Mother Slovenia
A Small Selection
of Slovenian Poetry
Alja Adam
This time
I will
write of the sun
which presses down on me with all its weight
so that I flinch at first,
then bear it, motionless.
its gentle burns heal me, revive me:
like red-hot hands they hold me, support me
and establish me in this place.
I am a living sculpture,
scalded and scorched by the sun I rest, enduring,
and rouse the moments, which are falling out of order
drunk on the heat.
but my
thoughts
are clear and bright and heavy as stone.
are mine and only mine -
invincibly sunny.
this
time I will, scalded and scorched by the sun,
write of nipples, sleek
as olives and darkening like nuts.
write of a body, nourishing and loving another body,
moving over its surface
and creeping on spider's legs,
devoted and quiet and soft.
this
time I will write of the weavings of net
in the evenings, the people already asleep,
when I thread my breath into his ear
and the street, so wide and welcoming,
breathes with us.
Translated by Jana Putrle Srdić and Kelly Lenox Allan
Alja Adam’s
poetry can be read in various Slovenian and Italian magazines. Her first book of
poetry Roundness was published by Aleph.
Come here, sit
beside me. There's something
I want to ask you. Now that I have new windows
I can see more, more clearly. The neighbours are
already planting, earthing up seeds, here, between the houses,
I sometimes watch
the garden. Now it has gotten
so bright! Lucky gardeners! And I can hear cars
gliding down the roads, at petrol stations it smells
of gasoline, where can I take you?
My ancestors were
mysterious peasants.
How
lovely it is in the country,
went the song.
But even lovelier to drive in the city
or walk the sidewalks with headphones on
My yard, forest,
how you've changed!
Now I play cassettes and with coins in my hand.
What should I put on, what music?
Now and then it's great to go for a drive
and get some fresh
air. Look, the light passes through
the plastic sheeting! Generally and always with mixed feelings
we like that noise and these fissured buildings.
Now the garden, too, has blossomed.
What are we having
for lunch?
Wait, I know. Soon now – some flowers.
ŕ Reverdy
1.
Pick up
castaway skates and glide
across frozen pavements.
Point-blank
honed, cut into the surface
and
let the legs with the skates be one.
Skate away
quickly, alone, as though it were a race,
pay no attention to shouts: “Where is he skating?”
It’s good to skate
this way, no bounds
under skates everything is allowed.
You’re the lone
skater down here, you see
neither marks nor shadows the skates cast.
You glide among
the city lights,
you hold your balance,
you don’t fall over backwards.
The skates leave a
sharp trace of lines,
grooves in the shimmering surface under them.
So, take a dusty
old pair and skate away
into a skidding substance, there you’ll feel whole.
Skate by yourself
and under you, ice will turn
to a quickened liquid.
Don’t tell people
about your skating.
Skate as though you weren’t skating alone.
2.
Boy, where are you
skating, in your anger
you have lost your bearings.
There is a
universe attracting you
and your skates take leave of the ground.
Do dancers dance
on their heads here
or do they simply fall
and are deep in their fast falling.
Tiny dots are
planets and the skates
every so often slide off the curved surface.
Is this a dance of
dancing or has the earth
danced for all time and your skating is only a wish.
If you move with
such haste, can anyone ever
stop you, see you take off your skates.
You are a fine
skater, your skating
the flight of a comet's shards through the cosmos.
Did you ever see a
shooting star, catch sight
of lightning, suddenly, hear big banging.
Did your inner
human voice burst or
close-lipped voice for the first time.
Ah, you tremble
(gliding into the void),
the skates groan: regret nothing.
3.
Will you always
skate alone.
Will your skating pay off.
Skater, the music
blusters out of silence
stronger,
your heart keeps balance with the skates.
The giant shapes
of cities want you melancholy,
but you can't stop to catch the open talk.
And you skate
alone (as if someone was skating beside you),
in a crowd of skaters (and yet you skate alone).
How you change,
you know what's under the sky,
how skilled your skates are!
Even the first
skater wants to show you how to be
the fastest skater in the rink of the universe!
That you are not
the only one,
that there are those more competitive,
but not everyone can be in the wonderful thicket of the void.
Are you following
the sky, follow it, follow it,
there's always something momentous there.
Just don't tell
people about your skating.
They wouldn't believe you kept your balance on your own.
Stop always saying
what makes you happy.
You're not the only one with jagged skates.
Skate as if you
were skating on your own.
Skate as if you were skating alone.
Translated by Ana Jelnikar & W. Martin
Primož Čučnik
was born in
Ljubljana
in 1971. He studied philosophy and cultural sociology at The University of
Ljubljana. His first collection of poetry, Dve Zimi (Two Winters), was
published in 1999 and received Best First Collection Award. His latest books are
Ritem v rôkah (Rhythm in hands, 2002), Akordi (Chords, 2004), the
collaborative book Ode on Manhattan avenue (2003), and Nova okna
(New windows, 2005). A selection of his poems, Zapach herbaty (2002), was
published in Polish by Studium, Krakow. He translates (mostly contemporary
Polish poetry), writes literary criticism and book reviews, is an editor of the
magazine Literatura, and runs a small press Sherpa. He lives in
Ljubljana.
W.
Martin
is a translator and critic. His translations have appeared in Fence,
Trafika, Parakeet, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals.
He edited the ‘New Polish Writing’ special issue of Chicago Review in
2000 and co-edited the ‘New Writing in German’ issue of the same magazine in
2002. He divides his time between Chicago and Berlin.
Svetlana Makarovič
Good morning
I wish
you good morning,
you damp gray daylight.
I wish
you good morning,
world covered with blood.
I wish
you good morning,
you hill without trees.
I wish
you good morning,
you featherless bird
and
you, motionless lumps
from hardened slime.
Good
morning to you,
my neighbor's eyeless head.
Good
morning to you,
castrated men, and to you,
women, beaten down to the ground.
I wish
you good morning,
you nameless creature
with your fur burned off
and your fruitless seeds.
The
wind is bringing
a smell of carrion,
the wind is singing
the song of my native country.
Good
morning you, pest,
and war and starvation –
good
morning to you,
you empty cradle.
Translated by the
author and Alain Duff
Birth Day
Damned
hour when the seed spilled,
damned hour, earth and sky.
Damned wind which into it sailed,
damned rain which damped the earth.
Damned be the axe-blow, long ago
and the bed made out of that tree.
Damned tepid springtime breath,
damned the first man, the first woman.
Damned hand which wove the linen,
damned hand which spread the bed,
damned window, apple-tree branch,
damned flower petals on the coverlet,
damned nails into the back, knife into the flesh,
teeth into the damned breast, lies into the ear,
damned moon and sweat and sticky blood
and the hour when bitter fruit mellowed.
Damned blood of bloods, heart of hearts,
damned first breath and light of the world.
Translated by the author and Alain Duff
Svetlana Makarovič, born 1939 in Maribor. Graduated at the Academy for Theatre and Film in Ljubljana. Worked as an actress and freelance writer. She is well-known for her poetry and prose for children and adults, as a singer, composer, illustrator and her own chansons performer. She wrote over hundred books of fairytales and theatre plays. Poetry collections:
Twilight (1964)
Midsummernight (1968)
Wolfberries (1972)
Heartplant (1973)
Time of War (1974)
Wormwood Woman (1974)
Counting (1977)
Neighbor Mountain (1980)
Chrysanthemum on the Piano (chansons 1990)
That Time (1993)
To eat, to be eaten (1998)
Winner
of Prešernov sklad Award 1975, Jenko award for poetry etc.
Some Day
Some day, when
in my mind I’ve strolled through my childhood,
when the blushing trace has finally disappeared in the strong
light, when the memory has been interrupted with a passionate
quote from Whitman, when my world is but mine, the smallest
and the biggest at the same time, when the angel has set down
on my bed, touching me silently, when, far away, a deer
is dying of a rifle shot, when everything has vanished and
I’ve started to doubt in the eldorado: then I shall whisper your name.
Translated from the Slovene by Uros Mozetic
In 1990 Novica Novakovic received one of the most distinguished literary awards in former Yugoslavia, the Goran Award for young poets at the international festival Goranovo proljece (Zagreb, Croatia) for his "surrealistic" manuscript, Elastic Tattoo, published by Emonica. The book was also published in Croatian within the framework of the Goranovo proljece festival.
His many other books include Fata Morgana or Cancan of a Clown (Mondena, 1993), Seduction (Cankarjeva zalozba, 1995), His Majesty Horror and Other Poems of Fear (Drustvo Apokalipsa, 1996), Strangely Images (Karantanija, 1997), Some Clearly True (Karantanija, 1998), Angel Fall (PM Chapbooks, Chattanooga, USA, 1999), Headless Horsemen (Mondena, 2002), and Biba, Come to my Palm (Drustvo Apokalipsa, 2004)
His poems have appeared in literary magazines in the US including Southern Indiana Review, Mala Review, and Poetry Miscellany.
He lives in Ljubljana
(Slovenia), where he was born on 15th December 1965. He has been a member of the
Slovene Writers' Association since 1993.
Iztok Osojnik
European Village
from “Mister
Today”
At two in the
morning the average European
sends love letters to the stars
over his village.
An old goat, upside down, bemoans the fact
he cannot master even more extravagance.
I am experimenting with myself, it occurs to Mister Today.
A black raven under the whiteness of a naked lightbulb.
Wingless fish fly around my head, seven thousand
fish of Swedenborg’s from the topmost heavens over Notranjska.
One day someone will write an essay on this. What will he consider?
What is generic here? A distant train rumbling across
the old Austro-Hungarian bridge near Prestranek?
How far is this from the supermarkets in America?
The yellow morning light in my computer’s blue guitar,
a glass giant river gliding across my soul with the sky
above the
village,
but nothing bothers me, even if three times this size
the river will devour the sky and night
and my little fortune, occasionally no bigger than
a few lines of poetry,
which make my life quite decent,
happy inkpot.
Translated by Ana Jelnikar
THE SKY OVER
BERLIN
(A German
poem)
A modern-day poet talking into a mobile phone about life
in a big city. Telling things to someone on the other side.
Very interesting, he says, to lose a thousand Deutschmarks –
no joke. You sit in a bistro,
guzzling first-rate dark wheat beer, the best beer for the late evening.
Lively conversation. You bend, and the vinyl cards fall
out of your pocket. This story about globalization is a load of crap, says Jun,
telling us instead about the civilization of Martians,
which is based on a thirty-six-hour-and-twenty-minute day .
The world can be understood through
a different concept of time. Alexandra runs off.
Irina is all in a flurry about the football match –
Ukraine vs. Germany. Though football is not her thing, the equalizer
got her interested. But she has no idea what this means for Ukraine.
Football's been introduced as a compulsory subject in schools all over the
country, she tells us. You must go with the times. Join in with the masses
that work and consume, cheer on stadiums and turn it all into poetry. And
why not? The modern-day poet makes poetry out of anything he touches. I
will throw Versace vests into the bin.
It seems I have enough change, if that's not the case, God help me,
I'll use Visa, Master Card, Discovery, Diners Club or
American Express. On Friday night we're going for sushi.
Jun carries on talking, explaining about the upside-down pyramid,
at the bottom of which a thatched barge was found. With it the Pharaoh
will go to Mars, the third solar system.
Just think, he says, how these things were worked out when there were no
PCs, Macintoshes, lap tops, notebooks, working stations.
Imax, Cinemascope, grand pianos, digital sound systems,
three dimensional films, creditcards and phonecards, travel passes, plastic
hotel keys, health insurance and ID cards, holograms and chips
that give the exact bearings of their owner. But who to?
Cameras in front of banks, traffic lights, on borders, road signs, on top
of staircases, corridors, foyers, entrances, bathrooms, kindergartens,
lifts, cars, ski helmets, motorists,
on boats, trains, buses, on top of computer screens,
under tourists' armpits, personal trainers, on airports, in airplanes
which've been falling down lately like ripe pears
or have gone crashing into tall buildings. They either drop bombs, missiles
or parcels with ten thousand left-leg shoes
or bags of flour maggots that had eaten two years ago.
Long live democracy of the countries of the West.
Long live the global empire.
Long live the IMF. Long live the International Trade Association. Long
live G8. Long live the World Bank. Long live control, censorship,
Long live the police, CIA, FBI, MI5, KGB, Moshad,
basic human rights, international law, etc.
The poet whispers into Nokia, Motorola, Erikson, Siemens,
throwing suspicious glances,
but the secret agent is invisible, made of chips and processors,
like a spider, he becomes one with his web, everywhere present,
in all the phones and invisible electromagnetic waves turning the earth into
the nucleus of an atom.
Listening out for the buzz words, the poet records them on the hard disc.
He won't let himself be distracted, he goes on talking, he has set himself up
with a water-proof phone for Antarctica, an organizer, GPS, a terminator,
he bought a bottle of Chilean red wine, white wine from Brda,
Beaujoulais nouveau. Visa is made for, live today, pay tomorrow;
brand new shoes for six-hundred Deutschmarks,
a leather jacket for a thousand, the world is open to all sides,
it's all in your head really, in your guts if you go for it;
who loses, disappears, perhaps to be one day remembered
by a poet, where was it again, he leans over the sink and spits out blood,
yesterday he got rid of his old computer and got a new one,
none of his old discs worked in the new programme environment, no
worries, you sit, put down your mobile, connect to the internet,
one hour and thirty minutes for two Deutschmarks in Easy Everything,
the place reminds you of a Las Vegas gambling house
with one-armed bandits or of Pachinko Halls in Japan,
the world's grown so vast,
its only limitation is your head, your ideas and
your understanding of things, though even these are no longer yours; their
copyrights are in the hands of Bill Gates, Warner Brother and Sony,
America on Line and New York Times, Church,
Compaq and CNN, which – at bottom – are one and the same
gigantic network, so, why bother going against the flow, trying to create
something truly yours,
much easier to just sink in the glorious images, to throw yourself into the
waves of ever-new gadgets, lovers, marriages, children, cafés, clothes,
jargons, trends –
yes, it all seems to depend on your interpretation of things,
on your status; occasionally, from somewhere, from the inside,
the deep-end of your soul, a wee panic bug shoots up,
and you sit on the underground thinking, yes, it's true, man consists of
a body, a social status, a bank account, all the tongues he speaks,
cash is dying out, you look up, put down your paper, stop staring at the
woman opposite you,
you are trying to guess how she lives, what sort of a life she's got,
if there's something you don't like about her, no worries,
there's another one sitting right next to her,
there are plenty in a city like this,
but neither does she quite satisfy your expectations, and besides,
why do they have to be wearing trousers, true, they feel more comfortable
in them, trousers are practical, leather trousers stick to your thighs,
constant irritant to the shaved skin,
but this is a step back for men,
men want to see legs, skirts sliding up the thighs,
men need a visual aphrodisiac to excite their imagination,
all else comes second,
but the woman stares ahead like a wax doll, doesn't bat an eyelid,
who can tell what legs she's hiding in those trousers under the coat,
but why the strange feeling that she wants to get up and scream –
yes, that's what I'd want, I'd want to strip naked
and throw myself onto the bike of life,
I've had enough of this shit, shopping, preparing organic food,
have your soya burgers and yoghurtless yoghurts, I've had it,
enough of decaf coffee and nicotine-free cigarettes, of fitness,
hair-dressers, fat-free cholesterol, of a man who's never at home,
yes, much like the one next to her, an almost exact copy,
flicking scattily through the newspaper, glaring headlines, almost no text,
colour photographs of football players, impossibly
expensive cars you can buy on credit or by installments,
advertisements, notices, offers, promises of happiness and
once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,
who for years hasn't had the courage to look a woman in the eyes,
and who, between phone calls at work,
secretly leaps to the erotic internet pages
to look between the legs of the digital Anabella;
and even before he gets to the end of the paper, his phone rings,
war is a serious matter, shares have tumbled by sixty percent, disaster, why
didn't he sell them a week ago, they were rising rapidly then,
give it another day or two, he thought, then I'll sell them,
and now this. Of course, his wife hasn't a clue about his problems,
she's commissioned a new bedroom, bathroom, living room,
balcony, kitchen, a dining set out of the finest porcelain for the very good
price of ten thousand Deutschmarks, apparently Lady Di ate from it
before she was pushed off the road and her car crashed into the tunnel,
it was awful, Prince Charles mourned her death terribly,
and possibly for the last time had sex with that cross between a horse and
Fernandel, with that camomile freak, but then had to rush off to Scotland
for the highest-ranking golf tournament,
Jun called it the club of the three hundred,
but the biggest hypocrite among the Slovenian
poets shook his fist, saying: Iztok, watch what you read,
it's all lies, Rosthchilde are good boys,
have you tried their wine, but couldn't finish the sentence,
having sped off to greet an eminent new Nobel Prize committee member,
he turned all sugar and honey, making a careful note of every single detail
related to what they like to eat and drink,
whom they respect, who his friends or enemies are, where he'd like to relieve
himself or perform in public, where he's already been and where not,
a shit on two legs, as we would say, but he'd never let himself use such
language, or if he did say shit, coming from his mouth,
it would sound extravagant, almost witty,
but the guy whose phone prevented him from getting through to the end of the
newspaper to find out the latest on how to obtain an hour-long hard on,
a seven-minute ejaculation and perfect bliss with some Polish woman
in the latest BMW roadster, stared ahead
into the virtual landscape formed out of uttered words
and his super-sly thoughts, not to mention his number-one interest
to wheedle his partner out of his share and make up
for the difference he had lost at the stock exchange.
Suddenly his face contorted, the voice on the other side had just informed
him, very sorry, they did not opt for his company, but do recommend
themselves for the future.
He who had been watching the woman opposite him, trying to turn her
into the object of his eros, had some thinking to do.
He looked out the window, the train was speeding across a huge building
site, whining amid heaps of concrete towers, half-built overpasses, bridges,
through a tunnel, past office blocks, the sky crisscrossed with yellow and
orange cranes,
a watch tower standing solitary by the side of the tracks from the time
the wall was still dividing the town into the living and the dead,
somewhere at the end of the compartment the digitalized opening refrain of
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony sang out,
he jerked, the train shook as it went over the switchpoint and disappeared
underground.
There's the inner world too. You are deep within yourself,
which is not saying much.
Being within yourself means having at least three, if not more, of you
gathered around your emptied-out self.
The one who is keeping a fatherly watch over everything,
directing the traffic, and whose caring hand is ever in command of the
situation, not always rosy. Deep down, below, wedged into a slit, iron is
glowing white-hot, a lava of sorts wanting
out, to spout all over, a surge of panic,
bordering on insanity. Things are unravelling double quick,
you've lost your head or let dissatisfaction go rampant, and the calming
father has a difficult time of keeping it all in check.
Some third party formulates explanations, not necessarily
false, on the contrary, they can clarify very precisely what is going on,
but they lack the power to influence, let alone change anything.
Man, looking into himself as though he were a well, knows that beneath
the narrow slit, dangerous stress has been accumulating for years, made up
of small sacrifices and suppressions, but the separate elements have long
ago melted into a red-hot broth,
into a sizzling little fiend with only one thing on its mind:
to break the armour and disgorge. The pressure he is creating
is not wholly destructive, destruction as such does not interest him,
all he cares about is breaking out.
The sight of the flaring slit of panic unfolds like a movie.
In a flash all the scenes reel off one after the other, everything
that has been pushed under, into the dark.
Too much has amassed, it lights up, now threatening to blow the telephone
man to smithereens, so no one will piece him together again.
But there are pills of all kinds and variety, sedatives,
stimulators, stoppers, accelerators, for sleeping, for staying awake,
against depression, headaches, stereoids for muscles,
viagra for a continual erection,
he could stuff himself with these, and the slit would fill up for as long as it
took him to finish this or that business, get through this or that book,
pay this or that bill, jump this or that secretary, co-worker,
might as well jump them all,
and one way or another await the New Year's Day,
only to collapse into bed, never to wake up again.
But no, man observes that point which seethes with the sense of utter panic,
he watches his quickened, angry and headless rushing here and there,
he listens to the furious hissing and cussing,
and ponders the odd fact that even though he understands perfectly well
what has happened and why it is all happening, there's nothing he can do
to free himself of the mounting pressure and untie the inner knot –
strange that in spite of his honest coming to terms
with what has so disagreeably brought on his fits of panic,
the pressure won't ease, no, it remains a vicious threat.
The devil's lava has no intention at all to spout,
keeping the pressure, stirring panic,
just that. The anger you felt can hardly
be put down to any more serious form of madness.
But he saw more, he saw what
withdrew into itself and was silent.
And ate up the words and thoughts and simply was. The dark sky over Berlin,
which didn't just hang over the city, but engrossed everything
and drew all of man into a form of deafness,
into something that did not answer back.
And a little bewildered, man shrugged his shoulders, coming to terms with
what was more powerful than him, no pressure, no consequence.
And man was looking into himself, sensing the dark, deaf sky staring at him
with all the faces of his own skin: his absent other, five times his size,
staring, as it were, with all the pores of his being.
Man watched aghast: the fiendish slit
that had been disgorging anger and panic,
suddenly seemed a puny yelping dog,
but the pressure refused to give way.
And man stopped looking into himself and looked outside, at the world
rushing past the train windows, and thought
how the world needed to incorporate the speeding train,
which, like his inner world, was immovable on the inside,
at which point his cheap mobile phone rang twice in his hand
and then died in his palm, its battery flat –
a useless, redundant object.
End of transmission.
Berlin, November 2001
Translated by Ana Jelnikar
Iztok Osojnik:
(born 1951 in Ljubljana, Slovenia), poet, fiction writer, essayist,
translator, artist, tour director, mountain climber, cultural manager, and
festival organizer. His many professions took him all around the world. A hippy,
a rock in the opposition musician, a trendsetter in his youth and a co-founder
of the prankish movements Garbage art and Sous-realisme is still
today a rebel and an independent mind, who proceeds along his own paths.
Graduated in Comparative Literature from the University of Ljubljana (1977).
Postgraduate studies at Osaka Gaidai University (1980-82). From 1999 until
October 2004 he was the Director of international literary festival Vilenica
and developed it from a provincial Central European event into one of the major
European literary festivals. He also co-founded Equrna gallery in Ljubljana and
two other well established literary festivals in Slovenia: Trnovo Tercets
(Ljubljana) and Literary Talks in the Villa Herberstein (Velenje). He is
an editor of Apokalipsa (Ljubljana), and Tvrđa (Zagreb) reviews,
as well as the national editor for the Dutch based international internet poetry
magazine
www.poetryinternational.org. and editorial adviser of the Absinthe review
(Detroit). He co-edited two book presentations of the Slovene literature:
Slovenia, a Nation of Writers (with Sunandan Roy Chowdhurry, Sampark, fall
2002, New Delhi) and Unlocking the Aquarium, Contemporary Writing from
Slovenia (with Fiona Sampson and Ana Jelnikar, Orient, spring 2004, Oxford
Brooks University). So far he published 19 collections of poetry and 4 novels.
He also publishes essays on literature, anthropology, and philosophy (The
Smile of Mona Lisa, essays, 2004). Lately an autobiographical novel The
Story of Mr. Pirjevec and Me, his major novel The Dark Matter (2005),
and four books of poetry Darkness of July (2002), Once upon a
time there was America (2003), From the New World (2003) and
Mister Today (2004) were published. He translated (poetry) from Chinese,
English, Spanish, Ukrainian and Croatian. His poems were published in English,
Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Hebrew,
Italian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian
and Slovak.. Three books of poetry in English: Alluminations (City
Gallery of Arts, Ljubljana 2001), And Some Things Happen for the First Time
(Modry Peter, Canada 2001) and Mister Today (Jacaranda Press, California
2003), and two chap books (Miscellany Poetry, Chattanooga, UT). In March 2005 a
collection of his poetry was published in Czech language (V tobe ožiju,
Zlin 2005). And another one in Croatian will be published soon (Tetralogija,
Zagreb 2005). For his work he was awarded with Jenko (1997 the best book of
poetry award), Veronika (1998 – the poetry book of the year), Župančič (1992 –
the town of Ljubljana), Italian Friuli Poetry Award (2002), and Hanibal Lucić
Laureate 2004 awards. In 2000 he was the fellow of Cambridge Seminar on
Contemporary English Writers. And in 2001 the fellow of Goethe Institut in
Berlin. He is also the cofounder (together with Richard Jackson) of the idea for
Vermont Summer Residence. And he has been cooperating with it from the very
beginning.
Ana Jelnikar,
a native of Ljubljana, received her secondary school education in London and
graduated in English and Sociology from the University of Ljubljana.. She
teaches English and translates both into Slovenian and English. Her translation
of Iztok Osojnik’s book of poems Mister Today came out in 2003 by
Jacaranda Press (California) and Brane Mozetič’s poetry volume Butterflies
was published in America in 2004. Her most recent translations of poetry
collections include Iztok Geister’s Hymn to a Bush Tree and Taja Kramberger’s
Mobilizations. Her translations have appeared in such literary magazines as
Verse, , Southern Hummanities Rerview, Third Coast, and The American Poetry
Review. Together with Fiona Sampson and Iztok Osojnik she edited Unlocking
the Aquarium, Contemporary Writing from
Slovenia
(Orient, spring 2004, Oxford Brooks University). She also translated the first
Slovenian edition of G.C.Jung’s Man and his symbols.
Gregor Podlogar
Illusion is growing rank. I don't say much.
There's nothing important about me on my ID.
54 TV programmes
just aren't enough.
Things come to things,
leave with greater solemnity than when they came.
Thank you
for being quiet.
One deer is writhing in pain
while others are watching,
the ship is sinking
down in the C20th.
Pallid October light,
some food that's gone off
in the fridge,
the drone of the central heating
like a rhythm of electronic music.
The world is pulsing
with dirty washing.
Sometimes you don't even know
yourself what is going on
Sunlight
collapses the night out of balance
I could come to depend on
such small moments
The little bit of pathos that is part and parcel of our lives
When all is said and done
It is all open to question
I could stay sat here Spring'd come & we'd still be dithering
My heart is in the East My heart is in the East
That's long been known here
: these leaves give off this taste
This poem too is being written in Berlin but is not about Berlin
Tell everyone and you'll be
just as freaked-out as before
When Charlton Heston acted salvation he meant it
When Pasolini wrote film poems, he meant it too
At this pace you'll not
escape the mood of the weather
The
rhythm will sweep us straight into amateur shots
This lesson never finishes
& the city has no end
sun rays have
ripped open the clouds' bellies
the rain has stopped tourists are exhausted
the machinery in my head takes on the beat
of the great empire there's something out there
where another life begins without the echo
of excavations the world around me has unfolded like Spring
in the central core of the old continent a postcard from Columbia
has reminded me once more that there's another world I have not
yet burnt that Tibetan money from the new one I am not
familiar with the Habsburg myth and why are you asking
I am the twentyfifth generation this side of the Carpathians
only a hundred years ago my ancestors shared their room
with pigs and other animals but today we proudly
strut the streets and take
to the air in metal birds
* * *
all the worlds
communicate among themselves some
how history throws an empty bottle through the window
and you cut yourself Tokyo is overflowing with mini
fictions everything is simple everything cannot be simple
some things you keep to yourself images fluttering it
may already be morning in Africa it is March
trees measure time from within their trunks look
where we are clouds even when we are no more
a brush of the eyes perhaps your touch on my skin
a detail in the collage everything glued together into
a series of photographs faces of the world cities streets
from above the relief of a house so very very
small the silver of last summer's wings
flat corridors of fantasy screens everywhere
different stories same house of history
all the worlds communicate among themselves
All poems translated by Ana Jelnikar & Stephan Watts
Gregor Podlogar, born in Ljubljana in 1974, graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana. He writes literary criticism and book reviews for the Slovenian National Radio, Vecher newspaper, and Literatura magazine, among others. He has published his poems in various literary magazines in Slovenia and abroad. Aleph Press published his first two collections of poetry, States (1997) and Joy in Vertigo (2002). In co-authorship with another poet (Cucnik) and a painter (Kariz), an experimental book on New York entitled Ode on Manhattan Ave (2003) came out with Sherpa Press. He lives and works in Ljubljana.
Tone Škrjanec
Calm
I am so calm. red moon. it has just
come drifting
from beyond the clouds. slowly, like an inquisitive toddler.
on television there is a small florid vase with a dried-up rose
and violence. killings with hands and guns. it's all
very fast, as if it were for real. monika doesn't know this.
she sleeps quietly. sleeps and breathes evenly like a machine.
it is night. but I can hear the cars not sleeping.
nor cats. screeching, they chase each other beneath our window.
I can't sleep either. I sit, can't say I'm thinking, just
watching the vein that licks your palm like a river.
Translated by Ana Jelnikar
Tone Škrjanec
was born in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in
1953. He finished high school and graduated in sociology at the University of
Ljubljana. After being a teacher for a short period, he worked as a journalist
for almost ten years. Since 1990 he has been a program co-ordinator at the
Cultural Centre KUD France Prešeren in Ljubljana, where he works also as the
organiser of poetry events. For several years now he has been the leader of the
traditional poetry festival called The Tercets of Trnovo.
He published five books of poems: Blues of a Swing (1997), a haiku
booklet The Sun on a Knee (1999), Pagodas on Wind,
(2001), Knives (2002), Copper (2004). In spring 2005
English translation of completed version of his book of haikus The Sun on
a Knee was published in New York. With five of his poems he also took
part on “poetry & music” CD record A Bit od Noise and a Pinch of Salt
that was recorded in by a group of poets and different musicians from Ljubljana.
His poems were translated in most European languages and published in literary
revues and anthologies in Europe and America.
Beside writing poetry Tone Škrjanec works also as a translator. He translates
poems and novels from English, Croatian and Serbian into Slovene. His preference
goes to modern American literature (Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Charles
Bukowski, Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, Timothy Liu).
The Other Side of Skin
Wishing for a
poem is like a dampness
in the air, 80% and increasing.
At night I
walk through the city in the shape
of a wet puddle, lights blur in its waving
and dry
islands of life are named:
a pump, Nobel Burek, Hot-Horse,
Day and Night. „Good morning,” grins
an aged motorcyclist, who in leather
with his helmet and motorbike
and a rock-n-roll youth,
enters the shop.
Everything
moving repels off
my body, a longhaired cat swiftly
puffs beside me, this hour is torn out,
time spirally
collapses
into itself, we are waiting in queues,
everyone with
his scraped aura,
with marbles of lust, scattered over the ground.
The city gives
us an infusion of glittering
rhythms and saves us from a sweaty
apartment, flowers in pots that are quietly dying away,
the city is a
recourse of a cellophane
and we patiently await– the rabid dogs.
all this world with millions
of headlights
snakily crawling somewhere, always somewhere else;
little fires at night burning Ganges and dead bodies,
perishing in it; clouds of midges above a steaming hot
field, above the piles of things, frying on a rubbish dump
under a hot sun; while shining shopping carts, stuck
one into the other await near the shop entrance.
bottles of milk, left
at the back doors of houses;
your smiles, when you`re waking up;
the long line of yogurts we have eaten. I can`t
choose among 78 satellite channels; shooting stars
are observing us from the sky, they will come down, wrap us up
into cotton and carry off, soak, wash, empty,
fill us with glass and pin our veins, stretch them,
send fluid through them, glittering in the dark,
to cover the world.
the world of a thousand and
one fairy tales, countless
music rhythms interfering in me; I have lost
so many keys, watches, umbrellas,
pencils and erasers;
I have lost so many scents, faces, gestures, words
and leaflets: entrance, bus, railway tickets,
shopping lists, lists of guys I have slept with,
receipts, postcards. I don`t remember people, who have
filled a glass of water for me, not even all of my dates,
sitting in painful silence; letters I have sent –
two hundred words,
we live in hope;
films I have watched
with slight dizziness
how much are nights in a
city worth? I have walked down
endless kilometers of streets, bearing reflection of
lights, glass, walls, passersby; fluently absorbing
objects, words, noises, music, touches to be
absorbed, dispersed, forgotten, blank.
Translated by Bridgette Bates & the poet
Jana Putrle Srdić
(1975) has been studying Russian language and literature and Librarianship in
Ljubljana. Her first book of poems Kutine (Quinces) was published in 2003
and well received among critics. Her writings are regularly included in Slovene
literary magazines as well as abroad, her poems were translated into seven
languages and included in two anthologies. Besides translating poetry from
English, Russian and Serbian, she also writes film reviews and leads literary
readings and conversations. Her poems do not flirt with academic or popular
poetics, they rather relate to the charms of independent low-budget art cinema:
stories revealed in front of the camera without some special effects, accepting
those limitations for their essential aesthetics.
Bathed in red
light,
seated at a table,
alone, an unknown woman gets ready
to light a cigarette.
She opens the
cigarette case
with a habitual gesture,
she takes out a cigarette,
puts it between her lips.
With her left hand
she
brushes a wisp of hair from her face,
with her right she takes a lighter,
flicks it open with her thumb
and strikes the flint.
The flame leaps up
shines in her eyes,
over her hair,
as she brings the cigarette slowly
toward it, and sensually,
in the timeless pause
of her invisible ageing,
she inhales
her first breath.
Here, there is no
death. All forms sift, one from
another. Everything floats and hovers. I shut my
eyes & see macadam sucked up to the skies. Acacias
give generously of their shadows, strewing the white
of their scent. Cherry trees answer from the garden’s
farther end, from the outer edges of day. Their speech
will soon become red. Grey-brown house fronts, with
windows sun-blazed as square-eyed giants, gobble up
the afternoon sun. Yellow digger-trucks scoop away
the hillside. I am small. I stroke a kitten that’s smaller
than the May-time grass. I hear people’s voices coming
& going from the house behind. When they enter, they
are licked by the dark & chill cool, when they exit
they are showered by the sun’s dust. Elder flowers
keep the gardens back from the road, from the world.
Only crumpled voices and
felled shadows come into
its inside.
Everyone’s calling me by my name & laying
their hands on my head. I don’t yet know the words –
Anger, Fear, Hate, Pain, Leave-taking – I don’t know
the spaces behind their sounds. I don’t know anything.
Only this garden, an infinite squint to conjure a world.
If I lie on my back, I can see the clouds. If I breathe
calmly, the clouds change : an air-plane, a dog’s head,
a horse, a sheep, the whited palms of the snow furies.
Now we sail together. Seven seas & nine hills we have,
to get to the first river, the last valley. Never an end to
this garden. No end to the world. In the rooms of time,
at the crossroads of days, eternal light glows, or else
a single candle. It makes no difference. On gold’s inner
rim, the future days make circles. Because I’m small,
I cannot read them. Because I’m small, I calmly slide
under the eye-lids of Time. Doors into light are wide
open, soft-cushioned. They don’t slam shut on anyone,
they don’t reject anyone. I lie and watch and I breathe
inaudibly. The garden will be a cloud any minute now.
Like this it can last for ever in the archives of the sky.
For two years my
shadow’s become a rain
of words. The world has not changed. Earth
purges itself and bleeds. Months follow on
months. Rainy days alternate with the sun.
People walk along the pavements. And they sit
in cafes & talk. Women grocers in the market
are friendly. The smell of fresh vegetables good.
Paradise and the Fall sometimes find themselves
in balance.
Insights to the world, withdrawal from
one’s own cosmos, broaden life, rough the edges.
The earth is what adds on time, Natasha’s body,
her warmth and her voice. If my ego undermines
them, I’m vectored off to another point in space.
Then I crucify myself and others. The darkness
behind the monstrosities of language flares up.
The rocket takes off without its crew. Someone
who’s set out alone for the South Pole, counts ice
floes in his mind, that in his captivated blindness
he won’t destroy love. A baby was born to my
friend last week. He cried when he saw her tiny
head. Now he’s changed & different. His voice is
softer and a trace of light rests on his face. I too
would like to place my hand on a rising belly, on
full female breasts. Only human measure binds
oxygen to itself. Criteria in art, applied to people,
hide the essence of the world. In an unknown
century, Perceval stares out at the three drops
of blood in the snow. There are more important
things in life than playing God.
Uroš Zupan
was
born in 1963 in a small industrial
town of Trbovlje, he graduated in comparative literature from the Faculty of
Arts, Ljubljana University. He has published six volumes of poetry, three books
of essays and a translation of The Hour of Mercy by Yehuda Amichai.
Translated into several languages, his poetry has been published in German (Beim
Verlassen des Hauses, in dem wir uns liebten, translated by Fabian Hafner,
Residenz Verlag, Wien 2000), Polish (Przygotovania do nadejscia kwietnia,
translated by Katarina Salamun-Beidrzycka, Zielona Sawa, Krakow 2001) and
Croatian (Pripreme za dolazak travnja, translated by Josip Osti and Milos
Durdevic, Konzor, Zagreb 2002). The winner of several awards in Slovenia and
abroad, he lives and works as a freelance writer in Ljubljana.