Stone Lullaby is a bilingual edition of a selection of Stevan Raickovic's best known poems.

Stone Lullaby: Selected Poems (A Bilingual Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Raickovic, Stevan

Poetry

The Serbian Classics Press

Jovan Ducic is the greatest Serbian lyric poet of the first half of the twentieth century. He appeared at a crucial point in the history of Serbian literature, the turn of the century, when the era of Romantic and Realist poetry was coming to a close and another, Modernism, was just beginning. By introducing new themes and sources of inspiration, Ducic was instrumental in setting Serbian poetry on a new course. He was an aesthete, and cultivated refined tastes and an aristocratic spirit. He is the best known practitioner of "l’art pour l’art" in Serbian literature. In his poetry, he strove for formal excellence expressed through clarity, precision, elegance, musical quality, and picturesque images. His subject matter and unique style, reflecting the manner of French verse—Parnassian, Symbolist, Decadent. Unlike previous Serbian poets, who were either romantically or realistically oriented, Ducic was attracted to esoteric, sophisticated, thought-provoking, and soul-searching themes, creating his own lonely world of the imagination, and reacting to it. 
--Vasa D. Mihailovich, from the Introduction

Songs of the Sun, Love and Death: Selected Poems

Ducic, Jovan

Pavle Maric, an architect, is furious with his wife because she is conducting an affair with Milan Novakovic, his best friend and business partner. Pavle leaves town to think things over. Weeks later, a deformed corpse is found washed up on the banks of the Danube and is identifed to be that of Pavle. The case is judged a suicide. Three years later, Pavle, now "the deceased," unexpectedly returns. He discovers that his heirs have not only plundered his estate, but also refuse to recognize him as being "legally" alive, and they unite to keep him "dead" to maintain the status quo. This is the first English translation of a masterful and darkly comic play that will enter its rightful place as a world classic. The fluid and natural translation lends itself to theatrical production. Comically absurd, filled with existential angst, it was ahead of its time in 1937. At once vaudevillian and modernist, it is distinguished by clever plotting and stinging dialogue. The play stands as a lasting and caustic satire of human greed, strangely consonant with todays society.

The Deceased: A Comedy with a Prelude and Three Acts

Humor & Entertainment

Nusic, Branislav

Humor

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.

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

Branko Miljkovic (Author)

Milo Yelesiyevich (Translator)

Mansarda is the first novel published by the renowned Serbian author Danilo Kis (1935-1989). Written in 1960, published in 1962, and set in contemporary Belgrade, Mandarda explores the relationship of a young man, known only as Orpheus, to the art of writing; it also tracks the personal relationship among a colorful cast of characters with nicknames such as Eurydice, Mary Magdalene, Tam-Tam, and Billy Wise Ass. Rich in references to music, painting, philosophy, and gastronomy, as well as literature, this bohemian Bildungsroman provides important perspectives on the evolution of Kis as a writer. It is a laboratory of techniques and the anvil of artistic ethos for Kis. In other words, as a work of art, Mansarda is at once a depiction of life in bohemian Belgrade, a register of stylistic devices and themes that would recur throughout Kis' oeuvre, and an account of one yong man's quest to work out one's artistic ethos and approach to representation by balancing art, life, and text. These three aspects of Mansarda add up to an admirable first novel, indeed. John K. Cox, Translator Professor and Department Head at North Dakota State University

Mansarda

Danilo Kiš

Genre Fiction