Poetry
Longing for the South
Т'га за југ
Konstantin Miladinov · 1861
Synopsis
A student far from home wishes he had an eagle's wings to fly off to his native land. Around him everything is fog, frost, snow and storm, under a dull sun. The poem divides into two nearly equal halves: to this dark north answers the south, where the sun shines, where one dreams of seeing the lake again, and which the traveller crosses in thought by way of Stamboul, Kukuš, Ohrid and Struga.
Context
The poem was written in Moscow, between 1856 and 1860, after a letter in which his brother urged him to return home. It appeared on 7 February 1861 in the twentieth issue of Дунавски лебед, the newspaper that Georgi Rakovski was then publishing in Belgrade, in the orthography of the time. It belongs both to Bulgarian literary history and to Macedonian, which regards it as the source of its modern poetry. It is read every year at the opening of the Struga Poetry Evenings, founded in 1961.
Who it is for
A short poem, in two halves that answer each other. It is better read aloud, the fog first, the light afterwards.
Prizes and reception
Included in the school textbooks of North Macedonia and translated into more than sixty languages, it is the best-known poem of its literature.