In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 6 “Flute, why does my joyous breath...?”* Previously, writing of Nastasijević’s Pet lirskih krugova, I have stated that to seek any exact “interpretation” would merely be to vitiate what one admires. Matija Bećković put this better in an interview when he stated: “It appears that commentaries have sense only if the riddles grow. Only then does art gain. What may be unriddled to the end ceases to exist.”1 The words might well serve as an epigram for the theme suggested here as the leitmotif for the five cycles. To suggest a theme, as being the basic theme of the poems, is not, however, to risk reducing the mystery and complexity, but, one ventures to hope, rather to open the way to the discovery of those very mysteries and complexities of which they are redolent. In any case, as the title suggests, the aim is concentrated on the first cycle, Jutarnje, but with the idea that it directs the attention towards the nature of the work as a whole. At least it assumes that one cannot write about one cycle without referring to the work in its entirety. The first poem in the cycle Jutarnje, “Frula” was composed probably immediately after Nastasijević’s article “Nekoliko refleksija o umetnosti.” In any case, a glance at the earlier poems will show variants of some of those of the Five Lyrical Cycles. It is safe to assume that most of the poems making up the Five Lyrical Cycles were written separately at different times and on different occasions. Yet, when the Five Lyrical Cycles appeared in 1932, they presented something very different from a mere collection of poems. The ordering of the poems in their cycles becomes as important here as the ordering of lines in an individual poem. Thus Jutarnje does not admit of being treated as nine separate poems. The ordering of Jutarnje, as of the complete Five Lyrical Cycles, might well make one think of a sonata in music with its passages, or even a symphony. Neither, of course, would actually fit. Indeed, “symphony” is the term one might be tempted to apply to the Five Lyrical Cycles as a whole, in which case Jutarnje is only the opening movement, with its various developments of its leading theme. Certainly, in approaching * Published in Serbian Studies 14: 1 (2000): 3–13. 1 Matija Bećković, “Kosovo je najskuplja, a sloboda vodeća srpska reč,” interview by Miodrag Perišić, Književne novine, no. 788–89 (December–January 1990): 1. 104 The Escaped Mystery Jutarnje one is compelled to treat it in a twofold manner, both as nine individual poems and as a unified poetic statement that presents both a variation and a development. To state this is, of course, to make a merely formalistic proposition. Having made it, one is tempted to attempt something more difficult and more risky—namely, to seek a central theme that, through all the convolutions of the cycles, lends them a unity. This comes close to interpretation, and this, as Bećković suggests, has its dangers. Equally dangerous, perhaps, would be to seek such a theme outside the poetry, in the critical writings of its author. While never ignoring such writings, one must retain the sense that to write about poetry (even one’s own) is one thing and to write poetry is another. Yet any too clear “interpretation” will risk the tragic error which we may at once see as suggestive of the very central theme of the Cycles, namely that we kill the thing we express by making it something else. In other words, one may attempt only to point out a general direction which may bring into clearer relations many other qualities, many individualities of the whole work, yet leave its reference still as open as it ever was: to do no more than merely propose that to look at a work “this way” may lend the reader an interesting insight which he is free to allow of modification or, perhaps finally, reject in favor of yet a better one. Imposition, however, must be avoided if one is not merely to kill what was not killed but rejoined with great effort, and if one is not to make language “only language” (or sign “only sign”!). The first poem of Jutarnje places the predicament of expression directly and, interestingly, in terms of music, of Nastasijević’s favored instrument, the flute: “Što dah moj radosni žalno u dolji razleže?” This poem...

Share