There’s a lot I don’t have the words for these days. I suspect that’s true of most of us, deep down, no matter the force we throw behind the ones we’ve got. Maybe it’s strange because I’m definitely not a poet (or maybe it’s not, for the same reason) but in the most harrowing times I often find myself turning to poetry.

I’ve been working on and off for a long time translating the poems of the writer Izet Sarajlić, one of Bosnia’s most famous poets. In particular these past few weeks I’ve been thinking of the poems from the notebook he kept during the first thirty days of the siege of Sarajevo, what he called, “the only book I wish I never wrote.”

Wars aren’t all the same, of course. But then, sometimes they are.

IN SURVIVING ALL THIS