Macedonian poet Nikola Madžirov (1973) is considered one of the most recognisable and established names in the contemporary Balkan region. As a poet, he travels extensively, and among other things, this year he was the guest of honour at the Days of Poetry and Wine festival, as part of which a selection of his poems, The Compass of Time (Beletrina, 2025), translated by Namita Subiotto, was published. He began travelling, as he says, even before he learned the story of his own name – his surname means ‘migrant’ or ‘person without a home’, which comes from the Arabic word muhajir (muadžir) – and the themes of home, abandonment, roots and memory are also one of the central axes of his poetry. He calls himself ‘a descendant of refugees and an heir to temporary homes’, and in our conversation we touched not only on his poetic language, but also on his reflections on the meaning of growing up and living in no man’s land along the three borders, and on the questions of what it means to belong and to leave – and how to preserve in language what is destined to disappear.
Photo: Thomas Kierok
The title of your poetry collection The Compass of Time suggests measurement and circulation. How do you actually experience time – as a linear path that moves forward and can be measured very precisely, or more like a circle that constantly returns?
‘Linear time is like the cardiogram image of someone who dies. I would like to regard time as an imperfect and unfinished circle, drawn with a compass in a trembling hand. In the openness of that circle lies the threshold of all returns and memories. There is the gate of rebirth before the last breath.’
In the poem Discovery you wrote these wonderful lines: ‘My home every day / under the roof of the world changes mysteriously, / childhood itself is like honey, / which does not allow any foreign traces in itself.’ What was your childhood like? How do you remember it?
‘In my early childhood, in rare moments of solitude, I would write with my mother’s red lipstick on the walls even before I knew about letters and the imperfection of words. My parents had to repaint the walls every new summer and punished me with a creative silence, white like the fresh walls. It sounds absurd, but those walls were the first palimpsest of my freedom. I began writing poetry when I started to understand letters, but I began to understand poetry when I learned about silence. Of course, this happened before the war in Yugoslavia. The war helped me become loud on paper when everything and everyone around me became loud.
Louise Glück, in the poem Nostos, writes: ‘We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.’ I return to childhood where the expansion of time is not the spending of life but a pure search for it. I often dream of my late mother returning from the market with bags full of fruit, while I run toward the apricot fields. My father, often with his old toothbrush, cleans the frame around her portrait on the tombstone and the letters of his own name, which he had engraved in advance right next to hers. Socialism taught him to plan everything – even his own death.
My son, on the other hand, who grew up with the constants of virtual existence, once asked me why the street he lives on is named after Nikola Tesla when it is the darkest in the city, and why the sign with the name of the builder of light is stuck to a crumbling house where darkness lives. In his eyes, I saw my own questions about dynamics, doubts and fears toward the world.
When I write, I look ahead – even when I remember. As a child I believed more in the names of things than in the things themselves. The table in the living room beneath which I hid from thunder was the safest place in the world, as well as the door frame under which I was supposed to stand in case of an earthquake, instead of running to rescue the marbles rolling towards the cracks. Our childhood memories are like the handle that needs to be pulled if the first parachute of reality does not open. In that in-between space of lost time, I return to justify the safety in the same way I was returning fallen birds to their nest. Do we return to childhood in order to belong? Do we belong where we return, or only where we die?’
Two years ago, when we were already working together on another project, for which you wrote an excellent essay on poetry, I was particularly touched by the story of your grandmother. I found it extremely strange that there was a ‘profession’ like the one she had – she was paid to cry at funerals (even though she didn’t know the deceased or their families). Can you tell me more about that? Did she teach you to listen to language, or to the silences within it?
‘Yes, as I wrote in the essay The blood and poetry of non-belonging, one of my grandmothers was a paid mourner at funerals; she used to ‘re-sing’ as they said in my hometown. She would translate all the quiet mourning into a loud cry, and with a voice that drowned out the priest she buried the hopes of the bereaved family, creating a cosmogenic cry at the grave of a person she did not even know. Oftentimes she would wake me in the morning testing the strength of her voice in the back garden, entering my dream as a foreign absence, like a key to a door of a ruined home. I understood this ritual of mourning as the audibility of absence, and the awareness of quietude as the single sign of presence would nest within me. Later, I came to understand that in this way she was, in fact, mourning every day for her youngest son, who had been killed by an electric shock while building his new house. She taught me that every absence is equally painful and important, that every silence is a postponement of pain. When a poet writes about death, he can evoke silence even when he does not promise a better world beyond reality, where there are no advertisements for prolonged orgasms nor elixirs to erase wrinkles. My grandmother was prepared to die without leaving anything written behind. She disliked the eternity of artificial flowers on graves, fearing they might steal the eternity of the dead. She kept her clothes for her funeral ceremony right next to the clothes of her youth, which she had never worn again and which existed only in rare photographs, for back then her body was young and beautiful, as were the dresses. When she was dying, her face showed no sadness, but rather the pain of everything unsaid.’
In your poetry you often address your ancestors and return to the past. You call yourself ‘a descendant of refugees and an heir to temporary homes’. How, and to what extent, have you been influenced by the war and the fact that you moved around a lot (as a child)? Who are your ancestors and what is their legacy?
‘Nomads do not believe in monuments, although my refugee ancestors kept the key of every lost home when they fled the wars, hidden in a medicine jar, as a symbol of extended life and of faith that one day they would return to the ruined house. More and more often, the home becomes a space one should abandon, because we have become so used to spatial changes that we no longer feel journeys as abandonments, but only as relocations – although sometimes I have the sense that all the abandoned homes follow me like hungry dogs.
I am a descendant of refugees from the Balkan Wars at the beginning of the last century, and through their stories I came to realise that home is a memory that cannot be inherited. After every war there are many abandoned houses, but there are even more abandoned homes.
I want to run away, because every dwelling is preceded by an escape. My grandmother used to say that home is where there is smoke rising from your chimney. But to see the smoke, you must leave the house. Often, when we speak of escape, we mean abandoning the self. But what if we consider escape as ‘leaving the imposed normality’? What if escape is a return to the purity of the first perception of the world? Czesław Miłosz, in his Ars Poetica?, writes: ‘The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person, / for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, / and invisible guests come in and out at will.’
A journey without memory is a curse. Sometimes I carried stones from my journeys, and now, when I want to arrange them on the shelves according to some geographical or temporal order, I no longer remember which came from where, or when. No one stamped the stones, although they speak far more of the time than passports do. On my trip to the first poetry festival after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad, the border guards greeted me with suspicion, because I was the only foreigner at the airport without a military uniform, whose temporary home was not a military base. The poets of Baghdad welcomed me with the words: ‘We travel through those who come here.’ There are people who cannot return because they can never depart.
The architect Juhani Pallasmaa says that old houses take us back to the slow time and silence of the past. Perhaps that is why I love to return. The thought of return carries within it the calmness of departure. It is not by chance that the people who work abroad build enormous houses for three generations in their native villages, fully aware that no one will ever return to live in them. Yet heavier still is the thought of the refugee who has a key in his pocket that no longer fits any lock, but instead fits half-memories that later transform into inherited myths.’
Your poems often feature the motifs of home, loss and uncertainty. How does the idea of ‘home’ translate into the structure and language of poems – is ‘home’ in your poems a place, a memory or a way of speaking? How do your personal experiences and the collective memory of a nation coexist in this ‘home’?
‘People who frequently change the places and rooms where they work and live, almost always leave traces of their presence even after they depart – wrinkles on the sheets, small burn holes from fallen cigarettes on the carpet that conceal the footsteps of previous inhabitants. Usually, these are objects or fragments that the next occupant discovers on their own, things that are not subject to the laws of mandatory inheritance – the accumulated ash in the ashtray on the windowsill with dead flies and wilted flowers in pots lacking both clean water and someone’s gaze.
Before I travel, I open the suitcase quickly, and my shadow is already at the bottom, waiting for the books and clothes. When I return, I open it slowly, as one opens a sealed coffin of a war victim. As if I want to prolong the escape, to postpone belonging and rebirth, this time without witnesses. Returning is an attempt to cancel memory. An attempt to kill the modern sadness that you have lost something you do not yet possess.
As soon as I utter the word ‘home,’ a field of warm interiority opens before me. When I think about ‘house’, the exterior is revealed – the geometry of the yard, the bordering façade of the changing space. The dynamism of the home is determined by the longing for constant return, whether through the reconstructed streets of childhood or through revived instincts of lasting belonging. Simone Weil says that to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. Only return builds the solid foundations of a home, as opposed to the fragile foundations of a house. My refugee ancestors have left the house in which someone else now lives, but the home is abandoned forever, because it is uninhabitable for others. One lives in a house, yet one returns to a home. To abandon the return is to truly abandon yourself.’
In your poetry, memory is not only a keeper of the past, but often transforms reality. When do you trust memory, and when do you no longer trust it or believe it?
‘The aesthetics of memory is built up through a continual interweaving of presence and absence, until the frontier between them is erased in the interstice of mental reality. The wife of a friend of mine who died at the age of thirty desperately preserves the only record of his voice, on their answering machine, which calmly states: ‘We are not at home. Leave a message.’ Five days after his death she gave birth, and still, virtually every day, she plays to her now seven-year-old son the tape of his father’s voice saying: ‘We are not at home…’ This is the voice of a presence announcing absence. A voice of a memory announcing oblivion.
In Macedonia people still take food for the dead when visiting their graves as a manifestation of the absolutist instinct of the living to maintain their sense of superiority and security. This ritual prolongation of the personal time of the dead is most frequently realised through a selective memory of moments of their lives that those who are no longer living might well not have remembered themselves. In fact, this is how a ‘theft of memory’ is born, a practice that was a chief method of survival for dictators in these parts. From the chrysalis of the self-proclaimed prophet who is concerned for a better tomorrow, the dictator develops into a resplendent protector, offering nothing more than memories of things that never happened. The risk of reality in the cradle of a dictatorial regime is far greater than the risk of remembering. People verbalise and, in their memories, give life to all their longings and unrealised wishes, their daydreams. What they remember least of all is the touch of life and its spatial and temporal frontiers.
Memory becomes a home and a sanctuary, while the house is transformed into a museum of conserved emotional exhibits. My father remembers in order to live. He sings songs from the year of my birth, he calls streets by the names of heroes from the old history books, he asks taxi drivers to stop in front of buildings that no longer exist. He still remembers the national TV channel as being number 1 on the remote control. Gaston Bachelard says that in order to analyse our existence within the hierarchy of ontology, it is necessary to desocialise our larger memories and to reach the level of daydreams that we have experienced in the realms of our solitude. Perhaps in his revisitations of shared projected memories my father is seeking a way to be alone, to weave the fence of his sociological and emotional security – because sometimes it seems to me his memories are longer lasting than death.
I’m afraid of a memory that everyone believes in.’
Nikola Madžirov at the Days of Poetry and Wine festival (Photo: Timotej Prelog)
You are a poet who travels – both physically and through language. If we focus first on the physical movement from place to place, can you really call these temporary dwellings home? Or are they just transitional rooms, spaces where we leave our scent or forget some socks?
‘The home is a psychological building, a fear of non-belonging, a faith in returns that postpone death, a fireplace of security. Even the most sterile hotel rooms welcome you with a roaring fireplace on the TV screen to convince you that you belong here, despite the kitschy paintings on the wall and the aggressive air fresheners. Today, being at home is called isolation. Unlike the mythical turning back, which kills or petrifies the beloved ones, turning back to the abandoned home makes the home even more alive in memory. For a long time now, I have lived the home as a dynamic reality, like a tree with roots in the air. Yet I belong more to the interspace, to unfinished homes.
I live in Strumica, a city near the borders with Greece and Bulgaria, and I have always felt safest in those hundred metres between the two border ramps – a space without monuments or conditions for historical memory. These spaces, cleverly named ‘no man’s land,’ want to tell you that you are nobody if you feel them as your own. The same is true for cities. We feel that a city begins to belong to us when, for each of our inner states, we find a corner, a small square, or a bridge whose name no one knows, and everyone begins to name it according to a fragment of their life routine or personal history. Having a place to live is different from having a home.
In the past, that place was called a fireplace – a place that provides the warmth of a mother’s womb. The urge to revive memories through the accumulation of objects and their stories makes us resistant to moving, but so many displacements and exiles have occurred in our lands that it is natural for roots and foundations to matter more than leaves and roofs. For Heidegger, dwelling is not merely one of the many human actions and states – it is an essential feature of human existence. To dwell and to exist are one. I try to build only that which I can leave, only that to which I can return, because I am tired of leaving spaces that do not belong to me.
Transitional spaces are our eternal homes. When I am stuck in an elevator between two floors and when the door won’t open, the space begins to expand with the tide of memories. Transitional spaces give you the feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere – which is only a privilege of the invisible: of the air or of the gods. Every time I travel, my shadow draws the safe boundaries of the interspace, of the space in-between, although the only safe space is the one we haven’t inhabited yet.’
What is your experience of travelling in language, through language? How do you view your poems in other languages? What do you think is a good translation?
‘To a poet, language is a body within which he feels all pleasures and restrictions, all pain and temporary disappearances. To think is to translate longing into truth; to remember is to translate time from conserved into personal time; to dream is to translate what we have not seen into what we will never see; to be a refugee is to translate one home into something that will never be a home.
Translating is a ritual, because it repeats something that will continue repeating. In rituals there are no losses nor gains, only reconstructions of realities and semi-dreams. By the act of translation nothing is lost, but by poor translating we lose everything – primarily, the silence in the poem.
The translator rewrites what he missed saying, while the author writes what he missed keeping silent about. There are many poems in which we can recognise ourselves without having written them, just as there are cities we have imagined ourselves in long before we travel there. The translator is a silent deconstructor, a night guard of the bridges of difference and understanding. In translating into another language, the translator is also saving the language from which he or she translates. Each replacement of one word with another preserves both words from oblivion, unlike the thief who repaints the stolen car, not only to make it new but also ensure that the old one is forgotten. Therefore, I do not agree with those who speak of the translator as a thief of meanings or as one who loses words. We write to remember, we translate so as not to forget. I have translated many authors into Macedonian from English and from several Slavic languages, and I have always fought against the surgical precision of dictionaries that rank words by the frequency of their use rather than by the intensity of their depth or untameability. When my poetry is translated into languages entirely unknown to me, I see the entire process as translating the words into a civilisational palimpsest that does not belong to any state or national literature.
In moving from one home to another, we translate ourselves from one uncertainty into another, from one believing into another. The language in which I write is being spoken by only two million people who emigrate each day in search of a secure home, placing their memories into the new spaces before the furniture. Mandelstam writes that excommunication from language is equal to excommunication from history. In that panic-stricken fear of disappearing, many nations in the Balkans have turned to history, which offered them spaciousness and fragile reality. Poetry was built upon Virilio’s aesthetics of disappearance and fed itself on the roots of what was spoken and not yet written. In the Balkans, we were together in war and alone in poetry.
Czesław Miłosz thought about language as a real home. I would like to speak of home as a language. Today, both the change of homes and the fear of losing the foundations of being generate the urge to conserve language. Sometimes words are lost in new language areas, like a curious child lost on the outskirts. A great number of ‘important poems’ with ideological background are lost the very moment they are translated, thus being demasked of their state-defined qualities. Therefore, translation does not occupy new spaces, but reveals them.’
There is a lot of silence in your writing. You say that silence, like the mere absence of words, scares you. What does silence actually mean to you? Can you find it and listen to it in the times we live in?
‘I grew up at a border crossing among three countries, among flags torn by the wind and inherited hatred. The silence of fear was strongest at the borders, where an aerial war was waged between different state radio stations.
In Paris, my home was the architectural complex of Récollets, now a home for writers and scholars, and four centuries ago a convent with monastic quarters, which about two hundred years ago became a residence for people with incurable diseases, and at the end of the 19th century, a military hospital. In what language did the monks in Récollets swear to silence, and in what language did the wounded soldiers plead to doctors or to God? Silence is not the absence of words, but a long effort to say something.
Creative silence is a prolonged dialogue with the fragility of the world. Arvo Pärt mentioned to me that he created Für Alina after a period of several years of complete authorial silence – perhaps to console me for my own creative silence, which I replaced with translations of other authors’ verses. I have always thought that patience is neither passivity nor delay of the essence, just as silence is not the dark shadow of words. Silence expands space, forcing me to wake amidst the noise coming from hospitals, from squares full of protesters, tourists and fountains with invalid coins. It allows me to hear my son’s footsteps even when he sleeps, to hear the patient ticking of time in the wall clock or in my chest.’
You also wrote a verse: ‘There is no silence in this world.’ So is there still room for poetry in a world where there is no silence?
‘The known words are like copied maps of belonging, or like inherited and never confirmed truths from history. In that whole process of interpreting words and histories, I consider silence a universal language, although silence can no longer be found even in places such as graves, where people speak loudly about those who have no voice anymore. When you think you are in a space of absolute silence, try turning on the radio – and you will witness all the identical noises of this world, although they originate from hundreds of different languages. ‘The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence,’ says Susan Sontag, according to whom silence can be also viewed as a form of self-punishment. Poetry is a thunderous silence that does not change worlds, but builds them.’
In a short essay titled Recreating Stone from Stone, you say that it is better to ask a poet what he will forget than what he will write. So do you often forget? Let me end by asking you your own question: what will you forget next?
‘I forget, so that I can return. I would like to forget the verses I know by heart, so that I may write them differently. I forget to lock the doors of hotel rooms, of rooms in literary residencies, thinking that a part of me still sits on the chair at the table full of scattered books and shadows. One must write to justify forgetfulness.
I cannot call myself a true nomad, because I more often bring something from trips than leave something behind – even if it is dust on my shoes or hundreds of undeveloped photographs. Still, in abandoned hotel rooms or literary residencies, I forget a book or an umbrella, believing someone will interpret it as a sign of presence, not merely as a poet’s forgetfulness.
The greatest traders of oblivion are the copyists of destinies, the dictators, the engineers of human life. The fear of forgetting drives us back to childhood, to the source of our thought, just as we timidly return to check whether we have turned off the lights. But this does not mean that we must unreservedly trust old narratives and inherited myths, for ‘they contain great danger, they are bombs that must be dismantled,’ as Zagajewski says. We must live between the critical memory of the present and the interrupted forgetting of myths. Those who impose forgetting and offer myths as immutable truths fear death the most.
One symptom of the illness I have experienced – and still experience – is the forgetting of facts, yet it forced me to remember atmospheres and feelings, to create new homes of reality out of fragments and distant truths. Yet we often attribute apocalyptic qualities to forgetting. When our parents forget our names or when they forget how to return home, we think they are slowly dying, when in fact they are beginning a new life. The fear of death disappears with forgetting.’
Language editing by Fiona Thompson
The project On the Balcony of the Balkans, hosted on the AirBeletrina portal, seeks to foster intercultural dialogue and strengthen cooperation among artists, institutions, and countries of the former Yugoslavia. It is not rooted in nostalgia or focused on the past, but is instead centered on present realities and, above all, aimed at reflecting on the future, as it seeks to contribute to the most successful possible development of the region. It is carried out with the support of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia.
Anja Grmovšek Drab (1993) is the editor of the European poetry platform Versopolis and the executive editor of AirBeletrina. She holds a master's degree in contemporary Slovenian poetry from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. In 2024, her debut poetry collection Prepovedani položaj was published by LUD Literatura.
