Looking Up at the Perfect Silence of the Stars

I have taken the liberty of adapting a line from Walt Whitman for the title of this foreword about a poet whose verses on silence are well known throughout his country. To me, my father’s silence is the silence of the stars. From out of that cosmic silence emerged his word, which sings of itself and through which the poet sings of himself, while, at the same time, being “the word En-Masse.” 

Šopov, I think, was among those who are called by the menacing voice of the “genius of poets of old lands, terrible in beauty, age, and power” to be ever-enduring bards. I am certain that as he sang of “Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,” he too, no less than Whitman, was singing the Modern Man. 

Šopov defined himself as a reader of the ashes, not a reader of the stars. The stars are unattainable, while ashes are everywhere around us. The stars are silent, which is why they have so much power over us, while the ashes are themselves silence—one that tells all kinds of stories about humanity. It seems to me that my father seized the silence of both so he could bury in it all that remains unsaid, and it is in the unsaid that the poetic charge of his work resides. I have noted, for example, that, until the last years of his life, my father nowhere in his poetry mentioned by name either his mother or his homeland, but, in my opinion, they are two of the few defining words in his work. 

For decades, whenever I have been asked to write something about my father, what catches in my throat are not words, but gnarls, as in his poem “Birth of the Word.” For me, he became “that thing that weighed on me and pained me” (to quote his poem “In Silence”), something no words can express.

About thirty years ago, for a similar volume of his poetry published in France, I wrote a short text about my father, a portrait from which I can neither separate nor free myself. That was ten years after his death. Today, more than forty years have passed since he died and it is now time for a large collection of his poetry to appear in English, in the United States. I offer you, in the paragraphs below, this same portrait as my gift, at the entrance to this book of which my father would say (if he did not bury in silence the most essential words): “This is my legacy.”

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In 1982, my father’s life burned out. The poems remain. Although they do not give a complete picture of their author—a handsome man, somewhat taciturn and discreet, but no less companionable; of slender, almost delicate stature; with green eyes of profound tenderness, sheltered by thick eyebrows—the poems nevertheless express the most essential thing: the intensity of being. Embodied in the images particular to my father’s poetry, this intensity takes the form of flame, fire, sun, a magnificent conflagration, at once destructive and creative, which, after it reduced everything to ruin and rubble, rises from the ashes, following the dictate of some primordial curse, and gives birth to the new day. 

For some forty years my father’s infinite silence has burned within me, and day after day, in his stead, it tells me his great phoenix dream. Bringing into English these poems—which foretell in the ashes the signs of our own not-being—was the only way for me to share his dream . . . to converse with the silence.