The Golden Apple

Vasko Popa is the most translated of contemporary Yugoslav poets---his entire poetic opus has been translated into English. He was chiefly responsible for steering Serbian poetry away from stale traditionalism, which came close to being socialist realism, in the early 1950s. His modernism is expressed in terse, aphoristic, elliptical idiom, in beautifully crafted poetic entities that tend to run in cycles, and above all in his efforts to penetrate the essence of the phenomena around him, dead or alive. Popa is a poet's poet, a powerful craftsman of images and metaphors, an incessant seeker of the primeval roots and myths. His eight collections of poems, so far, belong to the most accomplished poetry in all of Yugoslav literature. 020