VASILE “VASKO” POPA (1922–1991) was born in a village in the north of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, near the Romanian border in present-day Serbia. In high school, he met Jovanka “Hasha” Singer and became a committed Marxist, then studied medicine and philosophy in Belgrade, Bucharest, and Vienna. During World War II, Popa was a Communist partisan; he was captured by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp in Bečkerek (present-day Zrenjanin). After the war, he married Singer and graduated from the University of Belgrade. He worked as a journalist for Radio Belgrade and then as an editor at the Belgrade publishing house Nolit, a job he held until retiring in 1979. His first major verse collection, Kora (Bark), was published in 1953, and was awarded the inaugural Branko Radičević Award for Poetic Achievement. In 1968, he was given the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and he was elected to the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972 and to the Parisian Académie Mallarmé in 1977. His work includes eight collections of poetry and three anthologies of Serbian folk literature, and has been translated into dozens of languages. After his death, from lung cancer, the town of Vršac established an annual poetry award in his name. In 2001, a year after her death, Hasha’s ashes were interred alongside Vasko’s remains.
CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Among Simic’s recent works are New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012, Come Closer and Listen, and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a book of essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
Vasko
Popa
Selected Poems
SELECTED AND TRANSLATED FROM THE SERBO-CROATIAN BY CHARLES SIMIC
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2019 by NYREV, Inc.
Poems copyright © by the Estate of Vasko Popa
Translation copyright © 2019 by Charles Simic
All rights reserved.
Cover and book design by Emily Singer
The translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Serbia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Popa, Vasko, author. | Simic, Charles, 1938– translator.
Title: Selected poems / by Vasko Popa ; translated by Charles Simic.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024064 (print) | LCCN 2018024121 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373379 (epub) | ISBN 9781681373362 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Popa, Vasko—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PG1419.26.O48 (ebook) | LCC PG1419.26.O48 A2 2018 (print) | DDC 891.8/215—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024064
ISBN 978-1-68137-337-9
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Contents
Introduction
WHITE PEBBLE
White Pebble
Heart of the Pebble
Dream of the Pebble
Love of the Pebble
Adventure of the Pebble
Secret of the Pebble
Two Pebbles
BONE TO BONE
I. At the Beginning
II. After the Beginning
III. In the Sun
IV. Under the Earth
V. In the Moonlight
VI. Before the End
VII. At the End
GAMES
Before the Game
Nail
Hide-and-Seek
Seducer
Wedding
Rose Thieves
Between Games
Race
Seeds
Leap Frog
Hunter
Ashes
After the Game
GIVE ME BACK MY RAGS
Just pop into my head
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
THE YAWN OF YAWNS
The Stargazer’s Legacy
Forgetful Number
Proud Error
Wise Triangle
Echo Turned Stone
The Tale About a Tale
The Yawn of Yawns
HEAVEN’S RING
Stargazer’s Death
Heaven’s Ring
Good for Nothing
Orphan Absence
The Shadow Maker
The Starry Snail
Immigrant Stars
ST. SAVA’S SPRING
St. Sava’s Spring
The Life of St. Sava
St. Sava
St. Sava the Shepherd
St. Sava the Blacksmith
St. Sava’s School
St. Sava’s Travels
St. Sava at His Spring
HOMAGE TO THE LAME WOLF
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
WOLF’S EARTH
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
THE LITTLE BOX
The Little Box
The Admirers of the Little Box
The Craftsman of the Little Box
The Owners of the Little Box
The Tenants of the Little Box
The Enemies of the Little Box
The Victims of the Little Box
The Judges of the Little Box
The Benefactors of the Little Box
The Prisoners of the Little Box
Last News About the Little Box
from RAW FLESH
Wolf-Ancestry
Eyes of a Wolf
Stepfather of Wolves
Broken Horns
Under the Sign of Wolves
The Other World
Shadow of a Shewolf
Unknown Citizen
In the Village of My Ancestors
Earthbound Constellation
INTRODUCTION
IT MAY TURN out in the long run that much of the most original literature in the last century did not come from the ranks of various mainstream and avant-garde movements, but was the work of complete outsiders whose prose and poetry were a mix of native and foreign influences and the product of their own ingenuity. The poetry of Vasko Popa, who died in 1991, belongs in that select company. In 1969, when Penguin first published his Selected Poems, with an introduction by Ted Hughes, in its famous series on modern European poets, Popa was grouped with Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, two other astonishingly fine East European poets whose poems were unlike anyone’s in the West. In Popa’s work, the reader encountered a strange mixture of surrealism and folklore, which may have given the impression that poets from his part of Europe all sounded that way. Actually, no Serbian poet bears a resemblance to Popa. Like other poets coming from small countries in Europe and South America, he read widely and fell under the influence of French poetry, but the kind of poems he eventually ended up writing had no precedent anywhere.
Popa was born in 1922 in a region northea
st of Belgrade called Banat, whose population was a mix of Serbs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Romanians. His father was a records clerk in the village and, later, a bank employee, and his mother was a housewife. He attended elementary and high school in the town of Vršac, where as a teenager he started writing. In the last year of school he discovered Marxism and continued to regard himself as a Communist for the rest of his life. The Second World War began for Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, when the country was attacked jointly by German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian armies and then was occupied rapidly. Despite that, in the fall of 1941, Popa, following his parents’ wishes, moved to Bucharest to study medicine. He left after one year to go to Vienna and read philosophy. On a visit home in May 1943, he was arrested and interred in a concentration camp in nearby Zrenjanin where he remained till September. How his release was arranged is not clear, but he did return to Vienna where he enrolled in French and German literature classes and worked as a streetcar conductor. He did not return to Vršac until Yugoslavia was liberated in 1945. There he officially joined the Communist Party and shortly afterwards moved to Belgrade to study French language and literature at the university. This, of course, was an unusual travel itinerary for someone in Nazi-occupied Europe, unless that someone was also engaged in some sort of illegal work. In Belgrade, after the war, Popa began his career editing and writing for a weekly literary paper and eventually becoming an editor at the prestigious publishing house Nolit, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The appearance in 1953 of his first book of poems, Bark, created a storm even before its publication. Critics and poets in Communist Yugoslavia charged with enforcing the Party’s official socialist realist policy in literature vilified Popa. One of them typically demanded to know how it was possible that poetry of this kind could be written by a young poet and allowed to appear. The Party demanded paeans to the achievements of the working classes in building socialism and instead got the lyrical musings of a muddled youth. Others complained about Popa’s obscurity. Even the title of his book was ambiguous, since in Serbian “bark” (kora) can mean both the bark of a tree and a crust of bread. Still, a few courageous voices supported him, explaining his poetry and indirectly mocking the aesthetic principles of his opponents. Popa had uncommon luck as a poet: from the day he started publishing, no critic or reader remained indifferent to his work.
The poems in Bark were written between 1943 and 1953. The first edition had a number of prose poems that were later discarded. What remains today are four cycles of poems. They serve as a kind of preamble to Popa’s corpus. Many permanent features of his poetry, thematic and aesthetic, are present. The poems are short and elliptical, arranged in sequences, giving the individual cycles a quasi-narrative quality. As his early critics noted, the poems have a formal rigor and a compression that is almost classical, combined with daring flights of the imagination that equal anything the romantics and the surrealists ever attempted. Popa is not the hero of his poems, except in the early cycle Far Within Us, a sequence of erotic poems in the tradition of the surrealists, and in the series of autobiographical poems he wrote later in life.
More typical of his future poetry is the cycle Besieged Serenity, with its existentialist drama of one man’s struggle with the absurd. Camus’ Sisyphus and his “universe henceforth without a master” is the likely hero of these poems. The eternal breach between the self and the world is the subject. How to live one’s life while being torn between these two? What interests Popa is the heroic forbearance of the everyman Sisyphus pushing his rock—or as Saul Steinberg had it in an old cartoon, pushing a huge, boulder-like question mark—up a steep hill.
The poems that attracted the most comments when the book came out, however, were the cycles Landscapes and List. Here’s one of them, “On the Table”:
The tablecloth stretches
Into infinity
The ghostly
Shadow of a toothpick follows
The bloody trail of the glasses
The sun clothes the bones
In new golden flesh
Freckled
Satiety scales
The breakneck crumbs
Buds of drowsiness
Have burst through the white bark
There were also poems about a plate, a chair, an ashtray, a hat stand, and other such things. The critics were right to point the accusing finger at the French, for it was the surrealists who first drew attention to the beauty and mystery of everyday objects that in previous millennia, at least in European poetry, no poet found worth mentioning.
Unrest Field, the book that followed in 1956, once again consisted of four cycles of poems. This time the poems were even more original and entertaining, despite their admirers often finding themselves clueless as to what they meant. Wallace Stevens’s shrewd remark that we admire something in a poem long before we understand it pertains here. The cycle called Games was especially popular. Some of the games Popa describes are familiar to children all over the world and others were of his own invention. The one called “Hide-and-Seek” goes this way:
Someone hides from someone
The other looks for him under the earth
He hides on his forehead
The other looks for him in heaven
He hides in his forgetfulness
The other looks for him in the grass
Looks for him looks
There’s no place he doesn’t look
And looking he loses himself
We associate such games with childhood and innocence, but that is not what goes on in these grim nursery rhymes where fear and disappointment are ever present. The master of ceremonies of this Grand Guignol emblematic of our lives is unknown to us. We play his games hoping to win, despite a suspicion that they make no sense. The cycle Give Me Back My Rags personifies that unknown nemesis of ours and tries to exorcise its power. Two childlike voices are overheard playing, teasing each other, and squabbling from time to time like lovers.
Damn your root blood and crown
And everything else in your life
Every dried-up image in your brain
Every burning eye on your fingertips
And every step you take
Into three pots of foul-tempered water may you sink
Into three stoves of truth-telling fire
Three ditches without name or milk
Icy breath against your throat
Against the stone beneath your left tit
And razor-sharp bird in that stone
Swoop blackest of blackbirds into the lair of nothing
Into the hungry scissors of beginnings
Into the womb of heaven don’t I know it
Damn your seed sap and glitter
Darkness and dot at my life’s end
And everything else in the world
Here a translation into English cannot do full justice to the original. The phrase “give me back my rags” derives from a game little girls play with torn strips from their mothers’ and grandmothers’ old dresses, which they swap, attach as clothes to their dolls, until they quarrel and want them back. The entire cycle is a feast of idiomatic language and the submerged meanings that lurk in them. Constant movement, constant metamorphosis of one thing into another is the chief characteristic of these poems. Reading them is like being on a verbal roller coaster.
Surrealism was not invented in 1926 by a group of French poets in Paris but has existed in folk literature and mythology since the beginning of time. Popa compiled three anthologies of Serbian riddles, charms, proverbs, superstitions, exorcisms, prophetic visions, lyric poems, and children’s rhymes to prove that point and to mine them for his poetry. He sought to recoup the imagination of the anonymous folk poet who describes the crescent moon as father’s scythe lying across mother’s Sunday skirt in one riddle, or proclaims that if not for the wind, spiderwebs would cover the sky. For them, as for Popa, one sought the explanation of that world out th
ere in one’s imagination.
Writing about the early twentieth-century Serbian poet Momċilo Nastasijević, who influenced him and whose ideas about the uses of tradition he shared, Popa praises the elder poet’s poems by saying that each one of them is a “verbal icon of our immaculate mother tongue.” Still, there’s an important component of Popa’s poetry that is missing from the work of Nastasijević and that is humor. Writing about the comic in the introduction of an anthology of Serbian folk humor, Popa speaks of it admiringly as a prankster and blasphemer who mixes the sacred and the profane and makes heaven and earth change places. Such humor is as heretical as good poetry and as dangerous as truth. It never jokes, or knows what a joke is, since its disquiet is serious. In his third book, Secondary Heaven (1968), Popa gives us a comic version of the big bang theory of creation in “Forgetful Number,” one of the poems from the cycle Yawn of Yawns:
Once upon a time there was a number
Pure and round like the sun
But lonely very lonely
It started to calculate by itself
It divided multiplied
Subtracted and added up
But stayed always alone
It stopped calculating then
And shut itself away
In its round sunlit innocence
The burning traces of its calculations
Stayed outside
They began to chase each other in the dark
To divide themselves while multiplying
To subtract themselves while adding
That’s how it goes in the dark
No one was left to ask him
To call back his numbers
And to erase them
The poems in this book read like the creation myths of some lost sect of second-century Gnostics. In “Proud Error,” Popa speculates the universe may be an accident, a small, stupid error that caused space and time to burst forth. As above, so below, proclaims an old axiom that is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Popa believed the same thing. Our cosmologies mirror our desires. He anthropomorphizes abstract ideas, attributes human form or personality to things not human, the way our most ancient ancestors did.
The next two volumes of his poetry were again differently conceived. The poems in Earth Erect (1972) address specific events, historical monuments, and heroes and symbols. There are cycles about Saint Sava, the patron saint of Serbs; pilgrimages to medieval monasteries; the battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the first uprising against the Turks in 1804. Since Popa believed that a poet’s imagination is intricately tied to the language and place he came from, this was not an unexpected development. He may be charged with being a cultural nationalist, but certainly not a political one. There’s nothing exclusionary and fanatical about his view of Serbian history and culture.