Charles Simic

It may well be that the most interesting literature of this century cannot be subsumed under the broad label of Modernism or be said to have originated in the great literary centres, but was actually the work of outsiders and mavericks, starting with Kafka, who created something without precedent from a mix of native and foreign traditions. The poetry of Vasko Popa, who died in 1991, is of that eccentric company. He was the best-known Yugoslav poet of this century, and the most translated: his Selected Poems were first published by Penguin in 1969, as part of its series of modern European poets. Popa was then usually grouped with Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, two other astonishingly original East European poets, whose work was plainly unlike anything being written in Britain and the United States. Encountering in Popa an exotic blend of avant-garde poetry and popular folklore, the foreign reader tends to think that this is what all poets from that part of the world must be like. In fact, no other Serbian poet sounds like Popa. He was both the product of his time and place and the inventor of his own world.

We never even felt our share of the eternal in what was our life: the moments from which these bursts of activity and lethargy are made up, the similarity between here and there in inner and outer space. We exchanged life for its semblance, the object for its shadow, the visible coin for the invisible riches whose origins are unknown and whose value is ambiguous: the body for a wee...

They explained to me the bloody bandages On the floor in the maternity ward in Rochester, NY, Cured the backache I acquired bowing to my old master, Made me stop putting thumbtacks around my bed.

They showed me, instead, an officer on horseback, Waving a sabre next to a burning house, And a barefoot woman wearing only her slip, Hissing after him and calling him Lucifer.

...

And here I was asking About some child I saw on the street Carrying an Easter Lily.

It was spring then. She came my way In a crowd of turned backs And emphatically Blank faces, With eyes of someone Who sees Through appearances – And she didn’t like What she saw in me.

Was it alarm or pity? I always wanted to know. No hurry replying, I said to no one. It’s...

This is where all our joy rides ended: Our fathers at the wheel, our mothers With picnic baskets on their knees As we sat in the back with our mouths open.

We were driving straight into the sunrise. The country was flat. A city rose before us, Its windows burning with the setting sun That vanished as we quit the highway And rolled down a dusky meadow Strewn with beer cans and...