Vasko Popa: Collected Poems

by Vasko Popa, Ted Hughes, Francis R. Jones (Translation)

Vasko Popa is one of the great post-war European poets. From surrealist fable to traditional folk-tale, from personal anecdote to tribal myth, Popa's poetry embodies in an original form the most profound imaginative truths of our age, precisely located in the reality and history of Serbia, in the heart of Central Europe. His Collected Poems is an essential work of our time. Vasko Popa (1922-91) was born in Vrsac in the Serbian Banat. He was elected to the Serbian Academy in 1972 and the Académie Mallarmé in Paris in 1977. He lived in Belgrade where he worked as an editor for the publishers Nolit. Anne Pennington (1934-81) taught at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she was Professor of Comparative Slavonic Philology. Francis R Jones has twice been awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize for his translations of Ivan V Lalic.

Genres: Poetry, Serbian Literature

464 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1969

About the author

Popa was born in the village of Grebenac, Vojvodina, Serbia. After finishing high school, he enrolled as a student of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. He continued his studies at the University of Bucharest and in Vienna. During World War II, he fought as a partisan and was imprisoned in a German concentration camp in Bečkerek (today Zrenjanin, Serbia).

After the war, in 1949, Popa graduated from the Romanic group of the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University. He published his first poems in the magazines Književne novine (Literary Magazine) and the daily Borba (Struggle).

From 1954 until 1979 he was the editor of the publishing house Nolit. In 1953 he published his first major verse collection, Kora (Bark). His other important work included Nepočin-polje (No-Rest Field, 1956), Sporedno nebo (Secondary Heaven, 1968), Uspravna zemlja (Earth Erect, 1972), Vučja so (Wolf Salt, 1975), and Od zlata jabuka (Apple of Gold, 1978), an anthology of Serbian folk literature. His Collected Poems, 1943–1976, a compilation in English translation, appeared in 1978, with an introduction by the British poet Ted Hughes.

On May 29, 1972 Vasko Popa founded The Literary Municipality Vršac and originated a library of postcards, called Slobodno lišće (Free Leaves). In the same year, he was elected to become a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Vasko Popa is one of the founders of Vojvodina Academy of Sciences and Arts, established on December 14, 1979 in Novi Sad. He is the first laureate of the Branko’s award (Brankova nagrada) for poetry, established in honour of the poet Branko Radičević. In the year 1957 Popa received another award for poetry, Zmaj’s Award (Zmajeva nagrada), which honours the poet Jovan Jovanović Zmaj. In 1965 Popa received the Austrian state award for European literature. In 1976 he received the Branko Miljković poetry award, in 1978 the Yugoslav state AVNOJ Award, and in 1983 the literary award Skender Kulenović.

In 1995, the town of Vršac established a poetry award named after Vasko Popa. It is awarded annually for the best book of poetry published in Serbian language. The award ceremony is held on the day of Popa’s birthday, 29 June.

Vasko Popa died on January 5, 1991 in Belgrade and is buried in the Aisle of the Deserving Citizens in Belgrade’s New Cemetery.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm no longer here
I haven't moved from the spot
But I'm not here now

Let them come in
Let them look let them search

The watermill in the shadow of the ribs
Grinds the ripe void
Fag ends of cheap dreams
Smoulder in the ashtray
I'm no longer here

A moored boat rocks
On the red waves
A few unripened words
Hang in the cloudy throat
I'm no longer here

I haven't moved from the spot
But I'm far away now
They'll scarcely catch me

— — —

He fell for a beautiful
A rounded blue-eyed
A frivolous endlessness

He is quite transformed
Into the white of her eye

Only she understands him
Only her embrace has
The shape of his desire
Dumb and boundless

All her shadows
He has captured in himself

He is blind in his love
And he sees
no other beauty
But her he loves
Who will cost him his head

— — —

After the third evening round
In the yard of the concentration camp
We disperse to our quarters

We know that before dawn
Some of us will be taken out and shot

We smile like conspirators
And whisper to each other
Be seeing you

We don't say when or where

We've given up the old way
We know what we mean

— — —

A fat gaudy rope
Crawls between the constellations
And can scarcely get through

At each starry crossroads
It ties itself a knot
To remember all the paths

Its endless end
It ceaselessly draws
Out of the blue womb of heaven

It crawls between the constellations
Towards the very heart of the world
And never gets tangled

[крсн · Rating 5 out of 5]

Зауставио ме непознат човек
На углу моje улице

Реците ми молим вас
Пишу ли се песме ножем
На људској кожи

Јесу ли руке песника
Црвене од трагова слова

Реците ми ви то знате

[PGR Nair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collected Poems of Vasko Popa

Translated by : Anne Pennington

Vasko Popa is considered the greatest Serbian poet of last century. From surrealist fable to traditional folk-tale, from personal anecdote to tribal myth, Popa's poetry embodies in an original form the most profound imaginative truths of our age, precisely located in the reality and history of Serbia, in the heart of Central Europe. Popa could be grouped with Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, two other astonishingly original East European poets, whose works were plainly unlike anything written in Britain or the United States.

Popa was born in 1922 in an area north of Belgrade called Banat, where the population was a mixture of Serbs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians. His father was a record clerk and afterwards worked for a bank; his mother was a housewife. He went to school in the town of Vrsac, and in his last year there he discovered Marxism: he continued to think of himself as a Communist for the rest of his life. The war began for Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, when the country was attacked simultaneously by the German, Italian, Bulgarian and Hungarian Armies and quickly occupied. Nevertheless, that autumn, Popa, following his parents’ wishes, went to Bucharest to study medicine. He left after a year, and went to Vienna to read philosophy. On a visit home in May 1943, he was arrested and interned in a concentration camp. He was somehow released in September and returned to Vienna, where he enrolled in French and German literature classes and also worked as a tram conductor. He did not return to Vrsac until shortly after the Liberation. There he promptly joined the Communist Party and soon afterwards moved to Belgrade to study French language and literature at the university. It was a most unusual wartime itinerary, as his Communist Party dossier suspiciously pointed out at the time. In Belgrade, Popa began his literary career, editing and writing for a weekly paper; eventually he became an editor at a prestigious publishing house, where he remained until not long before his death in 1991.

The symbolist poetry of Mr. Popa, a modernist, was widely hailed as the finest in the Serbian language and an artful mix of folk poetry and surrealism. His language was succinct, often aphoristic and elliptical, and it focused on the specific over the abstract. He avoided rhyme while using humor and proverbs to explore the universal themes of life, love, fate and death. He was admired for being inventive and entertaining and for using paradoxical images and forceful rhythms to dramatize the senselessness, ironies and tragicomedies of life. The English poet Ted Hughes lauded him as an "epic poet" with a "vast vision" and added, in an introduction to the collected poetry: "As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a universe passing through a universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made."


Here are some samplers from the collected poetry ably translated by Anne Pennington who was a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford where she held the university’s Chair of Comparative Slavonic Philology.

Conceited Mistake

Once upon a time there was a mistake
So silly so small
That no one would even have noticed it

It couldn't bear
To see itself to hear of itself

It invented all manner of things
Just to prove
that it didn't really exist

It invented space
To put its proofs in
And time to keep its proofs
And the world to see its proofs

All it invented
Was not so silly
Nor so small
But was of course mistaken

Could it have been otherwise

In the above poem, Popa imagines the creation of the world as an accident; a small, silly error that invented space and time. A silly little mistake can get compounded by another and yet another in a vain attempt to cover the initial error, until it reaches gigantic proportions.


Here is another poem that shows Popa’s comic version of how the world began in ‘A Forgetful Number’ from the cycle ‘Yawn of Yawns’:


A Forgetful Number


Once upon a time there was a number
Pure and round like the sun
But alone very much alone


It began to reckon with itself


It divided multiplied itself
It subtracted added itself
And remained always alone


It stopped reckoning with itself
And shut itself up in its round
And sunny purity


Outside were left the fiery
Traces of its reckoning


They began to chase each other through the dark
To divide when they should have multiplied themselves
To subtract when they should have added themselves


That's what happens in the dark


And there was no one to ask it
To stop the traces
And to rub them out.

Here is another poem written in lighter vein that shows his penetrating ability to observe the sly games played by men for their survival


Race

Some bite from the others
A leg an arm or whatever

Take it between their teeth
Run out as fast as they can
Cover it up with earth

The others scatter everywhere
Sniff look sniff look
Dig up the whole earth

If they are lucky and find an arm
Or leg or whatever
It's their turn to bite

The game continues at a lively pace

As long as there are arms
As long as there are legs
As long as there is anything

Ref: Vasko Popa: Collected Poems [Paperback] Vasko Popa (Author), Anne Pennington (Translator), Francis R. Jones (Translator),
A Suspect in the Eyes of Super-Patriots by Charles Simic

[Gabrielle Danoux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Commençons, dans un souci de clarté, par les références de l'édition : elle est de 1977, éditeur Carcanet de Manchester, traduction d'Anne Pennington, introduction de Ted Hughes. On y retrouve les recueils suivants (les poèmes complets de 1943 à 1976) : "Bark" [Écorce], "Unrest-Field" [Le champ de l'intranquillité], "Secondary Heaven" [Paradis secondaire], "Earth Erect" [La Terre se dresse], "Wolf Salt" [Sel de loup], "Raw Flesh" [Chair crue], qui sont complets, plus des poèmes isolés de "The House on the Highroad" [La Maison près de la grande route] et de "The Iron Garden" [Le Jardin de fer].
L'oeuvre de Vasko Popa a eu plus de retentissement dans les pays anglo-saxons qu'en France, où un recueil a toutefois été traduit, moins complet. L'ambition d'exhaustivité du recueil permet de se rendre compte de son évolution, que je résume schématiquement : le premier recueil rappelle un peu Francis Ponge (la citation donne une bonne idée de son contenu), les deux suivants sont plutôt métaphysiques, le quatrième traite plus spécifiquement de son pays, la Serbie, et du sentiment national, le cinquième file la métaphore du loup et de son rapport à l'homme, le sixième traite du village où vivait le poète, les derniers extraits deviennent plus universels.
Les premiers poèmes sont souvent très réussis : on part d'un élément commun (la mousse, la poule, le pissenlit) pour arriver, dans une forme très brève, à esquisser une réflexion abstraite, comme sur cette mousse, qu'on imagine remplir le monde. La suite, éclairée par la glose historique de la traductrice, est imprégnée de Saint-Sava, suivi d'une meute de loups, image des ancêtres du poète, qui, dit-il, leur parlaient plus facilement qu'aux hommes. Enfin, les derniers recueils, mes préférés avec les premiers (mais il en va souvent ainsi avec les éditions complètes), cheminent à partir du local (Vasko Popa faisait partie de la « municipalité littéraire » de Vershats) vers l'universel : on y trouve des allusions aux camps de concentration, ou à d'autres poètes, Nikolaus Lenau, par exemple, si bien que les tout derniers changent même de décor, se retrouvent au Mexique pour une dédicace à Octavio Paz. Noter qu'en filigrane, le livre n'est pas dépourvu d'humour, malgré ses descriptions souvent tragiques, notamment de massacres historiques.
Un bref ajout un peu plus personnel : Vasko Popa faisait partie de la minorité roumanophone de Serbie (si, si, cela existe !), comme Ioan Baba ou d'autres, dont les textes, même en roumain, sont hélas, quasiment introuvables. À ses débuts, il a écrit aussi en roumain, si bien que ses poèmes ne sont pas tout à fait complets, n'ayant pas tous été écrits en serbo-croate. Je traduis ci-dessous, pour les personnes intéressées, un poème qu'il a écrit en roumain en 1947 :

Attablé avec la tristesse

Si le vin pleure
si le vin rit
tu te tais
et mentent les fleurs

Va-t'en avec le violon
les yeux fermés
ne reviens plus
va-t'en

Dehors il neige
le rêve laisse des traces
ne rêve pas

Et le ciel qui est dans le verre
lui aussi est étoilé

Si le vin chante
tu te tais

Avec qui danse
mon sourire ?

Dis-leur, s'il te plaît
d'oublier que chanson je suis
Il a du blé vert me dis-tu
Entre les paupières

Dehors il ne neige plus
à qui la faute
si le vin s'en va
ne les rappelle pas

[La masã cu tristețea

Dacã vinul plânge
dacã vinul râde
tu taci
Și florile mint

Pleacã cu vioara
cu ochii închiși
nu te mai 'napoia
pleacã

Afarã ninge
visul lasã urme
nu visa

Și cerul din pahar
și el are stele

Dacã vinul cântã
tu taci

Cu cine danseazã
zâmbetul meu ?

Te rog sã le spui
sã uite cã sunt cântec
Zici cã are grâu verde
între gene

Afarã nu mai ninge
cine-i vinovat
dacã vinul se duce
tu nu-i chema]

[Ana Atanasković · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proces je bio i ostao krug. Čitala sam knjigu koja mi je delovala inspirativno za temu novog romana na kome radim (ispostavilo se da je dobrano prevazišla moj instinkt) a onda u njoj naiišla na dva stiha Vaska Pope koji su me podsetili kako je njegova poezija pozitivno razorno uticala na moje shvatanje književnosti i pisanja u davno doba druge ili treće godine mojih studija. Pozitivno razorno, da, parčići su se razleteli svuda, parčići rečenica, reči, misli, poimanja, osećanja, dok sam čitala Popu, pa su se onda sastavljali u nove oblike. To je Popa, rastavljač i sastavljač, razornik, vulkan, pobednik poezije. Jer, malo ko mu može parirati i posle ovoliko godina. Popa je glavni "krivac" što sam najkritičnija prema poeziji. Ona, prosto, mora da bude vrhunska, revolucionarna i anti-korenska da bi bila dobra.
I onda sam, neplanirano, ponovo čitala Popu.
O, kakva energija ispod kratkoće. O, kakva promisao ispod zavrzlama. O, kakva poezija! Gađa u glavu, razbija, lomi...a pritom je volim, volim. Volim tu polugu od reči i ritma koja me savija. "Njive su nestale sa polja", nestajem i ja. I onda se stvaram, nova, među zvezdama padalicama.

[Zeitgeist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ova zbirka je čarobna! Treba čitati Popinu poeziju, upijati je i prepustiti se magiji njegovih neobičnih i dubokih slika.

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see why Charles Simic was a fan of Popa's work! There are some surrealist similarities between the two poets in how they approach the objects of their peculiar attention.

Here is one of my favorite poems in this collection by Popa titled "Chair":

The weariness of wandering hills
Gives its shape
To her sleepy body

She's always on her feet

How she would love
To dash downstairs
Or dance
In the moonlight of the skull
Or just sit down
Sit down on someone else's curves of weariness
To rest

[Vicki Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful poems. Love the style!

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I understand why Popa's poems resonate with so many people, and there are some startling images in this book, but among the Eastern Europeans, Popa's poems do less for me than many of his contemporaries.

[Harley · Rating 5 out of 5]

great poet

[j.e.rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Your hands flower / In the faraway desert within me..."

[Gary McDowell]

Library?