Novica Tadic is Serbia’s leading poet and the linguistic heir to Vasko Popa. With this translation, US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Charles Simic brings the full range of Tadic’s dark beauty to light:

I dream how on a flat surface

I set down knives of various

shapes and sizes.

Already there are so many of them

I can’t count them,

or see them all. Someone’s being done in

by those knives.

Novica Tadic has won most major Serbian literary awards, including the prestigious Laureat Nagrade. Charles Simic’s latest poetry collection is That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008).