Craft: Vasko Popa

Vasko Popa (Васко Попа, 1922-1991) was a major Serbian poet. His poems are antiauthoritarian, discontented, and risky. Rejecting the social realism of poetry of his era, Popa’s poems instead use Serbian folk material and Surrealism. These qualities evoke an unsettling, dangerous, and always take an adversarial position.

He was born in Vršac in northern Serbia, a border area with Romania where both Serbian and Romanian were spoken, though his poems were written in Serbo-Croat, known as srpkohrvatski or hrvatskosprski).

Popa was always antifascist and joined the underground during the outbreak of World War II. He fought the Germans as a partisan, and was imprisoned in the concentration camp in Bečkerek (today known as Zrenjanin, Serbia).

Popa in the snow: “It’s as if marrow flows through me / A bone-chilling marrow”