Fire and Nothing: A Bilingual Edition, Including Three Essays on the Art of Poetry

Branko Miljkovic, one of the greatest Serbian lyric poets of the mid-twentieth century, remains an enigma fifty years after his death. He was born in 1934 near Nis in southern Serbia. His genius, recognized at an early age, matured to write poetry that restored magic and mystery to the world. He cast a spell with the simplest words, created the great drama of being, fire, and nothingness, and invested his verse with unfathomable majesty.

Miljkovic referred to himself as a Neo-Symbolist, and continued where his mentors left off. Mallarme, the poet to whom he felt the closest affinity, longed to put the entire world into a single volume of poetry: L'oeuvre, Le Grande Oeuvre, comme disaient les alchimistes, nos ancestres. Since Mallarme's Le Grand Oeuvre remained unrealized, Miljkovic, supremely confident of his vocation, worked with the patience of an alchemist to create l'explication orphique de la Terre, qui est le seul devoir du poete et le jeu litteraire par excellence that Mallarme had envisioned.

Symbolism and Surrealism had both disappointed Miljkovic because he believed an important task had been left undone. He prepared to explore terra incognita by synthesizing the two movements, a mad attempt to create a poetic microcosm of the universe by tackling metaphysical themes with concrete imagery, paradox, intuition, and prophetic language.

Miljkovic did succeed in restoring poetry to the center of communicative discourse. His verse quickly entered the national consciousness, as if his simple, startling words had always existed at the end of the rainbow, but had only just now been spoken for the first time.