Radmila Lazic

In seiner Reihe „Poet´s Choice“ (Washington Post 21.12.03) stellt Edward Hirsch die serbische Dichterin Radmila Lazic vor:

„I’ll laugh everywhere, weep wherever I can,“ the poet Radmila Lazic writes in A Wake for the Living, translated from the Serbian with great panache by Charles Simic. „Life is candied fruit and vinegar,“ she declares. „I add them to my verses in equal amounts.“ There is something bittersweet about Lazic’s utterly convincing work, which has the texture of lived experience.

A Wake for the Living brings together a representative selection from Lazic’s six collections of poetry. It is the first English translation of her work. Born in 1949, Lazic has a jaunty wit, a restless and irreverent intelligence and a startling way of stalking the truth. …
Lazic writes as a feminist with a dark sense of humor and a surreal imagination, a woman forthright about her desires („Let me get to the nitty-gritty,“ the speaker announces in „Dorothy Parker Blues.“ „I give you the visa/To my body — my homeland“) and unsentimental about marriage. She can no longer be hoodwinked by conjugal love. „Many times I fell in love forever,“ she ruefully recalls in one poem.