The Bridge on the Drina (2 page)

Thereafter, Andric returned to academic pursuits, working towards a doctor's degree at the University of Graz, achieved in 1924. His thesis was entitled "The Development of the Spiritual Life of Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Sovereignty." The solid and precise historical information that underlies 
The Bridge on the Drina 
was thus systematically built up through academic study; but instead of continuing as a historian Andric opted for a diplomatic career. Between 1924 and 1941 he was stationed at various European capitals. In his spare time he wrote short stories and planned his later, larger works.

World War II presented him with the enforced leisure necessary for realization of those ambitions. With the collapse in 1941 of the government he had served, Andric, who had been Yugoslav ambassador at Berlin, returned to private life in Belgrade. During the ensuing years of harsh occupation and mounting resistance, he wrote no less than three novels, including 
The Bridge on the Drina. 
They were published in rapid succession in 1945, and at once established his reputation in Yugoslavia as a major writer. Translated into English in 1959, 
The Bridge on the Drina 
became the principal basis for his Nobel Prize for literature, which, in turn, made him a literary figure of world renown. Under Tito, Andric held a number of honorific offices, but even after the Nobel Prize he maintained a discipline of work that permitted continued literary creation, and kept a zone of privacy around himself that few could penetrate. He died in Belgrade in 1975.

What seems truly remarkable about Andric's literary achievement in 
The Bridge on the Drina 
is the way he entered into the minds of the Moslems of Bosnia. No doubt, in his youth he had ample opportunity to observe the fractured world in which the Bosnian Moslems found themselves. Very early in life he found the Orthodox Christian world view he himself had inherited to be inadequate. Revolutionary linguistic nationalism, to which he lent support in his student days, recognized no distinction between speakers of Serbo-Croat on the basis of their religion. Yet older habits of thought and feeling lingered on in Bosnia, so that Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats stubbornly distrusted one another, while both Christian communities remembered the former Moslem domination with dread.

Clearly, Andric grew up in a world where rival and mutually incompatible world views found themselves in acute conflict. This in itself is liable to provoke intellectual detachment, at least among sufficiently intelligent, sensitive, and experienced individuals. Andric's mature years pushed him further in that direction, for his youthful reliance on linguistic nationalism as a means of bridging gaps between Serb, Croat, and Moslem soon proved vain. During World War II he saw Tito lead yet another revolutionary ideal to power. But his age and temperament did not allow him to lend that movement active support. Instead, he turned his mind backward to the deeper past, probing for the roots of the conflicts that so distracted his Bosnian homeland.

In youth he had repudiated the Orthodox outlook. In middle age he was compelled to abandon the expectation of his youth that linguistic nationalism would somehow resolve social conflict in Bosnia. Just what he thought of the Communist recipe for solving ethnic and social conflicts is unclear. He definitely preferred the inclusive south Slav sympathies of Tito's movement to the narrow nationalisms of rival Serb and Croat leaders who disputed power with the Communists during the occupation years. This made him acceptable to the postwar Communist government. Yet anyone reading 
The Bridge on the Drina 
will find it hard to believe that its author thought Marxism or any other new faith could be expected to resolve long-standing national and religious conflicts.

In spite of the many honors paid him by Tito's regime, it seems plausible to suggest that Andric by the 1940s had become a thoroughgoing conservative. He clearly implies that the sort of cultural transformation required to transcend Bosnia's religious and social divisions will cost a great deal, requiring the surrender of precious local peculiarities and identities. Moreover, to judge by how such changes came in the past, as Andric understands that past, the requisite cultural changes are most likely to come about, if at all, not through intelligence and good will but through force and brutal interference from without—as happened both when the Ottoman identity was implanted on the province from distant, mysterious Constantinople, and when western patterns were imposed by a no less distant and incomprehensible Vienna.

Such a message cannot appeal to the youthful enthusiast who wants to make all things new and to brush away past errors. But for a person who has lived long enough to experience the persistent gap between human achievement and expectation, Andric's sensitive portrait of social change in distant Bosnia has revelatory force. That is the way it was. Here is human reality, stubborn, irregular, awkward, heartfelt, and ever-changing in spite of everything people can do to maintain, or to overthrow, inherited patterns of life.

TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

The customs and the minds of men alter less rapidly than the vagaries of political and ideological change. The visitor to Yugoslavia can still see the bridge on the Drina, whose fate is described in this book, though once again modernized and repaired. But he will find Višegrad itself less changed than he may expect and will not find it hard to identify the types of Andrić's novel even under a national state and a communist administration. The Bosnian peasant faces the hazards of an egalitarian administration with the same incomprehension and imperturbability as he faced the novelties of the Austro-Hungarian occupation; he experienced the greater brutalities of the last war with the same courage and resignation as he faced those of World War I, and his relations with state controlled purchasing agencies differ mainly in degree from those of his fathers with the banks and merchants of the Višegrad market. The last war, in Bosnia especially, showed examples of horror and torment at least equal to those of Turkish times, while the idealism and fanaticism of youth, so well described in the conversations on the 
kapia, 
have only changed slightly in direction, while retaining their essential mixture of practical politics and imaginative romanticism.

Dr Ivo Andrić is himself a Serb and a Bosnian. These provincial and religious subtleties are still as important in present-day Yugoslavia as they were in earlier times. But in the case of Dr Andrić they have had an effect different from that on other Yugoslav writers and politicians.

Instead of intensifying the local and religious conflicts that still bedevil Yugoslavia — as was only too tragically shown during the last war—they have resulted in a deep understanding of peoples and creeds other than his own. Born near Travnik in Northern Bosnia in 1892, Dr Andrić passed much of his childhood in Višegrad. Not only is there truth, insight and sympathy in his varied range of Višegrad portraits, there is certainly also a good deal of observed and critical biography.

Dr Andrić's books are almost all about Bosnia and Bosnians. But the peculiar position of Bosnia, a storm centre for centuries on the border of the Eastern and Western worlds, saves them from the curse of detailed provincialism and gives them an interest that extends far beyond its narrow borders. It would not be too much to say that the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by

Gavrilo Princip at Sarajevo in 1914 was the turning point of modern history.

Or Andrić's own career widened the field of his observations and his sympathies in a manner possible only in a vigorously growing society and a century of conflict. He studied first at Sarajevo and later at the universities of Zagreb, Vienna, Cracow and Graz, where he took his degree. Of a poor artisan family, he made his way largely through his own ability. As other gifted students of his race and time, and as his own students in 
The Bridge on the Drina, 
he belonged to the National Revolutionary Youth Organization, and experienced the customary cycle of persecution and arrest. After the First World War he entered the Yugoslav diplomatic service and served in Rome, Bucharest, Trieste and Graz. At the outbreak of World War II he was Yugoslav Minister in Berlin, when Yugoslavia was desperately playing for time, hoping to postpone the invasion of Hitler and at the same time consolidate her forces to resist it when it inevitably came. I recall waiting tensely in Belgrade for Dr Andrić to return from Berlin, the one sure sign that an invasion was immediate. He came back only a few hours before the first bombs fell on Belgrade. My only contact with him was when the Yugoslav Government was already in flight.

During the war, Dr Andrić lived in retirement in Belgrade, and during the German occupation took no part in public affairs. Therein we are the gainers, for at that time he wrote his most important works, including what may be called his Bosnian trilogy: 
Miss, The Travnik Chronicle 
and, the greatest of them all, 
The Bridge on the Drina.

The experiences of the war and the German occupation gave Dr Andrić sympathy with the Yugoslav Liberation Movement. Since the war, he has been associated with it and has been a member of the National Assembly for many years.

The Bridge on the Drina 
is not a novel in the usual sense of the word. Its scope is too vast, its characters too numerous, its period of action too long; it covers three and a half centuries. Dr Andrić himself calls it a chronicle; let us accept his word.

It has been awarded the highest literary award of post-war Yugoslavia and has been translated into several languages.

It is always an invidious task for a translator to comment on an author's style. It should be —and I hope it is —evident in the translation. Andrić's style has the sweep and surge of the sea, slow and yet profound, with occasional flashes of wit and irony. One subtlety cannot, however, be conveyed in translation; his use of varying dialects and localisms. I have conveyed them in the best manner that I

could, since a literal use of dialect would, even were it possible, be pedantic, dull and cumbersome. For the information of purists, the occasional Turkish words that are used are used in their Bosnian sense and spelling which often differs considerably from modern literary Turkish.

LOVETT F. EDWARDS

NOTE 
on the pronunciation of Serbo-Croat names

Andrić's novel is published both in the Cyrillic and Latin (Croat) alphabets. I have used the Croatian spelling throughout. The language is strictly phonetic. One sound is almost always designated by one letter or (in Croat) combination of letters.

Generally speaking, the foreigner cannot go far wrong if he uses 'continental' vowels and English consonants, with the following exceptions:

 is always ts, as in cats.

č is ch as in church.

ć is similar but softer, as t in the Cockney pronunciation of tube.

Many family names end in ć. For practical purposes, the foreigner may regard č and ć as the same.

dj is the English j in judge —the English j in fact.

dž is practically the same, but harder. It is usually found in words of Turkish origin.

j is always soft, the English y.

r is sometimes a vowel, strongly rolled. Hence such strange looking words as vrh (summit),

š is sh as in shake.

ž is zh as z in azure.

Other variations do not occur in this book. In a few cases I have left the conventionally accepted English spelling, instead of insisting pedantically on Serbo-Croat versions: e.g. San jak (Serbo-Croat: Sandžak), Belgrade (Serbo-Croat: Beograd), etc. In the case of purely Turkish names, I have sometimes transliterated them phonetically, as the Croat version is equally arbitrary.

The use of the original names retains dignity and flavour. Attempts to adapt them to English phonetics (in itself an ungrateful task) results in such monstrosities as Ts(e)rnche —for Crnče.

LOVETT F. EDWARDS

I

For the greater part of its course the river Drina flows through narrow gorges between steep mountains or through deep ravines with precipitous banks. In a few places only the river banks spread out to form valleys with level or rolling stretches of fertile land suitable for cultivation and settlement on both sides. Such a place exists here at Višegrad, where the Drina breaks out in a sudden curve from the deep and narrow ravine formed by the Butkovo rocks and the Uzavnik mountains. The curve which the Drina makes here is particularly sharp and the mountains on both sides are so steep and so close together that they look like a solid mass out of which the river flows directly as from a dark wall. Then the mountains suddenly widen into an irregular amphitheatre whose widest extent is not more than about ten miles as the crow flies.

Here, where the Drina flows with the whole force of its green and foaming waters from the apparently closed mass of the dark steep mountains, stands a great clean-cut stone bridge with eleven wide sweeping arches. From this bridge spreads fanlike the whole rolling valley with the little oriental town of Višegrad and all its surroundings, with hamlets nestling in the folds of the hills, covered with meadows, pastures and plum-orchards, and criss-crossed with walls and fences and dotted with shaws and occasional clumps of evergreens. Looked at from a distance through the broad arches of the white bridge it seems as if one can see not only the green Drina, but all that fertile and cultivated countryside and the southern sky above.