“Charles Simic has performed a great service by
reminding us, precisely at this moment of turmoil and destruction, that ‘there
are still poets and beautiful poems to be discovered and read with lasting
pleasure in this vile old world.’”
THE UPDATED AND EXPANDED EDITION OF THIS VITAL ANTHOLOGY, WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY EDITOR AND TRANSLATOR CHARLES SIMIC
When The
Horse Has Six Legs was published in 1992, as war
and hatred tore through the Balkans, this anthology of Serbian poetry became a
landmark for some of the most compelling poetry in the contemporary world. “The
ironies, in 1993, of giving an award to Serbian poets will be evident to many,”
Carolyn Kizer wrote in her judge’s citation for the Harold Morton Landon
Translation Award. “But the glory of great poetry is that it transcends its
time and these agonized events to enter the universal realm of art.”
Editor and translator has now
updated and expanded this anthology for new readers in the twenty-first
century. Simic has brought together an extraordinary range of Serbian poets,
from the oral tradition of folk song to the great postwar poets, including
Vasko Popa, Ivan V. Lalic, and Novica Tadic, and the new generation of poets
writing now. With wild imagination, mordant humor, and vivid surrealism,
Serbian poetry is rich, haunted, and intensely relevant to the world we
inhabit.
"The Horse Has Six Legs is one of the most vivid and surprising books of translation I know. It reveals the continuum that exists between the oral and the literary, between the wit of folktale and the extremity of surrealism. In these poems one feels the freshness, force, and impunity of culture as we no longer have it—
at once very deeply rooted and very international.”
