The small box gets its first teeth
And its small length
Its small width and small emptiness
And all that it has got
The small box is growing bigger
And now the cupboard is in it
That it was in before
And it grows bigger and bigger and bigger
And now has in it the room
And the house and the town and the land
And the world it was in before
The small box remembers its childhood
And by overgreat longing
It becomes a box again
Now in the small box
Is the whole world quite tiny
You can easily put it in a pocket
Easily steal it easily lose it
Take care of the small box
And its small length
Its small width and small emptiness
And all that it has got
The small box is growing bigger
And now the cupboard is in it
That it was in before
And it grows bigger and bigger and bigger
And now has in it the room
And the house and the town and the land
And the world it was in before
The small box remembers its childhood
And by overgreat longing
It becomes a box again
Now in the small box
Is the whole world quite tiny
You can easily put it in a pocket
Easily steal it easily lose it
Take care of the small box
THE SMALL BOX by Vasco Popa
The Yugoslav poet Vasco Popa (1922-1991) takes us into a different world, a world in which, as Ted Hughes writes in his introduction, terrible things
"happen within a containing passion – Job-like – for the elemental final beauty of the created world." Popa conducts the reader directly into the imaginative
life of a people – the ancient people of the Serbs. For those of us whose impression of the Serbs comes from the news spots during the horror in Kosovo,
reading this life-work in poetry (with its valuable notes) helps us to understand both the passion of a people for whom a fourteenth-century defeat in
battle can retain an impact comparable to that of the Holocaust in my generation and the profound role poetry has played in this passion. Quoted from
Poetry Daily.
"happen within a containing passion – Job-like – for the elemental final beauty of the created world." Popa conducts the reader directly into the imaginative
life of a people – the ancient people of the Serbs. For those of us whose impression of the Serbs comes from the news spots during the horror in Kosovo,
reading this life-work in poetry (with its valuable notes) helps us to understand both the passion of a people for whom a fourteenth-century defeat in
battle can retain an impact comparable to that of the Holocaust in my generation and the profound role poetry has played in this passion. Quoted from
Poetry Daily.
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