Against madness and forgetfulness

And if he was not a native of Belgrade, Charles Simić would be a miracle of a man. On the surface, it looks like the embodiment of the American dream: in 1953, when he was fifteen, his parents decided to leave Tito's Yugoslavia and took him first to Paris and then to New York. During high school, he began to write poems in his newly mastered English (and a novel, which he quickly abandoned), after which he continued his education at New York University, while working, and when he graduated, he enlisted in the army, where he spent two years . While in the army, he realized that everything he had written until then was worth nothing ("literary vomit", he later said), burned everything and started from the beginning. The first collection of poems (What he says Lock, 1966) brought him critical acclaim, and over the next forty years he published more than sixty books, mostly poetry and some essays, and won every possible American literary prize, including the Pulitzer (1990, for the collection The World se ne ends). Since 1973 he has settled in a house on the shore of a lake in the beautiful and wooded state of New Hampshire, where until recently he taught at the local university. Today, he is widely considered to be one of the greatest living American poets.

However, nothing about Simić, least of all his poetry, is what it seems at first glance. For decades, critics have tried unsuccessfully to categorize the poet who cites Emily Dickinson, the French surrealists and the legendary bluesman Fats Waller as his greatest role models, and the New York jazz scene from the fifties and sixties and Serbian folk tales and riddles as crucial influences. That is why he is regularly honored with contradictory qualifications: "mangup visionary" and "scholarly fella" are some of them, and the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney describes him as "a surrealist, therefore also a comedian, but with a specific weight that escapes the usual empty lightness that is the punishment for surrealists ". Simic himself claims that he is hard-line (hard-nose) realist: "Surrealism means nothing in a country like ours, where millions of Americans have allegedly been abducted by aliens, and where the cities are full of homeless people and madmen who go around talking to themselves." In one of his most beautiful poems (Chest) says: "The dying old janitor/ who demands that his wife/ show him her breasts for the last time/ is the greatest poet who ever lived."

A certain contradiction is also related to Simić's attitude towards his own Serbian, i.e. Belgrade roots: although he says he is an American, and has always written exclusively in English, he has translated a lot of Serbian poets, from Vasko Popa to Novica Tadić, but he has never tried to translate own works in Serbian. Although he rarely came to his old homeland, Simić never severed ties with it, through the press and the Internet, but also through conversations with those lucky people from Yugoslavia whom the trip brought to New Hampshire. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, he repeatedly raised his voice against nationalist madness in the independent media, which the local patriots never forgave him, but when the wave of Buka patriotism swept America after September 11, Simić was among the first American intellectuals to stand up in defense of common sense, and against the war in Iraq.

After a long break, Simić came to Belgrade to present his book of memories at the Book Fair Frightening paradise and held a lecture at the Faculty of Philology. For the first time in his life, he stayed in a hotel in his hometown, and for the first time he was welcomed as a star, obsessed with cameras and journalists.

"WEATHER" Kada th the last one put bili u Belgrade?

CHARLES SIMIĆ: 24 years ago, in 1982.

Da li th set here came kao tourist or kao neko ko se returned na my?

Cocoa feeling you have a?

It's strange, but somehow I don't feel like I haven't been here in twenty-four years. Maybe because I'm constantly following what's going on here. I mean, I'm a Serb, and now here I am among Serbs (laughs). But I'm always shocked when I come to my old neighborhood, on Palilula, around Maje Jevrosima Street, Takovska, because somehow everything seems smaller and smaller to me. It was the same when I was there in 1972 and 1982. The old quarter seems smaller and smaller to me. And that always makes me terribly excited. Today I was walking along the street of Mother Evrosima, and, interestingly, I remembered many things that I hadn't thought about in a long time. I grew up in Majke Jevrosima Street, I went to school in Dečanska Street, and later to the Second Male Gymnasium, and I often went to school through bypass streets, because there were various gangs that were at war with each other and that I had to avoid. Even today, while I was walking, I realized with amazement that, even after so many years, I remember every gate in that area, and how quickly it closed when you had to escape through them, and how complicated it was to go to school.

Once th mentioned da th 1949. years na basement the window one buildings u neighborhood broke glass, i da th, kad th the last one put bili here 1982, saw da je the rest broken. Jesu li ga u meanwhile repaired?

They didn't. I actually broke two windows, one they fixed and the other they didn't. The tenants in that building are eternally quarreling with each other, and all these wars and accidents did not affect the settlement of those people, and for that reason, apparently, those windows were not repaired either.

I what kind je feeling kad you see da se the city na I th adults it is not in general changed?

I really don't get that feeling anywhere like when I see the house where I grew up. It's as if behind the door of that house are still all my old people, who died long ago, my grandmothers, aunts, that they are crouching somewhere. Since everything remained as it was, I find it incredible that only they have disappeared.

Vi like double you speak Serbian. They spoke th o influence which je Serbian poetry i tradition had na vessel.

She had. Now less. In the sixties, I was very interested in the American poet Theodore Rathke, who used American folklore, the way Vasko Popa collected Serbian folklore in his famous anthologies. Golden apple or Midnight Sun. At that time, I also met Popa, who was then in full force, and we became very close. He told me a lot about the folk tradition, under his influence I saw its connection with surrealism, and loved it all very much. That period was very important for me as a poet, but I no longer deal with it.

Once th said: "Abandoned language je Second language. " Da li je Serbian za vessel strange language?

Well, it is. Today, I don't speak Serbian for months. I speak when I hear from, for example, Vladimir Pistala. I regularly read local newspapers, literature, follow politics, but it happened that I didn't speak Serbian for several years. So even though I can speak in Serbian, it never occurs to me to write in it. My first poems were published in English in 1959, and at the very beginning, while I was writing in English, sometimes a Serbian word would pop into my head. But that was a long time ago. I have translated from Serbian, and I am still translating, for example, I translated Novica Tadić, Radmila Lazić, as well as many older poets, but when I write, think, reflect, the Serbian language is no longer present. After fifty-three years, it's somehow logical.

Kada th this one put came u Serbia, welcomed th kao zvezda. First interview th therefrom u a taxi na way sa airport, hold on lectures, ima vessel na title sides of all novine. Da li VAM je to unusual?

Yes, I am surprised. I'm not someone who wants and wants to be a star, so I don't live like that. This is okay because it lasts for a few days. But when they wait for you as a star, then they expect you to say something very smart about things that are very difficult to say something smart about. And even if the man talks for hours, and is much smarter than I am - "give a solution for Kosovo", "say how America will love Serbia again" (laughter).

Looking sve te inscriptions, thought sam da ova Earth maybe i it is not tako bad, ako neko kao Charles Simic can da post office zvezda.

And perhaps many have forgotten what I have been saying all these years against Serbian nationalism. When all that madness started, in the nineties, I remember being called on the radio, asking what I thought about Milosevic, about this, about that. They usually called around two in the morning, because of the time difference, and then I said in my rusty Serbian what I thought, that he should collapse, and then reactions followed that this Simic was not a Serb, that I was from such and such families... What nonsense! No one in my life annoyed me more than my family, some of my uncles and aunts, because of them I wanted to run my head into the wall. Well, I felt the same way listening to those reactions from Serbia. And then, I often traveled to Paris at that time, I usually went to lunch with Bata Mihajlovic and I got to know that Serbian colony in Paris. And then it was: "You don't understand anything, Charlie, we have to separate from them, never with them again..." I say that it can't be done peacefully when the peoples are mixed... It's boring to repeat all those stories about war . Still, it was a very interesting era for me, I followed what was happening carefully, but until the end I didn't believe that things would go that far. And that made me wonder what a people, nation, politics, president, history is... I wrote a lot about it. Of course, I was also annoyed by how they spread that story in the West, and how the Serbs are evil and that they are to blame for everything, and how these other wonderful people and democrats, to put it simply. All this drew me closer to this environment than I expected. On the other hand, nobody remembers what I said then, what the late Stojan Cerović and many other smart people said.

Ta culture forget which th mentioned je like present here, ali to opens one much wider Question. One your collection se is calling Against forget.

Well, it's the same in America, where nobody ever remembers what happened two or three years ago. Maybe the whole modern world is like that. It's fantastic how Serbia from those years somehow resembles today's America. For example, the idea that all problems can be solved by sheer force. They tell me: "Charlie, you don't know them, they only understand force." And I think: "Where have I heard that before?". (laughter)

U one earlier interview th said da je poetry za vessel pre everything defense od good collective blocks kojima nose continuously they fill up.

Yes, poetry is a defense of individuality. It is a way for a person to defend himself from everything, from his tribe, family, religion... Poets have always been on the sidelines, and poetry is the only place where a person can say: "Listen, it's all beautiful, all your historical plans, etc. ., but I have my own life. I'm here alone, and I'm trying to understand these stars, this woman I love, my city, the garden he's working on... For me, the idea of ​​a national poet is completely incomprehensible, even when you take someone like Walt Whitman. Seventy years after his death, he was declared the national poet, and he himself wanted to be, but when you look, Whitman was writing about himself all the time.

Da, ali vi th i near distinctly individualistic attitude exceptionally engaged. You react na political events, you sign petitions, hold on lectures...

That's right, but always only in a personal name. I have always instinctively feared the collectivity, perhaps because I grew up under communism. It, poets, workers, youth, must, want, need... My whole family is like that, they were all anarchists and somewhat adventurous. They were not very happy to accept national and other holy things, and that must have left a mark on me. On the other hand, sometimes a person simply has to say something, for the sake of his own soul, even if he is aware that it will not change anything. When injustice happens, it must be said. Defense of the nation cannot be a justification for crime. In a way, what happened in Yugoslavia forced me to think about those things, to ask myself where it comes from...

Je li VAM tako prepared easier da se face it sa similar collectivist phenomena u America, sad kad je started u tome direction?

It's not easier. Madness is never easy, especially when it's repeated.