For this week’s Translation Tuesday, memories of a pastoral youth emerge as an urban woman’s coming-of-age in these selections from Serbian poet Radmila Petrović. Our speaker alternates between moments of bittersweet nostalgia for her erstwhile village life (“The Curse of the Woods”), and a reckoning with the violent patriarchal norms of her home (“Forest, Plow, Primrose”). This sequence of poems demonstrates a liberated wisdom beyond the stifling lessons of past generations, a voice which confronts the brutality of patriarchy—and even the alleged inefficacy of poetry itself—with an acerbic wit (“Above Your Collarbones,” “Just Checking”). Petrović’s verse masterfully bridges a bitter, world-weary narrative voice with moments of childlike vulnerability (see especially the power of maternal silence in “The Language of Plants”), and deploys bucolic images alongside moments of bodily destruction. Of particular note is the poet’s use of line breaks (here captured by the superb translation from Jovanka Kalaba and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać) to almost mimic the process of gradual, episodic recollection—and the hesitation warranted by traumatic memory.
The Curse of the Woods
does never came near the households
we would see them when we headed uphill
to pick rosehips for jam
one summer while mowing a meadow
Father accidentally mowed a fawn
the mountain wailed at sunset
ever since that day I have always
walked in front of the mower
moved rabbit kits out of the way
catapulted snakes with a pitchfork
ever since that day I have carried the curse of the woods
your doelike heart sees yellow hunting dogs
in my eyes
my fingers feel like blades of a mower
You can’t do this anymore, you said
Mother put my legs out with the hay
this morning
for the cows
Above Your Collarbones
come on, call me
I want to show you
how much soul I can
pour into the hollows
above your collarbones
Just Checking
don’t be too happy about it
I’m not thinking about you
I’m just checking
if poetry
can still excite me
The Language of Plants
Mama, I dream of meadows
letting cows out to graze
rains that make our language of plants
branch and grow
around whose neck
sentences will wrap like ivies
as they dissolve the facades
of family houses
Mama, I live in a city
but I’m a miner
trapped under burdens of the land
that so far has
come down through the male line
and when I was born
it became a dowry
as the sun sets down
the boundaries of our land are outlined
on my palms
much like the sound of water
a second before boiling
so I hear the thriving of our
plants
some words are so tender
that we keep them in greenhouses
should we let them in on it, Mama?
the language of plants
has nothing to do with where you’re from
the language of plants is spoken by a mother and
a daughter
when they don’t talk enough
Forest, Plow, Primrose
I feel the souls of female
ancestors
who suffered at men’s
hands
they clung to me when
I left for Belgrade
and now they won’t go home either
they say to me: slice them like aspic!
with a look or
a kitchen knife?
or the penknife I carry in my pocket?
I will, just not this one
especially not this one! they order me
of all I could have been in the world
I was just a woman, says
Radovanka
in the countryside, we never thought
much of dogs
and being a woman was worse than being a dog
your great-grandfather was like a spring
says Dobrosava, cold and
cross
we slept in a brandy vat
when he brought me to this house
he hanged me like a cat that ate all the chickens
and all that was because of the brandy
strength, don’t let yourself be
anyone’s
get out of my poems!
you too only wanted sons
who later smashed your
heads
you learned nothing from misery,
old women
it was all in vain
Translated from the Serbian by Jovanka Kalaba and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Radmila Petrović (1996, Užice) grew up in the village of Stupčevići close to the town of Arilje. She graduated from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. As the winner of the forty-second Lim River Poetry Evenings (Limske večeri poezije), she published the collection of poems entitled Miris zemlje / The Smell of Earth (Dom kulture “Pivo Karamatijević,” Priboj, 2014), and as the winner of the twenty-second Desanka Maksimović Poetry Competition, she published the collection of poems Celulozni rokenrol / Cellulose Rock’n’Roll (SKZ & Valjevska gimnazija, Valjevo, 2015). Her poems can be found in anthologies and online magazines. She took part in a number of poetry readings in Belgrade. She has attended several creative writing workshops. Her third collection of poems Moja mama zna šta se dešava u gradovima / My Mom Knows the Kind of Things that Happen in Cities was published by the PPM Enklava publishing house at the beginning of summer 2020. Her poems are being translated into English, French, Greek and Hebrew.
Jovanka Kalaba is Editor-at-Large for Serbia at Asymptote, an English Language and Literature graduate, with a PhD in Philology (Comparative Literature) from the University of Belgrade, as well as a literary translator from/into the Serbian language. She is the translator of Jovanka Živanović’s Fragile Travelers, published by Dalkey Archive Press. She can be reached via jovanka.kalaba@gmail.com and is on Instagram @kalabina_odmor_kuca
Ellen Elias-Bursać translates fiction and non-fiction from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, including work by David Albahari, Ivana Bodrožić, Daša Drndić, Kristian Novak, Robert Perišić, Dubravka Ugrešić, Karim Zaimović. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer was given the 2006 ALTA National Translation Award. Her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War was given the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015. The Serbian Center of PEN International honored her in 2017 for her translations of Serbian authors. She is the president of the American Literary Translators Association.
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