On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar: The Poet, the Road, and the Word

Abstract

Mehmed Alija Dizdar, the most famous Bosnian poet of this age, was born in 1917 in Stolac, a town in the heart of Hum, the southern province of Bosnia. Few of Dizdar's readers know him by the name bestowed on him by his father, Muharem, and his mother, Nezira, née Babović. Rather, they known him by his pseudonym, Mak—the code name he used as a member of the anti-fascist movement during World War II. (Mak's mother and sister Refika were killed in 1945 in the Jasenovac concentration camp, the Nazis' way of taking their revenge on the elusive Mak.) Although…