Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes | Poetry | Serbo-Croatian
March, 2020Branko Ve Poljanski (1898–1947) was a leading figure in Zenithism, a 1920s avant-garde movement unique to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The movement was founded by Poljanski’s brother, the writer and editor Ljubomir Micić, and promoted through the journal Zenit, the press Biblioteka Zenit, and numerous exhibitions across Europe. Poljanski was the movement’s emissary in Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris.
The central tenet of Zenithism was to attack bourgeois, western Europe through Micić’s concept of the “barbarogenius”—an archetypal, decivilizing figure pushing for the barbarization of a decadent Europe. Shades of this sentiment are found in the images of blood and barricades in Poljanski’s poems “Arise,” “Dusk,” and “Joyous Poem.”
A hallmark of the movement was its synthesis of futurism, expressionism, Dada, and constructivism into a pan-avant-garde aesthetic. Though Poljanski’s work best embodied the movement’s embrace of the various avant-gardes sweeping 1920s Europe, his poems are most rooted in expressionism, as evidenced in the melancholy-inflected poems “Eros,” “Longing,” and “At the Hair Salon.”
The untamed “Blind Man Number 52” and “Dada Causal Dada,” which first appeared in his single-issue anti-Dada journal Dada-jok (Dada-Nope) in response to Yugoslav Dadaist Dragan Aleksić’s one-off journals Dada Tank and Dada Jazz, best showcase Poljanski’s impish humor.
Our task as translators was to capture Poljanski’s tonal range, what made his work avant-garde for its time, and the spirit of Zenithism: in short, the essence of Poljanski’s poetics. The biggest challenge to this charge could be found in his shortest poem “Arise.” A literal translation of the poem’s conclusion is:
We build Balkan towers
Oh Europe
Your roads will crave the Balkan Man.
In the original, “Balkan Man” is Balkanac, a noun; however, it is rendered as a noun phrase in English. We felt that the repetition of the adjective “Balkan” somewhat flattened the language and tone of the lyric poem, an issue absent in the original. Also, to a present-day, American reader, the Balkan Man as a barbarogenius concept would be lost on its own, being divorced from its century-old milieu. We believe that our version resolves that problem by evoking a barbarian horde storming the bulwark of civilization, an image that would have been implied in its original context.
To date, these eight translations are the largest collection of Branko Ve Poljanski’s poems in English. The crush of the barbarogenius is at the barricades.
- Steven Teref and Maja Teref
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