Milos Crnjanski is considered one of the outstanding authors of the Serbian avant-garde. He managed to survive the battlefields of World War I and sought refuge in imaginary worlds. His poetic prose has essentially created the modern Serbian literary language. However, Crnjanski's origins lie in poetry. Ithaka is not a harmless collection of poems for the bedside table. Ithaka is a brutal reckoning with the old Central Europe of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and, with its sarcastic pacifist stance, is more relevant than ever for understanding the ongoing conflicts in the Balkans. Crnjanski breaks with both Serbia's great power dreams, which reference Tsar Dusan and the Battle of Kosovo, and with the hypocritical humanism of the Western powers. In 1967, eight years after the original was published, Suhrkamp Verlag released Peter Urban's translation of the commentaries.