His works has been translated into twenty languages: Nikola Madzirov, author from Strumica, a town in the southeast of Macedonia. Madzirov (37), is a poet, author, editor and translator. He has published four poetry books and the most recent one, "Relocated stone" (2007), was awarded with the Hubert Burda Prize for Young East European Lyrics. The chairs of the jury included the Austrian novelist Peter Handke and the German author and publisher Michael Krüger.
The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once said of Madzirov's lyrics, “Madzirov's poems are like expressionist paintings: filled with thick, energetic streaks, they seem to emerge from the imagination and to return to it right away, like night animals caught in the headlights of a car. We are the remnants of another age - Nikola Madzirov succeeds in convincing us.”
In an interview with Southeast Europe: People and Culture, Madzirov spoke about his poetry and his work in general.
In what ways has the prize "Hubert Burda" contributed to your further breakthrough on the international scene and to your personal creative urge?
International awards are only a ceaseless dialogue with one's own uncertainty. The most difficult task is to penetrate through the space of one's own fears, memories, inherited notions and strivings. Auto-censorship, or the unconscious forgetting of the word before it is written on paper, is a hint of the first prize that every author should award to himself - and that is silence.
Is it justified to say that poetry brings people together?
Verses were also written on the walls in Berlin. They were windows to a different, fenceless world and their task was not to moralize, but to break down the prejudices about the division of the European spirit. It is the transfer of poetry from one language to another that connects cultures with different historical and cultural heritage.
In the recent months, you have participated in festivals in Nicaragua, Spain, Norway.How important is cultural diversity for you?
The words "identity" and "identical" share the same root, regardless of the fact that here in the Balkans many people strive to express our identity through the principle of exclusiveness and endemic cultural values. Silence and darkness are the two halves of the core of the universal code of understanding. In silence all sounds are equal, in the darkness all objects are the same. However, poetry opens new spaces for inhabiting by means of the words and the light of individuality. Yugoslav novelist, Danilo Kiš, said that he was writing because he was dissatisfied with himself and with the world. And how can you be dissatisfied with something, if you don't know it well? In order to be able to write it is necessary to travel both through the world and through yourself.
Was the journey to success difficult for an artist from the Balkans?
When a poem is translated, first it must be melted and deconstructed, and then returned to life through the electric shocks of the new language power. I feel that with each new translation a poem is broken to pieces like a mirror in an empty corridor and then recreated into a somewhat different integrity In English the verb "to balkanize" - meaning to divide, to tear apart - is widely used today.. In fact, fragmentarity is an integral part of the identity of a person that comes from the Balkans: fragmented memories, fragmentary life, fragmented forgetting and fragmentary forgiveness. I often wonder how many identities should a Balkan author unite in himself, in order to gain a victory against the stereotype through which the world sees him as a divider?
To me, as an author who comes from these areas, the awareness of my European origin is more a sociological than a geographical. When I was staying in the U.S. last year, I introduced myself as one that comes from Europe, from the Balkans. It is paradoxical that in Europe, I have to explain that I come from Europe. I think the world is too small for each person that feels homeless and too big for everyone whose nationalistic views end in his backyard.
Which European poets inspired you in the days of your poetic adolescence, and which of them are your present companions?
When I was growing into an adult, the one-party communist system in my country was replaced by parliamentary democracy. Both changes came at the same time, destroying both the walls of childhood and the thick curtains of the false communistic certainty. Suddenly, the authors that were on the reading lists in schools were declared either enemies of the state or classics and that meant only one thing - no one was reading them any more. But cutting the umbilical cord of the censorship and normative power, I integrated into the broad framework of European literature without passing the local filters of the social usefulness or correctness. With adulthood - when I became formally accountable to the law - came the informal responsibility towards the pure aesthetic value of the word. Since then I am almost every day surprised by the complexity and diversity of European poetry. I have been growing up with the poetry of the romanticists, the symbolists and the surrealists, and have discovered myself in the verses of Pessoa, Bachmann, Stănescu, Różewicz, Tranströmer, Ritsos, Zagajewski and many more.
**The European Commission does not accept or recognise in whatever form or content a denomination other than “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. All references, direct or indirect, to this country used in this article are those of its author.
