Miraš Martinović at Poets' Square: The best books are the ones that find you by themselves

The literary program of the 37th Grad Teatar festival continued last night with the guest appearance of Miraš Martinović at the Poets' Square, and the moderator of the evening was the poet Barbara Delać.

During the evening, Martinović's entire oeuvre was presented, as well as the last book, "Living Antiquity", and Delac said that it was a book that collected 69 reviews, five interviews and 40 authors, and that, in addition to critical essays, they find interviews and mini-studies.

At the very beginning, Martinović expressed his satisfaction that all his dear Budva women and men from Budva are at Poets' Square.

"I am glad to be in Budva on this important civilization route, in whose foundations sleeps a legend that nourishes the city. Here the multimillennial duration measures this space and here the word is particularly binding. In the abundance of earthly clocks, here also ticks the clock that measures eternity."

He explained that "Living Antiquity" is and is not his book.

"It is a book of collected texts about me and my creativity. Such books are made when you recollect what you have done. There comes a moment and a time when you look back and ask yourself what you were doing, what kind of seeds you sowed, as the great Lebanese poet Halil Žubran would say," said Martinović.

He added that he turned around and came up with the idea of ​​that book, but he didn't have a concept.

"It was born during the shaping of the book. Then I came up with the idea of ​​taking one poem from my works, poetry books, and one prose segment from the prose books, and thus create a chain that will connect it all. At the end, there are five of my selected interviews as well as a block of photos from my life", revealed Martinović.

That's how, he said, this book took shape.

"Miraš is a writer, perhaps unique, who has traveled all his books in the field" is the sentence with which Bozena Jelušić started a literary evening dedicated to Miraš Martinović. He said at Poets' Square that Jelušić made the correct diagnosis.

"When I came to the sea, and if I hadn't come, I wouldn't be like this, I had direct contact with civilization, with old cities that would become my fascination and enchantment. Among these old towns, Butua or Budva occupies a central place. Risinium, however, is the source of my inspiration, that old Illyrian-Greek-Roman city that had 50 thousand inhabitants, it was a miracle. That's where I found my topics together with archaeologists, among whom Ilija Pušić is very important to me, who discovered the old ancient city in Risn to me in the XNUMXs. These days, I met with Professor Diček, one of the Polish archaeologists investigating that site, and I told him that if they hadn't been there, thinking of the archaeologists and their work, I wouldn't have been there either," said Martinović, explaining that it was this contact with archeology that made his literature what it is.

Speaking about the book "The Myth of the Cherry", Martinović said that Radovan Zogović was a key figure in Montenegrin literature who was his role model, first of all, in a moral sense, but also in a poetic sense.

"I met Zogović when I was young in Belgrade and I consider that acquaintance to be a significant event in my life. He deserves a much bigger story, and "The Myth of the Cherry" came to me from heaven, I wrote it in ten days. I was in love with a girl at the time and I told her that I would write her a seminar paper on the construction of Shkodra on Bojana, but I wanted her to write me a letter. That letter never arrived, but I fulfilled the debt and wrote the paper "The Myth of the Cherry". The best books are the ones that come and find you on their own, that you don't come up with much and don't sketch, but descend from some archetypal manuscript. If those books disappeared, they would be written again," said Martinović.

He said that writing poetry, but also poetry itself, is the greatest spiritual state.

“I'm talking about great poetry. Mirko Kovač said in an interview that whenever he travels, he carries a great poet in his bag. Not a prose writer but a poet. Poetry is an elixir, something that is above everything and the sublimate of everything. That's why great poets never pass away, they are pillars, they have an aura. That's how I always perceived great poets," added Martinović.

"Day and Night in Butua" is the name of the book that Martinović wrote about Budva, which he said deals with a metaphysical descent into its being.

"Lucija Đurašković and her colleagues helped me a lot during the work on that book. The poems from that book were the biggest surprise of a poetry festival in France that I attended in 2019, they were delighted with the discovery of Montenegro and its cities. So I am glad that our efforts were not in vain. I found information in a book that Sophocles came to Butua as the head of diplomacy, and I couldn't believe it. He was an official in the state administration in addition to being a poet. He came to Budva to negotiate and discuss important defense issues. Therein lies the key to my work. I imagined Sophocles walking on the Budva beach, he walks in the evening in my story, looks at the grains of sand and thinks about life and eternity, but also about the meeting about joint defense. It was the first contact with Budva through my literature, later I returned to Budva in various other ways. I use history, chronicle, record," Martinović told the crowd.

Fiction knows how to be more permanent and real than reality, Martinović emphasized during the conversation at Poets' Square.

"These are the archetypes that interest me. Everything big is essentially fantastic. Fantasy is the highest state of art, it cannot be overridden, it contains everything and it is impossible to erase it. You can erase reality, you can demolish cities, you can erase everything, but that fictional, fantastic is a permanent living condition that lives in this air and it will appear at the hour when it should appear. Everything is connected somewhere and everything affects everything. If I have achieved something fantastic, then I have also achieved being called a writer. Everything I did, I did because it interested me. It's a wonderful game that interests me and that I can't live without," said Martinović.

He also added that he never managed to cross the line between the old and the new era because he was always in the old era.

"However, about ten years ago, I became interested in the Bogomils and their fate. I go to various localities in Herzegovina, Bosnia, Montenegro, look at those tombstones and read all about them, and libraries are written about them. Only one book that a friend sent me from Osijek weighed five kilograms. Bogumili died because they wanted to be free, and those who want to be free always pay for freedom. Those who break the canons pay with their lives. Eastern and Western Christianity beat them equally, Constantinople and Rome beat them equally," said Martinović.

They say, he said, that they can pray to God anywhere, and they say that they have to pray from a church, from an institution.

"It was the most terrible suffering and disaster. Those tombstones are a whole letter of suffering, and I couldn't write anything. I once read the book "The Gnostics" by Jacques Lacarrier, a French writer who visited those necropolises in Herzegovina and Bosnia. He wrote a brilliant the text "Cistote planina" in which he says in one sentence "Only graves remain of that nation". That sentence opened everything up for me and I wrote the entire book "Bogumilske pjesme". My friend Stijepo Mijović Kočan, a Croatian director, told me that I'll remove these "poems" and leave only "Bogomil" ones and that's how it's left", said Martinović, after which he read a poem from "Living Antiquity", which ended the evening at Poets' Square.