This post is also available in: Macedonian French Spanish German Russian Albanian
Aco Šopov: Poems (Песни) 1944, 2014
Here are Aco Šopov‘s first nine poems ever to be published in a book. It so happens that this book is also the first book to be published in the Macedonian language in free Macedonia, in 1944, at the end of the Second World War.
These thirty pages bear witness to a period when, according to the expression of the author (in 1973) “fighting (fascism) was the only way to make sense of one’s life, the only way to live one’s youth or rather, to even have a youth.”
The publication’s genesis is interesting. In October 1944, Kumanovo Regional Headquarters of the Macedonian Anti-fascist Youth Federation photocopy Sopov’s nine poems and send them to Mlad Borec (Young Fighter), the Yugoslav partisan magazine, the offices of which are located in a forlorn village in Macedonia. Brana Perović, fighter and teacher within the Central Committee of the Federation, who was in the office at the time, took the poems and brought them to Belgrade where the printing equipment was better.
The magazine’s editors in Belgrade published the poems in book form. Copies of this book are then taken to the second Macedonian Anti-Fascist Youth congress in Skopje by a delegation of the Serbian Anti-Fascist Youth and given to the Macedonian participants.
Seventy years later, Sigmapres in Skopje and the Aco Šopov Foundation publish a facsimile of this book. They promote it at the Macedonian Writers’ Society (7 October 2014), as well as during the launch of Aco Šopov’s Lyrical House at the Saints Cyril and Methodius Univertity of Skopje (8 October 2014).
As a souvenir of this historic event, the publishers gave the public some 300 copies of the facsimile.
More information on the 70th anniversary of Poems.