Byron and the Beauty

by Muharem Bazdulj

  ‘Are you all right, my lord?’ Isak asked. ‘You are pale.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Byron shot back.

  ‘We’ll be there any minute now,’ Isak promised.

  ‘Any minute,’ Byron mumbled. “Everything is always so close,” he thought. Then the calm was broken by shouts of jubilation from the Albanians at the head of the column.

  Amazement crept across Byron’s face, and his heart leapt at the sight before him. It was perhaps five in the afternoon and the sun was already going down. The silhouette of a city was displayed against the bluish-red background of the sky. It’s just as it appears in books, Byron thought; or in songs. The closer they drew, the more beautiful everything became. He knew, he knew beyond doubt, that he would never forget this scene. A peculiar feeling of dejà vu had already come over him, even though he was certain that he had never before witnessed anything similar. Except in books. It’s like Branksome Hall in Scott’s writings, he thought. The palace jutted from a public square, on which Albanians were standing in rows, clad in garments similar to those that Byron had been given. Tatars with tall caps, Turks with fur-trimmed capes, two hundred swarthy guardsmen on black steeds outfitted with harnesses and saddle blankets. Drum rolls delivered greetings of welcome. The sun was almost all the way down. Against the dark purple firmament, the palace seemed tall and inaccessible. Taller than the palace were the tips of the minarets, from which the ezan rang out. Akşam, Byron said to himself. Night is here.

  Afterword: The Men and the Mountains by John K. Cox

  When Muharem Bazdulj writes fiction, he serves readers with powerful – in the sense of both heady and cerebral – but subtle cocktails; fortunately, like a stern (if urbane) mentor, he insists that we eat something substantial and make sure of our surroundings before we tip our glass. Bazdulj’s works bear down on us with intellectual flags flying and we have to grapple with the plot on multiple levels of meaning, but this is all done under the sign of erudition, not sensationalism. Indeed his works are colourful, but one shies from saying they are exotic, because the last thing his native Balkans need is to be further exoticized in the eyes of Western readers. Bazdulj writes in the service of ideas, especially ideas mined from the history of his beloved, trying, misunderstood ex-Yugoslavia and its southeast European neighbours – and ideas being minted there in our day, as well. There is no more engaged, and engaging, writer at work in Europe today.

  One of the hallmarks of Bazdulj’s writing is his preoccupation with biography. What I mean, more precisely, is historical biography – fictionalized historical biography. This is, arguably, the raw material for “historical novels” in the traditional sense: famous or historically attested personages set against realistic backdrops with plots and details designed to move the merchandise or, sometimes, put oblique critiques of the author’s own time or country into circulation. It is a subjective prejudice of mine, but I have to admit that I find most traditional “historical fiction” dreary; it tends to be neither formally experimental nor intellectually dynamic. Perhaps the problem is that such works claim to be trying to overcome the specificities of time and region and show their “universality", but their earnestness simply leaves them emotionally inert. But what if one believes, as I do, that every novel is universal, because it is written by representatives of the same species, and every novel is historical, because all are the products of a certain time and place even if they are set in the future or somewhere besides earth?

  It turns out that such theoretical rehabilitation is not necessary, thanks to the works of Muharem Bazdulj. It is beyond the scope of this modest essay to give a comprehensive analysis of the way this fine novel fits into Bazdulj’s rapidly expanding oeuvre, or to test the historicity of its depictions and assumptions against the standards of Byron studies. Let us just say that here, Bazdulj is writing about Lord Byron in a fresh, meaningful and adventure-filled way, paying homage to nobility of spirit and the galvanizing force of human beauty all over Europe. In Bazdulj’s book, in his Albania and, by extension, his Bosnia, there is no pomposity, no name-dropping, and no wooden celebrities or Potemkin villages of historical relevance. We live through a brief period of Byron’s life while he is on a journey through Albania, headed to Greece and Istanbul. The plot turns, simply, on Byron’s growing friendship with his interpreter, Isak, and his love-and-duel-fuelled contact with representatives of an important Bosnian family in October of 1809.

  Despite its relative brevity, the book is rich in detail. But the skies, trails, buildings, forests and fields (and even clothes and local words) are depicted so brilliantly – not for any encyclopedic or “ethnographic” effect; rather they contribute, like the omnipresent descriptions of the characters’ clothes and sleep and meals, to a quiet rhythm and all-embracing sense of motion that is at once predictable and unruly. Things start, things finish, and they are all part of something bigger. On the one hand, we are lulled into a sense of sameness, and on the other hand we are in the hands of a sure, measured, and confidently developed plot that offers us irresistible challenges. Byron has come to the Albanian highlands from misty England, full of book learning and literary ambition and a Casanova’s swagger, and he is bound for Athens and Istanbul; Isak has an even greater wanderlust and is as gentle and enthusiastic as he is wise, and he traipses back and forth across the Balkans as in a microcosm of the cosmos; lovely Zuleiha and her irascible but complex brother Selim Beg arrive from and leave for other parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Balkans, like the heavens and the (imaginary) guest list at the han, or caravansary, is not static or monolithic or impenetrable. People and words count, and they come to terms with reality; they sink or they swim, and unexpected events take their place at the starting line along with traditions every day. The Ottoman Empire feels here much more like a loose and far-flung confederation than a "scourge of God,” and it is certainly more puritanical than any “painted East.”

  A second hallmark of Bazdulj’s writing, and here one thinks of the non-fiction as well as the fiction, is the author’s embrace of and elaboration on the word “Balkans”. Many are the references to Balkan habits of mind and heart; religion, love, friendship, family life, quotidian philosophy, and, finally and very significantly, art and historical memory. These all play their part, naturally, in the tolerant Isak’s long conversations with the sometimes slightly manic Englishman. The reader will likely enjoy this cultural exploration, the enumeration of which serves not only to enlighten anglophone readers but also to underscore a certain living, breathing trans-national cultural assemblage in the very pluralistic Balkans. There is nothing prescriptive or reductionist about this representation of Balkan culture; it is powerful but open and unpredictable. In the end it does not drive the story; people, especially the men, do. One could argue, though, that the one facet of this issue that is firmly fixed is the way Bazdulj situates the Balkans in the world of words and regions. Albania and Bosnia are not transition zones; they are not blended cultures, half-European and half-Asian; they are already the East. The words “Orient” and “Oriental” are almost never used in the book; the author uses the words “East” and “Eastern.” Add to this the more conventional fact that Byron also refers to the lands he is traversing as “Turkey,” and it seems that Bazdulj is decidedly stating that southeastern Europe, despite its name, is fully, and proudly, the Other. To this historian, this statement is a bold and valuable one. It removes the temptation to pick Balkan cultures apart into more Western and less Western components, and it acknowledges, as Danilo Kiš did in a famous essay from 19801, that the legacy of the Ottomans, of both the Muslim Turks and the Muslim and non-Muslim affiliated peoples, are parts of Europe.

  Muharem Bazdulj has ably reworked, in his earlier writings, portions of the lives of historical figures such as the scientist Ruggiero Boscovich (Ruđer Bošković in his native Croatian), the dynamic American duo of Henry and William James, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and the occasional sultan or pharaoh. In addition, his novels, stories
, and essay abound in homages to – for these references are more deeply felt than citations – writers whom he admires. These are powerful, enduring writers, and they include Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Mirko Kovač, and Ismail Kadare. In Byron and the Beauty, then, we have Bazdulj turning his attention to a Romantic, and romantic, encounter between cultures from two sides of Europe. In the mountains, Byron and Isak (and the boy-princes and even the jealous brother) understand each other. Inter-communal violence, victim complexes, spite, primitivism, tribalism – these things are not in evidence. Just how far the Balkans extend, we do not know for sure, for Isak praises the sun and ocean of Greece and Turkey proper so much that, at the very least, we know southeastern Europe to defy geographical stereotyping. It is in these mountains (are they really so uniquely cold and isolated?) that Byron and Isak connect. The book is about people, not fracture zones or clashing civilizations.

  This is not to put too fine a point on Bazdulj’s Balkans, however. Their legacy is challenging. His new parable of the cave and the reminder of Byzantine war crimes are platforms for the introduction of ancient disillusionments and horrors into our modern world. The oral traditions that tie honour to artistic production leave plenty of room for glorification of banditry and worse. But two literary considerations, I believe, secure a positive place for this book as a Balkan novel of ideas: The first is the way Bazdulj’s work distinguishes itself from other recent, key works in literature by and about Southeastern Europe. With this novel, Bazdulj is swimming against the current in some ways, because of the agency and direction of the action: we have here a West European travelling to the East2. In many recent Balkan novels, those written under the influence of what one scholar calls the “new internationalism,” it is much more common for the local Balkan narrator to leave his or her country and experience (and react to and cross-pollinate with) the cosmopolitan West3. Another recent study of the contemporary Balkan literary landscape stresses national differentiation in the post-colonial (formerly) Ottoman space4. In contrast to the trends in these studies, Bazdulj’s Byron makes a successful visit (in human terms) to a place where cultures co-exist and share many values.

  It is this idea of coexistence that brings me to my second and final point. Ivo Andrić, whose work Bazdulj has long embraced and even adapted,5 wrote a powerful story entitled “In the Guest-House."6 In it, a low-ranking Franciscan brother cares for a dying Turk. Although Byron does not die in this novel, he comes close, and he is taken care of constantly by the unusual local character, Isak. The roles are reversed in Byron and the Beauty, or better, jumbled up, but there are enough similarities to make the impact appreciable: Brother Marko’s musafirhana (guest-house) is Byron’s inn, and the earthy hosts are content to find common earthly ground while negotiating space to operate from the exacting political or religious hierarchies above them.

  John K. Cox (john.cox.1@ndsu.edu)

  * * *

  1 Danilo Kiš, “Homo Poeticus, Regardless,” in Susan Sontag, ed., Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995), pp. 75-79

  2 Lord Byron did actually visit Albania, of course, and he wrote poetry about it. Other real-life traveller’s accounts of Southeastern Europe in general are numerous and have frequently been used by historians both to glean information about understudied societies and to interrogate the construction of Orientalist stereotypes in the West. Notable accounts include those of Edith Durham, Benedikt Kuripešić, Matija Mažuranić, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Rebecca West. Recent academic studies have pushed research on such accounts, and those of East European travelers, into important new areas. See, for instance, the three volumes edited by Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis: Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe (New York: Central European University Press, 2008); Orientations: An Anthology of European Travel Writing on Europe (New York: Central European University Press, 2009); and Balkan Departures: Travel Writing from Southeastern Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2011). See also: John B. Allcock and Antonia Young, eds., Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travelling in the Balkans, 2nd ed. (New York: Berghahn, 2000) and Andrew Hammond, ed., Through Another Europe: An Anthology of Travel Writing on the Balkans (Oxford: Signal Books, 2009).

  3 See Andrew Wachtel, “The New Balkan ‘Other,’” in Murat Belge and Jale Parla, eds., Balkan Literatures in the Era of Nationalism (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2009), 143-153.

  4 See Monica Spiridon, “’We Ought to Know Who We Are’: Post-Ottoman Identities: The Feud of (Hi)Story Telling,” in Murat Belge and Jale Parla, eds., Balkan Literatures in the Era of Nationalism (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2009), 273-282.

  5 See, for instance, his story “The Other Letter,” based on Andrić’s “Letter from 1920.”

  6 Ivo Andrić, “In the Guest-House,” translated by Joseph Schallert and Ronelle Alexander, in The Damned Yard and Other Stories (Beograd: Dereta, 2003), 49-59.

  The Author

  Muharem Bazdulj, born in 1977 in Travnik, is one of the leading writers of the younger generation to appear in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. He writes in a wide variety of genres, including novels, short stories, poetry, and essays; he is also active as a journalist and a translator. Bazdulj’s short stories and essays has been published in Best European Fiction 2012 (Ed. Aleksandar Hemon, Dalkey Archive Press) and in The Wall in My Head (Open Letter, 2009) alongside Milan Kundera, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin, Péter Esterházy and Andrzej Stasiuk, as well as in World Literature Today, Creative Non-Fiction, Habitus, Absinthe and elsewhere.

  One of his short-story collections has appeared in English (The Second Book, Northwestern University Press, 2005).

  Bazdulj is the author of six novels in all, including his most recent, Small Window. He lives in Belgrade.

  The Translator

  John K. Cox is a professor of history and department head at North Dakota State University in Fargo. His translations include long and short literary works by Danilo Kiš, Ajla Terzić, Ivan Cankar, Vjenceslav Novak, Ivan Ivanji, Ivo Andrić, Meša Selimović, Ismail Kadare, and Miklós Radnóti, and short nonfiction by Joseph Roth, Stefan Heym, and Erwin Koch. Cox’s historical works include the books The History of Serbia and Slovenia: Evolving Loyalties. He is currently translating the Holocaust memoir of Simon Kemény. Muharem Bazdulj’s Byron and the Beauty is his first translation for Istros Books.