Vasko Popa: Complete Poems 1953-1987
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From surrealist fable to traditional folk-tale, from personal anecdote to tribal myth, Popa's poetry embodies in an original form the most profound imaginative truths of our age, precisely located in the reality and history of Serbia, in the heart of Central Europe. This new edition, based on the 1978 edition translated by the late Anne Pennington, revised and extended for the 1997 edition by Francis R. Jones, adds a dozen previously untranslated occasional poems.
Vasko Popa (1922–1991) was born in the Banat district of Yugoslavia. During World War II he fought with a partisan group; afterwards he studied in Vienna and Bucharest before completing his education at the University of Belgrade. He was elected to the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972 and to the Parisian Académie Mallarmé in 1977. He visited Britain on several occasions, attending the London Poetry International and Cambridge Poetry Festivals. He was widely regarded not only as the greatest poet of the Serbo-Croat language but as a poet of towering European stature. He lived in Belgrade where he worked as an editor for the publishers Nolit from 1954 until 1979.
Francis R. Jones translates poetry from various European languages – especially from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Dutch into English, though he has also worked from Russian, Hungarian and Caribbean languages, and into Geordie and Yorkshire dialect. Among his solo book-length translations are six collections by Ivan V. Lalić. Jones’s poetry translations have won fifteen UK and international prizes. He lives in Northumberland, and is Emeritus Professor of Translation Studies at Newcastle University.
Anne Pennington (1934–1981) was a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford where she held the university’s Chair of Comparative Slavonic Philology. Her translations include Poems by Blaže Koneski (1979) and Vasko Popa's anthology The Golden Apple (Anvil, 1980 and 2010), both with Andrew Harvey; Marko the Prince: Serbo-Croat Heroic Songs (1984) with Peter Levi; and Vasko Popa’s Complete Poems (Anvil, 2011).
Francis R. Jones translates poetry from various European languages – especially from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Dutch into English, though he has also worked from Russian, Hungarian and Caribbean languages, and into Geordie and Yorkshire dialect. Among his solo book-length translations are six collections by Ivan V. Lalić. Jones’s poetry translations have won fifteen UK and international prizes. He lives in Northumberland, and is Emeritus Professor of Translation Studies at Newcastle University.