Dušan Stojkovic

The House of Language and Being

Matia Beckovic’s entrance into Serbian poetry was grand – meteoric. And highly unusual, too – with a bibliographic edition of a love poem entitled Vera Pavladoljska and published by Zaduzbina Ras in 1962. That poem was later to become a source of the finest collection of love poems / an anthology of Serbian love poetry. A great, open book, impossible to finish, as open as the complete poetic works of the poet we are writing about. Named after the apostle Mathew, he is, alongside immortal Njegos, the best disciple of the equally immortal Sima Milutinovic Sarailia. Matia burst into Serbian poetry somewhat like a haiduk, a highwayman, at the same time as Branisalv Petrovic. The first several collections of poems of these two Dioscuric Serbian poets, Branchilo and Matia, were published alternately: The Power of Speech (1961), Vera Pavladoljska (1962), A Wandering (Stray) Bullet (1963), A Building Site (1964), Thus Spoke Matia (1965).

Matia Beckovic was a mature poet from the very beginning. He has never been an embryo, a seed – he immediately grew into a tree trunk. He has never sneaked, hidden, but hit the snake of our poetry right on the head. In his rebuttal to Miljkovic’ poem Everyone Will Write Poetry he wrote ‘Nobody will write poetry anymore’. He opposes Miljkovic’s neosymbolistic hermetism with his poem, partially also - as paradoxical as it may seems at first –hermetic, commercial, a bullet-like, a thunder-like poem. The one that reaches even the (hyper)surreal and surrealistic image such as:

O, ears, grown on my heart
Which the wind fills with soaked beasts (‘A Tear on High Seas, V’).

Even when he thunders commercially, the poet who speaks to a poem with O, poem, you literally copied thunder (‘L`Espoire’) listens, both with his heart an mind, the great cosmic silence which settles above as, as well as inside us. He rushes into the arena of poetry with a poem hurled skywards, sang at the top of his voice, only to, by quietening it gradually, find himself at the very heart of silence, with a prayer in his heart. The verses of that prayer, like gently touched rosaries, count our hours in the universe, this time descending the sky ever more towards us and slowly inhabiting our souls with its blue grace.

The most accurate description of Beckovic’s poetic work would be: a single, temple-like, coherent book with separate collections of poems as planets circling around the whirlwind light of the language Sun. The author himself thought up a name that is impossible to surpass: From-To. The wideness and depth of the topics he sang about in his poems (everything that exists, as well as everything that has been or will be dreamt about can be a topic of a poem) can not be matched by almost anything or anybody in the entire corpus of Serbian poetry. By no means accidentally, Beckovic wrote these poetic verses at the very beginning of his career as a poet:

… but what is a poem
What it is or what it misses (‘The Ear of the World, Ever on Duty, IX’).

His feet are rooted in the past, whereas his head is facing the future; but the persistent wandering (stray) bullet looks high and low for his head, as well as ours. The supreme master of poetic models and lyric designs, Matia Beckovic has created a complex, ever fragmentary epic consisting of smaller parts - a mirror we have to look ourselves in to see what we are and feel the desire to change as much as necessary in order to become, at long last, what we have been in our poems for a very long time. It is not a mind’s toy (as Beckovic himself named a treasured a collection of selected poems by Sima Milutinovic Sarajlia) when he uses coek instead of covek (man). This ‘shortened’ form acquires an ethic halo as well. This word, made unconventional by the poet, shows us, reveals to us what is in the core of humanity, the humanity on the world as well as our own (our humanity having been established by Njegos’ twin epics: Gorski vijenac (‘ The Mountain Wreath’) and Luca mikrokozma (‘The Light of Microcosm’): first and foremost, in order to be accepted by others, we have to be ourselves. The only way not to drop out of the human kind is to respect and value our national selves. Together with our language and religion, our nation and kin are our only home. In his poems, Matia Beckovic, the keeper of our roots, seeks for the (missing) father, confidently deals with our history, converses with both Saint Sava who lived centuries ago and the tragic Serbian king Peter 2nd from the last century, both the heroes of the Battle of Kosovo and Jesus, but also with Vera Pavlodoljska; the things of this world as well as the next. He sings about secret and horror, a horrible secret, a secret horror, about poetry that is not really a special secret / but a secret to life, that is what poetry is (‘Secret’) and, in his poignant tales, about our sufferings brought to us by fate. He does that both wittily (up to a point of being hilariously funny) and ironically, both critically and satirically, both painfully and sneeringly, gnomically and with ripples of sound, aware that even with a poem one can, and must, fight against the evil that infernally closes in on us from everywhere. The entire nature and everything written and then indelibly printed on our minds are equally the source of poems, for:

The day was as beautiful as can be,
As if Vladika (Archbishop) Rade had written it (‘Bread’).

Matia Beckovic is the indisputable master of language. He does not bow to words; they are his slaves. His vocabulary is a rare found language gem. The follower of Vuk Karadzic and the one who clashes with his rules by being open to dialectal abysses of the language are both called poets. But Vuk marries the words of the language, and Matia divorces them. So much so, that the language thundered with its tongue (‘A Same Old Story’). Even when we have nothing else, we still have our language:

A man is a language
And a language a house and land (‘Bread and Language’).

No one ever leaves that house, and that piece of land one guards with one’s life. It feeds us and we stand guard over it so that nobody would hurt it.

Beckovic’s poetry, made of sound and thought, a symbiotic medley of bewitching his readers with sounds, playing with poetic language and lyrical wisdom, has sprung from the language itself and as well as from mature contemplation; his poetry deals with out entire poetic tradition. He brings to life mediaeval poetic expressions: poems of praise, prayers, letters missive… With a poem-story he poetically narrates both about his church and his kin, his people and God. Matia Beckovic has magically made voice and word, as well as verse, become poems. Just like short poems become long, the books simply are. Great Miodrag Pavlovic needed the whole book to say what sometimes took Matia a single word, and sometimes a single poem. Let us just remember word-poems, examples of dialects excluded (N.B. The following are examples of the new words created by Matia Beckovic. They do not exist in the standard Serbian language and, as such, cannot successfully be translated into a foreign language. translated into a foreign language. Therefore, they are presented here):

barjaciti; batotuk; bezgtvija; bezimenaš; bezljude; bezmozgara; bezotadžbenik; beskorenovic; bogomati (gl); boljoglaviti; bratotvorac; bracožderstvo; vratolomššti; desnopisati; doubiti; grombosati; zadomaciniti; zamostiti; zaplakivati se; zasebnik; iskriknuti; iskresaj; ispamecenje; jezitti; kosolomiti; krstorez; kumoubica; lažavgša; lomovracati; ljudomrz; morieuk; mrzija; nadostiti; nadrškati; nanožati; nebogladan; nebodan; nebožedan; nebolom; nebosit; nebostanjivati se; nenekati; obezbratiti; obezgranjen; obezgrobljen; obezdetiti; odjutriti; ozloputao; oluden; opodniti; pamtikamen; pozveriti; prvomracje; prvoumnik; razgrob; razjeziciti; raskuc; robijalizam; samouhapsiti se; samotariti; samohranica; sebpgrab; smlatimozgovica; suludnica; ugrobiti; umestiti; urnebesati; uroviti; usamnpcen; uskolenik; ucelijen; temeljkovic; cicuknuti; džamijati; šumoglav; šumogled; šumovati.

Let us also remember several of Matia’s more recent poem-books: "Vezivanje za mrca" (‘Tying Yourself to the Carcass’), "Pokajnica" (‘A Penitent’), "Karadorde" (‘Karadjordje’), "Crkva" (‘Church’). They now already constitute a song cycle on the uprising, just like Rakic’s cycle on the Battle of Kosovo. Each one is in itself a precious stone of Serbian lyric poetry, doomed to last and warn, so that we would survive and last as well.

By dividing Matia’s name we get: Mate and I. this poet, there is not doubt about it, keeps checkmating his readers.

Translated by Sofija Milanovic