‘Warmth shifts moods’: 2 soothing Serbian poems on loss and longing for the chilly days ahead
Mount Tara in Serbia. Image: Nemanja .O. via Unsplash
With the arrival of winter chill, our lives become smaller. Over the colder months, our homes and the objects surrounding us play an even greater role in our daily lockdown routines. With this in mind, we’ve selected two Serbian poems that reflect on and help navigate this change and find comfort in the present moment.
19 October 2020
The Beginning of Cartography
Written by Marija Knežević and translated by Sibelan Forrester
To be a thing
without use value.
To be a thing that gains value over time
though no one knows why.
To let yourself be called
a decorative item.
To hear that you’re superfluous.
To hear they can’t make it without you.
To breathe inside yourself.
To change owners.
To be unpossessed.
To be an object of admiration.
To change locations,
to avoid migration.
To be satisfied.
To be a ship.
Face turned to the seafloor to be
on both sides of the deep.
To leave a trace
not for eternity.
To sail in.
To sail out
the same way.
To be loved in harbors.
To be a ship.
To love
the better part of life in the open sea
to dream of harbors.
To avoid waiting. To move
always by the same path
from harbor back towards it.
Entranced by the nets on deck.
To transform cargo into stories.
To be a ship.
To bear yourself without effort.
To be kin. To anyone.
To men, women, algae,
tigers leaping at a deer,
lotuses settled in their own tears,
islands, caves who have at least one
chamber unexplored
to be related.
To love you
and never to learn it.
To be always suddenly
new joy and unexpected pain.
To avoid existence.
A drop
on your skin
that’s already a memory of touch.
The drop’s already another drop.
To be actually never.
To be now.
Singularity in passage.
Marija Knežević is an award-winning poet, editor, writer and translator based in Belgrade. Born in 1963, she studied Comparative Literature as a BA at the University of Belgrade and as an MA at Michigan State University. She has authored eight collections of poetry and 11 novels. This poem is part of her new bilingual anthology, Breathing Technique, published by Zephyr Press. You can get your copy here.
[I lost even the thing]
Written by Danica Vukićević and translated by Biljana D. Obradović
I lost even the thing
I didn’t have
The cord for the horoscope wheel
Tickets for fast trains
And decorations for a small forest fir
Oh, if I could measure
Where would a Chinese inventory fit
With nice Japanese things
And those ringing apparitions
Fog in the evening, and early in the morning in winter
The sun looks on with a cow’s white eyelashes
As I lie turned to stone in
A blue bed
And I see nothing but the essence
Of nothing; warmth shifts moods
A little work, a little movement, a table set for
A special occasion, wine,
A dotted line as in
A Pointillist painting, as in the houses I have not
Painted.
Danica Vukićević is a poet, editor and writer based in Belgrade. Born in 1959 in Valjevu, Vukićević studied Comparative Literature at Belgrade University. She has authored six volumes of poetry and two books of short stories. The poem above is part of the anthology Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry, published by Dialogos. Get your copy here.
