Nenad Trajković

Nenad Trajković (1982) is a Serbian poet, essayist, literary critic and translator. He graduated from Faculty of Law, University of Kragujevac, Serbia. He has published four collections of poetry ‘Traces’ (2008), ‘I Take You to the Museum’ (2011), ‘Wind From The Tongue’ (2016, for which he got ‘The Rade Tomic Prize’) and „The Thinner Line of Endless“ (2019).  His work have been published widely in literary magazines (‘Poem’, edited by Fiona Sampson, etc.), anthologies (‘Von A bis Z - Acht Jahrhunderte serbis’, translated and edited by Johann Lavundi, ‘World Poetry Almanac’, edited by Dr Hadaa Sendoo, etc.) and newspapers in Serbia and abroad. Translated into English, German, French, Polish, Macedonian, Slovakian, Russian, Bulgarian, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian and Romanian. He has translated and edited three collections of poetry from Macedonian into Serbian. In 2013 he received the award given by the Bulgarian publisher ‘Melnik’. In 2015 he received the award ‘Rade Tomić’ for the best poetry manuscript in Serbia and has been nominated for the most prestigious Serbian literary awards such as ‘Branko Miljković’ and ‘Lenkin prsten’. In 2018 he wins at the ‘Facebook Poetry Festival’ (Serbia) sharing the first place with Indian poet, Arvind Joshi. He is a founder and editor of an international literary manifestation ‘Pisanija’ and a member of Serbian Literary Society. He lives and works in Vranje, Southern Serbia.

On The Wire

 

​in a village my father comes from

the toilets were outside

their paper on a rusty wire

when I first entered them

I found Emily Bronte

whom my grandfather had tried to hang there

it was unpleasant

to be there with a lady

so I took her out in my arms

 

in the morning

I was shown a suitcase full

of convicted writers

ready for hanging

 

and these were the first people

I ever freed

Mediation In Prostitution

 

the minute you see a member of the party

whether in the parlament or in public media

praising his leader constantly and irreversibly

you know it must be love that has its price

and you have to go to the toilet inevitably

 

this fatigue makes you smell

his rotted breath coming out of the screen

that chills you to the bone

and you can see that your captured voice

dressed in the national will 

has been a civilization lie

you’ve accepted tacitly again

 

you turn off your TV

and give a legitimate right to the person

chosen to spit on people

to carry your words inside brothels

 

because it all ends with whoreing

 

ama et fac quod vis

 

Infanticide

​

on the grave near the old village road

letters did not exist

people said it was a small Gypsy tomb

in which all the Gypsies from the missing mahala[1] were placed

so one night when the super full moon has shown itself the villagers saw

the headless woman at the top of the hill giving birth

and throwing her child on a stone slab

to eat all the letters

 

abstractum pro concreto

Translated by Danijela Trajković

 

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[1] Mahala is originally Arabic word محلة, mähallä, which meant settling, occupying, but nowdays in the Balkans means a part of a town or village.