TEHRAN – Bosnian writer Ivo Andric’s novel “The Damned Yard” has been published in Persian by Tadaei.

Meisam Mirhadi is the translator of the book originally published in 1954.

Camil, a wealthy young man from Smyrna living in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, is fascinated by the story of Dzem, the ill-fated brother of Sultan Bajazet, who ruled Turkey in the fifteenth century. 

Camil, in his isolation, comes to believe that he is Dzem, and that he shares his evil destiny: he is born to be a victim of the State. 

Because of his stories about Dzem’s ambitions to overthrow his brother, Camil is arrested under suspicion of plotting against the Sultan. He is taken to a prison in Istanbul, where he tells his story, to Petar, a monk.

Andric is a major twentieth-century European writer, and winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1961. 

Set mainly in his native Bosnia, the stories and novella collected here reflect Andric’s overwhelming love of storytelling. 

Vivid, intensely suggestive and often disturbing, Andric’s stories draw on legend, myth, archetype and symbol to reveal universal patterns of behavior. 

Andric lived through the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, with its two world wars and extremes of revolution and totalitarianism. 

The wisdom that informs his work is tempered from that brutal reality. A diplomat, he served across Europe, including Nazi Berlin, but it was in Bosnia that he experienced most clearly the destructive power of the arbitrary divisions between people and their potential for violent conflict, often in the name of ideas that are remote from their daily lives. 

Photo: A combination photo shows Ivo Andric and the front cover of the Persian edition of his novel “The Damned Yard”.

MMS/YAW