Poetics and Revision: "Volele su me dve sestre, skupa" (1970) and "Volile su me dvije sestre, skupa" (1989) by Milan Milišić

Abstract

As a poet, Milan Milišić (1941–1991) was part of both Serbian and Croatian literary scenes and an inheritor of both literary traditions; however, his oeuvre has still not been sufficiently researched. The aim of this paper is to consider the importance of Milišić՚s tendency to return to his earlier poems and revise them, making new versions in his notes and changing the collections to a certain extent. The most remarkable transformation is certainly the second edition of his first poetry collection Volele su me dve sestre, skupa (Two Sisters Loved Me, Together) from 1970, which was published in Belgrade, in the Ekavian dialect, unlike the rest of Milišić՚s books. The second edition, entitled Volile su me dvije sestre, skupa, published in Sarajevo in 1989, was written in the Western Ijekavian dialect with a lot of regionalisms from Dubrovnik and the Adriatic region. However significant those changes are for the linguistic and stylistic unity of Milišić՚s work, I was quite interested in the corrections and interventions that could have had larger impact on the poetics and semantics of this book. The comparison between the two versions of the book shows important differences in the conceptualization of its three cycles. The first one even bears a different title in the second edition and the poet’s interventions point to his intention to make this cycle more coherent in terms of style, meaning and expression of the lyrical self. In addition, by introducing the intertextual relation to Torquato Tasso’s poem in the first poem of the cycle, Milišić provides the literary and cultural context of the peculiar and provocative title of his book. The second cycle, entitled „Zapiši to!“ (“Write that Down!”), has numerous travelogue motifs, and Milišić conceived its second-edition version as prose poetry. This emphasized the poems’ narrative and discursive potentials, while diminishing the significance of the rhetorical and bathetic elements, as well as the presence of the lyric voice. The transformations of the third cycle „Tvrđava“ (“The Fortress”) seem not to be so distinct and substantial, consisting mostly of some lexical and syntactic revisions, and the variants are rather similar to their original texts. However, through important modifications and reductions in the cycle’s key poems, „Tvrđava“ (“The Fortress“), the opening one, and „Volile su me dvije sestre, skupa“ („Two Sisters Loved Me, Together“), the closing one, Milišić made the book more coherent and meaningful both in itself and when viewed in the context of his other works.