To V V: On Our Translation of the Kossovo Fragments

Vladeta the Voyvoda!
   knight who brings the news
From Kossovo
   to gracious Militsa,
Lazarus's queen,
   sister of the Jugovici,
Daughter of Jug Bogdan—
   that's the stock you're made of!
In the name
   of God Almighty
As they all repeat
   in these old epic poems
We struggle with
   (and even in the name
Of Allah maybe)
   what could ever bring
A hero and a Serb
   To South Bend, Indiana?

Where Ivan Mestrovic
   petered out his talent
In the awful portrait busts
   and bland madonnas
Of his exile
   we meet beside
The only decent
   piece of work in town—
His Jacob's Well
   and puzzle over
Fates as dark
   as those of Lazarus

And Milosh Obilitch
   sung down centuries
Of Turkish occupation
   by dusty peasant guslers
Who didn't need to know
   that fancy alphabet
Saint Cyril left behind,
   in which reforming Vuk
Spelled out phonetically
   a living language
Where one itches through
   the final syllables of names
And scratches at the surface
   of a destiny
In verbal fragments
   of a people's epic past.

How unlikely, Vladeta,
   that we should meet at all.
In 1941 when I was born
   beside a silly field
Of vegetables
   that noncombatant types
Were urged to cultivate—
   officially they called
Such doubtful husbandry
   a "Victory Garden"—
You at just eighteen
   had taken to the hills
With Tito's partisans
   where every urgent message
Sent to Stalin
   (later on to Churchill)
Was the same:
   More boots!
The rugged karst
   that cut away your soles
Kept "the occupier,"
   as the euphemistic
Tour books call him now
   (for, after all, he's rich),
An easy target
   in the villages & towns.

Did you swoop right down on him
   like Marko on the Turks?
You did—
   but couldn't live with
Certain knowledge
   of unspeakable reprisals.
Nazi mathematics was
   a good deal easier
To follow than your theory
   of recursive functions
Hammered out in hiding
   six months later in Vienna—
For every officer
   you blew up in the town
They shot
   a hundred villagers.
And who is more
   within his rights
To moralize on firing squads
   than someone who himself
Would stand before one—
   Trying you summarily, your
Brothers tied you to a tree
   and lined up in a nasty file
With leveled rifles aimed
   to blow your very useful brains
To far less squeamish hills.

You can laugh four decades later
   since you've lived to tell
The tale:
   "But my uncle, who as fate
Would have it is in charge
   of this grim liquidation,
Couldn't shoot his nephew.
   That was 1941: two years later
And he would have."
   He cut you loose and kicked
You in the ass
   and shouted: Run!

In the ballad, Vladeta
   survives to tell the queen
What he saw at Kossovo:
   "Tell me knight," she says,
"When you were on
   that wide and level plain
Did you see
   great Lazar riding by?
Did you see my father
   and my noble brothers there?
Did you see the husbands
   of my daughters?
And Vladeta must tell
   of slaughter and betrayal
—the gusler singing
   mournfully in lines of just
Ten syllables, sliding over
   pauses at the fourth
Where prosodists
   would quickly place
Twin horizontal lines—
   Yes, Vladeta must tell
The queen exactly what
   annihilation feels like.

That I see you sometimes
   standing among memories
Like this other Vladeta
   before the queen
Or Mestrovic
   among his early works
Or even like Lord Milosh
   on that open plain
You find, of course,
   unspeakably absurd—
"With my broken
   battle lance, no doubt,
As all the enemy
   press in upon me fighting
Near the river Sitnitsa.
   One account says Milosh
Killed twelve thousand
   Turkish soldiers after
He had polished off
   the Sultan. In fact they
Took him in the tent and
   cut off both his arms!"

You open up the slivovitz
   and go on with your tales—
Which, my friend, for all
   the jokes and ironies
Required for the telling
   never cease to bleed—
And in your cups you sing
   to me Prince Lazar's fatal choice,
You sing the ancient
   downfall of the Serbs.
"Which Kingdom is it
   that you long for most?
That's the question that
   the falcon asked the Tzar.
If you choose the earth, he said,
   then saddle horses,
Tighten girths—
   have your knights put on
Their swords and make
   a dawn attack against
The Turks: your enemy
   will be destroyed.
But if you choose the skies
   then build a church—
Oh, not of stone
   but out of silk and velvet—
Gather up your forces,
   take the bread and wine,
For all shall perish,
   perish utterly,
And you, O Tzar,
   shall perish with them."

As you break your words
   for our inadequate exchange
And give me phrases which
   in token of their real worth
I give you back in scribbled
   & devalued English notes
I hear you choose the earth
   even as you tell me otherwise
And laughingly declare:
   The skies, the skies!
For you are out there
   on that wide & level plain;
You see yourself
   great Lazar riding by;
You see the father
   of the Lady's brothers there;
You see the husbands
   of her daughters—
And when your uncle
   cuts you loose
You stumble
   through the villages & hills
Playing tokens
   for survival, whispering
In code to border guards
   & agents, prostitutes & poets,
Fellow travelers and
   their wealthy following
Of contraband tobacconists
   an anagram compounded
Of the talismanic words
   that wound the clocks
In old Regusa:
   OBLITI PRIVATORUM
PUBLICA CURATE—
   Forget your private business
And concern yourself
   with public life, that's
The gist of it—
   knowing well that only those

A man can trust will whisper
   the correct response.
For if a man's a friend
   he knows that underneath
Those proudly chiseled words
   above the lintel close beside
The Rector's palace
   there's a dusty little shop
Whose owner chalks
   (in lingua franca too!)
Upon a blackboard
   hanging in his narrow window
The reply:
   ANYTIME FRIED FISHES.
And that's the phrase,
   you tell me, answers Latin.
That's the phrase
   that took you underground!
Obliti Privatorum Publica Curate
   you intone, and I cry out:
Anytime Fried Fishes!
   and we hug each other like
Two drunken Slavs
   and weep like sentimental
Irishmen & leave our
   empty bottle on the pedestal
Of Mestrovic's well.

Vladeta, my Voyvoda,
   my dear unhappy friend,
There is no Kingdom
   left for us to choose—
Neither of the earth
   nor of the sky.
But peace, peace,
   to all who wander
For whatever reason
   from their stony lands
Bringing all the heavy cargo
   of their legends
Humming in a cipher
   in their lucid, spinning minds!