Poetry
87 песама
Not translated into English
Miodrag Pavlović · 1952
Synopsis
Eighty-seven pieces by a very young poet, written in a city emerging from war, where nothing celebrates what was then expected of a poet, neither victory, nor labour, nor the future. The verse is free, the sentence brief, the image hard, and the thought looks beneath current events for older gestures, as if the peoples of the Balkans were unknowingly replaying what others had lived before them.
Context
The collection appeared in 1952, the year in which, after a speech by Miroslav Krleža, the Yugoslav authorities loosened their constraints on the arts. Literary histories always cite it together with a collection by Vasko Popa published the following year: the two books form the “poetic putsch” that put an end to the utilitarian poetry of socialist realism. It was reissued in 1979, 1999 and 2003.
Who it is for
Short pieces, in a dry tone and dense language. It is better to know what official Yugoslav poetry demanded in 1952, in order to gauge what this book refused.
Prizes and reception
The legendary collection that made its author the radical modernist of Yugoslav poetry, and one of the two beginnings of postwar Serbian modernity.