Srba Mitrović


Srba Mitrović was a Serbian poet, translator and librarian.

Life and Work

Mitrović attended the primary school in Pirot and Niš, and the secondary school in Niš and Belgrade with maturity diploma in 1952, then he studied with focus on English-speaking literature at the former Department of Yugoslav and World Literature of the Philological Faculty of Belgrade’s University and graduated with diploma in 1962. During his study time, he worked for the companies Intercont and Jugoelektro in Belgrade, and completed his military service in Yugoslav Army. After completion of his academic education, he became teacher for Serbo-Croatian language and literature at the care facility for children and adolescents, in which he taught young people who were victims of domestic violence, maltreatment, abuse and neglect from 1963-64, then he worked as librarian at the school library of Zemun Gymnasium until his retirement in 1985.
In 1970, he began to publish his first poems, and numerous book editions of his poetry have been published over the course of the following years, additionally more than 400 publications in Serbian literary journals such as Letopis Matice srpske, Književne novine, Sveske, Polja and many others, also in the Austrian literary journal Lichtungen selected poems in German translation. He translated poetry of Wystan Hugh Auden, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin into Serbian, also Haiku poetry of Yosa Buson and Matsuo Bashō in co-operation with Hiroshi Yamasaki Vukelić. Some of his poems are available in an anthology of Serbian poetry in English translation, compiled by Gojko Božović and edited by Serbian PEN in 2006. Tanja Kragujević commemorates his life and work in an essay on her Website, and recalls his significance for contemporary Serbian poetry.

Awards