Zlatna knjiga svjetske ljubavne poezije

"When I took on the task of compiling this Anthology, I did not (nor could I have) the intention of providing a complete panorama of world love lyrics. Such pretensions would be too ambitious and unachievable. The only path I could choose was: to review what has been translated from foreign poetry in recent times in our country, to try to have something more translated, and to choose from all of this what seemed to me the best and most appropriate, in order to provide readers with the best and most diverse collection of poems to read. There was neither time nor opportunity for a larger and more extensive organization of the work.

Thanks to the fact that in the last twenty years considerable attention has been paid to translating poetry in our country, I had at my disposal a lot of material, from which, after all, a fairly rich book of love poems of all times and almost all peoples could be compiled. But, reviewing all this material, it was easy to see that we still lack much, such as from the classical poetry of some European nations, especially from English and French. The poetry of Asian nations (Arabic, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese) is a special problem in our country. And the whole trouble is not that this poetry is not translated from the original language in our country, but that it was all done rather superficially and without any system. In the major European languages ​​there are many good and reliable anthologies of this poetry (compiled in recent times), and with serious work and consulting various editions, one could still achieve more or less satisfactory results. But, unfortunately, that is not how it is done in our country." - Nikola Milićević