These first poems showed \u0160opov to be a highly personal poet even when he was chronicling events of a social or patriotic nature. They showed a lyrical individuality and an autobiographical intimacy. He found his subject matter in his own experience, as when writing of a much-loved woman who was a fellow partisan, and yet he succeeded in avoiding too great a preoccupation with the self and the clich\u00e9s of a falsely sentimental intimacy. In the same way his poems of social protest avoid the cheap and easy use of the slogans and catch phrases that were then in vogue.<\/p>\n
\u0160opov ‘s poetry of this period, closely bound with his own experience of a war of national liberation, serves to illustrate his rejection, from the outset, of a utilitarian style with a narrow social or political purpose. This is not to say that these poems do not have a clear message. They treat the horrors of war, the traumas of a people finding itself, and the youthful awakening of consciousness throughout society, and they embody a vision of the future.<\/p>\n
Treating also the themes of love, struggle, and death, and employing imagery that conjures up an apocalyptic atmosphere, they also have overtones from folk poetry. Defiant and often action packed, they convey deep feeling and contain striking passages and images; nevertheless, these poems, published as\u00a0Pesni<\/em>\u00a0(Poems) in Belgrade and Kumanovo in 1944 and in \u0160tip the following year, are primarily of historical interest.<\/p>\n After the war \u0160opov graduated in philosophy from the University of Skopje and began work in the public sector. He had already been involved editorially in the youth publication\u00a0Ogin<\/em>\u00a0(Fire) and from 1947 on was engaged in various literary undertakings: he founded the journal\u00a0Idnina<\/em>\u00a0(Future) and at various times worked as editor of\u00a0Nov den<\/em>\u00a0(New Day),\u00a0Sovremenost<\/em>\u00a0(Contemporaneity) and\u00a0Horizont<\/em>\u00a0(Horizon) and the satiric magazine\u00a0Osten<\/em>\u00a0(Spur), to all of which he also contributed poems and translations. He then became director of the Makedonska kniga publishing house.<\/p>\n His next three books of poetry,\u00a0Pruga na mladosta<\/em>\u00a0(The Youth’s Railroad) (written with Slavko Janevski, 1947),\u00a0Na Gramos<\/em>\u00a0(On Gramos, 1950), and\u00a0So na\u0161i race<\/em>\u00a0(With Our Hands, 1950) developed the themes of his earlier poems and were a further organization of his experience of revolution and national liberation.<\/p>\n With\u00a0Stihovi za makata i radosta<\/em>\u00a0(Verses of Sorrow and Joy, 1952) and\u00a0Slej se so ti\u0161inata<\/em>\u00a0(Merge with Silence, 1955) there came a turning point in \u0160opov’s poetry and conceivably in Macedonian poetry at large. Consistently writing out of individual experience, \u0160opov now began to address his readers as individuals rather than as collectivized humankind. These largely confessional lyrics on romantic lines are poems of feelings, sensuous evocations permeated by the emotions of resignation, pain, sorrow, weariness, parting, and melancholy, while yet retaining a belief in human values.<\/p>\n \u0160opov was writing affirmatively of beauty, love, and freedom in this transitional phase while also acknowledging the existence of ugliness, hatred, and slavery. In his third phase, that of the award-winning collection\u00a0Vetrot nosi ubavo vreme<\/em>\u00a0(Winds Bring Nice Weather, 1957), \u0160opov was engaged in delving as deeply as possible in search of himself, and the resulting poetry was often tinged with a dark melancholy.<\/p>\n The periods of \u0160opov’s poetry are not hermetically self-contained. What distinguishes them is a marked development at each stage in both range and complexity, with no loss of directness and with an increasingly sophisticated simplicity. If, overall, his first phase was one of a movement from the general to the personal and the second phase is marked by writing of a personal nature, the line of his third phase moves from the personal to the universal. These poems present the subject of love as their starting point and project a view of the world and its phenomena as essentially transitory. They present a more complex reality than his previous work, uncovering in the depths of the author’s own being that nonbeing that threatens everyone and everything and that constantly hovers in the atmosphere of a world where unrest is unending.<\/p>\n No longer either exclamatory or purely confessional, these poems are meditations on an unbeing that emerges not from unbeing as a transcendental system of ideas but from the poet’s own experience and his feelings toward the world he inhabits. In these poems of love with a cosmic dimension \u0160opov employs a wealth of symbols and ideas, finding a place for intellectual experience as well.<\/p>\n The existential questions posed in the poems in\u00a0Nebidnina<\/em>\u00a0(Unbeing, 1963) are developed in the next two collections,\u00a0Gleda\u010d vo pepelta<\/em>\u00a0(Reader of the Ashes, 1970) and\u00a0Pesna na crnata zena<\/em>\u00a0(The Black Woman’s Song, 1976), written out of the experience of the years 1971 to 1975, when \u0160opov was the Yugoslav ambassador to Senegal.<\/p>\n There is a fusion of content and spirit in a form that allows a certain ambiguity; the formal elements of rhythm and versification are not added decoration but are integral to the whole structure of the poetry as an organizing principle. The author’s main concern here is the conflict between humanity and the nature of existence and a resolution of that conflict. He achieves this resolution through the metaphors that extend throughout these three collections. As a proven craftsman, he presents his own experience of life together with the wider drama of human destiny in a reflective synthesis that reaches out to the limits of existence and occasionally to the realm of the absurd.<\/p>\n The confessional element is still found in these poems, but it has been rigorously refined. The verse is disciplined, highly organized, and taut, as he carries on an unsparing and at times terrible dialogue with himself, with his poetry, and with literature in general in a world that is often chaotic and indeed verges on the incomprehensible.<\/p>\n In \u0160opov’s later writing unbeing came to represent not only the tragic aspect of human nature but also a Promethean heroism, a Faustian exhilaration, a torch of Heraclitean fire burning in humankind and after and beyond an individual’s life. However fleeting human life, however tragic the history of the black peoples of Africa, however isolated the experiences of loss, sickness, and death, humankind is involved in an unceasing struggle through understanding to overcome transience, death, and nothingness.<\/p>\n \u0160opov sees the transcendence of these conditions as a reconciliation of darkness with light, of unbeing with love, of mutability with lastingness, and of life with poetry. Thus, an individual’s life and all upon which one has left his mark are transformed into symbols and memories that outlast him.<\/p>\n This is the substance of the poems of the poet’s last book,\u00a0Drvo na ridot<\/em>\u00a0(A Tree on a Bare Hill,\u00a01980), and those included in the selection\u00a0Luzna<\/em>\u00a0(Scar, 1980). In these poems \u0160opov achieves a coherent construction with no redundant word or image and a lively and pregnant imagery that binds together the experience of the author and the reader. The language of these poems is penetrating, resonant, and melodic.<\/p>\n Poetry is the tool with which the author explores life’s mystery, whether this suffuses the beauty of Africa despite the shadow cast by slavery, the lone tree in a bare Macedonian landscape, or the reflections of a clochard in a Paris hospital.<\/p>\n From his earliest work \u0160opov speaks with his own voice, but his voice developed and was refined in part through his work as a translator. Working mainly from Serbo-Croatian, Russian, and French, he translated into Macedonian, over a period of twenty years, an impressive list of world classics by authors including\u00a0Pierre Corneille,\u00a0Edmond Rostand, William Shakespeare (Hamlet,\u00a0<\/em>1960, and\u00a0Sonnets,\u00a0<\/em>1970), Miroslav Krle\u017ea,\u00a0Jovan Jovanovi\u0107-Zmaj,\u00a0Izet Sarajli\u0107, and\u00a0Dragutin Tadijanovic. In turn, his poems have been translated into many languages, including English.<\/p>\n After a long illness \u0160opov died in Skopje on 20 April 1982.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t Graham W. Reid<\/strong> (1938-2015) British philologist, taught English for twenty-five years at Cyril and Methodius University, in Skopje. In 1973 he and his wife, Peggy Reid, received the Struga Poetry Festival Translation Prize for The Sirdar<\/em> by Grigor Prli\u010dev.<\/p>\n The text has been published in the\u00a0Dictionary of Literary Biography<\/em>. \u00a92005-2006 Thomson Gale<\/p>\nCopyright Information: A lively and pregnant imagery Aco \u0160opov is one of the most important Macedonian poets. He was born on 20 December 1923 in \u0160tip, in eastern Macedonia, where he attended both primary and secondary school. Influenced by his mother, a schoolteacher who herself wrote love lyrics, \u0160opov’s poetic debut took the form of writing for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":71347,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-98693","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98693"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98935,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98693\/revisions\/98935"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/71347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Turning point in \u0160opov’s poetry<\/h2>\n
An increasingly sophisticated simplicity<\/h2>\n
A reconciliation of darkness with light<\/h2>\n
![\"Graham](\"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Graham-W.Read_-150x150.jpg\" "\\"Graham")
\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t
\n<\/strong>Graham W. Reid, University of Skopje. Dictionary of Literary Biography. \u00a92005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
\n\u00a92000-2013 BookRags, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOther articles about \u0160opov in English\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMultilingual bibliography of works on Aco \u0160opov\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"