The Bandit Wind: Poems (The Struga Series of Macedonian Poetry)

#380
Title: The Bandit Wind: Poems (The Struga Series of Macedonian Poetry)
Author: Slavko Janevski
Translator: Charles Simic
Year: 1991
Publisher: Dryad Press
Country: Macedonia
80 pages

An engaging collection of poems by Macedonian Slavko Janevski, generally better than many I've read recently because it's translated by the excellent poet Charles Simic. A helpful introduction situates the poet in Macedonia's historical and geopolitical context. This is a dual language Macedonian-English collection, permitting an examination of Simic's translation with the original (and for the to find Russian-Macedonian cognates and loan words). Some notes on the poems follow their presentation. The poems themselves are generally vivid and imagistic, not pastoral, and quite visceral (literally--the last set is from a collection called "Anatomy"). An interesting and enjoyable collection.