Aco Šopov: The Long Coming of the Fire, 2023
"Without a doubt, The Long Coming of the Fire is a considerable achievement," Bosnian-American scholar and writer Denis Ferhatović wrote in his review published in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, in June 2024. "Grau and Kramer’s scrupulous, coruscating translation and meticulous paratexts offer an excellent entry point for English-speaking readers into the tormented, passionate, and surprising world of Aco Šopov’s poetic creation.
“Aco Šopov gives us the fire smoldering in the roots of trees, in the black sun, in the silence before the poem is composed. These poems burn with old fires, medieval battle cries, primordial limestone. This is a book for spelunkers and myth-makers," Sean Cotter said. The translator and professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas observed that "Grau and Kramer translate with the strength of blacksmiths working iron. The fire in these poems has been coming for a long time, indeed. I’m glad it’s here.”
“Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer’s translations of Aco Šopov’s lyrics reproduce the remarkable clarity and depth of this Macedonian master's vision, a vision hardened like a diamond by the forces of private and public catastrophe," Ukrainian-American poet and translator Boris Dralyuk said. "In these incantatory lines, strikingly stark images of the natural world blend with revelatory reflections on and from the human interior. Šopov keeps our eyes and our minds focused on the eternal chiaroscuro of existence. Time and again, he dazzles us with ‘those flashes of lightning that sleep in darkness.’”
Sibelan Forrester, professor of Russian, Swarthmore College, pointed out that "Šopov is not the only brilliant poet of his generation, but he alone can prove that a small nation can produce big poets.”
Having read some of the poems even before the book was published, Forrester noted that Rawley Grau's and Christina E. Kramer's translation were "dynamite, full of hard-won versions of the thoughtful, deep-dwelling originals."
"If this is Kramer's first translation of poetry, it is equally Grau's first translation of a Macedonian poet," noted Macedonian poet, translator abd essayist Zoran Ančevski. However, their joint work presented in this edition deserves serious and due respect from readers of Aco Šopov's poetry in English, and from any serious translator of poetry [...] In a word, this bilingual (Macedonian-English) collection of Aco Šopov's poetry, aimed at the broad English-speaking readership worldwide, is impressive for its comprehensiveness, expertise and skill in both poem selection and translation," concluded the university professor of English and American literature in Skopje.
"Taken as a whole, one might be tempted to view Šopov’s work as a trajectory of self-exploration," write the translators Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer in their in-depth introduction to the book, A poem from the 1950s is titled, with charming obviousness, “I Seek My Voice,” and twenty years later, as he visits the House of Slaves in Senegal, he declares: “here my primordial passion has summoned me / to discover my archetype” (“The Light of the Slaves”). But such an assessment misses the mark. With Šopov, we are not dealing with confessional or solipsistic poetry, although in places it may seem that way; ultimately, there is no self-obsession here. Rather, a focus on the self leads to what is universally human; the personal becomes primordial as the poet searches for the ordinary word not yet found, as he digs for the fire beneath the hide and the blood down below. This is a search full of paradox, rooted in his homeland but sought in the world, and vice versa. It pulsates with urgency, yet demands patience and struggle, for the fire is long in coming.
We are honored to be able to present the poems of this modernist master to the English-speaking world, and we can only hope that something of Šopov’s fire burns in these translations."