By Suzana Vuljevic
One of my first forays into literary translation came unbidden: Rastko Petrović (1898-1949), a Serbian modernist poet and a leading voice and representative of the Yugoslav avant-garde, active in the years between the wars, came calling from the depths. At the time, I was in the late stages of my dissertation work, examining intellectual currents in Southeast Europe, isolating figures who expressed an interest, however deep or fleeting, in uniting the region as a concept, as a geo-cultural space, or as a political entity, in the form of a union or a federation, flirting with what were deemed to be impractical, utopian ideas. Though Petrović did not quite fit into this particular cohort, he bore a striking resemblance to the cultural purveyors I was encountering, straddling the porous worlds of culture and politics, with an itinerary that took him far afield of the Balkan peninsula, and a predilection for unorthodox ideas.
The youngest of nine children, Petrović came from a prominent Serbian family and was raised by parents who were both teachers. His sister, the famous expressionist painter Nadežda Petrović, trained in Belgrade and Munich, was an early feminist activist, as well as one of the first women to document war using the medium of photography, in her capacity as a nurse during the Balkan Wars (1912-13). Petrović’s studies would take him to France, first to Nice, and then to Paris, where he studied law on a scholarship, as well as literature and the history of art, and where he would come into contact with the city’s arts and literary luminaries, the forerunners of Cubism, Surrealism, and the Dada movement: Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose Bestiary: or the Parade of Orpheus purportedly inspired Petrović’s early work. Armed with a youthful ardor, Petrović whiled away hours in the stacks of the French National Library, reading up on Slavic mythology and pagan religions, in step with a generation bent on retrieving and rebuilding a wholeness violently torn away on the battlefields. A cosmopolitan intellectual, Petrović was privileged enough to be able to go beyond the narrow confines of his birthplace in Belgrade, and to come to see it rather as a node in a larger global network. He, too, was in the business of imagining new spaces and horizons, but his explorations instead moved transhistorically, innovatively braiding the ancient with the modern world.
On first read, the irreverence and iconoclasm of Petrović’s lyricism appealed to me. While the high register, the antiquated language, and the occasional play on words found in the original threw me, Petrović the man was familiar and recognizable to me as a figure who fit squarely within Robert Wohl’s delineation of the generation of 1914, having come of age during the Great War, marked by the “sense of living through an interregnum.”[1] A familiarity with the writer’s milieu and the era’s zeitgeist has, to my mind, always served as an essential key to unlocking the text’s coding and making sense of its quirks. In other words, it always seems useful to ask, with whom or what is the text in dialogue? Undeterred by being underage, Petrović enlisted and served in the Serbian army, goaded by the loss of Nadežda, another sister, Draga, and his brother Vladimir. Brought to its knees by a combined Austro-Hungarian and German offensive, the Serbian army began its retreat southward through Albania—a formative experience for Petrović at just seventeen years old—which served as the subject of his two-part novel The Sixth Day. Blending reality with dream-like sequences, the novel had a fragmented structure. Though Petrović had completed this novel in 1935, influential Serbian politicians blocked its publication due to what they alleged was a negative portrayal of Serbian soldiers.[2] The work was published posthumously in the 1950s, serialized in the Belgrade monthly Delo (and released as a book in 1961).
Naturally, Petrović remained under the spell of the traumas of war long after they transpired, and arguably would never manage to shake free of them, spending an entire lifetime reflecting on the long winter of 1915.[3] Steeped in the world of writers, artists, and intellectuals who were responding to the total chaos and upheaval of the Great War, Petrović grasped for original modes of expression to bear witness to it. The modernists believed that the war, by virtue of its cataclysmic force and magnitude, made necessary the invention of new forms of representation in art and letters. Like so many others of his time, Petrović mined the deep past for directives, but led the charge in training his attention on the motifs and themes of Slavdom before Christianity took hold in the ninth century. In 1921, he published his first novel and what is perhaps his most well-known work, The Burlesque of Mister Perun, God of Thunder, noted for its utopianism.[4]
The Revelation, a slim collection of twelve poems, came out in 1922 in a print-run of 400 copies, a mere four years after the war had ended, rustling up the horrors of staggering losses of human life, raising the question, what new ways of seeing, sensing and understanding had the bloodshed begotten? What could war, with its brutal devastation, possibly reveal or illuminate? Public reception was rather polarized. On the one hand, the work drew controversy for its unconventional portrayal of biblical themes and for its sharp break with national tradition, and on the other, it established Petrović as a visionary of his generation. Alongside him was Serbian writer Miloš Crnjanski (1893-1977), who had published his own seminal yet contentious poetry collection Lyrics of Ithaca in 1919, and the novel Diary of Čarnojević in 1921, both of which centered a disillusioned soldier returning from war. Crnjanski issued one of the first laudatory reviews of The Revelation, praising it for its utmost Europeanness.[5] In his own manifesto, where he launched Sumatrism, an attempt at “cosmic harmony,”[6] Crnjanski claimed that “‘the new art,’ i.e., modernist art, is the only authentic art, because it strives to represent those ‘hypermodern sensations’ experienced by men in the trenches and to give shape to a world irreparably changed by war.”[7]
The cover of the original edition of The Revelation is set in grayscale and features a stripped-down, angular man with his gaze turned onto the distance, holding a lyre over his shoulder, standing at the edge of a dock, flanked in the background by an old-fashioned ship with sails and a peacock perched on a ledge to his right. If the comparisons to Apollinaire’s Bestiary hold, the figure is none other than Orpheus, whose lyre was given to him by his father, the god Apollo, and who charmed trees, stones, and animals with his divine musical talent, and thus the image stands as a sneaking reference to the collection of thirty short poems published in 1911. The first line of the first poem of The Bestiary, a celebration of mammals, birds, fish, and insects, introduces Orpheus, and beseeches the reader to “admire the power of the line.”[8] In 1912, Apollinaire coined the term “Orphism” to denote an offshoot of Cubism that aspired toward absolute abstraction and multisensory modes of expression. Featuring woodcut printing, a hallmark of contemporary avant-garde literature, and designs by Petrović himself as well as Milo Milunović (1897–1967) and Aleksandar Derokos (1894–1988), the visual packaging of this collection was much like Apollinaire’s, which had included woodcuts by French fauvist painter Raoul Dufy. Their depictions of Orpheus are almost indistinguishable from one another.
Irreducible to any single subcategory of the Yugoslav avant-garde, Petrović’s work could instead be understood to have moved each one forward. One could find notes of Cubism, Expressionism, Hypnism, Surrealism, and finally, Zenithism, an avant-garde movement unique to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which challenged existing cultural hierarchies and proffered the provincial “barbarogenius” as a redeemer and a revitalizer of Europe, a homegrown iteration of Nietzsche’s Superman. As Aleksandar D. Matić argues, Otkrovenje emerged from a very specific artistic and cultural juncture, suffused by Henri Bergson’s writings and philosophy as well as the concept of vitalism.[9] In an essay that he penned in 1924 under the title “Youth of the National Genius,” Petrović wrote about the nation as a sentient individual, equipped with its own spiritual life and impulses. Bojan Jović notes that classical Greco-Roman elements run through much of the work of the Serbian avant-garde (particularly the expressionist contingent), and claims that while Otkrovenje is “more semantically directed to problematizing Judeo-Christian symbolism and Slavic tradition than Classical antiquity, sporadic allusions to ancient Greek and Roman heritage can nonetheless be perceived.”[10]
Part of a wider circle of artists, writers and intellectuals who flouted the realist literary strictures in favor of expressionism and other new modes, Petrović’s interests crossed into the field of visual art as well. In fact, he began his career as an art critic. Other members of his generation included Stanislav Vinaver (1891-1955), author of a manifesto on Serbian Expressionism, and Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel The Bridge on the Drina in 1961. An avid traveler, Petrović penned several travelogues, including one on Sicily, posthumously published, and his most well-known, which chronicled his journey through Africa, published in 1930. This propensity toward travel and a fascination with the very image of the traveler (and the story of Ulysses) was another characteristic that Wohl argued bound the generation of 1914.[11] A year later, Petrović published People Talk, which featured a photomontage cover teeming with floating heads mid-utterance, reminiscent of the cover art of a horror film. Almost entirely composed of dialogue, the book is said to have been written on the basis of overheard conversations.
I was commissioned to translate two poems, slated to appear in a ranging anthology of the Yugoslav avant-garde, encompassing Surrealism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Hypnism à la Rade Drainac (1899-1943), and Zenithism. When that project eventually narrowed its focus solely to the latter, the product of which, edited by Aleksandar Bošković and Steven Teref, is a beautifully executed, definitive compendium of the movement spearheaded by Ljubomir Micić, these pieces ended up marooned.[12] The two poems, “The Mystery of Birth” and “Twenty Sacrosanct Lines,” are written in free verse and feature subtle rhyming sequences that I have been careful to preserve. With a focus on birth and death as monumental moments in life, these poems eschew romanticist aesthetics in favor of a new orientation and focus on the reality of lived experience, the irrational, psychoanalysis, and vitalism. In this expressionist work and elsewhere, Petrović exhibited a fascination with the cult of the primitive, early Slavic paganism, and mysticism. “Twenty Sacrosanct Lines” depicts a sort of neurotic focus on the body as both a material thing and a symbolic gateway or portal to another world. The “Mystery of Birth,” which in a more literal translation could be simply rendered as the “secret” of birth, already bears the traces of religious themes, as does the title “the revelation.” Within its semantic field lie the Book of Revelation, the last supper, or “tajna večera” in Serbo-Croatian, which ties into the mysteries of the Christian faith.
Zoran Milutinović summed up Petrović’s self-concept and his overriding need to reconcile his Slav roots with his aspirations toward European cultural acceptance in these plain terms: “I am a descendant of Slavs, who were once barbarian; however, I am not one of those barbarian Slavs, but a cosmopolitan traveller, interested in pre-civilized art and cultural forms which happen to be my inheritance too. This is neither something to be ashamed of, nor is the aim of my interest a construction of a Slav cultural block, it is simply a cultural and artistic interest, and thus eminently European.”[13]
In 1923, Petrović began working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgrade and was later posted to Rome. In 1935, Petrović entered the diplomatic corps of the royalist Yugoslav government, named vice consul in Chicago and a year later, secretary of the embassy in Washington, DC. He would never to return to Yugoslavia. Petrović died suddenly in Washington in 1949. His remains were transferred to the New Cemetery in Belgrade in 1986.
*****
Twenty Sacrosanct Lines
The mouth still icky with the residue of lofty names,
And the past is littered with the smell of paper and unwashed clothes:
Here I am chewing on hot bread in the company of formidable beings;
Oh, how that hot wheel draws me away, deeper and deeper
Into the mysterious life of the body!
Right here: indentations in the palm, traces left from recent handshakes
Of a New Covenant;
Before me are all the bodies, brown, rotund and white:
There they go, onto their next state of existence (and on and on to the billionth!)
The mighty wisdom of this hand nearly frightens me—
My brain is incapable of playing master to all of its slight movements
(No, the spiritual force of these venturesome tendons only gets in the way!).
And the ribs curved into longbows;
A single thigh stirring furtively;
A quiver! Full of stars and cellulite is the bright night,
Night of handshakes!
Those hands like furled flags, limbs: warehouses of coiling roads.
With greater resolve I place these words on the page:
Night of the New Covenant:
This is why I take great pains to make it known to you tonight, as Testimony to the World!
To my friends,
To the sailors in Korčula,
To Mate Jurković most of all.
Dvadeset neprikosnovenih stihova
U ustima još gadno od velikih imena,
I prošlost miriše na hartiju i neoprano rublje:
Evo ja žvaćem vrući hleb u društvu smelih stvorenja;
O, taj vrući kotur, kako me odvlači sve dublje
U tajanstveni život tela!
Evo: otisci poslednjih rukovanja
Novoga Zaveta;
Evo sva tela smeđa, debela i bela;
Evo njina druga (i sva redom do milijarditih) stanja!
Skoro me straši silna mudrost ove ruke —
Moj mozak je nemoćan da bude gospodar svih njenih pokreta
(Ne, duhovnost mojoj pustolovini mišićnoj samo smeta!).
I ta rebra savijena u luke;
Tajanstveno učešće jednog bedra;
Drhtaj! Puna sala i zvezda je noćas ova noć vedra,
Noć rukovanja!
Te ruke savijene zastave, noge: stovarišta drumova.
Jednom višom voljom ja stavljam ova slova:
Noć Novoga zaveta:
Zato te noćas ja obznanjujem toliko i za Svedočanstvo Sveta!
Mojim prijateljima
mornarima na Korčuli,
Mati Jurkoviću poglavito.
The Mystery of Birth
O smeared with the red of the womb I am
Light—hear it, coming from the home of no return
Air ablaze, hear it! shooting through stark white tents
For the silly young man
(Scenes from his childhood unfolding before his eyes)!
Red-hot air that could puncture the brain!
The deep, echoing forest brings to mind a herd of baby goats;
The swollen red tide of freedom—I’ll never mention it to you all,
Never will I speak of the exhilarating freedom
Known only to the jungle!
And while sipping soup, how many mesmerizing dreams I’ve kept watered,
How many hot heavens I’ve tasted from that very plate:
My belly still remembers the heaviness, and the cramps of the gods,
The remains expelled from that arduous feast in the bowels!
Yet the crimson glow of the home of no return,
And the vigorous body, still awake with hymns and movement
Will throw me into confusion,
Rattle me from head to heels—how marvelous!—and estrange me from the world!
At last I made it out of the fragrant jungle
And prostrated myself over the earth to prevent it from evaporating,
Then inhaled its aroma like that for days on end
Until I trembled with exasperation.
But the long-dead home to which no one can return
Will haul me away stealthily to the site of the fatal nightmare,
And by then, no one will be there to reveal the shortest path
To salvation: instead, I’ll die, I see it, from the bursting
Of veins.
In an olive grove of ecstasy,
Bitterness hanging over Vela Luka, on the island of Korčula.
Tajna rođenja
O crvenilo mi doteče iz matere
Svetlost, čuj, iz doma gde se ne vraća
Plameni zrak, čuj! kroz prebele šatore
Za smešnog mladića
(Kome se vizija detinjstva povraća)!
Crveni zrak mozak da probode!
Duboka zvučna šuma podseti na stado mladih jarića;
Ja vam neću reći nikada crvenu plimu slobode,
Ja vam neću spomenuti nikada
Prašumski zanos slobode!
A koliko supom pojih zanosnih svojih snova,
Koliko vrućih nebesa kusah to iz tanjira:
Trbuh još pamti težinu i grč bogova,
Ostatke čije protera sa mučnog trbušnog pira!
Ali crvena svetlost doma gde se ne vraća,
I krepko telo još zvučno od himni i pokreta
Pobrkaće me kod načela i kaljača,
Pobrkati — ha, divote! — i otuđiti od sveta!
Ta izađoh iz džungle namirisane
I pokrih zemlju telom da je sačuvam od isparenja,
I njuškah je tako duge dane
Dok ne zastrepih od razdraženja.
Ali umrli već dom gde se ne vraća
Odvući će me tajnom do mesta smrtnog košmara,
I neće mi reći niko tad — koja je staza najkraća
Do spasenja: No umreću, vidim, od prskanja
Damara.
U jednoj maslinovoj šumi zanosa,
gorčina nad Velalukom, na Korčuli.
— Rastko Petrović
Translated from the Serbo-Croatian
by Suzana Vuljevic
Suzana Vuljevic is a writer, translator, and historian who currently teaches in the Program in Albanian and Southeast European Studies at DePaul University. She holds a PhD in History and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and her most recent work, “Order Amid Chaos: The Crisis of Spirit and a Panoply of Pan-Balkan Solutions in Interwar Europe,” was published in Never-Ending Story? Mapping Crisis Discourses in East-Central Europe, 1918-2020 (New York: Routledge, 2024). Her translations from the Serbo-Croatian have been published in Zenithism (1921-1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2023) and in a compendium of primary sources, Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights: East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century (CEU Press, 2024). Her current book project focuses on transnational intellectual networks that coalesced around interwar pan-Balkan ideas and discourses of European unity.
Editor’s note: Although GlobalEurope does not usually publish literary texts in a language other than English (in Literature in Translation), it was thought that since the topic of this article pertains to the practice of translation, it would be useful to speakers and translators of the source language (Serbo-Croatian) to have access to both the original and translated texts.
[1] Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 226.
[2] Ante Kadić, From Croatian Renaissance to Yugoslav Socialism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 203.
[3] Dunja Dušanić, “Serbian Modernists and the Experience of World War I,” Transcultural Studies 10, 2 (2014), 10.
[4] Zorica Ðergović-Joksimović, “Serbia Between Utopia and Dystopia,” Utopian Studies 11, 1 (2000), 9-10.
[5] Srpska književna avangarda (1902-1934): književnoistorijski kontekst, ed. Gojko Tešić (Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2009), 262.
[6] Miro Mašek, “Poeticizing Prose in Croatian and Serbian Modernism,” in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 1, eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), 412.
[7] Dušanić, 2.
[8] Timothy Mathews, “How is Orpheus Honoured? Procession, Association and Loss,” The Modernist Bestiary: Translating Animals and the Arts through Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy and Graham Sutherland, eds. Sarah Kay and Timothy Mathews (London: UCL Press, 2020), 127.
[9] Aleksandra D. Matić, “Slovenstvo u ranoj poeziji Rastka Petrovića,” Lipar 55 (2014), 133.
[10] Bojan Jović, “From Ithaca to Magna Graecia, Icaria and Hyperborea – Some Aspects of the Classical Tradition in the Serbian Avant-Garde,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Classics in International Modernism and the Avant-Garde, eds. Adam J. Goldwyn and James Nikopoulos (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017), 91-92.
[11] Wohl, 226.
[12] Zenithism (1921-1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology, eds. Aleksandar Bošković and Steven Teref (Newton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2023).
[13] Zoran Milutinović, Getting Over Europe: The Construction of Europe in Serbian Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 111-112.
