International symposium "100th anniversary of the birth of the Macedonian poet Aco Šopov (1923-1982)", March 23

International colloquium organized on the initiative of the Section of Macedonian Studies, a rare discipline at Inalco, and the PLIDAM - Plurality of Languages and Identities: didactics, acquisition, mediations research center (Inalco).

With the support of the Fondation Aco Šopov-Poíêsis, the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Saints Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje: International Seminar on Macedonian Language, Literature and Culture.

Thursday, March 23, 2023 - 13.30-19.30 - Maison de la recherche Auditorium
Inalco - 2, rue de Lille - 75007 Paris

UNESCO pays tribute to the Macedonian poet Aco Šopov (1923-1982) on March 21, 2023, World Poetry Day, as part of the national program "2023, Year of Tribute to Aco Šopov", under the patronage of President Stevo Pendarovski.

100th anniversary of the birth of Macedonian poet Aco Šopov (1923-1982)

Aco Šopov was born in štip on December 20, 1923. He is one of the founders of contemporary Macedonian poetry and one of the most prominent poets of 20th-century Southeastern Europe.

"Aco Šopov's poetry, deeply rooted in his Macedonian homeland, is, in equal measure, projected into the universal."
Edouard J. Maunick, Skopje, April 1992, published in Anthologie personnelle d'Aco Šopov, Actes Sud, 1994.

The Macedonian poet Aco Šopov grew up in his hometown, with his two brothers Dimitar (1920-1972) and Borislav (1927-1996), his father Gjorgji Zafirov-Šopov (1893-1944) and his mother Kostadinka Ruseva (1897-1942), to whom he owes his love and talent for poetry. A "hundred-headed monster" ["Стоглаво чудовиште"], as he called her at the end of his life, this childhood was marked by his mother's illness, paralyzed as early as 1934. Barely eleven years old, he looked after her and his younger brother alone, the elder having been sent to the Prizren Seminary and the father almost always absent from the family home. The specter of incurable illness and death, anguish, sadness and loneliness permeated all his poetry from then on, from his first poems written in a school notebook at the age of fourteen, to his last.

From his earliest poems written in the maquis, Aco Šopov broke with fashionable poetic conventions, writing love poems in the midst of war. Later, he openly attacked the imperatives of socialist realism, earning him castigation from official literary critics in the 1950s, but unanimous recognition a decade later. The publication of his collections Du malheur et du bonheur [Стихови за маката и радоста], in 1952, and Confondu dans le silence [Слеј се со тишината] in 1955, provoked a veritable "quarrel of the ancients and the moderns" that divided the Society of Writers of Macedonia into two opposing camps.

Philosopher by training, but writing exclusively poetry, Aco Šopov always remained true to his ideas, charting his own literary course, without entering into dissidence. "The poet's greatest difficulty and moral responsibility," he declared in an interview, "is to find the right words for the contents and ideas he wants to express in an authentic and inimitable way. If he fails to do so, the poem falls apart, the word becomes a lie".

From his first collection, Poems [Песни], which was at the same time the very first book published in the Macedonian language after the Second World War, in 1944, to the last, Arbre sur la colline [Дрво на ридот], published in 1980, two years before his death, Aco Šopov laid the foundations and built a resolutely modern poetry, which takes root in the native soil with the sole ambition of inscribing it in the cadastre of the world. His work unites the poet's own experience, the fate of his country and the common destiny of mankind in a single, intimate experience.

In his lifetime, Aco Šopov has published some twenty books of poetry (twelve collections and eight poem selections), and a dozen in foreign languages. Since 1982, the number of books of selected poems in Macedonian and foreign languages has steadily increased.

In 1967, Šopov became a founding member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MANU). Three years later, he was awarded the AVNOJ Prize, Yugoslavia's highest distinction in the field of science and the arts.

After many years in the world of journalism and publishing, Aco Šopov was appointed Yugoslav ambassador to Senegal in 1971. He befriended president-poet Léopold Sedar Senghor, whose poetry he translated into Macedonian. In 1975, Senghor was awarded the Golden Crown of the Struga Poetic Evenings, the highest distinction of this international festival held annually in the south of the Republic of Macedonia, which had been founded some fifteen years earlier by Šopov himself and a few of his fellow poets.

The stay in Senegal inspired Šopov's Poem of the Black Woman [Песна на црната жена], a collection that won him the "Miladinov Brothers" Prize at the 1976 Struga Poetry Evenings. Back in his homeland in 1975, Aco Šopov was appointed Chairman of the Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries of the Republic of Macedonia. Just three years later, however, the illness so foreshadowed in his poems forced him to retire from active life. After a long illness, he died on April 20, 1982, in Skopje (Source: "the Lyric House of Aco Šopov")

50th anniversary of the birth of the creation of the Macedonian lectorate at Inalco

Macedonian studies in France - Inalco

Macedonian studies were initiated in November 1962 by Henri Boissin and Jordanka Hristova-Foulon, then a student at Inalco, under the chairmanship of André Mirambel, professor of Greek language. Henri Boissin, a specialist in Serbo-Croatian, is the author of an unpublished grammar of the Macedonian language. In 1973, thanks to a bilateral exchange agreement, a lectorate of Macedonian is openedand the first reader, Aleksa Poposki, professor of French, then rector of Saints Cyril and Methodius University, is appointed. The colloquium celebrates the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Macedonian lectorate and collaboration with the Macedonian Language, Literature and Culture Seminar at Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Republic of Northern Macedonia.

In 2022, Macedonian Studies at Inalco was awarded the label "discipline rare" as part of a project to map rare disciplines carried out by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESRI).

Organizers:
Frosa Pejoska-Bouchereau, PLIDAM, Head of the Macedonian Studies Section, Inalco,
Jasmina Šopova, Aco Šopov-Poíêsis Foundation
Vesna Mojsova-Čepiševska, Director of the International Seminar of Macedonian Language, Literature and Culture