MILENA MARKOVIĆ | The Common

As our new year of publishing and programming picks up speed, we at The Common wanted to reflect on the pieces that made last year such a great one! We published over 200 pieces online and in print in 2023. Below, you can browse a list of the six most-read pieces of 2023 to see which stories, essays, and poems left an impact on readers.

Two Poems from The Spring of Plagues by Ana Carolina Assis, translated by Heath Wing

“i wish I could / prevent your death / and bury your body alive / in the puny damp / earth
we tended / so that it kept on living / mandioca corn banana / would not sprout forth /
but instead / acerola cherry blackberry pitanga hog plum.”

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January 2023 Poetry Feature, with work by Tina Cane, Myronn Hardy, and Marc Vincenz

“Sheila had IHOP     delivered to her apartment     in El Alto, NY / on January 6th
so she could kick back     self-proclaimed terrorist / that she is     and eat pancakes
     while watching white supremacists / storm the Capital.”

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Poems by MILENA MARKOVIĆ, translated from the Serbian by STEVEN and MAJA TEREF.

Translators’ Note

As translators, we have multiple ways in which we interact as a translator couple. Oftentimes, we will sit side by side and take turns translating and transcribing as we work our way through a text. Sometimes though, one of us may translate a poem and later have the other check it. The poem “little lambs” is an example whereby Maja wrote out her translation in a notebook, which Steven later typed up and checked against the original. In the middle of the poem where “a band of clouds cross above my son,” Maja had followed the line with “while he squatted in the shallows,” yet Steven misread “shallows” as “shadows.”

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Translation: Five Poems by Serbian Poet Milena Marković

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