DUŠAN KOVAČEVIĆ, WRITER Who's Singin’ Over There? Me!
How much does a poet dif- fer from a playwright? “When you take a longer break from writing, you lose your form. And being in form is important for both an author and a playwright, without a difference. That‘s why it‘s a requirement for a person who writes to compose at least one sentence every day. I write everything with a pen first, then type it out using an electronic typewriter. I grew up with a pen in my hand. I made the greatest progress when I switched from a typewriter to an electronic word processor.” There are also poems ded- icated to the members of your family. Some impor- tant women determined the course of your life. Would you have been capa- ble of singing so beautiful- ly without those backing vocals? “Three women gave me my life and made it difficult. And I did the same to them. I only realised that was mutual in my later years. The first is my mother, Marija, who gave birth to me in the village of Mrđen- ovac near Šabac, and my father‘s mother, my grandmother Ljubica, who welcomed me into this world like a midwife in her arms, and then weighed me on a scale. Ljubica is certainly my greatest love, and my mother was always “my worry and I hers”. The third is my wife, Nada. We met when I was in the third grade of high school in Novi Sad and she was in the second grade.” Would life have been possi- ble without them? “That‘s something I can‘t even think about; my life would have been absolutely impossible with-
The plays he wrote are still performed today. His films are broadcast almost every day. And now we can even read him. With his autobiographical collection of poems “I'm singing over there”, Dušan Kovačević has compiled a scrapbook of his masterpieces, and his creative work and rich life can be summed up easily in one word: poetry H e has a company in which he is director, worker, driver and service provider. He is also the PR officer
There”, and we‘ve finally discovered that it was you… “The title of the film contains a reference to the song “Who‘s Singin’ Over There?” from the eponymous film, and the question I posed when the film was shot. And the media have asked that question many times, in various contexts and head- lines, as a paraphrase, but no one re- sponded with an answer except Dra- gan Nikolić, my great friend, who portrays the singer in that film and sings that song. The title of the book is dear to me as a reminder and a warning that a person is always ex- posed to evil and must fight against it. One form of that fight is poetry, which can be sung, spoken or read.” And poems started for you when you were very young and you sang while lost in a cornfield? “I was three years old when I got lost in a cornfield, so I sang children‘s songs loudly. My uncles rushed to find me and heard me thanks to that singing.”
and typist for the company of a writ- er. He needs a notebook, sheets of paper that he uses to write down his entire life. The pandemic forced him to spend more time working on his old manuscripts. He gathered his dispersed poems to form a poetic autobiography and told us - I‘m sing- ing over there. This unique poetic autobiography of Dušan Kovačević doesn‘t only contain poetic works, which many readers will recognise from his plays, theatre plays and films, but also contains comments, notes and even entire stories wo- ven around those poems. This au- thor shares with readers his mem- ories regarding the circumstances under which these poems emerged, while at the same time familiarising us with intimate parts of his life…
We‘ve spent precisely 40 years asking ourselves “Who‘s Singin’ Over
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