Sam u vodi

These poems come from Uroš Bojanović’s Alone in the Water, a collection of poetry that stunned me with its reverence for the repulsive. Bojanović’s book is decidedly direct as it affords dimension to morally ambiguous characters whose struggles are set in oppressive cityscapes and monotonous ruralities throughout the Balkans. The positionality of the Balkans, its people, and their headspace in the 21^st century is something I believe an English-speaking readership should have access to, especially considering the growing importance of countries like Serbia and Bosnia on the European and global stage.

Along with how it establishes political context for an often-overlooked region of the world, I also found Bojanović’s work to be chaotically indulgent, exhibiting a level of imagination that is rarely found in contemporary American poetry. There’s a high level of risk in this work that is as courageous as it is captivating, and I sought to translate these elements of Bojanović’s work into English the best I could.

Regarding the translation process, it was a collaborative one, with Bojanović being flexible and accommodating when it came to my suggestions of both sacrificing and repurposing some elements of his poems for clarity in English. Additionally, the grammatical structures of Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) and English are starkly different, with the former needing fewer words to depict an image that English needs a bit more space to describe. I’m incredibly grateful that Bojanović trusted me with his work.

I hope Asymptote’s readers enjoy these four poems, which are sardonically macabre, rebellious in tone, and cynically aware of how their characters have inherited a broader body of violence that they enact in their daily lives. (And how fitting to publish “Heather Langenkamp” during the month of Halloween! The piece alludes heavily to A Nightmare on Elm Street.)