MILNE HOLTON (College Park, MD, U.S.A.)

Beyond Affirmation: Macedonian Poetry since World War II

One of the significant but little celebrated results of World War II in Yugo- slav-indeed, in European-literature was the liberation of a poetry. On 7 July 1945 Macedonian was officially established as a Yugoslav language. Even be- fore that date, post-war poetry had begun to appear in , soon to be the southernmost of the Yugoslav republics.1 And in the thirty-six years which have followed, this new language has proved itself a capable vehicle for the articulation of the poetic imagination. This liberation of a language and a poetry was, of course, the culmination of a long historical process which has generated not only a language and a literature but a national consciousness and a special imagination peculiar to a people whose sad past has long been submerged in events of greater moment. That history cannot be summarized here. I can only note that the centuries of Turkish occupation, the terrors of World War I and of the Balkan wars (in which Macedonia was not an inconsiderable prize), the years of the old Yugoslav kingdom before World War II, and the wartime Italian and German occupations were hardly years in which a literary tradition might be established and might flower. Of course, the poetry of post-war Macedonia did not emerge ex nihilo, nor could it be said to have been the fruit of a long poetic tradition, or not in any usual meaning of the word. Yet the poets immediately after the war seem to have been almost self-consciously aware of a past imaginatively their own. They write of and imitate the songs of the damaskini, the dark narrative poems of Kosovo, of Marko Krale, and of Dojcin the ill one. Yet aside from this an- cient and primarily oral tradition (shared by Macedonia's neighbors), the Macedonian poets of today can look only to the barest beginnings of a modern written poetry in their own language, beginnings which do not emerge until well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, the very claim of possibility for a Macedonian poetry was not voiced until the middle of that century. Profes- sor Vivian Pinto has identified in a literary renaissance of the same period which in Macedonia today would be called a preporod2; in Macedonia,

1. As we shall see, a number of poets-Racin and Markovski among them-had pub- lished collections in "Macedonian" in the 1930s, and Aco Sopov's Pesni (Poems) was published in 1944. See Blagoja Korubin, "The Formation of the Macedonian Literary Language," MacedonianReview, 1 (1971), 54-61. 2. Vivian Pinto, ed., Bulgarian Prose and Verse(London: 1957), Introduction, p. xiii, uses the Bulgarianword v5zrazhdane to describe a similar event in that country. 161

at (then a part of the ), this renaissance took its first form-as every Macedonian poet today is aware-in a collection of Macedonian folk songs (after the Serbian example of Vuk Karad?it) by Dimitar and Kon- stantin Miladinov, finally published in Zagreb with the help of Bishop Stros- majer in 1861. Dimitar Miladinov also began, but never published, a first gram- . mar of the . But it was his brother, Konstantin, who was Macedonia's first poet of modem times. The Miladinovs were rewarded for their work by imprisonment; they died in a Turkish prison in in 1862.3 But in the latter half of the nine- teenth century there were others of like sentiment. Many were to study in Russia and were there to gain an enthusiasm for the pan-Slavic movement. Everyone in Skopje's literary community today knows of Partenija Zograf- ski, whose concerns led him to questions concerning the propriety of Bulgar- ian as the literary language for Macedonians. Also well known is the name of the poet-journalist Rajko Zinzifov, and that of Zografski's most noted fol- lower, Kuzman Sapkarev. Modem Macedonian poets, however, look to Grigor Prlicev as the out- standing figure in the establishment of their modem poetry. Prlifev, who was born in Ohrid in 1830 or 1831, made his first reputation in Athens in 1860 as a university poet writing in Greek. But the tragedy of the Miladinovs convinced 'him to return to his natiye Ohrid, to live among his own people, and to write- no longer in Greek-but in "Pan Slavonic" (his own transliteration of the lan- guage of the Ohrid area), which he hoped would serve as a literary language uniting the South . He translated into "Pan Slavonic" the Iliad and his own Greek-language epics, Serdarot4 and Scanderbeg and even attempted a grammar for his language, but he was never able to attain the level of poetic achievement in this unestablished language that he had achieved in Greek. As Priicev himseif admiiteu, he, who had sung like a swan in Greek, must now cry like an owl in Slavonic. But his struggle-in the face of the attacks of Bul- garian critics-to produce a poetry which would establish a literary language for his own people and his own solid achievement of a remarkable autobiogra- phy written entirely in his "Pan Slavonic," have made for Prlifev a place in the consciousness of Macedonians today as the father of their poetry. It is significant that the best known poem written by a Macedonian poet in the latter half of,the nineteenth century, Konstantin Miladinov's "T'ga za Jug" ("Longing for the South"), was written in . Indeed, the seven- ties, eighties, and nineties were years of repression and struggle, first in Bul- garia and then in Macedonia; they were hardly years of poetry. The period

3. See Pinto, p. xviii. n. 6, and Korubin, "Formation," p. 55. For an account of the collecting of the poems, see H. Polenakovid, "The , Heroes of the Macedonian Renaissance," Macedonian Review, 2 (1972), 155-61. 4. Peggy and Graham Reid have translated Serdarot into English (The Sirdar [Skopje: MacedonianReview, 1 9 73 ] ) .