The Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts (CANU) published a selection of Radovan Zogović's poetry under the title "Pjesme nepokorne", which was written by the writer Miraš Martinović with an introductory preface and accompanying comments. The publication was organized to mark the 110th anniversary of the poet's birth. With this, this high national institution, of which he was a member, duly marked the anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest Montenegrin poets.
The book "Pjesme nepokorne" represents so far the most complete selection from Zogović's otherwise rich, scattered and disorderly poetry, covering all his phases, from early to late, which presents this poet in the best way to the modern reader and the times in which we live.
In the review for this book, academician Jevrem Brković, who is also the editor of the edition, wrote, among other things: "Miraš Martinović chose with full responsibility and aesthetic importance, intellectual precision and emotional attachment what will be a worthy representative of Zogović's poetic talent for all time." , knowledge, persistence, precision and peculiarities in a literature such as Montenegrin! In fact, there is what is the most essential part of Zogović's being. There are eleven cycles, with two out-of-cycle poems, at the beginning and at the end, which Martinović made into cycles based on the affinity of the themes, poetics, versification luxury, language, typically Zogović's, originality when he plays with words, when he weaves them where they were nowhere before him were. This is his famous linguistic peculiarity, superiority and skill to give language a coded meaning and semantic mysteriousness! "Miraš Martinović was in charge of all that, all of those Zgović essentials, making Zogović's choice an essential Montenegrin one," says Brković.
Academician Niko Martinović writes in his review: "Martinović made his own circles out of Zogović's songs, creating Zogović's work in particular." This is the value and novelty of this choice. Martinović found a way and form to present Zogović to today's readers, in the best possible light, thus sculpting a new poetics, philosophy of life, relationship to art and man. Giving us a complete Zogović bound with this and all times. It is about creativity that has withstood all tests, whose universal messages, language, Montenegrin landscapes, history, olive, ash, hornbeam and other symbols have become a higher reality in Zogović's poetry, and Montenegro, to which its greatest poet wrote the most beautiful poems , a land untamed and unruly, with an epithet that only this poet could give it," wrote Martinović.
The editor brings a special block "They said about Zogović", where he publishes the opinions, judgments and criticisms of about twenty prominent writers, public figures and intellectuals, Zogović's contemporaries, which begins with three excerpts from Enes Čengić's book With Krleža from day to day and one letter from Krleža, in to whom he writes to Zogović, among other things: "Your verses are actually an entire navigation map of one consciousness and its wanderings, one scattered cerebral canvas in the anatomical sense, in one word something that is bitter and lonely and even better to say persistent." (A long time ago, many years ago, you remarked about yourself as if by the way, that you were a gnarled wild pear heifer, a lonely tree in the middle of a wild forest, superfluous to yourself and others. It was said more micromanically, and I had no impression that it was an act .)
What you sing is a mondrolato of catharan, a pagan cake, a dog's cake, which is swallowed with a curse like a fish bone. Bitter, poisonous wine. This diary of hypersensitized loneliness, crying for forests, for fictitious blue distances, wailing and cursing at the same time, lamentation (even mournful) and on the other hand dark hatred. The best formula would be: a wounded womb, a man with all his worries".
At the end of the introductory text for this selection, "Poetry of Becoming and Existence", Miraš Martinović writes: "Each choice bears the personal stamp of the one who chooses." And so it is with this one. Is it real? It is difficult to give an answer. It is certain: it was made with love and unreserved respect for this poetry and our poet. In the end, I would like to point out, and with a request that it not be seen as pathetic: I consider the acquaintance with Zogović very significant. That's why there was something personal about this choice and the work that took shape over the years. A small debt to great poetry.”
Explaining the chosen title for the selection, Miraš Martinović says: "Among the several titles that appeared to me during the work, offering themselves as possible, I opted for - Songs of the Unruly, convinced that this title personifies Zogović and his poetry, and almost convinced that he would agree."
Bonus video:
