We could describe Refik Ličina as a Bosnian poet of Novi Pazar origin with a Swedish address. He is all that, but he is much more than that. These days, Refik is in Sarajevo on the occasion of the presentation of his diary at the Bookstan festival, and we talked with him about literature, Sweden, art, and especially about human destinies.
Interviewed by: Matej Vrebac
In addition to the diaries of Velibor Čolić and Drago Glazmuzina in the edition edited for Buybook by Semezdin Mehmedinović, at this year's Bookstan you will have the presentation of your own called Listopadi. Is it typical for you to write a diary and how did this one from the period from autumn 2022 to spring 2023 come about?
Such forms are close to me. Traveling to and from work for years, I'm used to jotting down something along the way. Mostly small, daily things. I would catch a verse or a prose passage every now and then, which I would then slowly work on. I sent such things to Miljenko Jergović and his Eiffel Bridge, a unique literary portal. So, for years. I could say with peace of mind that I, as a writer, exist and belong to Eiffel and its reading fraternity.
I also wrote this diary by the way, "on my knees" in a dark period of the year, under the threat and attack of various diseases, but it turned out, it seems to me, quite bright and cheerful. I am thinking above all of the first two autumn months. Along with the diary, I planned to finally finish and polish a rough translation of Tiarna , a lyrical triptych by P. Saarikoski, which I haven't picked up since 2015. In November, illnesses and other troubles came, and I gave up on Tiarnie , and instead amused myself with a lighter book by this author ( Din Pentti ) composed of various travel observations, sketches and poems. Since the middle of November, I have given up both that book and the diary. I hoped that S. Mehmedinović, the editor of the Dnevnik edition, would forget about me. I hoped in vain. He only contacted me to cheer me up, I don't have to hurry, he said, there are no deadlines or anything else that could tie my hands.
When I started to massacre myself, and yes, not without irony, list my faults and virtues, I got a character who pulled forward and I followed him to the end.
You devote a good part of the diary to your plot in the colony on Källby mölly, in the south of Sweden. In addition to all the work and effort around it, while reading I experienced that plot as a saving one, a place that allows you and your wife to connect with nature and ultimately with yourself? Am I wrong?
That plot is wrong, not you. She led you astray. As you say, the path that leads from my apartment along the Hoje towards the mentioned plot plays a saving role in the diary. It is no longer than two kilometers. At its beginning is an old Danish house under a thatched roof, and at the end St. Lars, a complex of smaller (living) and larger (defunct) hospital buildings and parks.
On the right side of this path flows a stream called Hoje, and on the left side it is followed by six miniature overflowing lakes that build former wetlands, precipitation and similar water peaks. The treated waste water of the city of Lund is also treated there. The lakes are full of birds and fish that cannot be caught. Small deciduous trees grow around the banks of lakes and streams. Just the kind I grew up with. I also discovered a lot of fruit trees. Most of them are domestic varieties, and a few are not. Rather, they were transferred here from somewhere else. In the coil or in the seed, now it doesn't matter. Refugee fruit trees, stateless fruit trees. This diary was written because of them. Readers, if there are any, will understand why.
The plot itself is something else, there is a lot of that in Lund, it serves me more for leisure and entertainment.
You write about old age without romanticizing it. It seemed to me that it was not particularly pleasant in the Balkans, but from your example it is clear that illness, depression and insufficient pension are universal phenomena. However, it seems to me that working with children at school fulfills you, and they also love you. Are you still being called to substitute or help in schools? Is there any difference in aging in Scandinavia and the Balkans?
In one place in the diary, P. Saarikoski says that a true artist must be a child, never older than four years. And he explains why he says that. It is as close to me as the children, after all. I love and know how to listen to them, I love their imagination and courage. We have narrowed the world to their cages, and we complain that it is cramped for us. For children under the age of six, skin color, race, religion and other "key identity issues" are not worth a single plastic spatula. Well, not me either. Game, know how to play. An adult, gang-headed creature lacks that skill. I worked with children for fourteen years and I was never bored with them. Because of that, and the money, as I lie in my diary, I go and exchange it.
As for old age and pension, it is the same everywhere today. You are just as alone, removed from everyday use. No one will notice that you disappeared from the world. Again, this does not mean that a person cannot joke a little and write humorously about it.
On your plot of land, you will find mulberry trees, cherries and plums, but one fruit tree is special among all of them - an apple. That fruit has the same function for you as the madeleine cookie had for Proust. How were the smells and images of childhood hidden in her fruit?
When you are in exile, at first you are constricted and pressed by nostalgia. It is painful, but not deadly. You're alive, and there's a cure. It's wicked when forgetfulness takes hold of you. You are your own sandbox, your own sand. You're chilling, you're shedding.
By a lucky coincidence, and after a no less dangerous illness, I was saved. I was on sick leave, the year was 2012. The doctor recommended walking and I walked. I walked to the center and the Ahrimana cafe. One day I turned around, went out for the first time on this path that leads to Hoje. In one place I came across a fruit tree, a large janarika with abundant fruit. It was just ripening. I stood in front of the tree as if buried. God only knows when I last saw a janarika. It was etched in my memory, both the name and the tree. And now, when I saw it, the other janarika appeared in my mind – my janarika – yellow, on the field storage in the village of Šavci. I “saw” everything around the janarika. Our house, Miljko's house, Hamdov kotar, drenched in the gap, Simova trlica.
After that meeting, when I remembered, I realized what had happened to me. That tree, that janarika on Hoje, so to speak, patched up the hole in my memory, brought back the images, words, faces, events that I tied to it in my childhood. The same thing was repeated with every tree and every plant that I later encountered. The flora and fauna on Hoje is atypical for Sweden, more reminiscent of our domesticity and our regions. Some of the fruit trees, especially apples, revealed different things to me.
In November 2022, your mother Đulba left this world. You write that Mother did not look for diseases, she was not afraid of them. She was afraid of an empty house. She is an example of the first generation of women who in Yugoslavia won their economic freedom and a somewhat more equal position, although still difficult. Do you agree that she is an example of the emancipated generation of women who worked hard at "Raška" in Novi Pazar, in the textile factory that you call the "mother of the poor"?
My mother was a brave fighter, but not on that battlefield. And I wouldn't mention her here anymore. And the battle for women's emancipation was won by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In just twenty years after World War II, it rebuilt the devastated country, regained momentum and offered, among other things, a chance to women. Instead of "our traditional values", they got real, functional factories, schools and universities, social and health care, state apartments, etc. - and they could, therefore, "buy their own bread with their own money". I look at these buildings in Zenica these days. Ruined, blackened, but still solid, inhabited. These "single-minded, single-party villains" built them for their working class - and, you see, these new, democratically elected representatives of the government, in these thirty years have not managed to even paint their facades, to change the doorknobs. And it's like that everywhere, wherever you find yourself. They have only managed to mess it up. And they still managed to restore those "traditional values", to tie women to their doorsteps, to humiliate us and scatter us around the world.
You have lived in Lund since 1994, and since then Sweden, like the rest of the world, has changed a lot. In several places you touch on the right-wing government of Ulf Kristersson, Sweden's entry into NATO, the rise of Islamophobia and racism. What is the situation in the country at the moment?
This subject is not my thing, I don't know if I'm hitting the mark if I present it this way: Sweden has found itself in the same situation as Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Yugoslavia prided itself on preserving brotherhood and unity as the apple of its eye. Then the apple of its eye went out. Sweden prided itself on its neutrality. Then neutrality went out. What will happen next, God knows.
One of the parts of the program of the Bookstan festival will be devoted to the ethical challenges of literature in the era of political unrest under the slogan Among the weapons the muses are silent. You write in the diary about the silence and convoluted communication of the Swedish PEN and literary life in general. What do you think about what function and power literature has today or should have?
Great, good literature may not have, nor should it have, any function or power. Or it has it and it works in depth, so it's not noticeable to me.
The other, dedicated literature that is served by the loads, it has. It announces, participates in, justifies and hides every political and social abomination and evil. It is present and praised in "public discourse" and media fireworks. Let's just remember our writers and their "works" during the nineties. And their privileges.
Important places you write about, and through them about their fates, are mental hospitals and concentration camps. How did you become interested in them? Why is it important to write about them?
It's important, I think, because I'm writing about myself. And without them, without their fate and deeds, I would be a lot less of myself.
For example, the Polish women and Polish Jews who were rescued from Auschwitz and other concentration camps in late 1945 and transferred to Sweden. Some of them ended up in Lund, placed in schools I pass by, and I worked in some of them. My plot of land in Shelby used to belong to one of these women. Ludwika BP, the countess, a camp inmate, was a role model for me that I often relied on. Just like the “madman, alcoholic and vagrant” Count Eric Hermelin, the brilliant translator of classical Sufi poetry. He spent the last thirty-five years of his life in St. Lars, the asylum that is at the end of the path I walk along. He has a memorial room there, so I go and visit him. Kurt Tucholsky, RM Rilke, August Strindberg, Saarikoski, they were all exiles, and I still believe they all left something for me.
You say in one place that you carry Saarikoski's book The Dance Floor in the Mountain (translated by Osman Đikić) and Cavafy's Collected Poems (translated by Slobodan Blagojević) with you everywhere. Would you like to tell us why these two works and authors have special significance for you?
I read Pentti Saarikoski for the first time in the late seventies. The first translation of his poetry, and I think the only one, was done by Osman Đikić, our former ambassador to Finland, a great gentleman and man. In the early eighties, I can't remember the year now, P. Saarikoski was a guest of the International Meeting of Writers and read in Novi Pazar. After the performance, I happened to be sitting next to him. Two mute single men, in a noisy crowd. When I came to Lund in 1994, the first face that made me happy was his. It was on the cover of a book in a shop window. The book was called Tiarnia and I bought it. Saarikoski also traveled abroad here. Love brought him from Finland. He was languishing here on an island. Whenever I reach for his fate, my own seems easy, tolerable. Constantine Cavafy's poetry is as important to me as water. In Slobodan Blagojević's translation, not in someone else's. In 1991, that translation and I left the Novi Pazar library together and we are still together.
A good number of the lines of Listopada are filled with verses, and even when writing prose, poetic expression cannot be avoided. Can it be said that you are primarily a poet, and then everything else?
One could say so. Admittedly, I also write short prose, because it is close to poetry. I have neither the skill nor the will for larger forms. It's the same thing with translation. I can translate poetry, even the more demanding ones, but I can't translate prose at all. Already at the first sentence, I fail, I don't catch the rhythm, I freeze.
Translation is an important intellectual and even spiritual activity for you. How do you choose translations or do they choose you? Which three works written in Swedish would you like to see in translation on the shelves of our bookstores?
I translate mainly out of craft curiosity and for my own use. I have always followed Eliot's remark that you cannot inherit a tradition, you must build it. So I would take a poem by the master Tomas Tranströmer, literally translate every word and then, from that material, build it on the native language. It's not easy and it's no different than writing your own songs. And I count those translations among my own songs.
I translated, mostly, poets whose work I respected and loved. Bengt Emil Johnson, Tomas Tranströmer, Lars Gustafsson and Magnus-William Olson. For some of my friends, owners or editors of our publishing houses, I did poetry selections of those poets for free and they were published. Some in Bosnia, some in Croatia and Montenegro. No one, white, noticed them.
Which three works written in Swedish would I like to see on the shelves of our bookstores? I don't know. Poetic at all. Maybe something like a H. Mankell novel. It is read and bought, and such works are dear to bookstores and bookstore shelves.
And finally: what does a festival like Bookstan and coming to Sarajevo represent for you?
Damir Uzunović, the owner of Buybook, Buybook itself and everything that comes with it, are very important supporters in my world.