CHILL OUT

I have been in my “later years” for a long time and my memories are still not awakened. Some things have been erased, mostly the injustices I’ve experienced in my life, or - to put it another way – repressed in the corners of memory. I remember and most often recall moments of happiness, serenity, gentleness, joy, calmness. My album of the unforgotten is large.

Glistening winters and the snows of childhood, sledge rides down the Grebak, the first films in the Nevesinje cinema, St. George’s Day holidays in Batkovići, the warm care of my sisters, my first crushes, Olga and Lola, the town library and librarian Vinko Milas, so committed and dedicated to books and recommendations for children to read, football matches and little pictures of footballers that I collected from the wrappers of chocolates, carefully and with devotion, blue flowers in the Nevesinje field, buttercup grass, the smell of elderberry and linden trees in the gardens, the first scout detachment, a carefree existence, collecting medicinal herbs (rupturewort, linden, elder, orchid) and my first earnings from submitting the plants to be sent to Belgrade, where my uncle Mile Soldo, aka Forta, was the director of company Jugobilje. And the table football that we invented and played with buttons as footballers, and my uncle was a tailor and I had the best button team, and that beautiful button with a wind jacket that sometimes came to us as Unra’s assistance, along with Truman’s eggs and plant-based cheese from America. And the snowballs were dry and soft. It didn’t hurt when they hit you.

The Zubac family also had a house in the village of Batkovići, where your youngest uncle, Bogdan, lived, and aunt Stana with her children. It was at their place that you celebrated your family patron saint’s day of St. George and the feast of St. Elijah. The church and the faithful were frowned upon during that post-war period and people mostly celebrated “in secret”?

Vaso and Obren weren’t party members, so they were allowed to celebrate, but Obren did that at Bogdan’s place in Batkovići because he had been the director of socially-owned companies until his retirement (hotels, agricultural cooperatives, trade companies). Some ‘first fighters’ [WWII Yugoslav Partisan combatants] also came to the celebrations, and the priest came to Vaso’s, so whether we wanted it or not he would burn incense in our rooms and on the veranda. I loved the smell of

ANTIĆ AND ZUBAC WITH STUDENTS ON THE TRAIN TO SPLIT

I have been in my “later years” for a long time and my memories are still not awakened. Some things have been erased, mostly the injustices I’ve experienced in my life, or - to put it another way – repressed in the corners of memory

incense and myrrh, and still do. That’s something you don’t forget. And every Easter, which was my favourite holiday during my childhood, I went to the church tower with my friends to ring the bell, and looked forward to coloured eggs and competing to see which has the strongest shell, then the town was full of people who were filled with some universal happiness.

Did you recall the Christmas and Yuletide traditions of your childhood?

I remember some holy serenity from Christmas evenings and mornings, and some blessedness on the faces of all of us who were celebrating: česnica loaf, roast meat, cakes, the scent of Christmas bread,

JOVANKA, TITO, VLADIMIR AND PERO ZUBAC - VILLA RAVNE

slightly impoverished from today’s perspective of the celebrating of major holidays.

It is inevitable for certain “pictures” to be erased from our memory, but there are also those that remain forever. You mention with joy Nevesinje’s winters, snows...

In my memory, the snows of Nevesinje were a brighter fascination than the rains of Mostar, and their whiteness is described in many of my poems, especially those intended for children. There were days when buses couldn’t traverse the road from Mostar to our town. There were no sledges, except for larger sleighs that villagers used to come to the town with the help of horses, on Thursdays, on market day. The snows of childhood are my everlasting joy.

You lost your mother, Joka, at the age of just five. That is an irreparable loss, even though the widow Božana, whom your father married, worked hard to take your mother’s place for you and the other children?

I remember her only for good things. And the relatives multiplied: her brothers, the Živkovićs, Milan and Đoko in Belgrade and Ljubo in Straševina near Nikšić, sister Jela married to Vuk Nikčević, in Belgrade, their numerous children, were the new wealth of my upbringing.

You learned to read both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts early on, and the most interesting

book for me was also Stanojevic’s Encyclopedia.

My sisters taught me to read both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts, so I dragged that thick Encyclopedia with me to the park and read randomly on the bench, so they say that they took me to school for the children to see a kid who knows and is capable of all sorts and isn’t yet of school age.

You mention your teacher, Ibrahim Karadž, as one of the leading lights of your childhood?

My wonderful, good teacher! We would see each other later, whenever I visited Nevesinje, and there is one interview with him in Mostar’s Sloboda, when he spoke as the President of the Association of National Liberation War [NOR] Fighters in Nevesinje, and half of the article is about me. I keep it as a dear reminder of Ibra. Recently, my extensive (beautiful, white and thick) bibliography from 1962 to 2020 was published by Gordana Đilas, and that dear bibliographic unit was also registered.

You visited the Town Library every day, to take and return the books you read. That was also an opportunity to chat with the town librarian, whose name you haven’t forgotten?

I’ve already mentioned my Vinko, whose sister Nada is married to my cousin Aca, and we actually spoke recently, and in one poem I wrote the verses “If there were no Vinko Milas, none of us who’ve been renegades of the world for knowledge would recognise our own star”.

LAPOS ORCHESTRA

You completed the first two years of high school in Lištica near Mostar, then later continued your schooling in Zrenjanin, at the Second Experimental High School. You spent six days a week at school, then the seventh day working on your craft?

That school in Lištica was an experiment, a type of classical grammar school where even the physical education teacher had to be a national champion in some sport. In the first year that was Petko Radović, the national champion in boxing in the bantamweight division, who I recently met in Sarajevo via my friend, handball player Mustafa Demir, after a break of about sixty years. Next to the pupils’ dormitory on the hill, with playgrounds and a large park, was a large, dormitory-type library. My beautiful Široki Brijeg years. And afterwards two years in Zrenjanin at the famous Lerik’s Gymnasium [High School]. My beautiful boarding school days, with Bogdan Gušić, my father’s friend and a journalist, taking care of me, my schoolmates, my crush Smiljana Župunski. I received the “Lenka’s Ring” award for the most beautiful love poem (“Defence of Memory”), which also preserves within it for eternity Smiljana Anja Župunski, an intelligent and beautiful girl.

When did you start writing and publishing your works?

In the second grade of high school, when I was taught literature by poet Zdravko Ostojić. I

And every Easter, which was my favourite holiday during my childhood, I went to the church tower with my friends to ring the bell, and looked forward to coloured eggs and competing to see which has the strongest shell, then the town was full of people who were filled with some universal happiness

started writing poems and sent one to Sarajevo and it was published in the student newspaper ‘Dani’ in the section “Moment of Poetry”. The title of the poem was “Sadness”. The year was 1962.

Which poets and writers did you love in your youth, and whose manuscripts do you read today?

Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Šantić, Dučić, Rakić, Dis, Ujević, Cesarić, Desanka, Kaštelan, Sarajlić, Antić, Raičković, Trifunović, Leso Ivanović, Georg Trakl, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Miklós Radnóti, Nichita Stănescu…

I read contemporary poets, I receive many manuscripts with a request for a recommendation, I write the odd essay, order books that I would like to read from publishers. In the last few days, I received a new novel as a gift from Geopoetics: Iron Curtain by Vesna Goldsworthy. It is such an intoxicating book that I stop reading so it will stay with me for the next few days. The only other book I remember reading like that was Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović.

Although you wrote about Mostar, you never actually lived there. This was perhaps best described by your fellow writer, friend and comrade Duško Trifunović, in the preface to Neđo Šipovac’s extensive monographic study?

“The best poet from Mostar, after Aleksa Šantić, is Pero Zubac, who passed through Mostar when travelling from Nevesinje to Široki Brijeg, where he attended school. There he wrote his love