Galery

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Momchilo Radich is a teacher in French, translator and poet. He was born in Niš, Serbia in 1969. His mother is a Bulgarian and his father is a Serb. He began writing poetry as a teenager and became a member of the Yugoslav literature youth in 1986. He organized poetry readings in different cities of Yugoslavia along with a group of young poets. In 1987 he was awarded the prize for young poets in Loznica. His verses were published for the first time in the same year in the poetic anthology Soda Water for Mutant Thirst. He lives in Athens since 1991. He translated from French to Greek Henri Lechat’s essay Phidias. His first translated book entitled Serbian Tales (2004) came from the Greek publishing house Apopira. He has signed under the Serbian translations of the poetic books by Antonis Fostieris Precious Oblivion and Thought Belongs to Bereavement (2008), the poetries Rose Fear and Here by Maria Laina, and the selection of poems by the surrealist poet Nikos Engonopoulos (2009). In 2010 will be published Croatian Tales in his Greek translation. He has been writing poetry in this language for years. Zdravka Mihailova talked with Momchilo Radich especially for GRREPORTER.

Momchilo, you grew up in Serbia and it is clear you feel this country as your homeland. It is also clear why you don’t write poetry in Bulgarian but why did you chose Greek and not French the lights and shades of which you command?

I would say, paraphrasing Seferis: "Wherever I go, Serbia hurts me".... Can you translate a homeland? Can you love it? You are homesick far from it. It is becoming some images of warmth, sense of scent... It flies away... It becomes distant eyes looking at you and never leaving...

When did I realize that I wanted to be a Serb? In the spring of 1999 the Yugoslav Army accidentally brought down Stealth – the invisible plane, the pride of Nato aircraft ... The plane wreckage fell in a village near Belgrade and people flocked to see the invisible. They climbed a child with an angel’s smile above and laughed heartily. To all apologies for the "collateral damage" they only officially responded with an apology: "Sorry, we did not know it is invisible." Then I wanted to be a Serb, to laugh over evil as a man.

Why do I write in Greek? The most logical answer I could find for myself was that I have liked foreign languages for a long time. It happened to love the Greek language when I was still very small. My parents bought two LPs: The Birds of Hadzidakis and another one containing the song White Boats are Our Dreams (Άσπρα καράβια είναι τα όνειρά μας) ... I did not understand anything ... Later I read Aristophanes and began to study ancient Greek ... The second logical answer is that the Greek words are full of meaning. Sin means to miss the target (η αμαρτία είναι αστοχία). Time (χρόνος) does not mean the same in all languages. Time the secret of which no one could discover. There was a time when I thought how unfair my life was not giving me the chance to learn Greek better, nor ever to study modern Greek. So, I am proud to learn it by myself. I am still learning it. Love of a foreign language is directly proportional to the time you consecrate. And I'm lazy. I have been planning to read some books in Greek for years: biology, chemistry, physics - to learn all the words. But I only read poetry. I would sit down to trace any unknown words only in poetic text and if I like the poem I would read it hundred times.

So, why do I write poetry, why do I write in Greek? Imagine a happy child that comes from a joyful country, a University the child adored, evenings of poetry readings, poets who talk to each other and do not hide in their shells, imagine this child, then, sank into a whisper so that his new friends made comments that they do not hear that child’s voice. Poems are born of pain and my pain was to find my voice again. A voice of spelling mistakes, a strange voice.

What do you feel to Greece as ‘acquired’ homeland?

Homelands hut as well as attempts to laugh. Does Greece hurt me? What has come over them, all foreigners, as it comes to Greece?, they ask me sometimes. It is easy to love such a beautiful country. And it hurts when you see the burnt Olympia, Kronio with felled trunks of trees. How many times have I talked to tourists (in addition to teaching lessons in French, Momcil works as a tour guide) about the most holy place in Attica turned today into an industrial zone? Can I convince them that this was Elefsina? Beauty that was destroyed, it hurts everywhere. An Athens that buried its three rivers - Ilisos, Kifisos and Iridanos. It hurts when children write the word Acropolis with omega ...but spelling is not quite so important ...it hurts because of the schools that deprive them of a chance ... a society the supreme value of which is money, poor to the galleries in Kolonaki ...It hurts when my friends, smart young people with a soul, intend to emigrate, because they suffocate here.... The only project to make this city look better, which can be carried out according to plan, is a complete decline of its historical center that will decrease the real estate prices so that the rich could buy whole building plots, and then drive away Pakistanis, thieves, drug addicts, unfortunate fellows... Why would they care about tourism in their town since Greece has always been a poor country with a handful of wealthy? I hear the same happened in London and other European cities. How much anger is a homeland? Do not get me wrong. I do not want to convince anyone that I want to become Greek. If it happens it would be simply obtaining a ‘taftotita’ - identity card. Homeland of the poet is the poetry.
    
What is the illustration on the cover of your book of poetry - a sleeping dog?

Have you seen your favourite pet to dream? What is a dog dreaming of ... running on the green lawn hunting rabbits and other ‘motorbikes’? I look at the cover of my book. The artistic photographer Eni, who made the graphic design of the edition, had and eye to catch a sleeping dog and I'd like to believe this book of poetry will go ‘far away’... The most beautiful poems I wrote are candles I lit for the people I love ... because where I was born they do not know any other way.
    
What different meanings can the word ‘door’ get?
 
None, I am afraid.... When you open a ‘Door’ which does not mean a door you go into a world of imagination, in a small mythological grove that you scour/read for about an hour ... mountains, meadows of poppies, three rivers and a sea, an imaginary Hellas, the childhood of Europe and mine, a dream that has been saving me all these years and I do not want to interrupt ... Let those weary of the most beautiful - I think - something that happened in this world, which is called "Greek miracle" or better miraculum graecum, because I think the Latins invented the concept – mock at the verbal somersaults of this Serbian poet who writes in Greek. What are these tumbles, this poetic slapstick, they would say. They are words, jokes, tool that simply controls whether what I say is true. Laughter hurts until banished the pain. A good man loves the others and is laughing at himself. And vice versa ... The bad man laughs at the others and loves only himself.

The only advice I can give here and now to this country called Greece, as a classical philologist that I did not become and a poet that I want to be, is to teach our children more Greek, more literature, more humanity ... so that I as a poet to sell my books and live from my poetry... (he is laughing). This is why Aristophanes made fun of Sophists....this is why I love Greece, and not because of what it is not...

Maria Laina, reviewer of Mochilo Radic poetry.

Who could be called a poet?

He who writes good poetry. Nobody else. Neither the one that supposedly lives poetically, nor the one who really could live poetically. Who is a carpenter? He who knows that a table must have at least four strong legs to be made, that a door must shut up, be leveled, smooth, in carpentry language.
 
How can we consider whether a poem ‘stands firmly on four legs’?

Besides the pleasure it brings us, it is appropriate the poem to reveal something, to make us consciously share feelings we have not experienced before, or if we experienced them to recognize them in another way; to turn the usual way we feel them or to supplement it with something new, refreshing and anew. A good poem finds the words we could not find for something we've experienced. It can be ‘self-willed’, ie saying things but in a strange and unusual way, to sharpen our sensitivity using few words and changing our lives a bit, not necessarily to the usual ‘better’.

In other words, poetry is turning trivial upside down....

Poetry feels repulsed by the trivial, banal, it refers more to unexpected phrases and meanings and combination of meanings inevitably aiming at feelings above all. It believes thought is a derivative of feelings. It can keep you awake at night, reading or even worse - writing it, because what the reader – the cultivated reader – discovers and experiences, the poet has already suffered it the same or some of its variations.

Poetry enters into confrontation with everyday life. Even when talking about everyday things and activities, its purpose is not to flatter or scorn, but to overturn or reorder them. Can a man stand the startling and surprising? May be not. And can a man pursue it? To hear his words differently, to hear them as he would like to utter deeply into himself and from the depths of time. Because poetry has such a bad trait. To bring us back where we are, in our sober. In other words, where we are in agreement or disagreement with ourselves, with the others and the world.

The poem is one last attempt to put order when you can no longer tolerate disorder. The poem is nothing more than a little verbal mechanism, says the American poet William Carlos Williams, a little verbal mechanism barely heard in the world of huge machines, tycoons and mega electro volts.