MACARONIC VERSE IN OTTOMAN BOSNIA AND THE INCITEMENT TO MULTIVOCALITY
MACARONIC VERSE IN OTTOMAN BOSNIA AND THE INCITEMENT TO MULTIVOCALITY

Summary/Abstract: Amila Buturović describes an archetypical Bosnian-Herzegovinan literary form - macaronic verse, i.e. verse which switches to and fro between languages (in this case, Bosnian and Turkish). Crucially, Buturović argues, this is a poetry of "multiplicity" rather than "national purity". At the moment, as even the Serbo-Croat language has split into the particularities of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, there seems to be little room for linguistic multiplicity. "One Saturday morning as the cottage country north of Toronto awoke to a temporary ice age, my three-year old daughter broke its frigid stillness outdoors by resorting to a polyglot description: "Mommy," she said, "çok je zima outside." Put in plain English it meant, "Mommy, it is very cold outside". Enchanted by her linguistic economy and multivocality, I found myself face to face with a set of questions raised by her spontaneous leap through three languages - English, Turkish, and Bosnian - which captured with such candor her impressions. It struck me that the difference between the two statements." (...)

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