CALL TO POETS Original poetry wi

About Death and Other Things
by Aleksandar Ristovic
translated by Charles Simic

How strange will be my death, of which I've been thinking since childhood:
A sedentary old man leaving a small-town library
leans to one side and eventually collapses on the lawn.

I've every reason to believe that I'll experience what the others have experienced
while I climb the stairs carrying my supper in a plastic bag,
not even turning to look at the one who in that moment descends curly-haired and wearing a party dress.

It could be an ordinary death on a train:
a man who carefully studies the fields and hills in snow,
shuts his eyes folds his hands in his lap, and no longer sees what only a moment ago he admired.

I'm trying to remember other possibilities and so, here I am once again,
disguised as myself in a small, merry company,
where, after emptying my glass, I fall on the floor laughing, and pulling after me the tablecloth with the vase full of roses.

My death, of course, would have a spiritual meaning
in some mountain sanatorium for the insane
where croaking we complain to each other in beds with freshly changed sheets.

It could happen that I'll die in some way very different from the one I anticipate:
in the company of my wife and daughter, surrounded by books,
while outside a neighbor is trying to start a car that the night has surprised with snow.

And too, dear reader, an appreciation from BOSTON REVIEW: A POLITICAL AND LITERARY FORUM...

Devil’s Lunch: Selected Poems
Aleksandar Ristovic (translated by Charles Simic)
Faber & Faber, $13 (paper)
When Aleksandar Ristovic died in 1994, his poetry was little available to English audiences; his sole appearances were a collection in 1989 and inclusion in a Serbian anthology published in 1992. In both cases, Charles Simic served as translator and editor. Now, Simic has once again taken on the task of making Ristovic known in English, culling together a slim but faultless selection from his more than twenty collections. Ristovic could not have wished for a better advocate: the affinity between these two is deep. Like Simic, Ristovic juxtaposes the surreal and banal, grotesque and beautiful, shockingly vulgar and metaphysically transcendent, symbols of decay and despair with those of an irrepressible, humane hope. By turns wryly satiric and nakedly vulnerable, Ristovic populates his poems with a singular, shared set of images: rats, nunneries, nipples, pigs, lavatories, a solitary lamp, or a glass of wine. The book’s cover features a detail from the "Hell" panel of Bosch’s Garden of Heavenly Delights, and the association is apt. Lines like "[t]he water lay green in the stone well / while the frog watched me with her red eyes / out of that other world" or "[n]ow, we are walking under the big trees / in whose high branches the owls sit brooding. / God whispers coarse words into their ears, but they stay as they are" conjure up visions that seem to belong to Bosch’s painting. Yet despite the nightmarish quality of these figures, one might say of Ristovic what Simic has recently written of Bosch: "[a]gain and again, [he] insists, where there is evil, there’s also innocence."

–Monica Ferrell

So taste some more and wish, perhaps, we knew Serbian. From Devil' Lunch...

The touch of absence

Nothing exists, except a small object,
something formless that can only
loosely be called an object:
without hardness, color or movement,
without width or length,
or any other verifiable sign of its presence.
It exists merely in our touching hope
that we'll see it and use it,
or be of some use to it,
do with it what the hand does with keys,
flashlight, pliers,
or my always open book, for instance.

Happiness

The mouse is golden
and so are the turtle and the spider,
and even the centipede,
and the pebble with which you try
to get rid of it
without leaving your bench,
from which one can view man other
things and golden beings.

Workroom

You who are making a big cape out of mice-skin,
put aside briefly the tools of you trade:
the cushion studded with pins and the narrow scissors.

She isn't paying attention to your sewing,
but keeps squinting, instead, through the steamed window
at5 the man in a carriage wearing earrings.

Don't poke her with your needle
in her blushing cheek and forehead
or in her hair arranged in a bun.

Don't frighten her with the story
of a tragic death in a tailor's workroom.
Don't do her a wrong unintentionally.

Go and finish what you've started,
threading a new thread in a new needle,
while recalling other voices in times of winter holidays.