Distinguished director of the Struga Poetry Evenings, Mr. Nikola Kukunesh,
Distinguished Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mr. Zoran Ljutkov,
Distinguished poets,
Esteemed guests,
Dear citizens of Struga,
To be in Struga it is a gift for the senses and a balm for the soul, not only for Konstantin Miladinov, but also, for me. Struga is still the city of beautiful girls and the city where the guild yearns to have their craft house.
It is in Struga that the loving idyll and embrace of Lake Ohrid and the Crn Drim reach their culmination – the river flowing in harmony with poetry itself.
Struga is perhaps the most poetic town on Earth, a place sustained by emotion and inspired by it, where poems become portraits of joy and grief, of tears and laughter, and where the voice of one becomes the expression of many – evolving into art and culture.
For sixty-five summers now, this poetic home has connected meridians, bringing together and uniting the world’s poetic kin with lovers and admirers of the beautiful word in the old yet vibrant Struga – a rebellious republic of poets who strive for a better and more humane life.
For six and a half decades, we have been privileged to host masters of language and alchemists of thought, transforming words into both aesthetics and ethics.
Struga has seen, and has been seen by, numerous distinguished participants and Golden Wreath laureates – poetic relatives of Prlichev. Their names have been sown throughout the Poetry Park, alongside the trees they planted, standing as faithful witnesses to the boundlessness of poetry. Thanks to them and thanks to poetry itself we overcome the ephemerality of events and the disturbances and anxieties of our age through the eternity of the human spirit.
Once again, this year, here in the House of Poetry “Miladinov Brothers,” we bear witness to the simplicity and humility of the magicians of the word. They recite as though engaged in a battle of life and death; they unsettle us or comfort us; they open universes before us; they confront us with painful truths; they cast us into, or rescue us from, the waters of the Drim; like eels yearning for the Sargasso Sea, they teach and inspire us toward resistance, freedom, defiance, sensitivity, and wisdom.
Like lake nymphs, Struga and Ohrid love, understand, and support one another. And so, by tradition, poetry will once again fill Saint Sophia, as well as the sacred jewels of Saint Naum and Holy Mother of God Peribleptos, resonating with divine beauty under God’s blessing.
Dear friends of poetry,
Last year, standing here at the opening of the 64th Struga Poetry Evenings, and in the spirit of the Slavic antithesis, I asked both myself and those gathered here about the meaning of poetry in these difficult times; times of wars and conflicts, virtual digital entities, diminished emotions, false and pathetic solidarity used only for public relations, alarming indifference and apathy, and volcanic eruptions of anger and hatred.
Yet despite the surge of algorithms and relentless artificial intelligence, I chose to believe that poetry still possesses the power to change and perhaps even save the world, as Jean-Pierre Siméon once said. That is why I am here again: “to hear and feel the strange voice that cannot and will not disappear,” in the words of last year’s laureate, Ivan Shtrpka.
Nearly eight decades ago, the great André Breton, founder of Surrealism, wrote in his poem On the Road to San Romano that “the poetic embrace, like the embrace of love, covers our view of the misery of the world.” Incidentally, if you ask all-powerful and all-knowing artificial intelligence to find you a Macedonian rendering of that poem, you may well receive no answer, and in that case, you will rely on the old and faithful libraries and books themselves.
The misery of the world, and a humanity dehumanized almost beyond recognition, have not disappeared. They remain with us, perhaps even more visibly than last year. It is not enough to cover our eyes and seek shelter. It is time to confront the misery of the world, our own human misery. It is time for catharsis, kneeling before a wall of shame longer even than the Great Wall of China.
But art is a harbinger of tempests. Literature has always been, and remains, not merely an aesthetic act but an act of social rebellion. Do I sound utopian?
As this year’s laureate and Golden Wreath recipient, Anneke Brassinga would say in her poem Transient:
“Only atoms and the void are immortal,”
said Lucretius. What binds us is that we all
will be broken down into atoms.
What binds us is that we are transient and love one another,
that we feel more deeply our shared knowledge
of the mortality of being, of each other, than of those
damned atoms. Death is too small
and too large, but life is stronger; it unites
with the transient strength of the weak,
in the singular contingency
of this bodily meeting, in the joy
that surpasses all atoms.
Allow me, in closing, to emphasize once again that, for me, the opportunity to be with you is not merely a ceremonial and protocol-bound presidential duty. It is a privilege and a joy.
Therefore, it is with particular honour and immense pleasure that I declare the 65th Struga Poetry Evenings officially open.
Let us enjoy poetry passionately.
