Aco Šopov : Merge with the Silence, Skopje, 1955

This book marked a radical break with the dominant ideology and aesthetic norms of Macedonian literature in the 1950s, ushering in a decisive turn toward modernity.

It includes many poems that are still considered among Aco Šopov’s finest achievements. The book earned him the Kočo Racin Prize, became the first book by a Macedonian author to be translated into Slovene (Zlij se s tišino), and prompted the Slovene literary critic Fran Petré to claim that it heralded the birth of true lyric poetry in Macedonia. Yet when it was published in November 1955, the book reignited the debate between “modernists” and “realists,ˮ a dispute that had begun three years earlier with the collection Verses of Suffering and Joy.

Thus, while Dimitar Mitrev praised the book as a “poetry of lasting values,” marked by “lyrical density and synthesis” and by “metaphorical clarity,” Milan Gjurčinov criticized it for what he called a “disintegrated poetic thought,” “mere prosaicisms,” and “improvisations in which it is difficult to grasp any clearly articulated idea.” Stardelov, for his part, spoke approvingly of a “poetry of small beauties,” whereas Solev denounced the “short poetic form,” arguing that within it “the poet’s qualities fail to come fully into view.”

A few years later, a peace of equals was reached.