Lannan Translations Selection #15: Dark Things

Novica Tadic is Serbia’s leading poet and the linguistic heir to Vasko Popa. With this translation, US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Charles Simic brings the full range of Tadic’s dark beauty to light:

I dream how on a flat surface
I set down knives of various
shapes and sizes.
Already there are so many of them
I can’t count them,
or see them all. Someone’s being done in
by those knives.

Novica Tadichas won most major Serbian literary awards, including the prestigious Laureat Nagrade. Charles Simic’s latest poetry collection is That Little Something(Harcourt, 2008).

"Tadic may be the foremost living poet of Serbia: the short introduction from translator and former U.S. poet laureate Simic calls the Belgrade-based Tadic 'a poet of the dark night of history,' and recent Serbian history, with its atrocities, its dictators, its victims of retaliatory bombardments, is behind Tadic's sorrowful, anguished short poems. Yet the 'dark things' of the titular poem are at once 'close and far away,' 'stirring in our hearts': they are less topical than they are spiritual, folkloric, chthonic. The poet is at once perpetrator and casualty, his guilt exceptional and yet widely shared. His settings without contemporary reference, like minimal stage sets, provide backdrops for nightmarish exclamations: 'I'm a cross of human flesh/ on which nothing is crucified.' A few poems even bring in vampire legends. But only rarely do Tadic's poems topple over into gothic caricature; more often they measure the depths of a blasted despair, and they gain — for all their individual brevity — cumulative force. Simic translated the Serbian master's earlier poems previously: this volume, selected from verse published in Serbian since 2001, seems certain to get more attention, since Simic himself is now much better known. (July)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Novica Tadic is Serbia's leading poet and the linguistic heir to Vasko Popa. With this translation, US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic brings the full range of Tadic's dark beauty to light: Novica Tadic has won most major Serbian literary awards, including the prestigious Laureat Nagrade. Charles Simic's latest poetry collection is That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008).

US Poet Laureate Charles Simic translates Serbia's leading poet Novica Tadic. Includes Introduction by Charles Simic.

Novica Tadic was born in 1949 and has lived most of his life in Belgrade. The author of fourteen previous collections of poetry, he is the most-respected living Serbian poet, and the linguistic "heir"to Vasko Popa. His collections include, The Object of Ridicule, Monster, and The Unknown. Tadic has won most major Serbian literary awards including the Laureat Nagrade.