Charles Simic

I’ll be surprised if, a few years from now, there are many traces in Kosovo of Serbs ever having lived there. Jeremy Harding’s article (LRB, 19 August) makes this plain. ‘Of course the monasteries and churches should be cared for,’ Noel Malcolm exclaimed in a recent op-ed piece, in which he called for independence, but I don’t think the Kosovo Albanians are listening. As for me, I hope a...

There are a great many things to say about M.F. Burnyeat’s brilliant piece on Plato’s Republic (LRB, 21 May), but for someone like me, brought up under Communism, what stands out immediately is the similarity of Plato’s ideas to those of Stalin. The difference is that the dictator understood, and the philosopher did not, that to turn poets and writers into ‘engineers of the human soul’ one...

Charles Simic writes: So, I’m supposed to hate all Turks! That must be why I listen to Turkish music, cook Turkish dishes and have Turkish kilims on my floors. I have no recollection of the event. I may have said plenty about the brutality of the Turks in the Balkans and was probably unpersuaded by Ms Gün’s claim that for five centuries it was never the Turks, but always the local Balkan boys...