Poetry, Translations

Dark Things

Dark Things is a collection of poems by the leading living Serbian poet of our time - Novica Tadić. The 48 poems in this manuscript have been translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, who was born in Belgrade, and is considered one of America's leading translators of Eastern European poetry. Novica Tadić's poems are dark, brilliant, spare, and ever-mindful of the enormous acts of evil that human beings commit against each other. His brief words radiate far beyond themselves, as do their silences. Tadić’s vision is cold-eyed, drawn from a life lived where war and totalitarianism have been the status quo for decades. Charles Simic writes, “Tadić is a poet of the dark night of history. His protagonist, like the condemned Christ in some painterly depiction of Ecce Homo, is surrounded by an enraged mob, who, although wretched themselves, yearn to make his last moments even more miserable. The tormenting of the helpless is Tadić's recurrent theme.” "His gripping, grotesque vision arrives at just the right time for an American audience, who see all around them, like Tadić, 'a world gone mad.'" --Rain Taxi "A life under tyranny accounts for the gloom and doom pervasive in these spare, elegant verses, expertly translated by Serbian-American poet Charles Simic...Simic's previous translations of Tadić (Night Mail; Oberlin College Press) won high praise, and this one is even stronger." --Arts with The Star Ledger "Here, the real and imaginary, the sense of poverty and of the richness of imagination, merge to produce a sense of grotesque anger and hunger." --American Poet

On a Train Station, Dream

Small, bent over, gray,
I'm sitting with arms crossed
on my luggage.

I ask nothing of no one.
Wait for no one.

I don’t know where I’ve come from
nor where I’m going.

In the trunk are my books.
In the suitcase are my shirts.

I packed everything I had.

On my head I wear
a cap of many colors,
my great pride and joy.

© BOA Editions, Ltd, 2009

Available Editions:
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Paperback $16.00

FormatPaperback

Publication DateJuly 1, 2009

ISBN978-1-934414-23-1

$16.00

About the Author

Novica Tadic

Novica Tadic is author of fourteen collections of poetry, and is considered the most respected living Serbian poet and linguistic “heir” to the late, great Serbian poet Vasko Popa. His collection Dark Things, was translated by Charles Simic and published by BOA in 2009. Tadic has won almost every major Serbian literary award, including the prestigious Laureat Nagrade. In the last two decades, he has served as editor of several Serbian literary magazines, and his books of poems have been translated into more than two dozen languages.

Charles Simic

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published a year after his graduation from New York University. Since then, he has published over sixty books abroad and in the United States, for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Wallace Stevens Award. He is Emeritus Professor of the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and a past Poet Laureate of the United States. His translation of Serbian poet Novica Tadić’s Dark Things was published by BOA Editions in 2009.