Charles Simic, who died January 9 in Dover, New Hampshire, from complications of dementia, was a prominent Serbian-American poet. He was born as Dušan Simić in 1938 in Belgrade, but from 1953 he lived in the USA, where he emigrated with his family. His childhood was traumatic and overshadowed by the events of the Second World War, which he lived in Yugoslavia. These difficult early experiences of his are often found in his poetry. After the war, his father left Belgrade and went to Italy.

In 1948, his mother was successful and left illegally, crossing the border into Austria without a passport. (She told him that when she was little, the old people in their house spoke Greek.) When Dushan was 14, his mother, a music and opera teacher, finally managed to go to Paris. A year later, the whole family, parents and two boys, returned to America. They settled in Chicago, Dushan became Charlie and went to the same school as Ernest Hemingway. In fact, he had the same French teacher as Hemingway. In high school, he began to write poetry.

His first poems were published in 1959 in Chicago magazine. He attended the University of Chicago and served in the US Army. He then enrolled at New York University, working nights to pay his tuition. In 1966 he married fashion designer Helen Dubin. They had two children and a grandson. His first collection of poetry, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. He was one of the world’s leading poets. He wrote 26 collections of poetry. At the same time, he published several essays and 80 books of translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and North Macedonian poetry.

His poetry is partly based on his experiences of military Belgrade, the poverty and humiliation of modern life, material and spiritual. There is a clarity, an authenticity to his work that few of his contemporaries possess. The director of the Library of Congress, when he was awarded the Poet Laureate, said he chose him “from a short list of 15 poets for the astounding authenticity of his writings.” His poems have been published in the most authoritative literary magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry, Field, Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, Raritan. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and Der Spiegel, he briefly served as poetry editor for the Paris Review.

Simik’s works are difficult to rank or classify. Some of his poems have a surreal, metaphysical slant, depicting realistic images of stalemate, violence and desperation. He confessed: “I am an unrepentant realist. Surrealism makes no sense in a country like America where millions of Americans are known to have traveled with UFOs. Our states are full of homeless and crazy people talking in the streets and being ignored. I watch them and eavesdrop on them. Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents.”

Many of them influenced his writing and poetic language: ancient Chinese poetry, the poets of ancient Rome, the French symbolists, the American modernists, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the Yugoslav poet Vasco Popa, Walt Whitman, André Breton, and Stefan Mallarme. He has been widely recognized as one of the most authentic and unique poets of our time. His poems are characterized by fast pace and black, sharp humor.

He has taught creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and New York University. In 1972 he taught for a time at Haygard University in California.

That’s when we met at a poetry reading at Cody’s bookstore in Berkeley. We found that we have mutual friends such as Kenneth Rexroth, George Hitchcock, Philip Lamantia, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nanos Valaoritis. I remember him reciting his poem about Ezra Pound at an event hosted by City Lights in November 1972 in San Francisco. I first read his poems in an old issue of George Hitchcock’s Kayak in May 1971. Nanos Valaoritis lent it to me. Kayak was a West Coast Surrealist magazine. In October 1997, he came to Harvard University to read his poetry at the invitation of the Poetry Room, directed by Stratis Haviaras. There we reunited after 25 consecutive years.

Charles Simic was not only a great poet, but also a writer who wrote essays, reviews, research. He left behind a large body of work and many awards for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Wallace Stevens Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Prize, and the Griffin International Prize for Poetry. In 2007, he became the United States Poet Laureate.

He is one of the few but select writers who wrote in a language that was not their native language, confirming the words of Harold Bloom, who wrote that “the American language is updated from time to time by immigrants.” An immigrant child who did not speak English until the age of fifteen, his poetry has shades of darkness mixed with vivid tragic outbursts. His poems are somewhat reminiscent of fairy tales, strange tales from another planet. It has irony, history, humor, tragedy, the surprise of the last line, something that makes you feel excited while you read the poem. His poems have been translated into all European languages ​​and into Greek. In Athens, he came to the Athens Concert Hall in October 2010 for the presentation of his book Music of the Stars. His poems were read by Konstantinos Tsoumas, and the undersigned was the coordinator of the event. His poetry is addressed to the many, not to the few. He was a great observer of History, the world, life. One observation led him to another and another, and he composed poems that touch even those who are not fond of poetry.