Vasko Popa

Complete Poems 1953-1987

Popa Vasko

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.

About the Author

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 Academie Mallarme 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.

Reviews

"Popa's imaginative journey resembles a Universe passing through a Universe. It has been one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made" – Ted Hughes

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