Oranges and Snow: Selected Poems of Milan Djordjević
Milan Djordjević
Nov 2010 · Greenwood Publishing Group
Ebook
111
Pages
About this ebook
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic introduces and translates one of Serbia’s most important contemporary poets
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has done more than anyone since Czeslaw Milosz to introduce English-language readers to the greatest modern Slavic poets. In Oranges and Snow, Simic continues this work with his translations of one of today's finest Serbian poets, Milan Djordjević. An encounter between two poets and two languages, this bilingual edition—the first selection of Djordjevic's work to appear in English—features Simic's translations and the Serbian originals on facing pages. Simic, a native Serbian speaker, has selected some forty-five of Djordjević's best poems and provides an introduction in which he discusses the poet's work, as well as the challenges of translation.
Djordjević, who was born in Belgrade in 1954, is a poet who gives equal weight to imagination and reality. This book ranges across his entire career to date. His earliest poems can deal with something as commonplace as a bulb of garlic, a potato, or an overcoat fallen on the floor. Later poems, often dreamlike and surreal, recount his travels in Germany, France, and England. His recent poems are more autobiographical and realistic and reflect a personal tragedy. Confined to his house after being hit and nearly killed by a car while crossing a Belgrade street in 2007, the poet writes of his humble surroundings, the cats that come to his door, the birds he sees through his window, and the copies of one of his own books that he once burnt to keep warm.
Whatever their subject, Djordjević's poems are beautiful, original, and always lyrical.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has done more than anyone since Czeslaw Milosz to introduce English-language readers to the greatest modern Slavic poets. In Oranges and Snow, Simic continues this work with his translations of one of today's finest Serbian poets, Milan Djordjević. An encounter between two poets and two languages, this bilingual edition—the first selection of Djordjevic's work to appear in English—features Simic's translations and the Serbian originals on facing pages. Simic, a native Serbian speaker, has selected some forty-five of Djordjević's best poems and provides an introduction in which he discusses the poet's work, as well as the challenges of translation.
Djordjević, who was born in Belgrade in 1954, is a poet who gives equal weight to imagination and reality. This book ranges across his entire career to date. His earliest poems can deal with something as commonplace as a bulb of garlic, a potato, or an overcoat fallen on the floor. Later poems, often dreamlike and surreal, recount his travels in Germany, France, and England. His recent poems are more autobiographical and realistic and reflect a personal tragedy. Confined to his house after being hit and nearly killed by a car while crossing a Belgrade street in 2007, the poet writes of his humble surroundings, the cats that come to his door, the birds he sees through his window, and the copies of one of his own books that he once burnt to keep warm.
Whatever their subject, Djordjević's poems are beautiful, original, and always lyrical.
About the author
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, immigrated with his family to Chicago in 1954, and was educated at New York University, where he earned his BA in 1966. Although his native language was Serbian, he began writing in English. Some of his work reflects the years he served in the U.S. Army (1961--63). He has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts award. "My poetry always had surrealistic tendencies, which were discouraged a great deal in the '50's," the poet said, but such tendencies were applauded in the 1970s and his reputation consequently flourished. His poems are about obsessive fears and often depict a world that resembles the animism of primitive thought. His work has affinities with that of Mark Strand and has in its turn produced several imitators. His awards and honors included the PEN Translation Prize (1980), in 1990, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "The World Doesn't End.", the Wallace Stevens Award 2007, Frost Medal (2011), Vilcek Prize in Literature (2011), and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2014). He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007. Charles Simic died on January 10, 2023, at the age of 84.
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