Novica Tadic is Serbia s leading poet and the linguistic heir to Vasko Popa. With this translation, US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic brings the full range of Tadic s dark beauty to light:
I dream how on a flat surface
I set down knives of various
shapes and sizes.
Already there are so many of them
I can t count them,
or see them all. Someone s being done in
by those knives.
Novica Tadic has won most major Serbian literary awards, including the prestigious Laureat Nagrade. Charles Simic s latest poetry collection is That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008).