Poetry
Дахире
Not translated into English
Jovan Ilić · 1891
Synopsis
Poems of love and languor written on the model of the sevdalinka, the love song of the towns of Bosnia. They contain its familiar figures: the dert, the gnawing sorrow, the sevdah, melancholy desire, and the ašik, the lover who is consumed. The pieces are short, musical and meant to be sung, and their title names the tambourine that accompanies them. The vocabulary is full of Turkish words, which the poet does not translate.
Context
The collection comes at the end of its author's long interest in the East. He had already included in a collection of 1858 pieces on the dert and the sevdah, in the tradition of oral song, and in 1889 he published an article on the sevdalinka singers of Bosnia. In the eighties he had moreover renewed his manner, to the point of writing verse without metre and seeking sound more than sense. The collection belongs to this second period, in which he wrote most of his oriental poems.
Who it is for
Short pieces, made to be sung. It helps to know what a sevdalinka is, and to accept a vocabulary in which borrowings from Turkish are numerous and rarely translated.
Prizes and reception
With its pastoral poem, the best-known book of its author, and one of those in which critics see the coming of Serbian poetic modernity.