A Syncretic Interpretation of the Poem “Prince Marko’s Church” by Blaže Koneski

Abstract

Interpretative syncretism, as a coalition of critical methods (a trans-method), combines selected elements of several paradigms: poetic, stylistic, linguistic, cultural, mythical, historical, psychological, philosophical, and hermeneutical. It is not an ambitious synthesis, nor pure eclecticism, but rather an act of creative freedom. The following reading of the poem “Prince Marko’s Church” by the Macedonian poet Blaže Koneski (1921–1993) could be seen as an optional pattern of syncretic interpretation because of several reasons: the poem has dramatic and liturgical structure suitable to express both personal and collective memory; its narrativity is intertextually linked to the Macedonian historical and folk legend of King (or Prince) Marko (“Krale Marko”); the very act of understanding the poem is an act of therapy; its associations are linked to the biblical narrative of the “Weeping of Rachel”; it evokes a lot of ethical dilemmas concerning death and God, sin and forgiveness, confession and catharsis and, ultimately, the very sense of creation, i.e. the creation of good and evil. This is the ambivalent phenomenon coexisting in synchronicity. The Macedonian language even has a specific word uniting these antithetic meanings – “evilgood” (zlodobro). The economy of evil demystifies the genesis of the biggest human trauma and stigma: doing evil under the pretext of good. “Evilgood” is not only a cultural legacy, but also reality. To sacrifice the Other is not only a mythical image, but an “eternal present”. To interpret a poem sometimes means to look for the sense of absurdity.

Keywords

• interpretative syncretism
• hermeneutical cycle
• coalition of methods
• biblical intertext
• economy of evil
• evilgood
• participation mystique
• poetry therapy
• blaže koneski