Travelogue

In January 2020, I visited Bosnia-Herzegovina for the first time to take an intensive language course and experience the city of Sarajevo. I was drawn to Sarajevo after discovering that the subject of my dissertation, a psychoanalyst from Freud’s school who published ground-breaking psychoanalytic studies as well as several plays, stories, and poems in German, had also had an early career as a poet and literary firebrand in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language under a Slavic pseudonym. The decision to travel to Sarajevo to learn elementary B/C/S and attempt to read some of these early works on my own rather than pay a professional translator was, perhaps, a little eccentric. But more than simply translate a handful of poems, I wanted to immerse myself in the feeling of the city. I wanted a cultural understanding, however brief, that would help me imagine my way into this new treasure trove of work.

The result of those three and a half weeks is currently taking shape in a long-form essay to be published in the next few months. It is a meditation on language, cultural exchange, and anti-tourism. In the meantime, here is a short selection of photographs I took during a weekend’s visit to Konjic to see Tito’s underground bunker.