The Poet and the Word: Ancient and Russian Lyric Poetry in Branko Miljković's Translation

This paper examines issues of comparative analysis and the reception of texts by ancient authors within modern Russian and Serbian literature. The problem of transforming and translating classical poetic texts – Greek and Roman – is explored through an analysis of selected poems by Osip Mandelstam in the translations of Branko Miljković. In Osip Mandelstam’s collection Tristia, the recasting of epic motifs of wandering and return is dominated by a tone of lament and mourning, which imparts a distinctive color to the poet’s voice and prompts a reinterpreted reading of Ovid’s reception of Homer. A thematic shift is introduced in the odes written in the style of the epinician, whose progression is shaped by alternating images of darkness and light – a leitmotif that also determines the rhythm of poems such as The Horseshoe Finder and The Knotted Ode. In Miljković’s translations of Mandelstam’s odes one can trace the search for the  “mysterious and ancient” within the Serbian language, as well as for verbal markers that, in the Russian poet’s text, revive poetry from diverse temporal and cultural layers