Musa Cazim Catic

Life

Catic was born in the northern Bosnian town of Odzak where he attended the maktab and primary school. After his father's death and mother's remarriage, Catic relocated to Tesanj to study the barber's trade, also enrolling at the local madrasa to study the Turkish, Arabic and Persian languages as part of his curriculum. In 1898, upon leaving for Istanbul, Catic acquainted another Bosnian poet, Osman Dikic, before returning home the following year to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army in Tuzla and Budapest over the next three years. Having completed military service, Catic once again found himself in Istanbul where he attended the Numune-i Terakki Mektebi madrasa before entering the gymnasium. Troubled by the lack of funds however, he returns to Bosnia by 1904 and commences studies at the Islamic school in Sarajevo. At this point, Catic contributes to a number of papers, mostly in The Bosniak and Behar, and would take over as editor-in-chief for the latter in 1908 after having been expelled from the boarding school due to a "bohemian living". He still graduates, and leaves for Zagreb where he enlists at the Faculty of Law, socializing with Croat poets Antun Gustav Matos and Tin Ujevic during this period. By 1910, Catic returns to Bosnia and goes on to work in several locations (Bijeljina, Tesanj, Sarajevo) until eventually taking the magazine Pearl (Biser) in Mostar under his wings, fully dedicating himself to literary work: writing poems, essays, criticism, translations of numerous studies and books for the Muslim library of Muhamed Bekir Kalajdzic. Peace does however not stay with Catic for very long as he is once more mobilized by the Army in 1914, transferred to Tuzla and from there on to Orkeny in Hungary. Shortly after arriving, Catic fell ill with tuberculosis, and after a brief treatment in Budapest returned to Tesanj in late March 1915. He died on the 6th of April that year and was buried in the Tesanj cemetery with the following words carved on his grave: "Here lies a poet of excellent gift, who did not seek honor nor profit but lived bohemian and sang grand, until death escorted him to this grave." Many schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina bear his name including the high school "Musa Cazim Catic" in Tesanj.

He is currently featured on the 50 convertible mark banknote of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Esoteric

Catic was a poet by vocation and emotional structure who poetically experienced and imaginatively sublimated everything he came into contact with. Catic's poetry was life, the meaning of existence, the atmosphere of reality, and the medium in which his spirit ranged.

Mystic

The poetic theme of Catic is situated, mainly, between two poles: eroticism by instinct and mysticism by spiritual endeavor, respectively. The combination of these motives sometimes occurred with a certain sense of spiritual distress, while sometimes sublimated in the form of sin, life and repentance as visioned by Epicurus and Khayyam. Mysticism though never separates Catic from reality and life; his mysticism, which draws on that of Turkish and Persian poets, rejects the pessimistic escapism of the spirit, similar to Baudelaire on whom Catic likewise draws.

Impact

Catic began in the style of his predecessor Safvet beg Basagic, standardized, with conventional instruments of versification and metrics, and a limited fund of metaphors from female folk songs and Eastern poetic symbols. But he soon made ground in the limited and underdeveloped poetic heritage surrounding him, spurring a small school of literary followers who would represent the second phase in the development of modern Bosnian poetry.

Works