Tango: Poems in Prose

Over the many years of our academic and literary careers, fruitful and productive professional cooperation and genuine and untroubled personal friendship and mutual critical esteem, I have written about Professor Vasa Mihailovich and his inspired, erudite, and prolific scholarly and artistic creativity so many times that, in the approaching twilight of our lifetime and public activity, it is not so easy to find something worthwhile to say without running the risk of unavoidable, yet unwelcome, repetition and paraphrase. Fortunately, the risk is substantially decreased by Vasa’s seemingly inexhaustible inventiveness, undiminished poetic resourcefulness, delicately and acutely sensitive perception and enviably refined articulation of every detectable tremor, internal and external, of the eternal, inexorable, and unstoppable Heraclitean flux of things.

The eighty lovely, thoughtful and often poignantly touching prose poems in this attractively bound and physically slender, but intellectually, emotionally, morally, and aesthetically very rich and versatile collection are deliberately divided into four groups. Tango (20 poems), Moonlight Sonata (12), Human Symphony (38), and Christmas in the Old Country (19). Each of these sections is based on certain principles of selectionn which, though imminently defensible and completely justifiable, are not immediately obvious but represent an analytical challenge to the careful critical reader looking for significant unifying themes and common semantic denominators. The book has no introduction, preface, foreword, or epilogue, but at the outset it does include a very useful table of contents.

All of these deeply stirring, lapidary, tersely concise, quintessentially economical and elegantly expressive poems were written in the poet’s native Serbian and offered here in English translations. Forty poems were translated by their author himself and the remaining forty by eight, in my opinion, equally competent, comparably talented, and scrupulously faithful and responsible scholarly translators. These include Edward Davis (8), Michael Collins (10), Barbara Magee (12), Dwight Stephens (1), Mirjana Matarić (2), Irena Kostić (1), Milo Yelesiyevich (2), and the writer of this review (4).

Familiar with many of these poems from earlier encounters in Serbian, I was delighted to meet again, greet and salute these charmingly captivating and unforgettably striking old friends, whose place of honor together with that of their distinguished, supremely gifted and subtly refined author, has long been assured in Serbian and world literature dealing with this seductively beguiling, strangely evanescent, and dangerously brittle genre.

Together with the great and internationally recognized master-poet Jovan Dučić, Vasa Mihailovich occupies an equally important position. Dučić’s advantage in pioneering novelty is more than made up for by Mihailovich’s no less outstanding formal polish combined with far greater and much more widely appealing, though always tastefully restrained, emotional openness and human warmth. To all lovers of belle letters, and particularly of soothing gentle and therapeutically smooth, deeply thoughtful, and discreetly compassionate prose poetry, I wholeheartedly recommend this splendind collection of Vasa Mihailovich as his best.

The book can be ordered from the author at 821 Emory Drive, Chapel Hill, NC 27517, at the price of $10.