What language are we speaking? When we came here, you were young enough to adopt the rules of your new world without resistance, and for your new language to be closer to you than the one you arrived with. It was different for me, as I haven’t managed to tear myself away from the past, which means that I’m a prisoner of my language. Does that mean that you and I, father and son, speak different languages?

My world is in my language, and I’ve never begun to write in the language of the country where I’m now living. To be truly accepted, to transform myself from a foreigner into a local, a precondition is restructuring into the new language. And that’s fine. I have chosen to remain a foreigner. Once, some ten years ago, after the translation of my second book came out, an American poet explained to me, in a restaurant in Iowa, that all my problems would be solved as soon as I started writing in English. She said, very seriously, that I should just make a rough translation of my poems, she’d sort out the language, and then I could publish them as originals. She literally suggested that. I said that I didn’t have any problems that needed solving. I thanked her and explained that this one language in which I wrote was enough for me, and I wouldn’t want to change it. But, following my explanation, her eyes filled with tears. To be honest, her offer had offended me, but the fact that she ended up crying completely disconcerted me. I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t understand the real reason for her tears. Perhaps she hadn’t expected my reaction, and now her offer had been shown to be discourteous, but perhaps she was really sad to see in me a stranger who couldn’t be helped? She looked at me as though she had just found out that I had a disease from which I would soon die.

About ten years ago, when he was in college, Harun went to the Slavic department to take a foreign-language exam. The foreign language in this case was his mother tongue, but from an American perspective there was no room for doubt, the local language was English and every other language was foreign. The examiner, Michael Heim, met him in his book-filled office. Harun introduced himself and asked about the possibility of taking an exam. The professor suggested that he take the exam immediately, if he felt ready. And then he went to a shelf and took down a book from which Harun was to read, to confirm his knowledge of his own language. Professor Heim put the book down on the table in front of the student and suggested that he read from the page to which he’d opened at random. And so it was. Harun began to read the text, trying to hide his smile. The professor noticed his student’s unusual behavior, interrupted his reading, and asked: “The character in the story has the same name as you?” And Harun said: “Yes, but that’s because this story is about me, I am the character in the story.” His response astonished Professor Heim, he took the book from his hand, looked at the open page, then back at the student: “All these years, I have read a lot of books in this room, but this is the first time that I have spoken in real life to a character from a story.” The book was Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović.