#serbian literature

[krissim]

Through night and moisture wild geese go south crying in painful glory. I feel like writing a dark story: Them carrying away on their two white wings I don’t know where, I don’t know what of my soul’s dearest things.

Desanka Maksimović - (Селице) Migratory Birds

Кроз ноћ и влагу дивље се гуске селе југу и болно кричу. Осећам жељу да мутну неку напишем причу: како односе оне собом на крила своја бела два из душе моје драго нешто, а не знам куда, и не знам шта.

[xoxojoka]

"Just cross my mind,

My thoughts will scratch your cheek

Just come into my sight

My eyes will bark at you

Just open your mouth

My silence will break your jaws

Just remind me of yourself

My remembering will dig up the ground beneath your feet

That's how far we've come."

— Vasko Popa, "Give Me Back My Rags"

[ljiljanis]

My first attempt at oil pastels

It's is supposed to be a portrait of Simka from Roots

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #320

An end of week recap “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” – Toni Morrison (born 18th February 1931) This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming features, see what’s on the…

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Reading

Danilo Kiš GARDEN, ASHES

[theforeverlearner]

Thursday, September 19

I started my bachelor's degree in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrian/Serbian (BCMS) this week.

To be exact, it's called in French a Licence LLCER (Langues, Littératures et Civilisations Étrangères et Régionales) BCMS (Bosniaque Croate Monténégrin Serbe).

This program is taking place online which is a great for people working full-time like me.

I browsed the different courses that I'll be taking this semester: linguistics and grammar, grammatical exercises, translation, written and oral expression, literature, history...

Today, I mostly worked on reviewing A2 vocabulary/grammar. I am joining the B1 level but first I want to make sure that I am starting with a solid (grammatical) foundation.

[dukhoiada]

~~ Ivan V. Lalić, "In Praise of Sleeplessness" (translated by Francis R. Jones), painting by Henri Rousseau

[creatediana]

“Cargo” - a poem by Serbian poet Marija Knežević (born 1963), from her 2020 collection Breathing Technique translated by Sibelan Forrester 

[lepollock]

[violentsummerxx]

Sad smo bezbrižni, laki i nežni.

Pomislimo: kako su tihi, snežni

vrhovi Urala.

Miloš Crnjanski, Sumatra, 1920

[xoxojoka]

"Nobody will ever hug you this tightly,

all perturbed and pale.

I’m a sailor without a compass

whose ships always go crazy.

Nobody will ever

pour an entire last tenderness

into your bloodstream

like this,

nor find both hope and hopelessness inside of you.

Never again will you rot so wonderfully

in a common hotel,

yet not wish to get out of it.

You are the tastiest blood of this world

that I sponged with the bread

of my dark belly.

You are the salt from swollen lips

that we peeled off with our fangs

and spilled over my thighs

and your breasts.

You are the most infinite,

the deadliest sky

next to my rosy ear.

The most shameless girl

among all the women I've ever met.

The shiest woman

among all the girls I've ever met..."

— Miroslav Mika Antić, a fragment of "A Little Rocky Nocturne". Translated by me.

[mija-ditaliar]

Zašto je put do žene tako vijugav i tajan i zašto on sa svojom slavom i snagom ne može da ga pređe, a prelaze ga svi gori od njega? Svi, samo, on u silnoj i smiješnoj starosti, cijeli svoj vijek pruža ruke kao u snu. Što žene traže?

-- Put Alije Đerzeleza, Ivo Andrić

[bookcoversaroundtheworld]

Beloved - Serbia (2013)

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Halloween

REFERENCES (Banshee; Ghost; Ghoul; Goblin; Haunt; Specter; Vampire; Wraith; Origins of Halloween)

Banshee

A female spirit in Gaelic folklore whose appearance or wailing warns a family that one of them will soon die.

Banshee came from combining the Gaelic words meaning “woman of fairyland,” but any positive associations with fairies ends there.

Are female spirits that, if seen or heard wailing under the windows of a house, foretell of a death in the family that lives there.

Today, the word is most frequently heard in the idiom “scream like a banshee” or “wail like a banshee,” which shows the power of myth and the imaginative power of language, since probably no one has actually heard one.

Ghost

Most common meaning today is “a disembodied soul” or “the soul or specter of a deceased person”, which came next, a meaning based on the ancient folkloric notion that the spirit is separable from the body and can continue its existence after death. It originally meant “vital spark” or “the seat of life or intelligence,” which is still used in the phrase “give up the ghost.”

An older spelling of ghost, gast, is the root of aghast (“struck with terror, shocked”) and ghastly (“frightening”).

The German word for ghost, geist, is part of the word zeitgeist, which literally means “spirit of the time.”

Ghoul

A legendary evil being that robs graves and feeds on corpses.

Ghoul is a relatively recent English word, borrowed from Arabic in the 1700s.

Because it’s spelled with gh-, it looks vaguely like the Old English words ghost and ghastly (which share a common root in the Old English word gāst, meaning “spirit” or “ghost”).

In fact, it comes from the Arabic word ghūl, derived from the verb that means “to seize,” and originally meant “a legendary evil being held to rob graves and feed on corpses.” The word was introduced to western literature by the French translation of Arabian Nights.

Goblin

An ugly or grotesque sprite.

Usually mischievous and sometimes evil and malicious.

Haunt

To visit or inhabit as a ghost.

However, this is not the original sense of the word.

For centuries, it had a perfectly unfrightening set of meanings: “to visit often” and “to continually seek the company of.”

In the 1500s, it began to mean “to have a disquieting or harmful effect on,” as in “that problem may come back to haunt you.” The meaning here is simply the lingering presence of the problem, not the possibly scary nature of the problem itself; it is applied to thoughts, memories, and emotions.

The noun haunt retains this fright-neutral definition, “a place that you go to often,” as in “one of my favorite old haunts.”

A lingering idea, memory, or feeling may have led to the ghostly meaning of haunt, or one by a disembodied or imaginary spirit.

Specter

A visible disembodied spirit.

Specter originally meant “a visible disembodied spirit” in English—a good synonym for ghost. But, unlike ghost, the notion of being visible is paramount in specter, which came to English from the French word spectre, which developed directly from the Latin word spectrum, meaning “appearance” or “specter,” itself based on the verb specere, meaning “to look.”

Specere is also the root of many English words that have to do with appearance: aspect, conspicuous, inspect, perspective, and spectacle.

Vampire

The reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep.

Legends of bloodsucking creatures go back to Ancient Greece, with harrowing tales of them rising from burial places at night to drink peoples’ blood before hiding from dawn’s daylight. These stories were popular in eastern Europe.

Originally comes from the Serbian word vampir, which then passed from German to French, coming to English in the 1700s.

The extended senses of vampire, “one who lives by preying on others” and a synonym of vampire bat, were both in use within a few decades.

Wraith

The exact likeness of a living person seen usually just before death as an apparition. The distinguishing quality of a wraith, compared with other ghosts, is its specificity.

Originally, it referred to either the exact likeness of a living person seen as an apparition just before that person’s death as a kind of spectral premonition of bad news, or a visible apparition of a dead person.

When referring to a living person, it’s a synonym of doppelgänger, or the “spirit double” of a living person (as opposed to a ghost, which refers to the spirit of a dead person). Doppelgänger is now frequently used in a broader sense to mean simply “someone who looks like someone else.”

When referring to a dead person, wraith is a synonym of revenant, which originally referred to a ghost of a particular person and subsequently has been used for a person who returns after a long absence.

ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN

The traditions of Halloween have their origins in Samhain, a festival celebrated by the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland.

Samhain marked the end of summer and the onset of winter, and occurred on a date that corresponds to our November 1st.

It was believed that during the Samhain festival, the world of the gods was visible to humans, and the gods took advantage of this fact by playing tricks on their mortal worshippers. Those worshippers in turn responded with bonfires on hilltops and sometimes masks and other varied disguises to keep ghosts from being able to recognize them. Things tended to get spooky and dangerous around Samhain, with bloody sacrifices and supernatural phenomena abounding.

Samhain chugged along for centuries, until Christianity poked its nose in: in the 8th century CE, All Saints' Day, a somewhat new Christian holiday, got moved from May 13th to November 1st.

The evening before All Saints' Day became a holy—that is, a hallowed—eve. Within a few centuries, Samhain and the eve of All Saints' Day had been merged into a single holiday. Protestants of the Reformation and all that came after largely rejected the whole thing, but the holiday persisted among some communities.

19th-century immigrants to the U.S., including many from Ireland, brought their Halloween customs with them and deserve no small amount of credit for the holiday as it's celebrated in the U.S. today.

More: Writing Notes & References ⚜ Word List: October

[trupowieszcz-moved]

fun facts about (polish) vampire folklore because i'm too autism

(disclaimer: my source for all of this is the book "Upiór. Historia naturalna" by Łukasz Kozak i'm not pulling this out of my ass)

The word "vampire" came from a mistranscribed Serbian word, written down by Austrian officials informing about a panic among the locals, who claimed that during a plague their dead were rising and biting them and spreading the plague further

In Poland, the words used to describe what later transformed into a "vampire" in literature were: upiór (and variations thereof - the word came from Ukrainian, and the Ukrainians got it from Turkish "ubyr"), strzyga (f)/strzygoń (m) and wieszczy (m)/wieszczyca (f). "Upiór" was used in the southeast, "strzyga" around the central regions, "strzygoń" (as well as strzyga) specifically in Lesser Poland (Małopolska) and "wieszczy" in Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) and in Kashubia. "Wąpierz" was not a word until some writer in the 19th century made it up!

The upiór actually very rarely drank blood. It happened, sure, but a much more bloodthirsty creature was zmora/mara. However, upiory often drank milk, stealing it from cows and horses. Both are life-giving bodily fluids, after all.

The above might make you think about witches, who were often blamed with stealing or spoiling milk, and you wouldn't be far off. You see, you had to be born as an upiór (these ones weren't contagiously biting!), and while you were alive, it would give you various magical powers, like clairvoyance and detecting the dead upiory, and so the upiór was practically a synonym of a sorcerer or witch. Of course, the sources vary, but depending on who you asked, they could control weather bringing heavy rains or droughts, see the future, know literally everything and so on. Those so-called "living vampires" knew who they were since birth and were often helpful, until they died.

After an upiór died, that's when the bad things happened. They disappeared from their graves, destroyed churches, broke candles, brought plague upon the people, scared their neighbors, and if one puffed in your face, you would soon die. They were said to be able to walk around with their decapitated head, so anti-vampiric burials often had to be very thorough and decapitation wasn't enough.

The signs that were supposedly telling of a living vampire were, among others: being born with teeth, being born in a caul, not having armpit or pubic hair BUT having a hairy chest, not having undergone confirmation (i'll come back to that in a moment), having a very red face and easily and often blushing (not being pale!), or being born with a deformed foot.

Not having participated in the confirmation sacrament was especially damning, because it was believed that upiory had two souls (and two hearts). When they were baptized, only one soul was being saved, and the confirmation sacrament was supposed to protect the second soul. This, of course, was extremely against the catechism, so the first "official", church-related sources recording those beliefs had to invent another "backstory" for upiory, and they claim that an upiór is a dead person specifically, who was given to the devil at birth, the baptism saving their soul, but their body still belonging to the dark forces, which was why they rose from their graves - the devil basically hijacked their corpses.

I won't make this post much longer but I will GLADLY answer any questions because this is my special interest and I just came back from an exhibition where the author of the aforementioned book talked about all of that so. me right now ⬇️ (readmore so you dont get continuously blased with the gif under it)

[theforeverlearner]

About me

26 years old

Woman

French-Bosnian living in France

Graduated in 2022 with a Master's degree in International and European Law

Currently working full time

I started in September 2024 a second bachelor's degree in Slavistic (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrian, Serbian) – online program.

Languages I speak: French (C2), English (C2), German (C1), Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian (B2)

Languages I would like to learn one day: Spanish, Korean or Mandarin

Current language goals: pass the Goethe Zertifikat C1, pass the TOEIC exam and finish my bachelor in BCMS.

I enjoy reading!

I also practice yoga and I run quite often. I am currently training for a 21km run.

I'm an ENTP type.

Weirdly enough, I have a horrible memory! Makes my life a little bit harder than necessary.