It usually smiles little, not beyond an outline. It seems to a sullen point. Perhaps everything is a matter of the taciturn bile, or of the insomnia, or of knowing or perhaps misunderstood between compliments and congratulations. Sometimes, too, he is seen with gabardina, headded with postwar pet and with his glasses as an official, adapted to the gray existence. With Gabardina, it usually appears in a classic inn: next to the famous Ottoman bridge over the Drina River, where its most famous novel develops, A bridge over drina.
In other photographs, intended, he is also seen with his hands in the pockets of the gabán. Walk about the leaf litter of the Belgrade parks or is sitting in a bank under the warm sun. His portrait appears printed on bank tickets and has statues that immortalize it in public spaces. And there is no lack of graffiti and profiles with his face in murals and walls, such as those of Visera, in Bosnia-Herzegovina (again where the bridge, the drina and the novel located in the small city as literary as oppressive).
This is Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), the one who was a diplomat, writer and Prize Yugoslav in 1961. On March 13 the 50th anniversary of his death in Belgrade is fulfilled. He was the greatest author in the common language and the varied pair of the southern Slavs, reflection, in short, of that construct – site dissolved – which was called Yugoslavia, the country that no longer exists.
From Bosnian-Croatian parents (they lived in Sarajevo), Ivo Andrić was born by random on October 9, 1892 in a lost place called Dolac, attached to Travnik, in Bosnia. It was that poor “Catholic suburb” that is cited so much in Travnik chronicleanother of its great novels, set in the Ottoman era under the echo and the powder phosphons of the Napoleonic wars. And here, then, the confluence and chance between dates. 80 years have now been now since in 1945 Andrić published not only Travnik chroniclebut the aforementioned A bridge over drina y The lady. He had written them, of the pull, under the dark night of the Nazi occupation in Belgrade, the dreadful bombings and the seclusion in a floor of Prizenska street.
Another chance in time leads us to the unfortunate and truculent. Similarly, this 2025 is fulfilled 30 years of the end of the war in Bosnia (1992-1995). The chance wanted on his ominous day that the centenary of the writer’s birth coincided just with the beginning of the shooting and the long siege of Sarajevo (one of the most atrocious episodes of the war literally takes place in the prestile of the bridge over the drina in Viserad).
The jury granted by the Nobel Prize for literature did it “by the epic force with which he has drawn issues and represented human destinations extracted from the history of his country.” Claudio Magris, in the great gloss that draws on Utopia and disenchantmenthe says the same, but otherwise more poetic and dimensional, suggesting that Andrić is the writer of time depth. He manages to link the archaic past, a reflection of the Ottoman Bosnia (melting pot and Europe), with the sudden modernity that he had to live in the worst of the twentieth century.
The figure of Andrić, played by the Serbian actor Tihomir Stanić, has recently been taken to a television series, Nobel laureateissued by the public channel of Serbia. One might think if Andrić’s character, almost inarticulate for action, although efficient, full and discreet, gives for a serial hero in aciagos times, with two world wars in between and the creation of the Yugoslavia de Tito after the monarchical stage (Andrić served in several diplomatic legations at the service of his government, including that of Madrid, in the street of Velázquez, where he was 1928 to 1929).
Today, at 50 years of his death, Andrić is the Nobel Prize for the paradox and absence. His country as such, Yugoslavia, does not exist. Yugoslav By conviction, he never paid attention to national particularism as a claim (if Bosnio by birth, if he croatates for family, if he served by personal decision). Established in Belgrade since 1941, he believed that Serbia was the closest thing to the idea of a Balkan Piedmont (the simile is Claudio Magris). In his opinion, Serbia meant the spearhead of the Brotherhood and Unity country, where Bosnia herself was in itself another Yugoslavia, but in miniature.
Nationalism, before, during and after the war, repudiated it sometimes (not today) and sometimes manipulated and exalted it for convenience. If Andrić wrote in a missing language and that nobody wants to recognize today, it is something that lends itself to nuances. Writers and translators such as Marc Casals, Miguel Roán and Christian Martí-Menzel agree that the Serbocroata (Serbian-Croatian) It is today no more than an antigualla. He even had difficulties as a common and official language in Yugoslavia herself. There was always talk according to the territories and with dialectal loans (the dialect Ijekavica more in the Croats and partly the bosnians, and the ekavica more in the Serbs).
Since 2017, most posyugoslav authors approved the call Declaration on the common languagewhich subscribes that “Croats, Bosnians, Serbs and Montenegrinos have a common standard language of the polycentric type.” In professional translation, as Marc Casals clarifies, the politically correct term used is BCMS (Bosnio-Croata-Montenegrino-Serbio). Polyglot in eight European languages, Andrić himself, Bosnio-Croata, ended up writing in Cyrillic and in the Serbian variant.
Updated with the Nobel Yugoslav
The Canonical Work of Andrić, historically translated by Tihomir Pištelek and Luisa Fernanda Garrido, goes through the aforementioned titles Travnik chronicle, A bridge over drina (Historical, oral and legendary fable between the 16th and 1914) and The lady (The protagonist lady is heroin and usurera along). In these novels it is reflected how the history and the course of time levitate through fiction, altering the cycle of human existence and giving rise to the Porphia between the novel and the old, the progress and the natural marasmus. Bosniety in the atmospheres coves in the landscapes and penetrates stealthy into the blood and mental irrigation of its people.
Andrić is a great composer of human types. The character of his characters is perceived by his physical features and even by the goodness or abuse of his internal organs. He wrote his newslike the fable THE ELEPHANT OF THE VISION y The cursed patio. The first, appeared in Xordic together with Anika’s times y Rabbitit will be reissued this year. And the second, also by the Aragonese publishing house, will now appear in Casals version.
The isolated house and other stories (Meeting), kind of literary ghost, runs in a house in the Alifakovac neighborhood, in Sarajevo. Cliff published some Andrić stories in Café Titanic and other stories (It contains its controversial piece A 1920 letter). In the same editorial it appeared Goya (Essay translated by Roan, the result of Andrić’s devout visits to the Prado Museum) and will also be edited the great biography about the Nobel Nobel worked by Michael Martens and translated by Martí-Menzel. Sixth floor published Signs on the roaddiary in time and confidences gav between the author and his shadows.