Mak Dizdar
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| Mehmedalija Dizdar | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 17, 1917 Stolac, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then part of Austria Hungary |
| Died | July 16, 1971 (aged 53) Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then part of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | Bosnian (Bosniak) |
Mehmedalija Dizdar pronounced: (Mehmed Aliya) (October 17, 1917 - July 16, 1971) was one of the greatest Bosnian poets of the 2nd half of the 20th century.
[edit] Life
Mak Dizdar was born and completed elementary school in Stolac, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1936, Dizdar relocated to Sarajevo where he attended and graduated from the Gymnasium. Dizdar spent his World War II years as a supporter of the Communist Partisans. He moved frequently from place to place in order to avoid the NDH authorities' attention.
After the war, Dizdar was a prominent figure in the cultural life of Bosnia and Herzegovina, working as the editor-in-chief of the daily Oslobođenje (Liberation). He served as head of a few state-sponsored publishing houses and eventually became a professional writer and the President of the Writers' Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post he held until his death.
[edit] Work
Dizdar's two poetry collections and series of longer poems, Kameni spavač ("Stone sleeper") (1966-1971) and Modra rijeka (1971), fused seemingly disparate elements. He drew inspiration from pre-Ottoman Bosnian Christian culture, from the sayings of heterodox Islamic visionary mystics, and from the 15th century Bosnian vernacular linguistic idiom. His poetry referenced medieval Bosnian tombstones ("stećci" or "mramorovi" - marbles) and their gnomic inscriptions on the ephemerality of life. It articulated a distinctive vision of life and death, drawing on Christian and Muslim Gnostic sensibilities of life as a passage between "tomb and stars", expressing both the Gnostic horror of corporeality and a sense of the blessedness of the universe.
Mak Dizdar also fought against the forced influence of the Serbian language on the Bosnian language, as Dizdar called it, in his article "Marginalije o jeziku i oko njega", Zivot, XIX/11 - 12, Sarajevo, 1970, 109-120.
After the collapse of Communism and following the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dizdar's poetic magnum opus has remained the cornerstone of modern Bosnian literature.
[edit] See also
- MAK, 1917-1997. , by Safet Plakalo, on the 80th anniversary of Mak's birth
- Mak Dizdar Foundation
- Stone Speaker : Amila Buturovic's English language work on Dizdar's poetry. ISBN 0-312-23946-7
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