Mamasafari

This collection by poet, novelist and dramatist Olja Savičević, one of Croatia's most important contemporary voices, is the first of her books of poetry to be translated into English, following the critical acclaim for her novel, Adios Cowboy (Adio kauboju). Mamsafari is a woman's expedition into contemporary Mediterranean culture, a collection of prose poems that meditates with vivid imagery and narrative on family, identity and politics of the Balkans. “Mamasafari,” the second section of the book, continues in the vein of observation and political commentary (particularly the problematic history of the poet's native Balkans), yet this time in a more lyrical manner, and this time with the poet's eye lovingly scrutinizing and exploring family life. The speaker braids the experiences of being a mother, a lover, and a child, at times playing the three roles at once. This is a journey into what it means to be a woman. The third section, “Soundtrack for Blind Passengers,” contains more poeticized and metaphorically-complex work. These poems are thematically varied, and they solidify a sense that Mamasafari represents an expedition, as seen from female experience—first an expedition abroad, then among the speaker's identities, and finally to some truly distant, fictional destinations.

Translated by Andrea Jurjević.



Praise for Olja Savičević and Mamasafari

Olja Savičević's writing is savage; whether she is sharpening truths against "35 Years of Lies" or simply recalling a domestic scene where she suddenly unleashes: "Motherhood is self explanatory and useless like fireworks," her poetry drives the familiar into a state of uncanny. "Why would I eat paper, when I could write on it? So much about that kind of love." That "kind of love" in Mamasafari is a hunger that cuts just deep enough to astound. --Megan Burns, author of Basic Programming

Olja Savičević's poems and prose-poems tackle everything from the Devil to Pasolini, blue shoes to bicycles, the Bossa Nova to family portraits, and a precisely rendered sequence on Istanbul. Savičević is like the love-child of Carolyn Forche and Caesar Pavese: she possesses Pavese's eye for street-life and grit in the cities she travels (both inside and out), and yet she imbues that portraiture with Forche-like notions of the poet as witness. Andrea Jurjević's fine translations wrought in American-inflected-English present a Savičević who captures the rhythm of life that bends beneath the weight of history and isms to find the tiniest details that sing and resist. For, as she tells us: "The butchers will be behind bars, the ground that trembles will grow calm, but the deep satisfaction we call justice won't come. Still: there're many pleasures, that's what's worth focusing on." --Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow

These sensual and at times surreal poems are filled with Middle Eastern and Balkan images of minarets, hookah bars, brothels, baklavas and kebobs, so that one would wish to fly to this “mystical land” on a kilim but for the terror and war that haunt the region’s past and seep into the present.
—Biljana D. Obradovič, editor of Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry