My life Pero Zubac, author and poet selection “The Most Beautiful Poems of Pero Zubac”, published by Belgrade’s Prosveta in 2004. I most like this passage from his preface: “… And finally something very, very personal. In the half-light of the former building of the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad’s Njegoševa Street, I was approached by a young man in a long coat, resembling Prince Myshkin, absolutely absent, to be read as dedicated, and asked me to agree to his seminar paper on Dis. Who knows, maybe it was because of that purple and Novi Sad twilight that the new Dis visited me. I never asked if Zubac wrote that seminar paper on the poet of murk, riddles and secrets. But, in essence, the overall solution of this lyricist, so aloof, so dedicated, was that supposed seminar paper. Students have long since been our modern classics.” (Draško was no longer at the faculty, and I published the paper in two instalments in Novi Sad student newspaper INDEX)
MIŠO MARIĆ, VLASTA KNEZOVIĆ AND PERO ZUBAC, NEVESINJE
story, and then that love story became a term for Mostar and Mostar’s singing. Interestingly, there was nothing there. There were some things, but they didn’t cross the regional ramp…” Duško in typical Duško style! You wrote the love poem Mostar Rains in 1965, out of boredom, with no inkling that it would make you famous. While you were waiting for your friend and fellow poet, Rade Tomić, to write his poem on the premises of the then Youth Organisation in Novi Sad, you threaded a sheet of paper into a typewriter and wrote those famous verses in one go? It was a September evening. I didn’t have indigo and I typed it in one copy. And that night I posted it to Zvonimir Golob, the editor of Telegram in Zagreb. He published it under the name Perica Zubac, which was how I signed it; that’s what everyone in Nevesinje called me, on 8th October, 1965. If that letter had gone astray, if Zvonimir had forgotten it, that poem would not exist. He told me once, long ago, that he would include it in his anthology of world poetry, which he unfortunately didn’t manage to finish and publish during his lifetime.
58
March
In my memory, the snows of Nevesinje were a brighter fascination than the rains of Mostar, and their whiteness is described in many of my poems, especially those intended for children Although that legendary poem won over the sympathies of critics and readers, you didn’t include it in your first book of poetry. You only did so at the insistence of your then professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Dr Draško Ređep? Draško Ređep wrote about me several times, very affirmatively and beautifully, and for one article about me, entitled “Breath of Youth” and published in Politika, he was awarded the Milan Bogdanović Award, the top prize for literary criticism in our country. His last essay about me is included in his
Mostar Rains’ Svetlana was an intriguing character. Everyone wanted to know the identity of this girl, who still makes this poem magical. The poet initially said that Svetlana does not exist, then later revealed that Svetlana is a non-existent girl who was woven into the poem on the basis of the characteristics of Mirjana Šimić from Mostar, Ljiljana Njanje Canić from Belgrade, Vera Steiner from Osijek and Dragana Vajdić from Novi Sad, who later became your wife. The answer is in your question. Of those four golden girls from my early youth, I composed Svetlana. All “platonic” loves. Irina Chivilikhina’s Russian translation of Mostar Rains was published in Moscow magazine Robotnica (1988), which had a circulation of 19.75 million copies. Your poems can also be found on other Russian sites and with “Orwell”, alongside Njegoš and Goran Kovačić. Mostar Rains was also published on a Finnish website, alongside two Desanka Maksimović poems. The internet extended the literary life of Mostar Rains, multiplying it a thousand times, and it has been translated into 20 world languages. Belgrade publisher Admiral Books published the jubilee edition in 2015, in thirteen languages, then another translation was published in Polish, then in Hungarian, Spanish, German, and the most recent, from 2019, in Bulgarian. You didn’t visit Mostar for a long time. You
