![]() ![]() If chess is typically the figure, for Simic, it’s the ground: chess is more real than reality. But for Simic, the chessboard is more tangible than the surreal hellscape around him. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.” When chess appears in literature, the game typically symbolizes some kind of escape. As he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “The kinds of poems I write-mostly short and requiring endless tinkering-often recall for me games of chess. Simic was also a chess prodigy, and the game rewired his brain. Simic emigrated as a boy to the United States, and he wrote poetry in English, but the hellish landscape of his youth lay at the heart of his work. ![]() Belgrade had become a chess board, a deadly battleground for both the Nazis and Allies. Images of a war-torn country inform Simic’s earliest memories. Three years later, in 1944, another series of detonations exploded across town-this time, dropped by Allies. In 1941, when Simic was three, Hitler invaded, and a bomb explosion hurled Simic out of bed. Charles Simic, the late, great Serbian-American poet, was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. ![]()
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