Srbija - nacionalna revija - broj 54 - engleski - niska rezolucija

B E L V E D E R E S
MILOVAN DANOJLIĆ, WRITER, ABOUT THE SOIL, LANGUAGE AND WORLDS
VISITING A POET
Condemned to Waiting
and Faithfulness
The soil has nowhere to go from itself, nor do I from it. It gave me, it will take me back. The most
difficult slavery is the one we unconsciously carry. Danger begins where the path of self-denial starts,
the trap of the “Stockholm syndrome”. Those in power used to keep their subjects in illiteracy, while the
present ones understood that semi-literacy gives better results. Pop culture is a spice of the consumer
view of the world. Intellectual servants constantly rush to the one who is currently strongest. Our basis
is beyond time, in the invisible, in the beyond-historical
Text:
Vesna Kapor
and NR Press
Serbia, real and integral, beats in his sentence.
The warm and open one, with
both feet on the ground, full of ancient
images and poems, bareheaded in the wheat,
craving for St. George’s Day rain. The one that
studied good schools, constantly visiting the
library, knows that Homer and gusle players
were hammered on the same fire. And the
oak tree one, bringing the sun in its bosom,
looking up towards the heavens, with roots
in its depths. Thus he can sing both a lullaby
and a requiem, both in Poitiers and in Ivanovac
near Ljig.
Milovan Danojlić (Ivanovac, 1937), one
of the most significant Serbian writers today,
answered the questions of National Review
with ancient solidness, as if incising his
words in stone.
In your poetry, the deep cosmic acts together
with the personal, which often disintegrates
and lives in the collective. That is your path:
Ballad of...
Born in Ivanovci near Ljig in 1937. Graduated from the Faculty
of Philology, Department of Romance Languages, in 1973.
Published more than seventy books of belletristic in Serbian,
covering all genres, from children poetry to novels (“A Kind of a
Circus”, “Ballad of Poverty”, “Personal Things”, “Liberators and Traitors”…).
Winner of numerous reputable awards. Translated important
works of Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Pound, Yeats, Cioran,
Claudel… into Serbian. Lives in Poitiers, France since 1984, where
he worked as lector at the University and associate at the Paris radio.
Member of Serbian Academy of Art and Sciences since 2000.
Regularly spends a part of the year in his native village.
from the “cope of heaven and starry arch”,
in a romantic manner, it descends into the
depths of the personal and flies above the
collective?
Personal experience and feeling of things
in literature is effective as far as it is able to
be shared with others. Ever since he began
to sing and narrate, verbally and in writing,
a human has been asking a few existential
questions and replying to them in different
ways, without any final conclusion. The
most personal things are at the same time
expressed as universal, whilst the reader, in
difficultly communicated secrets, recognizes
with joy his or her own intimate states and
feelings. There are, certainly, different levels
of satisfying the same spiritual thirst. Some
drown their sorrow for the irreversible transience
of life in a kafana, listening to the
song “Take everything life has to offer, today
you’re a flower, tomorrow a withered rose”,
while others do it in a concert hall, enjoying
compositions of Tchaikovsky and Brahms.
Homer, Ovid, Horatius, Dante, Shakespeare,
Goethe, Pushkin and Chekhov – who
could list them all? – are our contemporaries,
more actual and more interesting than the
daily newspaper bought this morning. Able to
transfer us to faraway lands and even further
away époques faster than any jet plane. A human
is an ancient cosmic animal; he has seen,
experienced and expressed all sorts of things.
What is the kind of time when “everyone fed
their own wolf”?
72 SRBIJA • BROJ 54 • 2016.