Mohamed Njeim Favorite
Among the publications of the House of Poetry in Morocco, a collection of “optimistic poems in a time of madness” by the American poet of Serbian origin, Charles Simic, was recently published. By living on the edge, in the margins, and deep around it, always on the edge, where everything teeters on the edge of everything. Through it, the poet tries to remind people of their imagination and humanity, and for him the poet is nothing but a “metaphysician in the dark.” A poet seeks, with his unsentimental view of the world, to write an eternal earthly poem, a poem that turns tragedy into a kind of poetry that is happiness, the old happiness that has become A new happiness.. the anatomy of melancholy that leads to the inner chambers of the soul that sees.
The translator believes that there is a dual view in the poem that Simek writes of the imaginary and the ordinary, surreal worlds in which the mythological collide with the banal, and the daily collides with what is behind it: for the better. Humor, circumstance, presence of intuition, and sarcasm are essential features in the structure of the poetic project he is working on.
Childhood places
Charles Simic, in his poems, does not stop returning to the places of his childhood, as if he is still living there, as if the poem in itself is his lost paradise, but that return is more like solitude, the loneliness of the loner who looks at himself from a small hole in his memory, Isolation is not the isolation of the other – the distant, the distant, the stranger and the foreigner – but rather that existential mirror through which we want to read his poetry, to jump into its depths, and to be a vital part of the whole scene, to dismantle the layers of silence that surround the poem, to see our faces radiate, without Masks, not only on the surface, but deep within our very being. To see words, poetic images and metaphors, in all their conditions and places, and they have become a luminous path that takes us on an inner journey to find the meaning, the meaning of our own existence, the existence of the one who does not have a history, but an endless nostalgia.
International awards
Poet Charles Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938 and left his hometown in 1954, accompanied by his mother and brother, towards Paris, where they resided for a few months before moving to America, where his father had been working for about 6 years. His first collection of poetry, “What the Grass Says” was published in 1967. Then his poetic works, which numbered more than thirty, continued. He won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin International Prize for Poetry.
