Nikola Madzirov - I saw dreams that no one remembers and people wailing at the wrong graves. I saw embraces in a falling airplane and streets with open arteries. I saw volcanoes asleep longer than the roots of the family tree and a child who's not afraid of the rain. Only it was me no one saw

Nikola Madzirov, Remnants of Another Age, Trans. by Peggy Reid, Graham Ried, Magdalena Horvat, and Adam Reed, BOA Editions, 2011.


"These poems move mysteriously by means of a profound inner concentration, giving expression to the deepest laws of the mind. Their linguistic 'making' is informed by vivid evidence of a serious self-making, soul-making, and heart-making. We are lucky to have these English incarnations of Nikola Madzirov."—Li-Young Lee

"Born 1973 in a family of Balkan Wars refugees, Nikola Madzirov's poetry has already been translated into thirty languages and published in collections and anthologies in the United States, Europe, and Asia. A regular participant in international literary festivals, he has received several international awards including an International Writing Program fellowship at the University of Iowa. Remnants of Another Age is his first full-length American collection and carries a foreword by Carolyn Forché who writes, "Nikola Madzirov's Remnants of Another Age is aptly titled, as these poems seem to spring from elsewhere in time, reflective of a preternaturally wise and attentive sensibility. As we read these poems, they begin to inhabit us, and we are the better for having opened ourselves to them. Madzirov is a rare soul and a true poet."


"The birth of a major European poet is often heralded long after the fact by his or her emergence into the American poetic consciousness. The rapturous reception that has awaited Nikola Madzirov as he has travelled the US has only served to confirm what many already knew – Macedonia has produced a poet whose significance is undeniable, and whose gift is indelible. Nikola Madzirov is a poet who can look eye to eye with the great figures of the 20th century, he is one of our generations luminaries. His poetry is deft, sure and canny, he wields a wry and wise and often elusive aesthetic and while Peter Boyle has rightly traced his line back to Vasko Popa, Milosz, Herbert & Zagajewski, his voice is absolutely his own, absolutely of this generation. “We are the remnants of another age” — Nikola Madzirov succeeds in convincing us.”" - SJ Fowler

"Madzirov's poems are like Expressionist paintings: filled with thick, energetic streaks they seem to emerge from the imagination and to return to it right away, like night animals caught in the headlights of a car. 'We are the remnants of another age'—Nikola Madzirov succeeds in convincing us." —Adam Zagajewski

"The poems of Nikola Madzirov are similar in quality to the poems of the Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer. They are genuine and open; they put up no barriers to empathy and concentration. Their cosmos is only infused with detonations. Madzirov searches for a feeling of being at home that no longer requires walls." —Der Spiegel

"Madzirov's poetry is striking in its lightness. It plays with everyday objects, deconstructing their self-evident meanings and associations in order to question established thought patterns and explore new sensual worlds." In a recent interview, Madzirov said of his own work: “Silence and darkness are the two halves of the core of the universal code of understanding. In silence all sounds are equal, in the darkness all objects are the same. However, poetry opens new spaces for inhabiting by means of the words and the light of individuality....In order to be able to write it is necessary to travel both through the world and through yourself.” - The Berlin International Literature festival

"In his introduction to Vasko Popa’s, Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems, Charles Simic ascribes part of Popa’s appeal to the fact that his “aim is to present the known in terms of the unknown and recover its mythical potential.” Much the same could be said for Nikola Madzirov’s newest poetry collection, Remnants of Another Age, in that the clarity and simplicity of the language of the poems belie the deeper movings beneath their surfaces that shift the reader’s perception of seemingly common and mundane objects and events from the obvious to the strange. In this collection Madzirov is most concerned with issues of stillness versus movement, home versus absence, and location versus displacement, and succeeds most where these issues are shown to the reader rather than described.
One of the most intriguing things about the collection is the voice of the speaker that persists throughout, and the way in which this voice serves a variety of functions. In regards to this particular collection, it seems helpful to conceive of there being a single speaker for nearly all, if not all, of the poems. The speaker switches between the first person singular and first person plural mostly, with an occasional trip into the second person, but never seems to use the third person. And yet despite using the first and third person throughout, the speaker manages to keep his or her distance from the reader. When the “we” and “us” are used in a poem, they typically seem to leave the reader out, as if the reader is watching the action surreptitiously from an external location to the world of the poems. In “Shadows Pass Us By,” the reader is privy to what seems like a communiqué between lovers:
We’ll meet one day,
like a paper boat and
a watermelon that’s been cooling in the river.
The anxiety of the world will
be with us. Our palms
will eclipse the sun and we’ll
approach each other holding lanterns.
A few page later, in “What We Have Said Haunts Us,” the reader again encounters a similar interaction of which we’re not part of: “We’ve christened our children/with affectionate nicknames/taken from letters/read only once,” and “What we have said without witnesses/will long haunt us.// The winters have piled up in us/without ever being mentioned.” In both of these poems the reader is purposely kept out of the “we” of the poem, and the poems themselves read like love letters that we’ve discovered by accident. This exclusion from the “we” can be disorienting at first for the reader, but it actually serves a clever purpose. By not including the reader in the “we” as often happens in the poetry, the speaker makes a witness out of the reader, thereby implicitly ensuring that what is being said will not haunt the speaker and his or her companion, and it also avoids the clichéd pitfall of the “we” by not proposing to speak on behalf of the reader. The reader then, not feeling boxed in by the “we” of the poem is welcome to make of the scene what they will, to look for the emotion of the poem in its images or the way it moves on the page, in the syntax and word choice. In this way, the speaker is cleverly offering the reader a way into the poem without proclaiming or projecting anything onto them.
Interestingly, even when the speaker uses an occasional dangerous “you” in a poem, it never feels addressed to the reader, but again reads as the “you” of a letter might. Take for example the poem “Ruined Homes,” where the speaker discloses, “In the wastebasket, I saw locks of hair/you’d brushed while the birds and the world were waking.” A few pages later, “Everything is a Caress” begins, “The snow was folding its wings/over the hills, I was laying my palms/over your body like a tape measure.” Its clear that the “you” in these poems (and others) is not the typical “dear reader” of other poets, but again, an utterance from one lover to another, something that feels quite private, and again places the reader firmly in the role of a peeping tom.
However, the feeling of confusion, of displacement, of “outsiderness” that permeates the collection is not only cultivated through the speaker’s choice of pronouns. Madzirov also has a talent for making the mundane seem new, and for creating atmospheres of both loss and hope through evocative imagery. It is exactly this commonness that is celebrated in the poem “A Way of Existing,” which begins, “Too many rises and falls/are not recorded in the books/that are burned in usual wars.” The poem tracks just those mundane things that the histories of the world ignore, those things that fail to be seen in the larger events, but that for most people are what constitutes life, even during periods of loss and war. These books “write of the fall/of empires and epochs but not/of the old man who looks at a toy/dug up by a bulldozer.” It is these small objects and events that happen on the individual level that are passed on through generations as a sort of family history that often reflects life as it was lived more accurately than the most well-researched and elegantly written history books. And perhaps no poem in the collection creates a sense of absence than the very first poem, “After Us.” It begins:
One day someone will fold our blankets
and send them to the cleaners
to scrub the last grain of salt from them,
will open our letters and sort them out by date
instead of by how often they’ve been read.
Here, the images of the folded blankets and the sorted letters suggest what’s left behind when we die. Blankets to be cleaned, and perhaps donated. And the image of the letters suggests the anthropologist ordering and studying humans from the past, trying to make sense of the way they save their letters and their strange, individual rituals. And later in the poem, we see the plight of the refugee, the person always on the move, as the speaker opines, “One day the ache will return to our backs/from the weight of hotel room keys/and the receptionist’s suspicion/as he hands over the TV remote control.” The collection is punctuated by these seemingly simple images–the keys, the remote control, the letters, the blankets (all given greater emotional by being paired with something more unique–that something as light as a key could cause a backache for example)–that as they accrue energy from poem to poem, suggest the will and the voice of the collective calling out to be heard.
As the reader makes their way through the collection, they may begin to question exactly where and how this speaker exists in space or time, as the speaker is prone to making quite large and grand statements about their existence within, or perhaps more accurately, without the world. In “When Time Ceases,” our speaker tells us “We are remnants of another age. // That’s why I cannot speak/of home, or death/or preordained pains.” Later, in “Revealing,” our speaker says, “I haven’t belonged to anyone for ages/like a coin fallen from the edge of an old icon…History is the first border I have to cross…Every day my home/secretly changes under the world’s tent,/only childhood is like honey/that never lets anything leave a trace in it.” At these times the speaker seems to projecting a voice, an aura of ancient wisdom, almost as if the speaker were a lonely deity or the manifestation of some sort of eternal, ethereal idea traveling through time, looking for a place to land. But we know this speaker is no god, or else he or she wouldn’t be so insistent on the need for answers, and so ready to admit that he or she doesn’t have those answers.
What comes across is that through his or her ruminations on presence and absence, creation and destruction, home and travel, the speaker indeed wishes to commune with and give voice to all those who have been displaced in one way or another, those who have trouble answering the question of where they call home, those who, like the speaker, wish to probe the wound of a vanished homeland. And its Madzirov’s willingness to ask these big questions, and his clever ability to allow the reader to serve as witness, that ultimately gives Remnants of Another Age its freshness and power." - Nick DePascal

"Poetry may be the most difficult of all literary forms to translate, and yet the beauty and depth of poetry are appreciated beyond the bounds of any given language—thus, poetry begs to be translated. Some of the greatest poets commonly read in English—Rimbaud, for example—are translated from another language and yet their books out-sell the works of many English-language poets. To think however that a contemporary Macedonian poet’s work would be the focus of a popular press, a non-academic volume, and still be furnished the care and expertise expected for a major academic work is impressive—nearly outlandish—and yet that is exactly what BOA Editions has provided with their book of poems by Nikola Madzirov, Remnants of Another Age.
Born in 1973, Madzirov is of an especially adept age: old enough to recollect the harrowing times of Communist rule and the broken, uneven, transformation from Soviet models toward a new day of post-Yugoslavic independence; and young enough to view his Macedonia as acute, immediate, and not nostalgic, what it is and what it will be, without coloring it in Soviet tones. An accomplished writer, Madzirov has gained serious attention in the world arena for someone not writing in a majority language and this new volume is not his only work to be translated. Still, he is very much a living Macedonian writer and not simply a writer from Macedonia: the tenor and tone of his native language are plenty apparent in his work, even in translation, and obvious is the crucial importance of his native language in how he constructs his poems. With that in mind, any attempt at translation of Madzirov is going to be a delicate and complex undertaking. Beyond the aspects of language and native culture, it also must be noted that while a poet, Madzirov is a writer with vast interests—like the Russian journalist William Pokhlyobkin, Madzirov is keen on political issues but mostly in their relation to personal, social, and daily discourses of life.
When Remnants of Another Age arrived in the post from BOA, I flipped it open and noticed it itself was a work of translation: the original Macedonian Cyrillic appears on the left side with the translated English text on the right. Though I’d heard of Madrizov, somehow I didn’t make the connection with this book, at first; glancing quickly at the Cyrillic I played the game all who read Russian do—it was, obviously, non-Russian Cyrillic, so what is it? An exciting moment, discerning which of the other, less-common, languages that employ noble Cyrillic we had here on the page! When I realized it was Macedonian, I was even more excited: my own research foci within the Slavic languages are Bosnian and Serbian, so seeing a contemporary work of poetry in translation from Macedonian was a rare treat. Having the original source text aside the English translation was, without any overstatement, a powerful experience in pedagogy and literature for me. It also showed BOA’s courage and willingness to take a risk: selling any $16 book of poetry in today’s economic climate is a challenge, and one with half the pages devoted to a script few readers may be able to read is a greater venture yet. However, it is a challenge that should have ample rewards as BOA is doing a great service in making Madzirov’s work available in the United States and elsewhere.
Carolyn Forché provides an essay of introduction to this volume, a well-written and tersely cogent account but one laden with Forché’s personal experiences in meeting Madzirov. To introduce work of this caliber in such a manner from a poet from a nation that not all readers may know is imperative. To do such in as sublime a voice as Forché provides is a real credit to the poet and publisher alike.
While Madzirov has not set out to write poems that provide a history or atlas of his native land, it is important to understand how life differs in the Balkans from elsewhere. There is a powerful synergy in the Balkan states forged by years of Communism and more years of other empires, other means of rule. There are proud divisions of language and culture, but also a unified sense of understanding that goes well beyond the conflicts recent or long-past that have visited this region. The geography of mountains and verdant farms retains the lingering presence of Ottoman rule and even the pull of Turkish pop music on local “turbo-folk” dance techno and other influences is strong today with Macedonian, Bosnian, and Kosovar youth.
The second poem in this volume lives under the ungainly title of ”When Someone Goes Away Everything That’s Been Done Comes Back”, a title that portends much and a poem that provides even more:
In the embrace on the corner you will recognize
someone’s going away somewhere. It’s always so.
I live between two truths
like a neon light trembling in
an empty hall. My heart collects
more and more people, since they’re not here anymore.
If I am to find any error or complaint with Madzirov’s book, it is that this poem is given to us second, and not first. It is a perfect introduction to his world and some of the leading themes throughout the book. That said, ”After Us”, the poem that in fact opens the book certainly works well, too:
One day someone will fold our blankets
and send them to the cleaners
to scrub the last grain of salt from them,
will open our letters and sort them out by date
instead of by how often they’ve been read.
Taking the opening lines of these two poems, we can quickly discern a sense of not only longing but an expansive exploration of emotion wrought from shared experience (and the fact that those experiences may not always remain intact). Slightly further into the book, in ”Shadows Pass Us By”, Madzirov appears to offer some level of solace or at least climax, though, to this process of lonesome removal:
One day, the wind won’t
change direction.
The birch will send away leaves
into our shoes on the doorstep.
The wolves will come after
our innocence.
The butterflies will leave
their dust on our cheeks.
We may have a hint of resolution here, yet we also have such wolves after our innocence. Here, as often in Madzirov’s poetry, there is a sense of escape but also a sense of the imperative for such escape. The characters who people his poems are half the time in transit, in flight, and half the time already gone. There is a sense of autumnal winsomeness yet also a feeling of suspense in his work. Back in ”When Someone Goes Away”, Madzirov reminds us of the acute nature of the never-ending, long-standing, process of transition:
We forget
things even before we lose them –
the calligraphy notebook, for instance.
Nothing’s ever new. The bus
seat is always warm.
So it seems like a circle, a circle each person takes part in, knowingly or not, a circle that we all have a cycle within—even those wolves. From this cycle, this circle, we garner the remnants of all ages. His poems, though short, are deep, sturdy, robust creations. After reading four or five , one may feel as if in the midst of something grand—something of a heavy tome rather than this book of only 104 pages. This is to suggest that the translations demand attention and time, and for the reader who can make them out, Madzirov’s originals in Macedonian invite a contrast to the translations. All in all, it’s enough to keep you up at night with the book for a long while.
For the American reader, it cannot be stressed enough that Madzirov comes from a place where history isn’t something just learned in a textbook or considered on the Fourth of July but something as natural as leaves and bone in all fabrics of life, just as geography isn’t confined to a map but etched in lives old and young alike. Or perhaps better than using etching as a metaphor, we should consider serigraphy: the silkscreen process that deposits ink in thick liquid layers on paper or cloth. For that mechanism of coating, of printing, is how history and geography intersect in the Balkans. Macedonia, itself a nation just by a thread and a prayer; the Macedonian people, proud but with a language contested even by their Bulgarian neighbors (who believe Macedonian is in fact a mere dialect of Bulgarian), strive long and hard to legitimatize their very being. Geography and history, however, do not always offer evidence in their favor.
Given Madzirov’s original Macedonian included in this edition, I tried my own hand at translating some of his poems and then compared my efforts to those of the official translations. The translators on this project—who include several native speakers—have done a stellar job in imparting their translations with the sound, feel, and gravity of Madzirov’s pen. In places Madzirov’s language seems simple yet his ideas are sprawling and complex; the cultural application of language was probably a challenge to the translators in rendering Madzirov’s poems in language as simple and forward as his own, without losing the nuanced undertones of his meaning. It certainly was a challenge to me. Madzirov is tough to read in places, and tougher still to translate: back in 1999 I published an article in the ATA Chronicle regarding the cultural challenges in translating contemporary Slavic literature and those points I feel are just as true over a decade later. The Slavic languages are filled with subtle metaphors and historical references that are treasures to discover yet do not lend themselves to a ready translation. There are places here and there such as the ”calligraphy notebook” mentioned in ”When Someone Goes Away” that could benefit from footnotes or other means of explanation. The Macedonian original is somehow more lovely though. It refers to the exact same and literal thing as the English, and through it all we still are unsure what a ”calligraphy notebook” is: for is it a workbook for learning calligraphy or a personal journal filled with beautiful writing? Madzirov’s sleek original here though deserves repeating:
Нештата
ги забораваме уште пред да ги изгубиме -
тетратката по краснопис, на пример.
The translators have expectedly left certain mysteries, but their work overall is superb and brings to life in English everything Madzirov seems to have intended. I expect he is happy with these translations and as a reader, I am happy, too. Someday I do hope for a scholar’s edition of Madzirov though—no doubt he will deserve such attention—where his contributions to Macedonian literature and the specifics of his native language alike will be detailed. Madzirov is a first-rate poet who deserves worldwide attention (and he is thankfully finding it), and the Macedonian language and its literature also deserves such attention. This slim volume is a noble introduction to both this poet and the larger Macedonian realm. For anyone with the background to read even some of the Macedonian text, it’s a joy to take on and proves rewarding. This volume provides that experience plus the experience of top-shelf contemporary poetry in translation." - Mike Walker

"Remnants of Another Age is a bilingual Macedonian-English edition of selected poems by Nikola Madzirov (b. 1973), an internationally acclaimed poet of a younger generation. Madzirov represents yet another genuine lyrical voice of the Balkans, from the territory of the former Yugoslav republics. His poetics are founded on a specific type of nomadic wandering between variously opposed geographical, cultural, and spiritual territories that determine its characteristic existential position. Because of this, the poetic voice sees itself as a palimpsest comprised of several layers of memory, always reflected from an inner standpoint. The poem "Things We Want to Touch" begins with the line, "Nothing exists outside us."
Although Madzirov evokes the mythical and historical migrations, exiles, and wars that were waged in the Balkans, his poetry primarily reveals his private and personal mythology. This can be found in the long lines of his poems, highly resembling prose poems ("I don't know" and "Ruin Homes"). The lyrical mythology of this poet is formed around fragile, precise, and expressive images that alternately emit light and darkness, shadow and dust. The landscapes of these images tend to be fantastic at times, almost mystical, with narrative elements that sharpen their symbolic potential.
Growing up homeless or between shelters, nostalgia always at hand, Madzirov shapes the former reality and saves it from oblivion by randomly writing down its visible yet hidden traces, and by naming things that nobody before him has seen or written down: "We forget / things even before we lose them - / the calligraphy notebook, for instance. / Nothing's ever new." Still, the principle of the repetitive cycle of life, remembrance, and death and the desire for love are always realized in a particular, specifically chosen moment. This moment, however, makes the poetic present transparent for both past and future, and for their mutual reflection in time that transcends the known world. As a result, a truly melancholic and elegiac atmosphere permeates these lines, despite occasional incantations, for it constantly reminds us of words that condense silence, which precedes and follows our lives.
The poet's vulnerability is thus equated with his mute testimony without witnesses: "My absence is a consequence / of all recounted histories and deliberate longings." And no matter how strong and painful this longing to go back to the original state of innocence and wholeness is, it might be the only thing that sustains the poet in and out of time. His transience can be measured by the intensity of spiritual and physical sufferings found in Madzirov's superbly modern religious imagination, as combined with the image of the body as a metaphysical entity: "I have a heart pierced by a rib. / Fragments of glass float through my blood / and clouds hidden behind white cells."
For Nikola Madzirov, to separate from one's self, to be alone—in order to commit oneself to air, fire, stars, and angels—means the return home, to earth, to those ancient habitats that preserve the remnants of bygone ages." - Bojana Stojanović Pantović

I SAW DREAMS

I saw dreams that no one remembers
and people wailing at the wrong graves.
I saw embraces in a falling airplane
and streets with open arteries.
I saw volcanoes asleep longer than
the roots of the family tree
and a child who's not afraid of the rain.
Only it was me no one saw,
only it was me no one saw

AFTER US

One day someone will fold our blankets
and send them to the cleaners
to scrub the last grain of salt from them,
will open our letters and sort them out by date
instead of by how often they've been read.
One day someone will rearrange the room's furniture
like chessmen at the start of a new game,
will open the old shoebox
where we hoard pyjama-buttons,
not-quite-dead batteries and hunger.

One day the ache will return to our backs
from the weight of hotel room keys
and the receptionist's suspicion
as he hands over the TV remote control.
Others' pity will set out after us
like the moon after some wandering child.


LIGHT AND DUST

In the space between
the four seasons I'll find you,
when children are taken out for a walk,
and souls come back
like dirty dishes in
a workers' canteen.

We are not a religion
and nobody believes in our
holy scriptures.

Our looks hide
in the curtains' folds
which let other people's prayers through
and the falling light.

Will our angels touch
when we hug each other
in the dark, will someone light a candle
to proclaim a kingdom?

We are the light of a burnt match
which turns to dust
when touched.

—from Remnants of Another Age


I WANT ONLY THAT

Like a feather my soul
travels between two windows.
God's uncertainty is my path,
your presence is my imperfection.
I bring your petals of cyclamen and peonies
in the apple season,
I squeeze resin from the vulnerable trees
unskillfully into my hands,
I present you with
the fruits of all the branches
we broke as children.
I want you to replace your shield
with a veil of light;
to hide your absence
behind the steam from hot tea
when the whole world cools.
I want your heart to beat
freely behind the bars of your rib cage.
I want only that.

—from Remnants of Another Age


WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

To live without reason or necessity,
to embrace the offenders
liberated from love,
to life the candle from ruined graves
and say a word or two
when there's no wind,
to open the rusty door of the world
and depart with airy footsteps.
To recover from time's dividers
thrust into our own hearts.

—from Remnants of Another Age


Interview by SJ Fowler