Aco Šopov : The Song of the Black Woman, Skopje, 1976

The Song of the Black Woman, which earned Šopov the Miladinov Brothers Award in 1976, was inspired by his stay in Senegal from 1971 to 1975.

“If in his earlier books Aco Šopov established himself as an exceptional poet of thought, a visionary of passion, a celebrant of love and beauty, a disentangler of sorrow and desire, I would say that in this book he succeeded in bringing these qualities to perfection,” wrote Milivoje Marković in 1977 in his essay “The Reality of the Poem,” published that same year in the journal Rukovet.

The collection provoked numerous responses from literary critics, a summary of which is available on the Macedonian version of this page. These reactions notably address the notion of exoticism, which Šopov briefly defined as a mere “backdrop against which human dramas unfold,” adding that, in this book, his aim was to penetrate the deepest and most hidden regions of the human being.