Vasko Popa

by Vasko Popa, Charles Simic (Introduction)

Vasko Popa is widely recognized as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, a riddling fabulist, whose work, taking its bearings from the songs and folklore of his native Serbia and from surrealism, has a dark gnomic fatalistic humor and pathos that are like nothing else. Charles Simic, a master of contemporary American poetry, has been translating Popa’s work for more than a quarter century. This revised and greatly expanded edition of Simic’s Popa is a revelation.

Genres: Poetry

126 pages, Paperback

Published June 25, 2019

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

[Krys]

This thoughtful and cohesive selection of Vasko Popa’s poetry marks my first encounter with him. I liked that the themes of Popa’s early poems took on a different resonance in his later poems. His poetry is mostly fabulist, inspired by children’s rhymes, creation myths and folklore, and embroidered with surreal flights of imagination. With a single line break, the initial childlike naivety and irreverence in his poems can hint at brutality or destruction. The line between the sacred and the profane, good and evil, life and death is less a boundary than it is a game or a high wire act, where the rules are never clear and are constantly changing. There isn’t any choice but to keep playing.

I liked all the later poems about wolves and I’d say that the cumulative effect of Popa’s poetry is more interesting than any single poem. Here’s one about ‘the little box’ that winks playfully at creation myth.

The Benefactors of The Little Box

We’ll return the little box
Into the arms
Of her small honest properties

We won’t do anything
Against her will
We’ll simply take her apart

We’ll crucify her
On her own cross

Puncture her bloated emptiness
And let ooze
The blue cosmic blood she gathered

We’ll sweep her clean of stars
And anti-stars
And everything else rotting inside her

We won’t make her suffer
We’ll simply put her together once again

And restore to the little box
Her chaste insignificance

[Kaylee]

Wow. So rarely do i love i mean really love every single poem of a collection A new favorite for sure

[Wyatt]

Midway through this collection, I was worried that Vasko Popa would end up as the type of poet I enjoy more in theory than in practice. I immediately appreciated the way that he uses surrealism and absurdity in his work, but I found some of his poems to be beguiling without much specific language to lack on to.

By the end, though, I was glad to have stayed the course. As his work becomes more overtly focused on the imagery of the Wolf, I found myself enjoying the poems more, to the extent that I was frankly astonished by some of them. Therefore: recommended.

[Mike]

Poems that alternate from nonsensical surrealism to oversimplified images of the natural world and folklore. Popa's cycles will take up a topic – a "lame wolf," a pebble, a spring, a "little box" – and then riff on that topic for several brief poems in a way that neither illuminates nor provides any novel perspective.

Simic’s introduction mentions that when Popa's first collection was published in English, he was grouped with Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, but I’m not sure why, since he shares nothing in common with either, except for the fact that he was alive at the same time and European, I guess. Simic lets slip that after the publication of one collection of poems, “admirers often [found] themselves clueless as to what they meant.”

I agree, and I’ll go one step further: I don’t care what they meant, either.

[Green Lion]

There are some lovely pieces but I think the jacket's blurbing oversells it. Then again, I'm more canonfocused than Celanpilled, and something tells me Simic and I aren't in close accord. I think the pieces improve as they move on, gain some concreteness and folkloric quality. The Little Box, etc-- a bit abstracted for my taste. The sensation of cognition without determinate objects isn't my aesthetic golden calf; i like specific beauties, and ones less adrift in jagged lines.

[Tom]

Combines knowledge of folklore with affinities for surrealism and word play to create poems describing myths of imaginary conditions, often funny.

[Weatherly]

I LOVED THIS SO MUCH.

I've never heard of Vasko Popa before (Google tells me I'm ignorant and he's one of the most recognized and famous poets of the 20th century but honestly Google there are a lot of people in the world stop being so condescending, goddamn.)

I loved almost every single poem in this. There were a few 3/4 of the way through from a later collection that I didn't connect with as much as all of the others, and I thought maybe the earlier ones were a fluke (I'm fickle like that), but then the last two collections had me weak again, and a few of them had me crying.

His writing is just. Fucking. Beautiful. And it feels really raw, vulnerable, accessible... He's using metaphors and fairy tales and telling the truth, which is my favorite kind of writing. And doing it through poetry in a way that's page-turning... So rare.

It reminds me of Brand New Ancients by Kate Tempest (which came much later, of course, but I read much earlier), the way it weaves mythology up out of the words, creating new stories as well as recreating old ones. Just so GOOD. SO GOOD. Definitely a favorite I'm going to revisit. It's been a long time since I've had this kind of reading experience that got to my heart in such an intense way.

[Jimmy]

This is a collection of poems by Vasko Popa translated by Charles Simic. In the Introduction, Simic speaks of how "in the long run it may turn out much of the most original literature in the last century did not come from the ranks of the various mainstream and avant-garde movements but was the work of complete outsiders whose prose and poetry were a mix of native and foreign influences and the product of their own ingenuity." He believes the poetry of Vasko Popa, who died in 1991, "belongs in that select company."

He was first published in 1969 with an Introduction by Ted Hughes who grouped Popa with Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, "two other astonishingly fine East European poets whose poems were unlike anyone's in the West." Popa's work includes "a strange mixture of surrealism and folklore." But "no Serbian poet bears a resemblance to Popa." And "the kind of poems he eventually ended up writing had no precedent anywhere."

Simic notes how Popa "anthropomorphizes abstract ideas, attributes human form or personality to things not human, the way our most ancient ancestors did."

A fascinating and extremely different kind of poetry.

[Jeremy]

Most of these strange, playful, surrealistic, and minimalistic poems grew on me after some reflection and re-readings. This is a small but well-curated sampling of Popa's career by Charles Simic. The first cycle of poems (from an early collection) about a formless pebble is a perfect way to get acclimated to his style. Later towards the end of his career, we get a cycle of splendid poems about a little box, and it feels we've gone full circle. Simic writes a great intro and gives us some much needed context (esp. about the wolf poems).

[Alana]

The arcane illogics of a child’s game mirror war’s absurdities, at once senseless yet leaving every part of the suffering body bruised. Self-sustaining fable-like cycles offer terse reflections on fate transmuted through simple objects revered in a sparse world of loss; or cryptic riddles in the sky offered as celestial mirror to our world; or the subterranean life of bones taken up in a danse macabre. Tragicomically cute and simple as a charm scribbled on scraps of paper planted in the earth and left to rot. Leaving its pleas in riddles effortlessly unanswered and unsolved.

[Dakota Easbey]

Vasko Popa made me fall in love with poetry. I strongly recommend this selection! Simic’s translation preserves Popa’s unique diction beautifully.

“I am a bone you’re a bone
Why did you swallow me
I can’t see myself anymore

What’s wrong with you
It’s you who swallowed me
I can’t see myself either

Where am I now

Now no one knows any more
Who is who or who is where
It’s all nightmare dust dreamed

Can you hear me

I can hear both you and me
And the cockspur within us crow”

[RD Chiriboga Moncayo]

Puzzling and fascinating surrealist poetry from a Serbian language master.

[jake!]

This was so good!

Poems I loved: In the Sun and Homage to the Lame Wolf

[Laura Daniels]

This was the January Poetry Foundation Book Club selection. Vasko Popa was a Serbian Marxist and editor of a prestigious publishing house in Belgrade until he died in 1991. His poetry involved surrealism, folklore, and gameplay. He tried to describe how to live when being torn between self and world without him being the hero of his poems. His poetry had much humor, and it was easy to read, and he anthropomorphized abstract ideas.
He noted that great poems were works of infinite patience and acts of critical thinking.