Translating the Serbian poet Novica Tadić typically involves a complex process of balancing poetic lineage, eccentric diction, wretched syntax, nightmarish imagery, and obscure cultural references.
In the case of the poems in this selection, namely the sparse “Sonnet of Dead Owls” and “People Who Shriek,” the task before Maja and Steven was in preserving the musicality of the lines, a priority they managed to achieve. Admittedly, images and ideas survive in a translation at the expense of a poem’s music, but the Terefs have been fortunate in finding appropriate musical equivalents for Tadić’s verse. Although the poet doesn’t usually incorporate rhyme or a set meter into his work, his poems frequently feature alliteration, predominantly consonance. Though in free verse, his poetry is formally structured. In “Sonnet of Dead Owls” and “Incantation (Against Phantoms),” Steven and Maja managed to preserve the hypnotic aspects of the poems by finding an alliterative equivalent for the refrain of the former and keeping the anaphora without losing the momentum in the repetition. In “Notebook, Voice,” they found a structure that maintained the formality of the original without losing the clarity of the sequence of ideas and images.
Maja and Steven do not aim to be literalists in their work. They aim instead to do what they can to make the poems sound as if they were originally written in English. Novica’s and Steven’s poetic sensibilities happen to be quite similar, in fact; Steven has a very strong ear for alliteration in his own poetry, which easily transfers in translating the Serbian poet’s musicality.