Poetry (excerpts) | Slovene | Slovenia
March, 2018Slovenian writer Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanč Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. He has published four books in English: The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin, a collection of lyric essays, appeared from Counterpath Press in 2015; Essential Baggage, a book of prose poems, appeared from Equipage in England in 2016; and the novel Absolution appeared in England in 2017. He also has worked in the field of visual arts (most recently with a large-scale installation at the International Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India), completed several collaborations with musicians (Godalika, Uroš Rojko, Peter N. Gruber), and collaborated with Peter Zach on the film Beyond Boundaries.
The poems in Smugglers, including those featured here, move through rapid historical shifts and meditations on personal experience, exploring the depths and limits of comprehension through the people and geography of the Balkans. Ultimately, Debeljak's urban imagination creates a mosaic--intimate and historical--of a vanished people and their country. Every poem in Smugglers is 16 lines long (four quatrains, a common form for Debeljak). This structural regularity is reinforced by a commitment to visual balance, with each poem working as a kind of grid into which the poet pours memories and associative riffs.
Other translations from Smugglers have appeared in Asymptote, Barrow Street, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, and other journals.
- Brian Henry
Short Prose | Slovene | Slovenia
January, 2014First published as a chapter in her 2009 novel Poletje s klovonom (Summer with the Clown), which is comprised of pieces that might equally be called linked stories or extended prose poems, Nina Kokelj's "Early Butterfly" draws the reader into Besa's hypnotic trance from the very first sentence. The train does not just head toward the exotic-sounding Mongolian lake (Uvs Nuur) but heads there "with a sense of longing" that echoes Besa's. What Besa longs for is not completely revealed in this short piece, though mercy, intoxicating passion, and a sense of feeling all feature as prominent suggestions. The chapter stands alone as a story in its ability to convey fully Besa's sense of longing, however, as it captures a great variety of emotions and subjects but is here concentrated on one subject: the "him" referred to almost exclusively in italics.Who is Early Butterfly? He is a messiah of sorts for passion and love who floats across Europe and Asia an as-yet-undefined archetype, who found eternity in Amsterdam, and who figures directly into what Kokelj calls "the embroidery of women's dreams." As readers, we long to discover who Early Butterfly is alongside Besa--we, too, would like to see him, as Besa states over and over. By the time the collocation is reversed--when Besa is told he would like to see her--the anticipation is palpable, even as we are told that after everything, Besa will leave alone. The days of travel that multiply like grasshoppers lead to this moment: the realization of desire, which is both fulfilled and immediately dissipates. Kokelj explores the contours of longing, love, and what it means to reach a seemingly unreachable destination in alluring detail.
- Kristina Zdravič Reardon
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).