Poetry as the Secret of Life

"A people that do not create have no literature; they have no reason to justify their existence. They do not know why God placed them where He did. Our great folk poetry, medieval painting and memorials outnumber similar works among any other peoples in the Christian east…" wrote Matija Bećković, one of the most distinguished authors of contemporary Serbian literature.

By Mila Milosavljević
Photo by Milan Melka

It has already been said – a poet is what a language breaths with. A poet is a medium: the more faithful, the better for poetry… These are the words of a poet with a prolific bibliography, highly regarded by a wide circle of followers. For decades the literary evenings organized by Matija Bećković have stood as events that rally hosts of admirers of his poetry, earning him the epithet of "national poet".

Mister Bećković, how and in what terms would you define your life?

- Every poet has two biographies. One contains the fixed dates that are known to everybody. In the other, nothing is fixed and not even the poet knows who he is or his origin – let alone anybody else. In the first, it is known when and where one is born, who one’s parents are, what schools one attended, what one’s career is. But to learn who we are, where we come from and what the meaning of our existence is – that is the quintessence of a poet’s vocation and profession.

The poet is interested in when he was born as a poet, and especially the place where this person we call the poetic subject claims native ties. That is what we explore. In other words, the inner man and his biography is the book – of which the external man is only the cover. Our search for answers to these questions constitutes the manuscript of our autobiography. We imagine meeting our personality and our name only once we have merged all the roads we have traveled along with all of the thoughts and feelings we have had. I have always thought that a man is what he memorizes and that memory is the secret of our identity. Nobody remembers the same (details) from the same event. The magnet of a man’s personality to which one or another detail is retained is decisive in the formation of his self. The history of humanity, like the first kind of poet-biography mentioned earlier, teems with great historical events as if devoid of real life. What was cast aside from those accounts and what constitutes the very essence of life is contained in the unwritten history – just like it is contained in that second kind of biography. The important dates of our inner reality correspond to those events that stand out and become the motifs of our poetry. These motifs can be very obdurate and the more obdurate and older they are, the better they are for poetry. They are not put to rest until they are expressed. They are deeper than we are and know more about us than we know about them and therefore constitute our true and unique biography. My grandmother Jelica-Jeja used to put everything she found in her pockets. Gradually her pockets became full of yarn and wires, coils and nails, stumps of things and broken bits and pieces. When asked why she was bent on collecting such odds and ends, she would reply, "Someone will need something and these things will be useful to somebody; you will be looking for something one day..." And indeed, whenever people could not find what they were looking for anywhere else, they went to her. Some things could be found only in her pockets. She would wait for this moment and with triumph she would say, "What did I tell you? And you made a mock of me!" I cannot say when I began to collect just like my grandma – except in the place of warped nails I would mostly write down words, draw pictures and record thoughts that by their logic differed from what I had experienced, heard or said. From the start I did these things as if I was doing something I should be ashamed of and I have never got rid of that feeling. Sometimes I would collect things or thoughts in secret. Now I don’t hide what I do any more. This may puzzle my chance acquaintances but my friends have got used to it.

Matija Bećković   Matija Bećković was born on November 29, 1939, in Senta. He attended school in Velji Duboki, Kolašin, Slavonski Brod and Valjevo. In 1958 he enrolled at the Philological Faculty in Belgrade in order to study Yugoslav and World literature. He worked as a journalist and on TV. In 1983 he became a corresponding and, in 1991, a regular member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. From 1992 to 1998 he was the president of the Writers’ Association of Serbia. He is a member of the Crown Council. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and fiction among which the most distinguished are "Vera Pavladolska", "The Roaming Bullet", and "Such spoke Matija". Famous songs and poems include "One Man Told Me", "Međa Vuka Manitoga" and "Woe! Woe!". Notes and poems include "Kaža", "Service to Saint Sava", "Kosovo, the Most Expensive Serbian Word", "Whose are you, little one?", "We Will Continue Chasing Each Other", "Bread and Tongues", "Poslušanja", "Man’s Lament". "Saslušanja", "Neboš", "The White Stick", "Belgrade Once and Now", "Če, a Lasting Tragedy", "A Spectacled Train" and "Richard the Lion Heart".   In recognition of his work, Matija Bećković has received nearly all of the important literary awards and recognitions.

Were you asked why you needed to collect all those things?

- Indeed, I was. I didn’t know what to say in reply but I had an inkling that it might be useful one day. I am never without pen and paper. It is not that I always have to write something down but if I am without a pen I feel incomplete or deprived of an important tool. When I am armed, I am on duty, at ease. I don’t have to record anything, but my tools are ready. It seems as if I feel like a writer only when words, which I have recorded at various times and in various places, find a lost entity and then occupy their place within it. Quite often it has happened that one of those words was just the right one: the word I was missing and would never have thought of had I not written it down at an earlier time. These words emerge ahead of my poems as their precursors, as if they know more about these poems than I do, as if they are asking for the poem from which they had originated. And when all that I have collected through making records and writing things down has been consumed by an idea, then the meaning of this strange habit of mine becomes clear. It is as if I am the protagonist of a story that is being written by someone else. I illuminate backwards the roads that I was not able to light up as I took them. What hasn’t been consumed but has been written down – waits. Even I don’t know if their origin will eventually turn up, let alone what it may look like. If I were to lose one of these slips of paper I think I would spend an entire century looking for this source of wealth. If someone else were to find this piece of paper scribbled with meaningless ciphers it would mean nothing and would be nothing but a series of ciphers and blots. And just as hundreds of nails outlived Jeja so after me many of these words will survive and nobody will be able to decipher their meaning so they will mean nothing to anybody else. And as in childhood it would happen that half of something in my pocket would find its other half after some time, so the words I chance to hear and write down become the small suns of my life as if nothing else had existed before. This could function as my autobiography. I would also like to say, as I have already mentioned my grandmother, that if anyone had any influence on my life these were females, above all my mother. I have also written a short autobiography:

"I had a grandmother, but not a grandfather
I had a mother, but not a father
I had daughters, but not a son
I had a wife, but not a husband."

Can you imagine having a different role or mission in life? Do you think that man chooses his own mission, or is it chosen for him?

- People often speak with disdain about belated wisdom. However, there is no other wisdom but the belated kind and this belated wisdom shows that I cannot imagine my life in any other way except as it was and as it is now, well advanced.

How do you see the role of poetry in the contemporary world and the role of poetry here and now?

- We constantly hear about the death of poetry and we know that poets are no longer cultural heroes. This is a proper answer to this question, but nobody believes in proper answers. When the worst years started two decades ago, the monuments to poets were covered with sacks so as to prevent their being damaged and then the monuments were damaged. Šantić was thrown into the Neretva River and Andrić into the Drina River, while Ćopić and Kočić were left headless in their native land.   "All arts will die; only poetry will survive". Tell us more about that poetic miracle and its indestructibility.

- Man didn’t create life so I hold that he cannot destroy it either. What is true of life is also true of poetry. It is as if poetry creates us and not vice versa and as if the language cares about us and not we about it. And I do not know what else to say but to cite the verse, "Life is not a secret at all, but the secret of life is poetry".

Stone is one of the most powerful and impressive symbols in your poetry. You say that man does nothing his whole life but stumble over the same stone again and again…

- In some cultures, people say that a wise man never stumbles over the same stone twice. Actually man does nothing but stumble over that same stone. There is no other stone but that one. When we speak of Easter we should mention that the Holy Land is a stony land and that from there begins the glorious and great biography of stone, so that this stone – one of eternity, belonging to Christians – is also connected to poetry and the Savior, and is called the live corner stone of Christianity and in the same way Christ is the stone that we stumble over again and again.

What message does your poetry convey?

- Poetry does not reveal but widens the secret of life and the secret of poetry. Hence poetry doesn’t give answers but raises new questions.

You said, "Where there is no language there is no people either." Who or what guards or manages to preserve the other: the people their language or the language its people?

- I have always believed that language cares about us and not we about it because everything we have been entrusted with has been more or less demolished and language remains as the sole witness of all times as it has seen everything, remembered everything and named everything. The greatest tyrants had problems only with language. They could do nothing to it. Not then and not now.   How do you feel about being considered as a folk poet?   - Only the people have always said everything they wanted to in the way they wanted. Hence even now I regard the attribute of being labeled a folk poet as the highest recognition.

What have you been working on recently?

- Politika and Narodna Knjiga published my "Selected Works" in seven volumes. They are being sold at newsstands with newspapers and enjoy a circulation of ten thousand copies. I hope they will reach Montenegro too. Also, Oktoih from Podgorica published a selection of my songs and poems. The Institute for School Textbooks published my books of speeches. It contains all of my speeches delivered at various occasions in the last seventeen years. It took time to assemble all that material but I have always supported the idea of publishing selected pages of classical literature in newspapers, alongside the daily news. Somehow, there is always a greater temptation to read a poem or a story printed in the newspapers than to take a book from the shelf and do the same. Such high levels of production and high circulations disprove those statements that we are faced with the death of the novel and poetry.

I have even learned that this reading public is not the same as that which buys books in the bookshops. Some say that the publication of these books harms traditional publishers because they are cheaper and because they have higher circulations, but there we are and nothing can be done about it. In any case, this proves that something ought to be done to bring books closer to today’s reading public considering that bookshops are rather exclusive, removed venues for the people of today. Often a person lacks the courage to enter such a bookshop in the same way that one doesn’t enter a jewelry shop. Hence the idea to sell books with newspapers seems to me a great and an important cultural endeavor.