Sima Pandurović

[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] Sima Pandurović (Сима Пандуровић), born in Belgrade on 14 January 1883, was a Serbian poet, part of the Symbolist movement in European poetry at the time. He was one of the founders of the Modernamovement in Serbian poetry. Young Pandurović was educated at Belgrade's Grande École (Velika škola), and after a brief experience at teaching determined to devote himself to literature, writing poetry and criticism for literary magazines, particularly Misao, which he founded shortly after the war. At the beginning of the 20th Century, he joined "the poets of pessimism" - Milan Rakić and Vladislav Petković Dis - then under the influences of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe.Biography

At the outbreak of the Great War, Pandurović enlisted in the Serbian Army as a volunteer; and as a soldier he served with conspicuous distinction for the first two years. Near the end of 1915 he was captured by the Austro-Hungarian army, and sent to a military prison in Neusiedl am See, a town in Burgenland, Austria, and then in the notorious Boldogason in Hungary. He survived the internment and by the end of the war he was secretary to Serbia's Minister of Culture and assistant director of the National Library of Serbia. Between the wars, he continued to translate Shakespeare, write poetry, contribute literary articles, working also as co-editor (with Velimir Živojinoviċ) of Misao: književno-politički časopis (Thought: A Literary-Political Magazine), published bi-monthly in Belgrade, from 1919 to 1937. Although Pandurević died in 1960, he had practically ceased writing at the outbreak of World War II. He refused to resume his writing activity when the communists took power in Yugoslavia in 1945.

His poems - Posmrtne Pocasti / Posthumous Honours, Mostar, 1908; Dani i Noci / Days and Nights, Belgrade, 1912; and Okovane Slogove Zagreb, 1918—have found many readers almost immediately. Equally renowned were Panduroviċ's pulpit addresses in defence of Ksenija Atanasijević when she lost her professorship at the University of Belgrade. Though he was no orator, his appeal to the reason was effective. He translated Victor Hugo's Kralj se zabavlja / Le roi s'amuse (1904); Edmond Rostand's Romanticne Duse / Les romanesques (1919 and 1920); Jean Racine's Athalie (Belgrade, 1913); Moliere'sTartuffe; and some the works of Shakespeare (including Hamlet, Richard III, Henry IV, and Macbeth), with Živojin Simić, are deservedly praised by critics Jovan Skerlić, Pavle Popović, and Bogdan Popović. He also wrote a critical work - Ogledi iz estetike / Aesthetic Outlook, published in Belgrade in 1920.

As a lyric poet, his genius is no less original; he takes rank with the best Serbian poets of his class in the Post Modern period of the first half of the 20th Century (1900–1940). His contemporaries were Milan Rakić, Vladislav Petković Dis, Milutin Bojić, Jovan Dučić, Veljko Petrović (poet), Danica Marković as well as novelists Borisav Stanković, Petar Kočić, Isidora Sekulić, Jelena Dimitrijević, Veljko Milićević, Milica Janković, and others.

He died in Belgrade on August 27 1960.