Moments Frozen in Time : A Wedding in Hell, By Charles Simic (Harcourt Brace & Co.: $19.95; paper $11.95, cloth; 80 pp.) : The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs, By Charles Simic (University of Michigan Press: $39.50; paper $13.95; 128 pp.)

By Christopher Merrill

March 19, 1995 12 AM PT

Christopher Merrill 's most recent book of poetry is "Watch Fire" (White Pine Press)

Where shall we place our faith, in the individual or in the tribe? For Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic the answer is a function of poetry itself: “Lyric poets perpetuate the oldest values on earth,” he reminds us. “They assert the individual’s experience against that of the tribe.” Those values, needless to say, are under attack around the world. Religious fundamentalists, ardent nationalists, tribalists of every color and moral suasion--all seek to diminish the worth of individual experience. Born in solitude, the poem celebrates freedom, the ideologue’s enemy; hence the sad history of poets in exile--or worse. As the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, a victim of Stalin’s gulags, wrote of Dante: “To speak means to be forever on the road.”

This knowledge is what makes the simultaneous publication of Simic’s 12th volume of poetry, “A Wedding in Hell,” and third book of prose, “The Unemployed Fortune-Teller,” such an important literary event. His ars poetica --”trying to make your jailers laugh”--is wise as well as funny: his is an essay in liberation. And never has he been more successful at unsettling a reader’s certainties. “My aspiration,” he admits, “is to create a kind of non-genre made up of fiction, autobiography, the essay, poetry, and of course, the joke!” In these books he fulfills that ambition.

Simic was born in 1938 in Yugoslavia, spent the war years in Belgrade, and in 1954 emigrated to the United States. Unlike many poets of his generation, he served his literary apprenticeship away from the university, forging a unique poetic sensibility out of his encounters with his adopted homeland. The writings of the French Surrealists, Theodore Roethke, Emily Dickinson and Vasko Popa--these were central to his artistic development, inspiring him to use chance operations, myth and folklore in order to say the unsayable. Of equal significance is his interest in translation from Serbian, his native tongue (which, he regrets to tell us, he was never able to use for his own poetry, because when he started to write “all the girls (he) wanted to show (his) poems to were American”). Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalic, Alexander Ristovic and Novica Tadic are just four of the Serbian poets he has translated and promoted in this country; in 1992 he published “The Horse Has Six Legs,” a remarkable anthology of Serbian poetry.

Simic’s own poetry has always been informed by his acute historical sense, strange juxtapositions, daring imagery and comic spirit--qualities on full display in “A Wedding in Hell.” “Paradise Motel” is one of his best new poems:

Millions were dead; everybody was

innocent.

I stayed in my room. The President

Spoke of war as of a magic love

potion.

My eyes were opened in astonishment.

In a mirror my face appeared to me

Like a twice canceled postage stamp.

I lived well, but life was awful.

There were so many soldiers that

day,

So many refugees crowding the

roads.

Naturally, they all vanished

With a touch of the hand.

History licked the corners of its

bloody mouth.

On the pay channel, a man and a

woman

Were trading hungry kisses and

tearing off

Each other’s clothes while I looked

With the sound off and the room

dark

Except for the screen where the color

Had too much red in it, too much

pink.

Those refugees may well come from the former Yugoslavia, where day by day History’s bloody mouth opens ever wider. Indeed, the Third Balkan War provides the backdrop to much of Simic’s recent poetry and prose. And no wonder. What could be worse for the man who has done more to bring Serbian poets to the attention of the English-speaking world than to witness the carnage his former countrymen have committed in Croatia and Bosnia? In a courageous essay first published in The New Republic and included in “The Unemployed Fortune-Teller” he makes plain his feelings about Serbia’s war machine--and his former countrymen, his tribesmen. “The destruction of Vukovar and Sarajevo,” he writes, “will not be forgiven the Serbs.”

Whatever moral credit they had as a result of their history they have squandered in these two acts. The suicidal and abysmal idiocy of nationalism is revealed here better than anywhere else. No human being or group has the right to pass a death sentence on a city.

“Defend your own, but respect what others have,” my grandfather used to say, and he was a highly decorated officer in the First World War and certainly a Serbian patriot. I imagine he would have agreed with me. There will be no happy future for people who have made the innocent suffer.

“Here is something we can all count on,” he adds. “Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.” This Simic will not do--to the chagrin of his old friends--perhaps because he witnessed enough carnage in World War II. (In one essay he remembers eating watermelon while Belgrade was bombed in the distance--”The watermelon made a ripe, cracking noise as my mother cut it with a big knife. We also heard what we thought was thunder, but when we looked up, the sky was cloudless and blue.”) While epic poets “find excuses for the butcheries of the innocents,” he sides with the solitaries, the lyric poets who “deserve to be exiled, put to death, and remembered.” And lest we imagine Yugoslavia’s tragedy is a local event, Simic warns: “If our own specialists in ethnic pride in the United States ever start shouting that they can’t live with each other, we can expect the same bloodshed to follow.”

Simic’s prose has taken on a new urgency in “The Unemployed Fortune-Teller.” Here are introductions to poets from the former Yugoslavia; meditations on food, music, film and photography; and witty essays on chance, the limitations of nature writing and “The Necessity of Poetry.” His memoirs about his military service in Luneville, France, and years in New York are lyrical, aphoristic and stunning. As in his previous book of prose, “Wonderful Words, Silent Truth,” Simic has chosen to publish selections from his notebooks, which include some of the most interesting pensees on the art of poetry since Wallace Stevens’ “Adagia”: “A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.”

And what fresh sights he offers in “A Wedding in Hell.” These lyrics and prose poems are records of marvelous journeys. He addresses mystics, Raskolnikov and a certain Mr. Zoo Keeper; his reading of Pascal, like his depiction of the Miracle Glass Co., is both delightful and terrifying. “I have my excuse, Mr. Death,” is how “The Secret” begins, “The old note my mother wrote/ The day I missed school.” And since the poet believes “The secret wish of poetry is to stop time” we are treated to one such moment from Simic’s childhood, when he saw his mother:

In her red bathrobe and slippers

Talking to a soldier on the street

While the snow went on falling,

And she put a finger

To her lips, and held it there.

The secret? The poetry and presence--the gifts--of Charles Simic.