Anthology-Preface: Ivan Antić
Translation: Saša Đorđević
Bojan Vasić, Đorđe Ivković, Uroš Kotlajić, Ivana Maksić, Anja Marković, Bojan Marković, Radmila Petrović, Maša Seničić, Tamara Šuškić, Marko Stojkić
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I think that, except in a close circle of Slavs, the phenomenon of Serbian surrealism is not well known in the world, although to it, mainly thanks to the friendship of Marko Ristić with André Breton, belongs the exclusivity of history coexistence with French surrealism. And not just surrealism: in the time between the two world wars, several original movements appeared in Serbian literature, such as the Sumatraism of Miloš Crnjanski, hypnotism of Rade Drainac or zenithism of Ljubomir Micić, while in the latter’s magazine, Zenith, were published original articles by Mayakovsky, Blok, Khlebnikov, Pasternak, Trotsky, Kandinsky, Picasso and others.
Through this selection of Young Serbian Poets run the desire to rise the rank on which contemporary Serbian poets, consciously or unconsciously, have been happy debtors of the aforementioned avant-garde, but also of later neo-avant-garde currents. Therefore, it is not surprising that a literary critic, writing for this generation, felt the need to invent the term third avant-garde.
Sometimes, however, my assumptions that Serbian Poetry is not well known worldwide is in question. Like when, for example, the publisher of Ugly Duckling Press recited a poem by Branko Miljkovic by memory. Or when I read the letter of T. Šalamun to his sister from the early seventies, in which the poet, with a hint of justified poetic jealousy, admits that he is surprised at the fact that Vasco Popa’s popularity in America is on the rise. With the paraphrase of Popa’s verse, Charles Simic entitled his anthology The horse has six legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (Graywolf, 1992). However, Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry (Dialogos Press, 2016), another anthology worth mentioning, published only a quarter of a century later.
I only mentioned the English translations: if this happens with the language in which Serbian poetry is translated the most, it is easy to guess how things are with translations into other languages. Therefore, I hope that this anthology will guide readers after first meet with contemporary Serbian poetry, to seek other translations of the poetry of Dušan Matić, Rastko Petrović, Vasco Popa, Miodrag Pavlović and others.
According to this basic historical-poetic bias of the curator, in this anthology one can recognize a certain resistance to too simple readability, that is in the poetry of simplicity and direct communication. Such poetry is dominant today and paves the way for itself: the mobility of this poetry is reflected in all phenomena, through a more effective impact on public readings, through easier work for translators, up to a greater representation at international festivals. For this reason it seemed important to me to give at least a small advantage to poets who have no power over the “media”, who do not run publishing houses, are not editors of magazines, do not organize festivals, as well as those who are not (too much or not at all) present in social networks, but write good, strong poetry.
The poets of this anthology of Young Serbian Poets are, for the most part, the marginalized poets of density, of image density, of metaphor and meaning, as well as silent engagement, with only a few exceptions to a more explicit social critique.
Ivan Antić