Refik Ličina is an important poet of our world. He has been living in Sweden for several decades, and in his poetry and prose books he describes the reality of his new world. This is also the case in the diary "Listopadi", in which he is most often an observer who describes the landscapes during his regular walks. There is an unspoken, almost alchemical feature in these descriptions - the writer deciphers his "new world" through the smells and impressions of childhood. In language, that mirror between worlds takes place, in the landscape of southern Sweden, the writer finds images from his childhood in Novi Pazar, and it is not nostalgia, but the way the poet sees the world.
Tomas Tranströmer, an important poet of this northern part of Europe where Refik Ličina lives and describes in "The Leaves", shares a similar or the same attitude towards the world and language with Refik Ličina, when he says in the poem: "Tired of all who come with words, words but not language/ I went to an island covered with snow./ Wilderness has no words./ Unwritten pages spread everywhere!/ I come across roe deer tracks in the snow./ Language but no words."
Everything here is in language. This diary was written during 2022 and 2023. The figure freely returns to the past from the present, so it seems that his entire life is here together; that is why this is a diary that also has all the characteristics of an autobiography. The pages in which he describes the death of his mother are especially precious (“Somehow I don’t think you can write about your mother. Those five or six pages took me five or six months,” he says). “Listopadi” is a precious book, its language contains the memory of our world scattered across continents.
Semezdin Mehmedinovic