Ivo Andric

‘Wherever I look there are poems – whatever I touch is pain.’

(Ex Ponto, 1918)

Ivo Andric. 

Not available in English as such, this above collection of his prose poems. But keen to read more from him (feeling nostalgic about Bridge on Drina, if reading can be nostalgic too). Here's some selections from his essay-like writings.

About him:

"Words were the material of Andrić’s own individual struggle against transience, and one of man’s most potent means of survival in a fundamentally tragic and hostile world. They must be used with the greatest precision and not lightly or carelessly transacted.

This sense of responsibility to words was closely related to the strong sense Andrić had that the mere activities that seem to fill our daily lives are not real life. The real, the enduring things are ideas and the works of artists, the accounts of past events, the stories and legends handed down through the generations."