The Fire Is Here: The Long Journey of Aco Šopov
In the poem “An Event by the Lake” [“Nastan na ezerskiot breg”], Aco Šopov tells the story of a winged horse that, after traveling the world, returns exhausted to his native lake to be restored by its “clear and health-giving water.” The people watching him question whether there was any point to his journey, but for the horse, we are told, it was “the highest purpose of his life: to discover his native land by discovering the world.” At the end of the poem, the horse regains his strength by diving into the lake and flies off again, “carrying with him his highest purpose: to discover his native land and so discover the world.”
Šopov wrote this poem in the early 1970s, when he was already one of the most celebrated poets in his native Macedonia, then part of Yugoslavia.
At the time he was serving as the Yugoslav ambassador to Senegal, and, although he had made trips to several European cities, this was the first time he had lived for an extended period in a place so different from his own country, so the reciprocal discovery he talks about—to find one’s homeland in the world and the world in one’s homeland—is all the more striking. While it bears witness to the poet’s deep connection with all of humanity, regardless of continent, race, climate, or history, it also seems an apt metaphor for Šopov’s own poetic mission: to develop a poetry rooted in his own ancient culture and language that is simultaneously universal and modern, and to do this not by turning away from tradition but by drawing on something at the core of both the traditional and the modern, some truth that is both of the moment and beyond the realm of time.
At the Heart of Contemporary Macedonian Poetry
Aco Šopov came of age with Macedonian poetry and was at the heart of its maturation into a modern literature. Although the Macedonian people enjoy a long, primarily oral, poetic tradition, their literary tradition is relatively new. Macedonia itself was not established as an official political entity until August 1944, when it became a constitutive republic within the newly declared federal state of Yugoslavia (on territory that was still being liberated from the Axis Powers). It was only then that the Macedonian language was finally standardized and made the official language of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia. The language’s codification and new official status ensured a revitalized environment for creative expression, particularly in poetry. As the literary scholar Milne Holton noted: “This liberation of a language and a poetry was, of course, the culmination of a long historical process which has generated not only a language and a literature but a national consciousness and a special imagination peculiar to a people whose sad past has long been submerged in events of greater moment.”
While earlier poets such as the brothers Konstantin and Dimitar Miladinov, Grigor Prličev, and, especially, Kosta Solev (“Kočo”) Racin had laid the groundwork for a new literary verse, modern Macedonian poetry came into its own only after World War II with Blaže Koneski, Slavko Janevski, and Aco Šopov, all of whom also made substantial contributions to the development of the scholarly, educational, and cultural institutions necessary for an educated, literate society. Šopov’s role in this process was well described in 1970 by the critic Draško Ređep in his review of the book Reader of the Ashes [Gledač vo pepelta]: “This is, above all, an author who, over the past quarter-century of Macedonian poetry’s life and growth, has been in many respects its synonym—its representative and, in many ways, its most influential part.”
A Poet in War, a Poet in Love
Aco Šopov was born on December 20, 1923, in the city of Štip, in the eastern part of what is now the independent Republic of North Macedonia, but at the time was a region within the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later called Yugoslavia. The country into which he was born had been founded just five years earlier after decades of upheaval that included the end of the five-hundred-year reign of the Ottoman Empire, two Balkan Wars fought by Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro over the Macedonian territories, the partition of those territories in 1913, and World War I. At the time of Šopov’s birth, his native land was known as South Serbia, a name it would carry until the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 and its occupation by Bulgaria.
Šopov’s childhood was marked not only by the general poverty and turmoil in the region, but also by family difficulties, in particular the frequent absence of his psychologically troubled father, Ǵorǵi Zafirov-Šopov, and the long, paralyzing illness of his mother, Kostadinka Ruševa, a schoolteacher who instilled in him a love of poetry. Aco was the middle of three sons, of whom the older had been sent to study at the Eastern Orthodox seminary in Prizren, about a hundred miles away. When their mother became paralyzed in 1934, it was left to ten-year-old Aco to care for both her and his younger brother. The poet would later refer to this period in his life as a “hundred-headed monster.” Nevertheless, all three brothers were educated. Aco completed secondary school in Štip, where he became interested in the socialist movement. He had begun writing poetry at the age of fourteen—mournful personal verses—but now he turned to social themes and, with two other students, published the underground Macedonian-language newspaper The Spark [Iskra].
In 1940, while still in secondary school, Šopov joined the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia. The following year, in early April, Germany invaded Yugoslavia, which quickly surrendered and was divided up, with most of Macedonia annexed to Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Šopov’s mother died in 1942, and in fall 1943 he joined the antifascist Macedonian armed resistance, fighting to liberate Macedonia from the Bulgarian occupation. These fighters were part of the broader Yugoslav Partisan movement that had been founded by the Yugoslav Communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, soon after the invasion. Šopov continued writing poetry as a Partisan combatant and served as literary editor of and contributor to Fire [Ogin], the newspaper of the Third Macedonian Shock Brigade. In fall 1944 his first poetry collection, Poems [Pesni], was printed by the underground press. It was the first Macedonian book to be published on liberated territory.
In the years following the war, Šopov published three books—Railway of Youth [Pruga na mladosta] (1946) with the poet Slavko Janevski and On Gramos [Na Gramos] and With Our Hands [So naši race] (both in 1950)—works marked largely by reflections on the socialist revolution and national liberation.
The poem “Eyes” [“Oči”], first published in 1946 and later included in With Our Hands, was dedicated to Šopov’s Partisan comrade and first love Vera Jociḱ, who died after being wounded in battle. It remains one of Šopov’s best-loved works, and the poet himself, in a 1966 interview, called it one of his favorite poems.
In 1948, Marshal Tito broke with Stalin, which led to Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Communist Information Bureau. Among other momentous changes, this break signaled the beginning of the end of Soviet-style socialist realism as the only permitted doctrine in the arts. In October 1952, at the Third Congress of Yugoslav Writers, the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža gave a famous speech calling for an end to socialist realism and stressing the need for creative freedom, and a month later the Yugoslav Communist leadership confirmed this new direction at the party congress in Zagreb. Writers, artists, publishers, and others were now allowed much greater freedom to make their own decisions about themes and styles, a move that opened the way to the modernist tendencies that would dominate Yugoslav culture well into the 1980s.
Šopov himself had been criticized for diverging from socialist realism at least since 1950, when he began publishing highly personal poems stemming from the breakup of his first marriage (to Blagorodna Cvetkovska) and his separation from his son, Vladimir, who was born in 1948. These poems were collected as Verses of Suffering and Joy [Stihovi na makata i radosta] in 1952, a month before Krleža’s speech, and the turn from social topics to intimate themes sparked controversy in the Macedonian press.
Šopov continued to develop this personal lyricism in his next two books, Merge with the Silence [Slej se so tišinata] (1955) and The Wind Carries Beautiful Weather [Vetrot nosi ubavo vreme] (1957), both of which won Macedonia’s Kočo Racin Prize for poetry.
A Turning Point in Macedonian Poetry
As the literary scholar Graham W. Reid noted, this period marked “a turning point in Šopov’s poetry and conceivably in Macedonian poetry at large.” “Consistently writing out of individual experience,” Reid continues, “Šopov now began to address his readers as individuals rather than as collectivized humankind.” Merge with the Silence and The Wind Carries Beautiful Weather are notable, too, for poems in which Šopov thematizes his destiny as a poet, such as “I Seek My Voice” [“Go baram svojot glas”] and “At the Lake” [“Na ezero”] in the former collection and “The White Sorrow of the Spring” [“Bela taga na izvorot”] and “Call Me Sky” [“Kaži mi nebo”] in the latter. Also striking is his use of the lyric miniature—jewel-like poems of no more than eight lines.
Not-Being [Nebidnina] appeared in 1963. This was another deeply personal collection, in which many of the poems were inspired by his love for Svetlana Velkovska, whom he married in 1958. The book is about much more than love for a woman, however. As the title suggests, the personal expands into a broader, more philosophical dimension, in which healing love is related to something mysterious that transcends existence and lies at the very root of poetry. Not-Being opens with one of Šopov’s key poems, “Birth of the Word” [“Raǵanje na zborot”], which serves as a prologue to the cycle “Prayers of My Body” [“Molitvi na moeto telo”]. Written in an intensely focused, meditative tone of pain, love, and hope sustained over eleven poems, the cycle is an achievement worthy to stand among the great works of postwar European poetry.
On the morning of July 26, 1963—the same year that Not-Being was published—the city of Skopje, Macedonia’s capital, was struck by a devastating earthquake. Over a thousand people were killed, several thousand were injured, and over a hundred thousand were left homeless. Šopov responded to the disaster with some of his most powerful poems, including “Horrordeath” [“Grozomor”], “August” [“Avgust”], and “Lament from the Other Side of Life” [“Tažačka od onaa strana na životot”]. These works first appeared in 1964 and 1965 in the literary journal Modernity [Sovremenost], with which Šopov was closely connected, and then in three collections of selected poems published later in the decade. The poet’s most immediate literary response, however, was the prose piece “At Five Seventeen” [“Vo pet i sedumnaeset”], published in both the Macedonian and Serbian press soon after the earthquake occurred. Given the text’s importance, we offer a translation of it as an appendix to this volume.
A Towering Figure on the Literary Scene
In 1970, Šopov published Reader of the Ashes [Gledač vo pepelta], which consisted entirely of poems written since Not-Being, including those inspired by the earthquake. More than just a collection of new poems, this is a clearly structured work with themes, images, and symbols echoing from poem to poem to create an energy and rhythm that draw the reader into its drama of suffering, love, and emergent meaning.
Opening with the cycle “The Long Coming of the Fire” [“Dolgo doaǵanje na ognot”], it moves to eight more loosely connected poems of cataclysm and self-examination, which are grouped under the heading “Reader of the Ashes.” This is followed by two more cycles, each of three poems: “Black Horsemen, White Riders” [“Crni konjanici, beli konjici”] and the apocalyptic “Black Sun” [“Crno sonce”]. Although many of the poems in this book can be read individually as reflecting the poet’s personal struggles, when taken together they build into something much more expansive. “The fire is here, beneath these mad waters,” Šopov declares in the opening line of the poem “The Long Coming of the Fire,” restating this a few verses later as “The fire is here, underneath this hide” and commanding us (and himself): “Dig, / dig it up.” The desire to reach some primordial creative/destructive force that is also deep within us—already present in Not-Being—now in Reader of the Ashes acquires new urgency and complexity. At the same time, the journey he expresses in both books is implicitly entwined with the turbulent history and destiny of his homeland.
By the early 1970s, Šopov was a towering figure on the literary scene. He had won several important awards for his work, including, in 1970, Yugoslavia’s highest honor in culture and science, the AVNOJ Award. That same year, he received his third Kočo Racin Prize, for Reader of the Ashes. As early as 1947 he had been one of the eight founding members of the Macedonian Writers’ Association, and in 1951 he started the Kočo Racin Publishing House (named, like the award, for the poet, who died at the age of thirty-four as a Partisan fighter), which was later renamed Makedonska kniga [Macedonian Book]. Šopov also led the initiative to create, in the town of Struga on Lake Ohrid, the Struga Poetry Evenings, an internationally important annual poetry festival that today is considered to be the oldest continuous event of its kind in the world. In 1967 he was named one of the first members of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the following year was elected as a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy. It is also worth mentioning that in the mid-1960s, in a departure from his usual poetic practice, Šopov published a series of poems satirizing various aspects of contemporary Yugoslav society, which he collected in 1968 under the title Jus-univerzum (a possible translation might be The YUniverse), Macedonia’s first book of satirical verse.
A Genuine Connection With Africa
Šopov was appointed as the Yugoslav ambassador to Senegal in 1971, a decision that is not as surprising as it might seem at first. The president of Senegal was the renowned poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the founders of the Négritude movement, and the country was a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, which Yugoslavia had co-founded and on which its position in world affairs significantly depended. As ambassador, Šopov was tasked with persuading Senghor to become more involved in the Non-Aligned Movement and to encourage other West African nations to do the same. The Belgrade authorities were undoubtedly counting on the two men to find a mutual language in diplomacy as much as in poetry. Šopov’s diplomatic mission was capped off by Senghor’s official visit to Yugoslavia, where the Senegalese president was received by Tito at the latter’s state villa on Lake Bled, in Slovenia, and then traveled to Lake Ohrid to receive the Struga festival’s highest award, the Golden Wreath.
Šopov’s years in Africa, from 1971 to 1975, had a substantial impact on his writing. Senghor’s influence can be seen in, among other things, the long discursive lines in a number of the poems from this period. On a more personal level, the poet experienced a genuine connection with the peoples and cultures of West Africa. To some extent, this may have been due to Macedonia’s own centuries-long history of oppression under foreign powers, but for Šopov it went deeper than that. In the poem “Into the Black Woman’s Dream” [“Vo sonot na crnata žena”], he addresses “the Black woman”—a symbol of Africa itself—as “a dark light that leads me down a narrow, dangerous path, / haunting me since childhood, / since before my childhood, from my mother’s womb, / from my first, my most unconscious beginnings.” In his African poems, Šopov’s pursuit of that creative/destructive impulse, which he expressed so powerfully in Reader of the Ashes and Not-Being, gains new dimensions through his reflection on the commonality of human experience and his effort to understand and identify with the traumatic history of the Atlantic slave trade. It is in this context of trauma and revelation that Šopov articulates the idea, in “An Event by the Lake,” that the discovery of the world and the discovery of one’s native land are inextricably connected. Upon his return to Macedonia, Šopov published The Song of the Black Woman [Pesna na crnata žena, 1976], for which he received the Miladinov Brothers Award at the Struga poetry festival.
Šopov's Poetic Legacy
A year earlier, in 1975, he had published his translation of a large selection of Senghor’s poetry, which, in a way, we can view as part of Šopov’s effort to bring his discovery of the world to his homeland. Translation, indeed, was something Šopov was involved with throughout his career. In the 1950s, he had focused on translating poems for children, such as Ivan Krylov’s fables (from Russian), Charles Perrault’s fairy tales (from French), and Oton Župančič’s collection of children’s verse Ciciban (from Slovenian). Other translations included Eduard Bagritsky’s Lay of Opanas (from Russian, with Slavko Janevski) and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (from French), as well as, from Serbo-Croatian, poets such as Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Grigor Vitez, Miroslav Krleža, Izet Sarajlić, and Dragutin Tadijanović. Most notably, he translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1960, for which he won Macedonia’s most important cultural honor, the October 11th Award, as well as a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which appeared in 1968.
In 1976, Šopov was appointed as the president of Macedonia’s Commission for Foreign Cultural Relations. The following year, however, his declining health forced him to retire from public life. Over the next few years, he sought treatment in hospitals in Ljubljana, Paris, Zagreb, and Moscow for a disease of the blood vessels that was progressively affecting his ability to walk and speak. He continued to write poetry nevertheless, much of it dealing with his illness. In these poems, which he published in 1980 under the title The Tree on the Hill [Drvo na ridot], we find many echoes from earlier work: the fire in the breast, the spreading blood, the plunging into waves, the lonely tree. Here, too, in a number of poems, he speaks more explicitly than ever before about his love for Macedonia and his childhood in Štip. Despite its themes of illness and impending death, The Tree on the Hill is suffused with light, love, and transcendence.
In 1981, Šopov published his last book, Scar [Luzna], which brought together a large number of poems from across his lyric books since Merge with the Silence, along with his beloved poem “Eyes.” Šopov made the selection himself, with the intention that this book would represent his poetic legacy. That same year he received Macedonia’s October 11th Award for Lifetime Achievement.
He died on April 20, 1982, at the age of fifty-eight, leaving behind his wife, Svetlana, and two children, Vladimir and Jasmina.
Translating Šopov
During the poet’s lifetime, collections of his poems appeared in several languages, including Hungarian, Russian, French, and Romanian. Posthumous books were published in Spanish (1987, Mexico) and French (1994). More recently, Šopov’s poetry has appeared in a new Spanish translation (2011, Argentina), as well as in German (2012, Luxembourg). This year, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, collections have been published in Polish and Arabic (Tunisia). This book, also set to mark the poet’s centennial, is the first significant collection of his poems to appear in English.
All three centennial translations, as well as several others before, were initiated by Jasmina Šopova, the poet’s daughter. In our case, Jasmina wrote to Christina in the fall of 2020, asking if she would be interested in translating a selection of her father’s poems. Christina, thinking it would be good to have someone working on the project with more experience in poetry translation, suggested her friend Rawley. Jasmina saw that the combination of Rawley’s experience as a translator of Russian and Slovenian poetry and Christina’s deep knowledge of Macedonia’s language and culture could form the basis of a vibrant collaboration that drew on the linguistic and literary skills and knowledge of both. Jasmina herself, whose knowledge of Aco Šopov’s poetry is unsurpassed, was the third member of our team. It was she who chose the poems to be translated—a selection based largely on Scar—although we also offered a few suggestions in this regard. She carefully read every translation we made, providing valuable insights, comments, and, where necessary, corrections, for which we are immensely grateful.
Neither translator had much experience with collaborative translation, nor had we read Šopov. Rawley, with Christina’s help, was just beginning to learn Macedonian. So we began tentatively, taking our first steps “in a kind of fog that is both frightening and exciting,” as Jasmina put it in an early email, but we soon developed a good working process. Christina, in Toronto, would send Rawley, in Slovenia, the poem in three versions: the original Macedonian with marked stresses; an interlinear translation noting linguistic details about particular words and significant cultural references; and a first, more or less literal, translation. From this material, Rawley created a draft that sought to capture the poetry of the original (rhythm, rhyme scheme, imagery) while preserving its meaning. Drafts went back and forth with questions and comments as we revisited our decisions, often with input from native speakers, until we eventually settled on a near-final version, which we then sent to Jasmina. As we became more familiar with Šopov’s work, noticing especially his development of images and ideas across books and over decades, we revised our earlier translations to bring such connections to the fore. Meeting on Zoom, we read entire cycles out loud, alternating between the original and the translation. We came to realize that Šopov had created a remarkably coherent conceptual system—a poetic universe—and that it was essential to convey this in our translations.
How to Preserve the Integrity of the Poet’s Vision
A salient example was our handling of the Macedonian word pesna, which can refer either to a song or a poem. It is a key word for Šopov, who at times even addresses it directly, as in “Reader of the Ashes,” one of the first poems we translated. That poem opens with the words “Izgasni pesno . . . ” [“Burn out, pesna . . . ”]. Since it seemed likely that the poet could be addressing the poem he was writing, or hoped to write, we initially translated this as “Burn out, poem . . . ” But much later, when we were working on the cycles in the book Reader of the Ashes, it became clear that Šopov’s notion of pesna transcended any individual poem or even the idea of a poem. It was instead connected with something from the beginning of time and also seemed to relate to both the folk-song tradition of Macedonia (the “song of old” in “The White Sorrow of the Spring”) and the mysterious female figure who appears in Not-Being. In the poem “Black Sun,” for example, the speaker exclaims: “O pesna, land, woman, O life and death at once, / whatever you bring me today, I will thirstily drink up.” With this in mind, we reviewed our earlier translations and, in most cases, changed “poem” to “song.”
As we became more aware of such interconnections, we realized that to preserve the integrity of the poet’s vision, the poems had to be read in groups—ideally, in the same groups the poet had used when organizing his books. We were particularly struck by the power of the collection Reader of the Ashes and knew that we wanted to present this masterwork as a whole. The same was true when we reexamined Šopov’s previous book, Not-Being. Consequently, when it came to structuring our own book, we decided that it should open with these two impressive works from the prime of his career, followed by the most important poems from earlier collections and ending with representative selections from his last two books, The Song of the Black Woman and The Tree on the Hill. We were reluctant, however, to start the book right off with the Prayer Cycle (as Not-Being does) and so decided to follow what Šopov did when he was organizing Scar, using the same two poems—“Down Below There Is a Blood” and “Scar”—to lead the reader into Šopov’s poetic world. We should also note that, while Šopov generally did not revise his poems once they had been published in a book, in cases where variations do exist, we take the Scar version as the basis for our translation.
Unlike the usual single-translator process, where decisions are largely intuitive, our back-and-forth dialogue forced us to articulate the reasons behind our choices. We thus alerted each other to possible overinterpretations that departed from the poet’s actual meaning or, on the contrary, overly precise renderings that failed to capture the spirit of the line. We learned to be content with ambiguity. Šopov often blurs the boundaries between subject and object, between the one who acts and the one who is acted upon. In “Second Prayer of My Body” [“Vtora molitva na moeto telo”], for example, it is not clear if the bridge wants to see itself in the wave, or the wave wants to glimpse its face in the light it reflects onto the bridge. Our translation, then, while always striving for precision, also had to allow for openness. To borrow an image from “August,” Šopov’s poems create nets of meaning in which golden fish are dreaming, and as translators we had to capture not just the cords of the net but also the spaces between them.
Challenges
Translating poetry is particularly challenging because you are working in a small space. While there might be several ways to resolve a dilemma when translating prose, with poetry the choices are narrowed by the constraints of the form—line length, the shape of the stanza, rhythm, rhyme, and other effects. From a linguistic perspective, differences between grammatical categories are drawn acutely in seemingly small variations. For example, both Macedonian and English have a category of definiteness—the contrast between saying a book and the book parallels the contrast in Macedonian between kniga and knigata. Macedonian also developed an optional, although by no means regular, indefinite article from the number one, edna, that does not always correspond to the English article a/an—the Macedonian word generally points to something specific but not definite: a certain book. Translating such distinctions can be tricky, especially when the poet himself steps outside of conventional usage. An example is the title of “Down Below There Is a Blood,” which translates the Macedonian “Ima dolu edna krv.” Using the indefinite article with the mass noun “blood” sounds a bit strange, and, in fact, in earlier drafts we decided against it. But Šopov’s use of edna is also odd here, and we made it a general rule to “trust the poet.” Our final version of the title seeks to capture the strangeness and strength of the original.
Another parallel is that Macedonian, like English, has lost the use of most grammatical cases, i.e. changes in nouns and adjectives that indicate a word’s semantic relation to other words in the same sentence. Instead, it relies heavily on prepositions, some of which can express various relationships. The preposition na, for instance, may indicate possession (“of”), location (“at”), or the indirect object (“to”). More than once we debated the meaning of this preposition and on several occasions asked native speakers to tell us how they understood a certain phrase. The line in “August” about nets offers a good illustration of such dilemmas. In Macedonian, it reads: “Ribarite na tvojot pogled pletat nevidlivi mreži,” which could be rendered, more or less word-for-word, as “The fishermen in/of your gaze weave invisible nets.” One of our early drafts interpreted the phrase na tvojot pogled as “in your view/sight,” suggesting that the fishermen are seen by the speaker (who is speaking to himself here). But then we wondered if na could indicate possession: “the fishermen of your gaze”—as if they were somehow weaving their nets inside the eyes. Our final draft became: “The fishermen in your eyes weave nets unseen,” a wording that allows for both readings and captures the kind of subject/object ambiguity typical of Šopov: are the fishermen seen by the gaze or are they themselves the vehicles of sight?
Other challenges related to Šopov’s choice of specific words. We spent days discussing how to translate the names of certain plants mentioned in the poems, and sometimes the names of the poems themselves. In the case of “Horrordeath,” the solution was relatively easy: the Macedonian title, “Grozomor,” is a compound the poet coined from the word groza, meaning “horror,” and the Slavic stem -mor-, which relates to large-scale death and destruction. Rather than use an ordinary English word such as “horror,” we devised our own compound.
There are, indeed, a fair number of coined words in these poems, and we did our best to reflect them in our translation. But Šopov’s most famous coinage, a word that feels more like a discovery than an invention, is nebidnina, which he first used in 1963 as the title for a complex poem about the journey from loneliness and pain to love and healing, and then as the title of the book in which the poem appeared. Although on the surface, the word might seem easy enough to translate, it presented one of our greatest challenges. It is a noun derived from the verb bide, “to be,” with the negating prefix ne. So perhaps nonbeing, nonexistence, or unbeing. But it is clear from the poems in which it appears that it refers to something more than nonexistence or simple nothingness. Šopov himself, in various interviews, discussed the difficulty of defining the word. As he was preparing the book for publication, he noted that the title “could mean, roughly, something that is impossible, something that will not be realized” and that he was using it to underscore the paradox that “poetry, however much we might understand it and create it as something essential, as something more than what we usually understand by the concept ‘life’ . . . is still, even in its most perfect form and highest achievements, incapable of grasping all the richness and complexity of this concept.” Many years later, in a magazine interview, he explained: “Nebidnina I understand as realization through nonrealization. I did not reach this awareness suddenly or consciously; rather, it is a result of my poetic experience to which I come closer with every poem.” Given the elusiveness that the poet himself attached to the term, we wanted a word that could be as open as possible and hold various meanings of nonexistence, nonbeing, and unbeing, while also suggesting something new, something unattainable yet always potent in its absence, and so we chose the unusual hyphenated word not-being.
Šopov employs a wide range of poetic forms in his work: from the miniatures of the 1950s collections to the intricate four- and five-line rhymed stanzas that characterize the Prayer Cycle (and many other poems as well) to the couplets in the cycles of Reader of the Ashes and the long discursive lines of his later poetry. The vast majority of his poems use rhyme, often with a very clear rhyme scheme, but even when he ventures closer to free verse, repetition and rhythm remain defining elements. In a 1965 interview, he stated: “I strive for a kind of formal perfection and want this formal perfection to also be justified internally by the content.” Šopov’s meter tends to be irregular, composed of two-beat and three-beat measures in different combinations with lines of varying length. But the rhythm is almost always distinct, at times even pounding (as in the Fire Cycle). In our translations we sought to preserve as much as possible the form and energy of the originals, without, however, resorting to anything contrived or strained. We used rhyme where we could, but we were often content to merely suggest the idea of rhyme through some phonetic or visual correspondence.
A Reciprocal Love
Šopov was fully aware of his responsibility as a modern Macedonian poet, crafting richly textured, complex poems in a once-suppressed language for a people whose national identity had itself only recently been officially recognized. Something of this is expressed in the poem “If There Isn’t Enough Light for You” [“Ako ti nedostasuva svetlina”]. Read alone, it sounds like a touching love poem, a lover’s promise to do all he can to comfort and console his beloved. But when we read it in the context in which it appears in Reader of the Ashes, coming immediately after the “Lament from the Other Side of Life” and surrounded by other poems written in response to the devastation of the Skopje earthquake, we hear the poet expressing his love to his grieving nation, promising to use all his abilities to assuage their unfathomable sorrow.
The love is reciprocal. Many Macedonians can still recite verses learned in school from the Partisan poem “Eyes” and they are familiar with the story of the heroic woman it celebrates. The four-line poem “In Silence” [“Vo tišina”], which joins form and content near perfectly, is similarly widely known and cherished. The word nebidnina has become part of the language, although most Macedonians would be hard-pressed to define it. While it is impossible for us, as translators, to fully mediate the experience of Šopov’s Macedonian readers, the notes at the back of the book seek to clarify a few of the more important cultural references in the poems. We also try to provide other useful information that will deepen the reader’s experience of Šopov’s poetry.
Taken as a whole, one might be tempted to view Šopov’s work as a trajectory of self-exploration. 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.
Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer
Introduction to Aco Šopov's bilingual book The Long Coming of the Fire = Долго доаѓање на огнот, selected poems, translated by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, and published by Deep Vellum in 2023.