Dinner with Fish and Mirrors E-Book

Ivana Milankova

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 70

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Ivana Milankov belongs to the first generation of poets from Central and Eastern Europe to be influenced by American anti-establishment poetry, including the Beat poets. Her own work, as a result, captures and rails against Serbia's rich historical and religious history. Hers is also an untiring effort to reach beyond the confines of the world towards mystical revelation, to communicate the incommunicable. Translated by Zorica Petrovic & James Sutherland-Smith. Ivana Milankov once translated the works of Allen Ginsberg on his tour of the former Yugoslavia, and subsequently worked with him in workshops in Colorado. She now works as an English teacher. James Sutherland-Smith was born in Aberdeen, and has lived in Serbia since 2002. His own collections include In the Country of Birds (2003) and Popeye in Belgrade (2008), both published by Carcanet. This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

Leseprobe

DINNER WITH FISH & MIRRORS

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright in the poems © Ivana Milankov, 2013

Translation copyright © Zorika Petrović & James Sutherland-Smith

Introduction copyright © James Sutherland-Smith, 2013

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2013 Design by Tony Ward 978 1904614 78 4 (pbk)

978 1906570 18 7 (hbk)

978 1908376 26 8 (ebk) Cover image: © Shamil Khairov, 2013 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of the translations in this volume have previously appeared in The Bow Wow Shop; in Čortanovci-Andrevlje 2011, the sixth volume of texts published by the International Writers’ Colony of the Serbian Literature Society; and in www.recoursaupoeme.fr This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part, nor of the whole, of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herewith.

‘Arc Translations’ Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

Ivana Milankov

Dinner withFish & Mirrors

ВЕЧЕРА СА РИБОМ И ОГЛЕДАЛИМА

Translated by

Zorica Petrović

& James Sutherland-Smith

2013

CONTENTS

Introduction: Animula, Vagula, Blandula

Хадријан, Сличности, Скривеној

•

Hadrian, To a Likeness, Hidden

Додатна Димензија

•

An Extra Dimension

Заповести

•

Commands

Exodus

•

Exodus

Писмо Губернатору

•

A Letter To the Provincial Governor

Писма из Персије

•

Letters From Persia

Непознатом Племићу

•

To an Unknown Nobleman

Десети, не Усуђујем се да Кажем ко би то Могао Бити

•

The Tenth, I Dare Not Say Who That Might Be

Јовану, у Дивљини

•

To John, In the Wilderness

Сенка пре мог Тела

•

A Shadow Before My Body

Други Долазак

•

The Second Coming

Балтички Профил

•

The Baltic Profile

Посетилац

•

Visitor

Подне у Стакленом Звону

•

Noon In a Glass Bell

Стаклено Поподне

•

A Glass Afternoon

Стаклени Поседи

•

Glass Property

Вечера са Рибом и Огледалима

•

Dinner With Fish and Mirrors

Варијација на Тему

•

Variation On a Theme

Маскарада

•

Masquerade

Слутим

•

I Have Forebodings

У Белим Угловима, док су ме Распињали

•

In the White Corners, While They Crucified Me

Не, Није Падала Киша, Тако је Говорила Касандра

•

No, It Wasn’t Raining, Thus Spoke Cassandra

Касандра у Врту са Орхидејама

•

Cassandra In a Garden With Orchids

Реквијeм

•

Requiem

„Сестре моје Крићанке…“

•

“My Cretan Sisters…”

Долазак Близанаца

•

Arrival of the Twins

Близанцу, Савет Први да не Улази у Сутон и Биљке

•

To the Twin, the First Advice Not to Enter Twilight and Plants

Високи Близанац

•

The Tall Twin

Халуцинације Бога Хермеса

•

The Hallucinations of the God Hermes

Маестро

•

Maestro

Одлазећем

•

To One Who Is Leaving

Дубок је Свет

•

The World Is Deep

Месечар

•

Somnambulist

Географија Блиске Наде

•

The Geography of Near Hope

36, the Richmond Bus

•

36, the Richmond Bus

Sorella Fiorentina

•

Sorella Fiorentina

Клеопатра, Последња Беседа

•

Cleopatra, the Last Speech

Зови Ме Атланта

•

Call Me Atlantis

Или Како Нисам Постала Бетон

•

In My Heart I Have the Spirit or How I Didn’t Become Concrete

Хадријан, Смислу и Облику

•

Hadrian, to Sense and Form

Учитељу Геометрије

•

To a Geometry Teacher

Рај

•

Paradise

Biographical Notes

INTRODUCTION: ANIMULA, VAGULA, BLANDULA

Ivana Milankov was born in 1952 in Belgrade, a propitious year as this was when the great triumvirate of Serbian modernist poets, Ivan Lalić, Miodrag Pavlović and Vaško Popa, began to make their mark. Although she lives in Belgrade, Ivana has roots in the Vojvodina, the Serbian region of the Pannonian plain that stretches north to the Hungarian border and the foothills of the Carpathians which run in a great arc from Serbia through Romania, Ukraine, southern Poland and northern Slovakia and taper to foothills in the south-west of Slovakia close to Bratislava. She spends her summers at a house belonging to her family in the part of Vojvodina known as Banat.

Ivana completed her education at Belgrade University in English language and literature and pursued her vocation as a poet, supporting herself as a teacher of English in secondary schools, and by translating. I met her as the translator prevailed upon – as she was almost every year by the Serbian Writers’ Association – to translate the poems I would read at the International Meeting of Writers in Belgrade in 2002. Invariably she would be given less than a week to render a slew of the visiting Anglophone poets’ work into passable Serbian versions and usually without the opportunity of consulting the poets over points of difficulty. Years before, Allen Ginsberg had met her in similar circumstances in Belgrade and, with his famous sympathy for the put-upon, had decided that there might be more to the waif-like young translator than the male, Yugoslav organizers of the meeting had let on. Ivana was invited to a workshop run by Ginsberg and Ann Waldman at the Naropa Institute near Boulder, Colorado. Later she spent some time in Poland, which is a source for some of the poems (such as ‘The Baltic Profile’) in this selection. In the 1980s Ivana was active in performance art and street theatre and this has given her poems an immediacy, a sense of how they ‘come into being’, of how they impinge on the reader’s consciousness and of where they might lead.

Fifty years ago, twentieth-century European poetry was introduced to British readers through the Penguin Modern Poets series. Poetry in what was then understood as Serbo-Croat was represented by Ted Hughes’s and Anne Pennington’s versions of Vaško Popa which focused only on a narrow part of the poet’s work, a world based on Balkan folk motifs – fragmented, anthropomorphic and harking back to Neolithic cultures. It has always seemed to me that an aspect of Popa’s poetry at a stage in his career where the potential for violence was contained within forms alien to the British poetic tradition coincided with a particular strand in Hughes’s poetry. In recent years the publication of Charles Simic’s translations of the poetry of Aleksandr Ristović and Radmila Lazić have reinforced the ‘pagan’ origins of Serbian poetry, while the twentieth-century connection of Serbian language poetry with European modernism evident in the work of Lalić and Pavlović (in Francis Jones’s exemplary translations of the former and in less visible Canadian translations of the latter), has been largely ignored.

Ivana Milankov’s poetry rehabilitates for the English reader the connections with a modernism informed by Serbia’s classical and religious culture. It is perhaps useful to remember that from the early third century to the late fourth century AD the Roman Empire was sustained largely by a series of Balkan-born soldier-emperors, many of whom originated from the territory that now comprises modern Serbia. Indeed, the Emperor Constantine, who made the most important decision for the religious-political history of Europe by adopting Christianity, was born in the southern Serbian city of Niš. Consequently, it is not surprising to encounter enormous cultural pride among Serbian intellectuals and there is a similar hauteur among Croatians. Milankov’s poetry draws part of its reference from the ancient presence of the Roman Empire and surrounding ancient civilisations of the Middle East, particularly with regard to the strain of mysticism passed from civilisation to civilisation even into the philosophy of Christianity. The animae of these civilisations inhabit her poems.

Bojana Stojanović Pantović, in her illuminating essay ‘Poetry of New Senses’, has aligned Milankov with post-modernist practice, drawing attention to the allusive nature of her poetry: “the hermetic images and scenes in which are distilled mythical, historical, literary and empirical fragments, never refer to their models directly.” This might appear puzzling to English readers accustomed to the crude representational and mimetic realism which still prevails in contemporary British poetry, but for me Milankov’s poetry has something in common with that of the Uruguayan poet, Ida Vitale (born 1923). The opening lines of Vitale’s ‘Moth, Poem’* could stand for how we might approach meaning in Ivana’s work:

In the air was

imprecise, tenuous, the poem.

Imprecise as well

the moth arrived.