Vasko Popa | |
|---|---|
| Васко Попа | |
 Portrait of Popa by photographerStevan Kragujević, 1990 | |
| Born | (1922-06-29)29 June 1922 |
| Died | 5 June 1991(1991-06-05) (aged 68) |
| Occupation(s) | poet, writer, editor, translator |
Vasile "Vasko" Popa (Serbian Cyrillic:Васко Попа; 29 June 1922 – 5 January 1991) was aYugoslav and Serbian[1] poet of ethnic-Romanian heritage. He is regarded as one of 20th-century Yugoslavia's and Serbia's most important poets, and his work has been widely translated.
Popa was born in the village ofGrebenac (Romanian:Grebenaț),Yugoslavia (present-daySerbia) into aBanat Romanian family. Popa started writing while at high school. His first poems were written inRomanian. After finishing high school, he enrolled as a student at theUniversity of Belgrade's Faculty of Philosophy. He continued his studies at theUniversity of Bucharest and inVienna. DuringWorld War II, he fought as apartisan and was imprisoned in a German concentration camp in Bečkerek (today'sZrenjanin,Serbia).
After the war in 1949, Popa graduated in Romance philology at Belgrade University. He published his first poems in the journalKnjiževne novine (Literary News) and the newspaperBorba (Struggle).
From 1954 until 1979, he was the editor of the publishing houseNolit. In 1953 he published his first major verse collection,Kora (Bark). His other important work includedNepočin-polje (No-Rest Field, 1956),Sporedno nebo (Secondary Heaven, 1968),Uspravna zemlja (Earth Erect, 1972),Vučja so (Wolf Salt, 1975), andOd zlata jabuka (The Golden Apple, 1978), an anthology of Serbian folk literature. In English translation, hisCollected Poems first appeared in 1978, with an introduction by the British poetTed Hughes; the final edition, hisComplete Poems, appeared in 2011.
In 1954, Vasko Popa was the inaugural winner of the Branko Prize (Brankova nagrada) for poetry, established in honour of the poetBranko Radičević. In 1957 he won another poetry award, the Zmaj Prize (Zmajeva nagrada), which honours the poetJovan Jovanović Zmaj. In 1965 Popa received theAustrian State Prize for European Literature. In 1976, he gained theBranko Miljković poetry award, in 1978 the Yugoslav state Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia Award, and in 1983 the Skender Kulenović Prize.
On 29th May 1972 Vasko Popa founded the Vršac Literary Municipality, plus Slobodno lišće (Free Leaves), a library of postcards. In the same year, he was elected as a member of theSerbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.[2] Popa was also one of the founders of theVojvodina Academy of Sciences and Arts, established on 14 December 1979 inNovi Sad.[3]
Vasko Popa died on 5 January 1991 inBelgrade and was buried in the Aisle of Deserving Citizens in Belgrade'sNew Cemetery.[3]
He was a good friend of French poetAlain Bosquet.
Popa was married to Jovanka "Haša" Singer from when he moved to Belgrade in the 1940s until the end of his life. In 2001, a year after her death, Hasha’s ashes were interred alongside Vasko’s remains.[4]
Vasko Popa wrote in a succinctmodernist style that owed much tosurrealism andSerbian folk traditions (via the influence of Serbian poetMomčilo Nastasijević) - a style radically different from theSocialist Realism that dominated Eastern European literature afterWorld War II. He created a unique poetic language, often elliptical, that combines a modern form, often expressed through colloquial speech and common idioms and phrases, with elmenents rooted in the Serbian oral tradition of epic and lyric folk poetry, tales, myths, riddles, etc. In his work, earthly and legendary motifs mix, myths come to surface from the collective subconscious, the inheritance and everyday are in constant interplay, and the abstract is reflected in the specific and concrete, forming a unique and extraordinary poetic dialectics.
InThe New York Times obituary, the author mentions that the English poet Ted Hughes lauded Popa as an "epic poet" with a "vast vision". Hughes states in his introduction toVasko Popa: Collected Poems 1943-1976, translated by Anne Pennington, "As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a universe passing through a universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made."[5]
Mexican poet and Nobel laureateOctavio Paz said, "Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others."
Popa'sCollected Poems translation by Anne Pennington with its introduction by Hughes is part of "The Persea Series of Poetry in Translation," general editor Daniel Weissbort. Premiere literary critic John Bayley of Oxford University reviewed the book inThe New York Review of Books and wrote that Popa was "one of the best European poets writing today."[6]
Since his first book of verse,Kora (Bark), Vasko Popa has gained steadily in stature and popularity. His poetic achievement – eight volumes of verse written over a period of 38 years – has received extensive critical acclaim both in his native land and beyond. He is one of the most translated Serbian poets and at the time he had become one of the most influential World poets.
In 1964, composerDarinka Simic-Mitrovic used Vasko Popa's text for her song cycleVrati Mi Moje Krpice.[7]
In 1995, the town ofVršac established a poetry award named after Vasko Popa. It was awarded annually for the best book of poetry published inSerbian. The award ceremony is held on the day of Popa's birthday, 29 June.[8]
