КАКО СЕ МОЛИ СО ТЕЛО? (Ацо Шопов, „Молитви на моето тело“) / HOW TO PRAY WITH YOUR BODY? (Aco Šopov, “Prayers of my body“)

Abstract

Aco Šopov is a poet who is so deeply, with soul and body, dedicated to the
creative act and to the Poetry as a synonym of living. This text tries to elaborate Šopov’s
creative impulse by referring to the cycle of poems “Prayers of my body” from his cult
poetry collection Not-being (1963). In the context of contemporary Macedonian poetry,
Šopov’s Not-being is illustrative of the creative changes of our literature in the 60s of the
last century, in the sense of the best modern European traditions that our poet reached
115Lidija Kapuševska-Drakulevska
through symbiosis of personal and universal poetic experience, of lyrical (emotional)
and intellectual knowledge, of “singing ant thinking” (Heidegger), in the last instance. If
“coming into the world” always means “coming into language”, according to the famous
phrase of the German philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk, then language
is an immanent determinant of human existence. Further, the eroticism of the body as a
primordial human urge promotes the body as a synonym of existence. The dilemma: is the
body just an object, or can it also be a subject, aware of its sexuality? – opens the way of
perceiving the creative process as a kind of erotic act. The life of the body and the life of the
word are identified into the poems of the cycle “Prayers of my body” and the sensibility of
the body becomes material and medium of poetic expression.