Miroslav Josic Višnjic

LITERARY YARD AS A TEMPLE FOR CENTURIES

To write... that is a gift from God and earthly punishment.
I want to say that I could comprise all topics, the ones I live with and these written in the programme and calendar of this year's 42nd International Literary Meeting in Belgrade, in the title of this writing.
I have in my head, and I will try to put on the paper too, two images.
The first one is general, the second is concrete, but they melt into one another.
1.
All writers in the world write one book.
A real book.
Book over books, book of all books, which will never be either finished or perfect. Only the Creator is perfect.
From the first letters on clay slates till alphabet that electronically blinks, from ancient times till tomorrow, man lives and tells the same story, the story about his persistent lasting and seeking, about suffering and happiness, about fears and love, about ecstasies and spites, about dream and reality.
In Chinese or European rivers in spate, in American hurricanes, in Scandinavian glaciers, in African sand dunes, in Amazonian rainforests, in Indian waves, in Siberian spaces, in villages on lonely ocean islands, in Balkan gorges...the thoughts and words without which there would be neither people nor books hug each other.
Man is God's creature only when he speaks, even the wise Greeks and older of them knew that, otherwise, he is a "smiling animal".
The world in which men and women breathe is one yard. At times damned, at times ecstatic, at times flamelike, at times mild, at times suspicious, at times opiate, at times modest. Man is born, he grows, and learns. His cradle is his first home, his room his second one, and his yard is entering into the world. Businesses come later, there is no rest.
A lot of people choose their occupation, only art chooses man. Shoemakers make shoes, tailors sew, fishers throw their nets, drivers control speed, politicians stir and settle, musicians seek rhythm, painters paint the world, and writers are the only ones who are the witnesses and guard.
They guard on open borders, testify about the world without borders.
They are waiting for their readers and interpreters in a vast yard, there is no shade around, all around abysses and eddies, and eloquent winds don't let the spiders "web the sky".
In that yard is also a literary temple in which aldermen and mortals marked by voting-papers who pull Karagoz strings, who create maps to nations, who fetter men to breathe freely and to repeat that there was word at the beginning as well, arrogantly enter.
And literary yard is a temple for centuries, the library of human kind. There are traces in it about the days and lives which are the salt of salt of history of humankind, there are all important words that testify with their rhythm and meaning about wars and prayers, about the sound and the fury.
If there were no writers, there would be no past as well.
In the time in which they live, they memorize for their descendants, write for their possible readers.
They are the balm for oblivion on which the future of the world blooms.

2.
The second image speaks about the writer today and here, in Serbia which is like a "fruit-tree on a road", in the third millennium.
The first thought is that a writer can create even in the difficult, torturous times if he is free. Free with his pencil in his hand, free before the whiteness of paper, free in his soul.
For the past hundred years, since the day when Simo Matavulj and Jovan Skerlic, "Serbian workers on belles-lettres", came to the head of Literary Society, we have had tumultuous and subversive years. Not a day for leisure and pastime. We came through several wars with millions of murdered ones, we lived in privation and were getting accustomed to despotism.
I wonder at and admire each story, poem and novel signed by Serbian authors. Not a single one had the elementary conditions for work, and a lot of them left in their best years.
Writing was a cure for insomnia.
A balm for the wounds.
Kosovo is not the only Serbian wound, there are also drifts in Albanian gorges, fratricidal urges, suffering on Goli Otok (Barren Island), the postwar enthusiasm and robbery, Brozlike greediness, self-management frenzy, students revolt, refugee columns, merciful grenades...a these are all literary topics, the topics of chief books of Serbian authors.
I do not know anyone here who writes in order to become famous or to get rich. A lot of them entered reading-books and cultural history after their death, and they spent their strength during their lives earning day bread.
Nowadays, when the Minister "abolished" the status of free artists by decree in his summer deafness, Serbian writer has to write and publish at least a novel per year if he wants to pay the country for social security and pension fund, but at least four novels or seven books of poetry if he wants to sustain himself. There are little writers here who wrote as much for their whole life. Both Sremac and Kostic as well as Crnjanski and Andric, not to summon the others without whom there would be no Serbian literature, would have to wave with a beggar's stick or strech out their hand on the doorstep of a church.
The country pushed the writer to the margin, it wouldn't light him a candle even if he was dead. The clerks sign the decisions which become senior to both law and custom, and they only think about whether they would be in power too when they wake up.
Circulation is small, advertising is null, critics are drowsy and people are poor. One out of thousand writers can count on circulation larger than a thousand of copies, and nine hundred and ninety are lucky if their book at all comes to the bookstore or library, to their readers.
Nowadays, writer is driven from literary yard in which some new power-holders will give children for required reading stories and poems they passed by with empty bags of tax-collectors as soon as tomorrow.
No one can disarrange literary temple, forever. Icon lights can be extinguished, but iconostasis will for a long time and spitefully light and radiate.

Translated by Natasa Danilovic