From Sarajevo, With Sorrow ― Poems

When Sprinting from the Graveyard was published in 1997, Goran Simic’s poems were severely altered out of the fear that they might offend Western sensibilities.” These newly translated poems restore all that is offensive, despairing and necessary to our understanding of war by capturing the poems’ original power and humanity. In addition, this collection contains both previously unpublished poems, written under the candlelight” of the siege, and new poems returning to the sniper’s alleys and bunkers of Sarajevo. From Sarajevo, With Sorrow is a disturbingly resonant, timely and important collection.

Goran Simic: Goran Simic was born in Bosnia in 1952 and has been living in Toronto since 1996. He has published eleven books of poetry, drama, and short fiction, including the acclaimed volume of poems in English translation, Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford University Press, 1997). In Canada, Simic has published Peace and War, a limited edition volume gathering poems by himself and by Fraser Sutherland; other books of his poetry and drama have been translated into nine languages. His poems are included in anthologies of world poetry, such as Scanning the Century (Penguin, 2002) and Banned Poetry (Index, 1997). He has received major literary awards from PEN USA and four times in former Yugoslavia.

Amela Simic: Amela Simic is a translator and writer. Her translations from English of works by Susan Sontag, Bernard Malamud, Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Michael Ondaatje and Lawrence Darrell, among others, have appeared in various literary magazines of the former Yugoslavia. She has also translated several novels and works by contemporary philosophers. Her essays and translations of Bosnian poetry have appeared in Salmagundi, TLS, The Paris Review, Canadian Forum, Meta, and BBC Radio. She is currently the Executive Director of Playwrights Guild of Canada and lives in Toronto.