Then you spread the news and arm the survivors.”

  4

  “What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?” Once upon a time, when there was a Yugoslavia, its language used to be called Serbo-Croatian. Let me simplify: The Serbs were mostly Orthodox, their script Cyrillic, and they felt what has been called “the mystical Russian bond”; the Croats were predominantly Catholic, used the Roman alphabet, and sometimes turned toward Germany. Both of them claimed Ivo Andrić. In the interests of federalism their differences were repressed, both psychologically and politically. (I remember a Dalmatian Croat from 1981 who in a low voice identified himself as “Christian.” He said that he could and did go to church, but that his career suffered accordingly.) At great cost, the Titoists had reconstructed and maintained some kind of Yugoslav identity. That Serbs, Croats, and most other Yugoslavs shared a common language, or at least were presumed to do so, may be readily verified by the titles of prewar dictionaries. Their successor nations have now elevated dialects into new languages—Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak, Slovenian—which remain more or less mutually intelligible, although during the war I once or twice witnessed the solemn charades of nationalists communicating to their ex-countrymen through interpreters. In Yugoslavia there used to be highway signs in both alphabets; nowadays one frequently finds one orthography or the other spray-painted out by the zealots of ethnic correctness. For that matter, on the back cover of this publisher’s galley of Omer Pasha Latas, you could read a biographical note in evidence of this bifurcation: “Celia Hawkesworth has translated several books from the Serbo-Croatian. . . . She taught Serbian and Croatian at University College London for many years. . . .”

  5

  Yugoslavia, then, was a failed attempt to unify separate and sometimes conflicting identities. Its 1918 incarnation was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In 1945 it became the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. In both of those names, other Yugoslavs went unmentioned. But the civil war that destroyed the federation was fought in the name of Serbs, Croats, and a third group, whose anguish would haunt the news for years: Bosnian Muslims.

  Among the many infamous metonyms—the fall of Vukovar, the massacre at Srebrenica, the rape camps—of this hideously personal conflict, in which neighbors violated each other’s daughters and cut their throats, the siege of Sarajevo remains prominent. When I think of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, I who never got to see it before 1992 remember the double and triple thuds of shellfire, and then rushing down the almost empty streets, acutely conscious of my neck; tall blocks of buildings, so many broken windows; another row of apartments flecked with bullet holes; journalists paying two hundred and fifty American dollars to fill a gas tank; soldiers laughing and ducking behind their sandbags, kept company by a woman who was grinding coffee by hand. Andrić’s secondary school was here, and most of Omer Pasha Latas is set either here or in other parts of Bosnia. How unquiet was it then? Remember that Sarajevo was the place where World War I began. But the windows were not always broken, and women ground coffee in peacetime as in war. Then as now, one would have felt the overwhelming influence of Bosnian Muslim tradition. And indeed, Omer Pasha Latas is set in the period of Ottoman rule, about which Andrić appears to have felt, to say the least, melancholy.

  He did not live to see the civil war. But during the Second World War, while he novelized in seclusion, other ethnic massacres of comparably sadistic cruelty had stained Bosnia.* Did he take a side? “I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.”

  From 1463 until 1878, Bosnia was a conquered province of the Turkish Empire, during which time, according to the historian Noel Malcolm, “the main basis for hostility was not ethnic or religious but economic: the resentment felt by members of the mainly (but not exclusively) Christian peasantry towards their Muslim landowners.” In any event, the previous sentence contains two terms that though not ethnic were in the context nonetheless opposed: Christians and Muslims. In the 1990s I frequently heard Serbs and Croats harp back on what had become the bad old days, referring to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks.” But was that just war propaganda? Even in Andrić’s “A Letter from 1920” we read: “Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.”

  6

  So. “What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?” Why did Djilas not ask “a Croat, a Serb, or a Bosnian”? Indeed, Lovett F. Andrews, the translator of Andrić’s most famous book, The Bridge on the Drina, into English, assures us in his foreword to it that the author is “himself a Serb and a Bosnian.” (Incidentally, the title page of my 1977 copy reads: “Translated from the Serbo-Croat.”)

  Why was this third sort of Yugoslav so effaced yet so visible in Yugoslavia itself? (In 1992 a Croatian Muslim assured me: “It was only the Serbs trying to dominate us who forced us into one country.”) Why did the ostensibly progressive Djilas call his language Serbian, not Serbo-Croatian? If you ask a group of ex-Yugoslavs about these matters, you will receive a discouraging plenitude of answers. But as you read Omer Pasha Latas, I urge you to keep wondering and guessing, for this novel is a hoard of shining questions.

  7

  Ivo Andrić was born on October 10, 1892—almost exactly a century before the civil war. At this point Bosnia’s overlords were the Austro-Hungarians, whose architecture still colors Sarajevo. His birthplace was Dolac, “now in Yugoslavia” (the latter according to the 1976 edition of my Encyclopaedia Britannica). Or, if you prefer a slightly different dateline, he was “born in Travnik, Bosnia, on 9th October 1892.” That place also figures in his novels. What that region was like during his childhood I, who was never there before 1992, cannot imagine, but an English observer from 1897 has left us the following highly significant remark on Christian-Muslim relations in Bosnia: “It is strange that they should bear so little hatred to their former oppressors, and the explanation lies probably in the fact that they were all of the same race.”

  More necessary but insufficient desiderata: He went to school in Sarajevo, and also in Višegrad, the setting of The Bridge on the Drina. From 1919 until 1941, he was a diplomat. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961 and died on March 13, 1975, in Beograd, which was first the capital of Yugoslavia and then the capital of the Serbian Republic. As one post–civil war Serbian edition of his selected short stories complacently remarks, “his Belgrade funeral was attended by 10,000 people.” Back to the Britannica: “It was his native province, with its wealth of ethnic types, that provided the themes and psychological studies to be found in his works.”

  In Malcolm’s history of Bosnia, we read that sometime around 1907 to 1910, the young man “presided over” a student group called “the Croat-Serb or Serb-Croat or Yugoslav Progressive Movement.” In name, at least, this hardly sounds Greater Serbian. But neither does it sound Bosniak. Nor does it have an Austro-Hungarian ring. The translator of The Bridge on the Drina writes: “As other gifted students of his race and time, and as his own students in The Bridge on the Drina, he belonged to the National Revolutionary Youth Organization, and experienced the customary cycle of persecution and arrest.” The Britannica works in this episode equally blandly: “His reputation was established with Ex Ponto (1918), a contemplative, lyrical prose work written during his internment by Austro-Hungarian authorities for nationalistic political activities during World War I.” Meanwhile, continuing to claim him as a native son, that Serbian edition of stories recounts the same event thus: “He was imprisoned for three years during World War I for his involvement in the Young Bosnia Movement which was implicated in the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo.” I have been told that the archduke’s killer, Gavrilo Princip, yearned for Greater Serbia. Or did he? Princip has also been called a “Slav nationalist,” which may or may not be the same thing. In Sarajevo the commemoration simply reads: “Here, in this historic spot, Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of Liberty on the day of St. Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914.�
��

  At any rate, Andrić, along with many others, was arrested almost immediately after the assassination and kept on ice until the general amnesty of 1917. Two years later, as I said, he entered the diplomatic service.

  In 1924 he received his doctorate in the Austrian city of Graz. (Per Lowell Edwards, “Of a poor artisan family, he made his way largely through his own ability.”) His thesis evaluated “The Development of the Spiritual Life of Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Sovereignty.” What conclusions did it come to? The introduction to that 1977 printing of The Bridge on the Drina contents itself by blandly asserting that “the solid and precise information that underlies” the novel “was thus systemically built up through academic study.” But Malcolm’s history of Bosnia (published in 1994) labels the work “an expression of blind prejudice,” in evidence of which we are given this unfortunate sentence: “The influence of Turkish rule in Bosnia was absolutely negative.”

  The reporter Fouad Ajami, who visited Yugoslavia’s bleeding ground in the same year, quoted the same sentence in evidence of Andrić’s “great dread of Islam in the Balkans, his allergy to the four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia.” (By then a commander of Sarajevo irregulars had assured me: “They’re only terrorists now. They were Serbs. Now they’re not Serbs. There are no more legitimate Serbs.”) Meanwhile, Ajami compounded the accusation: “He was anxious to cover up his tracks. . . . [He] had been ambassador of (Royal) Yugoslavia to the Third Reich at the time of the signing of the Tripartite Pact; and he was there in Vienna in March 1941, when Yugoslavia capitulated and joined the Axis powers.”

  8

  The unfairness of blaming Andrić for being Yugoslavia’s representative to Berlin is obvious. Someone had to try, however vainly, to delay or mitigate the forthcoming oppression, when, as Drina’s translator puts it, “Yugoslavia was desperately playing for time, hoping to postpone the invasion of Hitler and at the same time consolidate her forces to resist it when it inevitably came. I remember waiting tensely in Belgrade for Dr. Andrić to return from Berlin, the one sure sign that an invasion was immediate. He came back only a few hours before the first bombs fell on Belgrade.”