Parafraziranje

Paraphrasing is the skill that separates someone who has learned Serbian from someone who can use it. If you know only one way to say a thing, every conversation depends on that one word being available. If you know two, you can talk your way around anything.

The text is biographical, and biographies in Serbian have their own register — a set of formal, slightly bookish verbs and phrases that appear in almost every one of them. That register is the real content of this exercise.

Notice how the formal column leans on two things: reflexive verbs (školovao se, rodio se) and the passive (rođen je, zarobljen je). Serbian moves up in register largely by removing the person doing the action — the same move you practised in the passive exercises earlier in this level.

Koča Popović is a good subject for it. He was a surrealist poet in Belgrade in the nineteen-thirties, fought in the Spanish Civil War, commanded a Partisan division, and ended up as Yugoslavia’s foreign minister — a life that forces a biography to change registers several times.