from Airplane Without an Engine

Ljubomir Micić

Marvelous marvels boarding platforms are
Anywhere above Europe
High above European bordellos and bars
Wouldn’t you say Mata Hari you immaculate virgin
Boats or airplanes
Sailing dappled seas oil-slicked from ships
Trample over corned feet Lady Asquith
In the soccer stadium of the Leviathan
At last
To watch a radiofilm in the ninth heaven

                                    EUROPE

                                        OR

             THE DEMISE OF A PUFFED-UP FROG



At least Madagascar
Afghanistan or Kuku-Nor
Zanzibar or Hamilton
The Urals or Durmitor
Argentina
The Equator
Kangaru




Sailors
Chimneys
Mermaids
Cannons
Binoculars
Captains

                          ?

                                             is there any
                                              room left
                                                   for
                                         the Balkan man


Behold weary helmsmen dreaming
In spite of romantic dreams
I’ll rewrite the rules of poetry in reality
Never mind
Of all the poets on earth

Let only the new ones defend the heart and soul of the new life
It’s no bother
Women give birth in large numbers following bouts of seasickness
Women kiss the rags that they swaddle their babies in
Which is why I like neither dreamy poets nor snotty-nosed women

In a dream
I hopelessly fled from muddy floods
And in vain I strutted in royal feathers
In truth I flounder in Balkan mud and stumble over skeletons

In the eyes of my horned fate
I haven’t found a port




At night
I kept hurling black cloths at the unsightly cheeks of haggard days
But in the morning I stroke my wife’s marvelous hips and back
If she maidenly permits

People
Don’t fear my love
They’ve lapped enough of our blood of
Milk Milk Milk
of sun-drenched milk
Weep you humanists
Today I think like a barbarian
Tomorrow we’ll be humanity’s haiduks again

Hellooooooooooooooooooo
I leap headlong into my ideoplan
To smash the hollow engines in the factories of the whorish press
O the vanquished
O the conquerors
I will slay all of the Western pilots with my ideoplan
I have already bent the pan-European spine over the Danube
I built a bridge without iron and repairs for the Balkanites

Hellooooooooooooooooooo




Our bridge is an earthly rainbow
East versus West
Here: our new freedom: bridge
There: your new life: descent

Quake-o-earth
Temblor — tremor — Temblor — tremor — Temblor — tremor
In my honor
My countrymen wait for the moment when the ravens come to peck me to death

Grandfathers tubby wise men
Anti-zenithists stretch your bows from the English Channel to the Black Sea
Shoot me down from my zenithist flight
Hey
High above the oaks I’ll aim fire at death

What trials and wonders
Aerial waves flash through the prism of my small brain
Lying on a rebellious spine
Often with a twisted vein between my legs
I guide the Bolshevik revolution of the metacosmos
Alas..............
Love has hooked my heart – heart of my dynamomotor
To the switchboard’s main line of electricity
The insanity of persecution damns the steep town of Belgrade




Because
Zenithism is the propeller of the Balkan continent
Let it be known to all
The Balkans are a young male
Europe a raggedy whore and his withered mistress
Let whatever you called Europe be Balkan henceforth
From the very beginning
The Balkans are that
My crazy ideoplan let your will be done
Let’s go friends black and white
via the zenith
Vrooooooooooooooom Vrooooooooooooooom Vrooooooooooooooom

In all the lightbulbs Balkan bells clack
—for European wings to break
—to shatter stock-exchange windows
—to detonate the vacuumed living quarters of all the bourgeoisies on earth
—to collapse the foul-smelling old
—to wildly sprout anew
                          anew
                          anew
Everywhere things are turned upside down
Always against eternity
Wherever the fist of my furious eyes hits
Down with eternity
Long live the life of the lively living alive




Perhaps we have been deceived as to the shape of the earth
Isn’t it just three airplanes that reached the world’s record
Bravo …
At last the cell of motorized skulls opens
Cultural cells break apart into crumbs like walnut shells
bitter is the fruit of civilization
on the Balkan continent
hurrahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Perhaps the new life is an oyster from blazing waterfalls
—to fly deep
—to journey through the Steppe
—to triumph over culture
—to fall high
—to serenade barbaric people
—to defy civilized man
everything is perhaps just a product of wild waterfalls
Niagara
Volga
Vardar
Only wild waterfalls are strong
     wild waterfalls are raw and proud
     wild waterfalls generate electric power
Which is what my Balkan blood brother did
The first inventor of wireless telegraphy
Serbian electrogenius Nikola Tesla

translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Suzana Vuljevic

Read the original in Serbo-Croatian

Aeroplan bez motora, billed as an “anti-European poem” by Micić, was published in 1925 as an imprint of the Zenit circle’s press, but had been written earlier and shared at Zenithist soirées held in Belgrade in previous years. Micić was a leading spokesman of the Yugoslav avant-garde, whose poetics often adopted a sardonic, incendiary tone and inspired a sense of urgency in its bold-faced indictment of bourgeois, capitalist western Europe and its culture—which he deemed bankrupt. In an effort to build a new ideology and aesthetics of the subaltern, Micić coined the term “barbarogenius,” which he conceived as a new man, a mascot, and a hero of the Balkans. His depictions of the barbarogenius bore resonances of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. With the call for the Balkanization of Europe, Micić sought to build a case for the redemptive power of Europe’s proverbial other as an antidote to western European decadence.

Using the figure of the barbarogenius, Micić signaled the value inherent in Balkan man—the vital, dynamic, primal, and spiritual forces that were to be summoned against a rational, conservative, and putrefied West. Such an understanding is evident in verses that depict light bulbs ringing with the sound of Balkan bells, an homage to Nikola Tesla, whom he claimed as his Balkan brethren. Following the ban of Zenit and a stint in jail, Micić finally fled Belgrade to settle in Paris, but continued to develop this concept further while in exile, in a novel he wrote in French titled Barbarogénie, le décivilisateur, published in 1938.

As a poet, Micić tested and pushed the conventional limits of language through experiments with typographic representation, wordplay, and symbols. Lyric phrases such as “eyes of my horned fate,” “unsightly cheeks of haggard days,” and “fist of my eyes,” in their anthropomorphization of intangibles, are a mark of this playfulness.

In my translation, I set out with the aim of preserving the wordplay of the original, which makes for a fluid and incantatory reading experience. The poem opens:

Divne su divne polazne stanice

[Marvelous marvels boarding platforms are]

In another passage, Micić similarly introduces an earthquake as a double-edged symbol of destruction and renewal:

Tres o zemlju
Tres — po-tres — Tres — po-tres — Tres — po-tres

[Quake-o-earth
Temblor — tremor — Temblor — tremor — Temblor — tremor]

A literal translation would use variations of the compound word “earthquake.” Instead, I chose to use adjacent terms evocative of earthquakes, i.e. temblor and tremor. The alliteration and assonance of these two words made this seem a more appropriate aural equivalent.

Although influenced by the many contemporary European avant-garde movements of the time, Aeroplan bez motora exhibited a strong affinity to the futurists and their fascination with the technological advancements of the machine age. In recent decades, there has been a renewed interest in the Zenithist movement, prompted by a combination of factors, including the discovery of Micić’s papers in his Belgrade apartment upon his death, and the growing interest in assessing the influence of peripheral and global modernisms in the existing scholarship.

Ljubomir Micić was born in 1895 and died in 1971. Micić was a poet, writer, editor, actor, and, most notably, founder of Zenithism—one of the most significant avant-garde movements to emerge from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Micić studied philosophy at the University of Zagreb and is remembered as a trailblazer of Yugoslav modernism, a proponent of free verse, and a brash exponent of a new poetics that he dubbed “Zenithism” for its aspirations toward a new spiritual transcendence. Micić launched this wide-ranging avant-garde movement in 1921, along with its literary organ, Zenit, an international magazine of arts and culture published in Zagreb and Belgrade from 1921 to 1926. Internationalist in its scope and ideology, Zenit established links to other avant-garde movements throughout the continent—its manifesto was published in Serbo-Croatian, French, and German—beckoning international contributors, including Pablo Picasso, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Wassily Kandinsky. The magazine experimented with the visual representation of textual characters and graphic design, and ultimately represented a melding of expressionism, cubism, futurism, Dadaism, and constructivism. Micić also founded a Zenithist press as well as a gallery to house and display art.

Suzana Vuljevic is a historian of modern Europe and the Balkans. She holds a B.A. in History and Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan and earned a Ph.D. in History and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her dissertation reconstructs the transnational networks of a largely forgotten elite group of liberal idealist intellectuals who coalesced around pan-Balkan initiatives in interwar southeast Europe. She translates poetry and short prose from Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Albanian to English. Her translations of the work of Serbian poet Ljubomir Micić are forthcoming in Zenithism: A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (1921–1927) (Academic Studies Press, 2022), edited by Steven Teref and Aleksandar Bošković. Her translations from Albanian, of Ervina Halili’s surrealist collection of poetry, Amulet, appeared in Exchanges and in the inaugural issue of Balkan Poetry Today in 2017.