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 Krle\u017ea 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.<\/p>\r\n
\u0160opov 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 <\/i>[Stihovi na makata i radosta<\/i>] in 1952, a month before Krle\u017ea’s speech, and the turn from social topics to intimate themes sparked controversy in the Macedonian press.<\/p>\r\n
\u0160opov continued to develop this personal lyricism in his next two books, Merge with the Silence<\/i> [Slej se so ti\u0161inata<\/i>] (1955) and The Wind Carries Beautiful Weather<\/i> [Vetrot nosi ubavo vreme<\/i>] (1957), both of which won Macedonia’s Ko\u010do Racin Prize for poetry.<\/p>\r\nA Turning Point in Macedonian Poetry<\/h2>\r\n
As the literary scholar Graham W. Reid noted, this period marked \u00ab\u00a0a turning point in \u0160opov’s poetry and conceivably in Macedonian poetry at large.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0Consistently writing out of individual experience,\u00a0\u00bb Reid continues, \u00ab\u00a0\u0160opov now began to address his readers as individuals rather than as collectivized humankind.\u00a0\u00bb Merge with the Silence<\/i> and The Wind Carries Beautiful Weather<\/i> are notable, too, for poems in which \u0160opov thematizes his destiny as a poet, such as \u00ab\u00a0I Seek My Voice\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Go baram svojot glas\u00a0\u00bb] and \u00ab\u00a0At the Lake\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Na ezero\u00a0\u00bb] in the former collection and \u00ab\u00a0The White Sorrow of the Spring\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Bela taga na izvorot\u00a0\u00bb] and \u00ab\u00a0Call Me Sky\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Ka\u017ei mi nebo\u00a0\u00bb] in the latter. Also striking is his use of the lyric miniature-jewel-like poems of no more than eight lines.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n
Not-Being<\/i> [Nebidnina<\/i>] 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<\/i> opens with one of \u0160opov’s key poems, \u00ab\u00a0Birth of the Word\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Ra\u01f5anje na zborot\u00a0\u00bb], which serves as a prologue to the cycle \u00ab\u00a0Prayers of My Body\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Molitvi na moeto telo\u00a0\u00bb]. 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.<\/p>\r\n
On the morning of July 26, 1963-the same year that Not-Being<\/i> 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. \u0160opov responded to the disaster with some of his most powerful poems, including \u00ab\u00a0Horrordeath<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Grozomor\u00a0\u00bb], \u00ab\u00a0August<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Avgust\u00a0\u00bb], and \u00ab\u00a0Lament from the Other Side of Life<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Ta\u017ea\u010dka od onaa strana na \u017eivotot\u00a0\u00bb]. These works first appeared in 1964 and 1965 in the literary journal Modernity <\/i>[Sovremenost<\/i>], with which \u0160opov 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 \u00ab\u00a0At Five Seventeen\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Vo pet i sedumnaeset\u00a0\u00bb], 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.<\/p>\r\n In 1970, \u0160opov published Reader of the Ashes<\/i> [Gleda\u010d vo pepelta<\/i>], which consisted entirely of poems written since Not-Being<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\r\n Opening with the cycle \u00ab\u00a0The Long Coming of the Fire\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Dolgo doa\u01f5anje na ognot\u00a0\u00bb], it moves to eight more loosely connected poems of cataclysm and self-examination, which are grouped under the heading \u00ab\u00a0Reader of the Ashes.\u00a0\u00bb This is followed by two more cycles, each of three poems: \u00ab\u00a0Black Horsemen, White Riders\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Crni konjanici, beli konjici\u00a0\u00bb] and the apocalyptic \u00ab\u00a0Black Sun\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Crno sonce\u00a0\u00bb]. 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. \u00ab\u00a0The fire is here, beneath these mad waters,\u00a0\u00bb \u0160opov declares in the opening line of the poem \u00ab\u00a0The Long Coming of the Fire,\u00a0\u00bb restating this a few verses later as \u00ab\u00a0The fire is here, underneath this hide\u00a0\u00bb and commanding us (and himself): \u00ab\u00a0Dig, \/ dig it up.\u00a0\u00bb The desire to reach some primordial creative\/destructive force that is also deep within us-already present in Not-Being<\/i>-now in Reader of the Ashes<\/i> 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.<\/p>\r\n By the early 1970s, \u0160opov 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 Ko\u010do Racin Prize, for Reader of the Ashes<\/i>. As early as 1947 he had been one of the eight founding members of the Macedonian Writers’ Association, and in 1951 he started the Ko\u010do 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]. \u0160opov 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, \u0160opov published a series of poems satirizing various aspects of contemporary Yugoslav society, which he collected in 1968 under the title Jus-univerzum <\/i>(a possible translation might be The YUniverse<\/i>), Macedonia’s first book of satirical verse.<\/p>\r\n \u0160opov 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 L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar Senghor, one of the founders of the N\u00e9gritude 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, \u0160opov 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. \u0160opov’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.<\/p>\r\n \u0160opov’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 \u0160opov it went deeper than that. In the poem \u00ab\u00a0Into the Black Woman’s Dream\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Vo sonot na crnata \u017eena\u00a0\u00bb], he addresses \u00ab\u00a0the Black woman\u00a0\u00bb-a symbol of Africa itself-as \u00ab\u00a0a 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.\u00a0\u00bb In his African poems, \u0160opov’s pursuit of that creative\/destructive impulse, which he expressed so powerfully in Reader of the Ashes<\/i> and Not-Being<\/i>, 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 \u0160opov articulates the idea, in \u00ab\u00a0An Event by the Lake,\u00a0\u00bb that the discovery of the world and the discovery of one’s native land are inextricably connected. Upon his return to Macedonia, \u0160opov published The Song of the Black Woman<\/i> [Pesna na crnata \u017eena<\/i>, 1976], for which he received the Miladinov Brothers Award at the Struga poetry festival.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n 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 \u0160opov’s effort to bring his discovery of the world to his homeland. Translation, indeed, was something \u0160opov 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 \u017dupan\u010di\u010d’s collection of children’s verse Ciciban<\/i> (from Slovenian). Other translations included Eduard Bagritsky’s Lay of Opanas<\/i> (from Russian, with Slavko Janevski) and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac<\/i> and Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid <\/i>(from French), as well as, from Serbo-Croatian, poets such as Jovan Jovanovi\u0107 Zmaj, Grigor Vitez, Miroslav Krle\u017ea, Izet Sarajli\u0107, and Dragutin Tadijanovi\u0107. Most notably, he translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet<\/i> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n In 1976, \u0160opov 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<\/i> [Drvo na ridot<\/i>], 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 \u0160tip. Despite its themes of illness and impending death, The Tree on the Hill<\/i> is suffused with light, love, and transcendence.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n In 1981, \u0160opov published his last book, Scar<\/i> [Luzna<\/i>], which brought together a large number of poems from across his lyric books since Merge with the Silence<\/i>, along with his beloved poem \u00ab\u00a0Eyes.\u00a0\u00bb \u0160opov 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.<\/p>\r\n He died on April 20, 1982, at the age of fifty-eight, leaving behind his wife, Svetlana, and two children, Vladimir and Jasmina.<\/p>\r\n 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, \u0160opov’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.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n All three centennial translations, as well as several others before, were initiated by Jasmina \u0160opova, 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 \u0160opov’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<\/i>-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.<\/p>\r\n Neither translator had much experience with collaborative translation, nor had we read \u0160opov. Rawley, with Christina’s help, was just beginning to learn Macedonian. So we began tentatively, taking our first steps \u00ab\u00a0in a kind of fog that is both frightening and exciting,\u00a0\u00bb 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 \u0160opov’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 \u0160opov had created a remarkably coherent conceptual system-a poetic universe-and that it was essential to convey this in our translations.<\/p>\r\n A salient example was our handling of the Macedonian word pesna<\/i>, which can refer either to a song or a poem. It is a key word for \u0160opov, who at times even addresses it directly, as in \u00ab\u00a0Reader of the Ashes,\u00a0\u00bb one of the first poems we translated. That poem opens with the words \u00ab\u00a0Izgasni pesno .\u00a0.\u00a0. <\/i>\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Burn out, pesna .\u00a0.\u00a0. <\/i>\u00ab\u00a0]. Since it seemed likely that the poet could be addressing the poem he was writing, or hoped to write, we initially translated this as \u00ab\u00a0Burn out, poem .\u00a0.\u00a0. \u00a0\u00bb But much later, when we were working on the cycles in the book Reader of the Ashes<\/i>, it became clear that \u0160opov’s notion of pesna<\/i> 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 \u00ab\u00a0song of old\u00a0\u00bb in \u00ab\u00a0The White Sorrow of the Spring\u00a0\u00bb) and the mysterious female figure who appears in Not-Being<\/i>. In the poem \u00ab\u00a0Black Sun,\u00a0\u00bb for example, the speaker exclaims: \u00ab\u00a0O pesna<\/i>, land, woman, O life and death at once, \/ whatever you bring me today, I will thirstily drink up.\u00a0\u00bb With this in mind, we reviewed our earlier translations and, in most cases, changed \u00ab\u00a0poem\u00a0\u00bb to \u00ab\u00a0song.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\r\n 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<\/i> and knew that we wanted to present this masterwork as a whole. The same was true when we reexamined \u0160opov’s previous book, Not-Being<\/i>. 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<\/i> and The Tree on the Hill<\/i>. We were reluctant, however, to start the book right off with the Prayer Cycle (as Not-Being<\/i> does) and so decided to follow what \u0160opov did when he was organizing Scar<\/i>, using the same two poems-\u00ab\u00a0Down Below There Is a Blood\u00a0\u00bb and \u00ab\u00a0Scar\u00a0\u00bb-to lead the reader into \u0160opov’s poetic world. We should also note that, while \u0160opov generally did not revise his poems once they had been published in a book, in cases where variations do exist, we take the Scar<\/i> version as the basis for our translation.<\/p>\r\n 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. \u0160opov often blurs the boundaries between subject and object, between the one who acts and the one who is acted upon. In \u00ab\u00a0Second Prayer of My Body\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Vtora molitva na moeto telo\u00a0\u00bb], 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 \u00ab\u00a0August<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb \u0160opov’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.<\/p>\r\n 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<\/i> book<\/i> and the<\/i> book<\/i> parallels the contrast in Macedonian between kniga<\/i> and kniga<\/i>ta<\/i>. Macedonian also developed an optional, although by no means regular, indefinite article from the number one, edna, <\/i>that does not always correspond to the English article a<\/i>\/an<\/i>-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 \u00ab\u00a0Down Below There Is a Blood,\u00a0\u00bb which translates the Macedonian \u00ab\u00a0<\/i>Ima dolu edna krv.\u00a0\u00bb Using the indefinite article with the mass noun \u00ab\u00a0blood\u00a0\u00bb sounds a bit strange, and, in fact, in earlier drafts we decided against it. But \u0160opov’s use of edna<\/i> is also odd here, and we made it a general rule to \u00ab\u00a0trust the poet.\u00a0\u00bb Our final version of the title seeks to capture the strangeness and strength of the original.<\/p>\r\n 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<\/i>, for instance, may indicate possession (\u00ab\u00a0of\u00a0\u00bb), location (\u00ab\u00a0at\u00a0\u00bb), or the indirect object (\u00ab\u00a0to\u00a0\u00bb). 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 \u00ab\u00a0August<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb about nets offers a good illustration of such dilemmas. In Macedonian, it reads: \u00ab\u00a0Ribarite na tvojot pogled pletat nevidlivi mre\u017ei,\u00a0\u00bb which could be rendered, more or less word-for-word, as \u00ab\u00a0The fishermen in\/of your gaze weave invisible nets.\u00a0\u00bb One of our early drafts interpreted the phrase na tvojot pogled<\/i> as \u00ab\u00a0in your view\/sight,\u00a0\u00bb suggesting that the fishermen are seen by the speaker (who is speaking to himself here). But then we wondered if na<\/i> could indicate possession: \u00ab\u00a0the fishermen of<\/i> your gaze\u00a0\u00bb-as if they were somehow weaving their nets inside the eyes. Our final draft became: \u00ab\u00a0The fishermen in your eyes weave nets unseen,\u00a0\u00bb a wording that allows for both readings and captures the kind of subject\/object ambiguity typical of \u0160opov: are the fishermen seen by the gaze or are they themselves the vehicles of sight?<\/p>\r\n Other challenges related to \u0160opov’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 \u00ab\u00a0Horrordeath<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb the solution was relatively easy: the Macedonian title, \u00ab\u00a0Grozomor,\u00a0\u00bb is a compound the poet coined from the word groza<\/i>, meaning \u00ab\u00a0horror,\u00a0\u00bb and the Slavic stem -mor-<\/i>, which relates to large-scale death and destruction. Rather than use an ordinary English word such as \u00ab\u00a0horror,\u00a0\u00bb we devised our own compound.<\/p>\r\n There are, indeed, a fair number of coined words in these poems, and we did our best to reflect them in our translation. But \u0160opov’s most famous coinage, a word that feels more like a discovery than an invention, is nebidnina<\/i>, 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<\/i>, \u00ab\u00a0to be,\u00a0\u00bb with the negating prefix ne<\/i>. So perhaps nonbeing<\/i>, nonexistence<\/i>, or unbeing.<\/i> But it is clear from the poems in which it appears that it refers to something more than nonexistence or simple nothingness. \u0160opov himself, in various interviews, discussed the difficulty of defining the word. As he was preparing the book for publication, he noted that the title \u00ab\u00a0could mean, roughly, something that is impossible, something that will not be realized\u00a0\u00bb and that he was using it to underscore the paradox that \u00ab\u00a0poetry, however much we might understand it and create it as something essential, as something more than what we usually understand by the concept ‘life’ .\u00a0.\u00a0. is still, even in its most perfect form and highest achievements, incapable of grasping all the richness and complexity of this concept.\u00a0\u00bb Many years later, in a magazine interview, he explained: \u00ab\u00a0Nebidnina<\/i> 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.\u00a0\u00bb 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<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n \u0160opov 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<\/i> 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: \u00ab\u00a0I strive for a kind of formal perfection and want this formal perfection to also be justified internally by the content.\u00a0\u00bb \u0160opov’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.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n \u0160opov 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 \u00ab\u00a0If There Isn’t Enough Light for You<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Ako ti nedostasuva svetlina\u00a0\u00bb]. 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<\/i>, coming immediately after the \u00ab\u00a0Lament from the Other Side of Life\u00a0\u00bb 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.<\/p>\r\n The love is reciprocal. Many Macedonians can still recite verses learned in school from the Partisan poem \u00ab\u00a0Eyes\u00a0\u00bb and they are familiar with the story of the heroic woman it celebrates. The four-line poem \u00ab\u00a0In Silence\u00a0\u00bb [\u00ab\u00a0Vo ti\u0161ina\u00a0\u00bb], which joins form and content near perfectly, is similarly widely known and cherished. The word nebidnina<\/i> 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 \u0160opov’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 \u0160opov’s poetry.<\/p>\r\n Taken as a whole, one might be tempted to view \u0160opov’s work as a trajectory of self-exploration. A poem from the 1950s is titled, with charming obviousness, \u00ab\u00a0I Seek My Voice,\u00a0\u00bb and twenty years later, as he visits the House of Slaves in Senegal, he declares: \u00ab\u00a0here my primordial passion has summoned me \/ to discover my archetype\u00a0\u00bb (\u00ab\u00a0The Light of the Slaves\u00a0\u00bb). But such an assessment misses the mark. With \u0160opov, 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.<\/p>\r\n 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 \u0160opov’s fire burns in these translations.<\/p>\r\n Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer<\/p>\r\n Introduction to Aco \u0160opov’s bilingual book The Long Coming of the Fire = \u0414\u043e\u043b\u0433\u043e \u0434\u043e\u0430\u0453\u0430\u045a\u0435 \u043d\u0430 \u043e\u0433\u043d\u043e\u0442, selected poems<\/em><\/a>, translated by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, and published by Deep Vellum in 2023.<\/p>\r\nA Towering Figure on the Literary Scene<\/h2>\r\n
A Genuine Connection With Africa<\/h2>\r\n
\u0160opov’s Poetic Legacy<\/h2>\r\n
Translating \u0160opov<\/h2>\r\n
How to Preserve the Integrity of the Poet’s Vision<\/h2>\r\n
Challenges<\/h2>\r\n
A Reciprocal Love<\/h2>\r\n
![\"\u0420\u043e\u043b\u0438](\"https:\/\/www.acosopov.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/Ch.-E.-Kramer-Rawley-Grau-UNESCO-2023-WEB-300x221.jpg\" "\\"Ch.")
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