Vesna Goldsworthy (Serbia / UK)

Kindred Spirits: My Friendship with RB

“As I write to you, I find it surprising that we haven’t actually met before,” Richard observed in his first email to me on 8th August 2019, an introduction prompted by Inventing Ruritania (1998), my study of the Balkans in the Western imagination. He discovered that book – and me – while working on Balkan Spaces, his stunning collection of essays about the world I come from.

Insofar as I define myself as a Serbian writer in English, I am tempted to say – although Richard has written so much more and about many other places – that he too is a Serbian writer in English, my kindred by choice. Serbia, and the rest of former Yugoslavia, are lucky to have him, not just as a poet but as a dedicated scholar of South Slavonic writing and culture. In this era of shrinking, and often disappearing, university departments dedicated to South Slavonic Studies in the UK, his work on maintaining the fragile links becomes even more precious.

Our lives had, for many years, run parallel to each other, but in opposite directions. I settled in London in 1986, just as Richard was about to move to Belgrade. Occasionally, I’d hear about an English poet teaching at my alma mater, Belgrade’s Philology Faculty, but he was then writing as Richard Burns, and, before the internet, it was easy to miss the awards and honours he was garnering in Yugoslavia.

It may have taken us years to connect, yet Richard’s introductory email uncovered a series of lay lines which ran between us and linked the worlds of our imagination. We are haunted by the same ghosts – Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalić, Miodrag Pavlović, Danilo Kiš – except that I remember these great writers from school textbooks and the readings I attended as a bookish Belgrade girl, while Richard remembers them as personal friends.

To have been translated into Serbian by Ivan Lalić and Danilo Kiš, as Richard was, would have seemed almost impossibly dazzling to that star-struck girl. It dazzles still. Kiš wrote about “the grace of form”. Such is the poet’s advantage: you need that grace bestowed on you just once to be granted eternity. Had Richard written nothing else but The Blue Butterfly, and had that been his only poem translated from English, and only into my small Slavonic language, it would have been enough.

Professor Vesna Goldsworthy, FRSL

Department of English and Creative Writing

University of Exeter

Back to introduction here.

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