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Ales Debjelak / Slovenia |
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Aleš Debeljak (b. 1961 in Ljubljana) graduated in comparative literature from the University of Ljubljana and received his Ph.D. in Social Thought from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, New York. He was a Senior Fulbright fellow at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study-Collegium Budapest. Debeljak published 12 books of essays and 7 books of poems in his native Slovenian. His books of poems in English translation include Anxious Moments (White Pine 1994), The City and the Child (White Pine 1999) and Dictionary of Silence (1999). His books of cultural essays include Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia (White Pine 1994), Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms (Rowman& Littlefield 1998), The Hidden Handshake: National Identity and Europe in Postcommunist World (Rowman&Littlefield 2004) and a comprehensive anthology The Imagination of Terra Incognita: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine 1997) which he edited. A translator of a book of selected poems by John Ashbery and of a book on sociology of knowledge, he edited an anthology of American metafiction and published a book of critical essays on American literature. He won the Prešeren Foundation Prize (Slovenian National Book Award) and Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize-Tel Aviv and Chiqyu Poetry Prize, Tokyo and was named Ambassador of Science of the Republic of Slovenia.
Slovenia Bosnian Elegy for Miljenko Jergovic Sarajevo-Zagreb Sing, young poet, touch my burning skin, darkened by long treks through the wild hills to the ends of the world. Don't give up now, when the gunners' fevered sights are trained on the stained facades of museums and palaces. They cower silently, like spent reliquaries. Just list what remains: flocks of swallows twittering under former arches and campaniles, the eternal wisdom of the French novel we read in the bomb shelter, the silvery down which disappears from a baby's earlobes, thunder from the Pannonian plains. The smell of gunpowder irritates the lungs. We haven't yet crossed the line. Speak now: the surface of the pool ripples. I don't know if it will be blessed. Rings glow in the depths. What remains unknown rejoices. Believe me: I'm ready, sing to me for the last time of the gentle love of storms, of the mysteries of a woman's shadow and a marble staircase. Sing, as you sang before your hair turned gray! Grand Hotel Europa The Carline thistles wither in the vase on the shelf. No man’s land beckons me. I’m guilty because I will not forget. That would be easy like the course of a hasty flock cutting the sky. I lean against the window, as others have before me. The taste of fruit, the nude woman who visits me in dreams: nothing I touch surprises me anymore. And the harmony of a still life doesn’t help. A different pain blinds me. I want to share it with someone. But with whom? If I whisper it alone into the night, its echo will not find its way back. If we all speak it vanishes, like a copper engraving in a blast furnace. But I cannot renounce it. Mine is the fear of the fugitive who couldn’t hide in this cheap room. When the merciless god covers the window frame only the mirror will preserve their faces. I’ll lend them my throat to intercept the barking of dogs and the blare of a hunter’s horn. I can’t even see myself anymore, yet I must sing for them to find peace in my song, finally united. Translated from Slovenian by Christopher Merrill and the author (from The City and the Child, White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY 1999) Cast Vote That crystal morning, snow over snow: in capital cities they might be ashamed of it. That conference of birds, and light upon water, the parliament of dreams that knows no fear of getting old, and she, alone this winter morning, her face that sees itself within a flower etched by ice along the glass, her reflection thawing and piercing the window: is she really so strange? Outside, her shadow sputters again like a match refusing gravity and singe. In the vast expanse of frost and worry, not even a minute to think, she was the one with the courage to disobey silence, disobey orders, she could not be voted down and said: Look, in the shallows of this common river the Black Sea claims as its own, fish still wriggle out of a boy’s hands, tracing a nearly perfect arc, and with them everything that flows, everything that falls, rushes without reason as one’s childhood rushes by— look: we are not a wall but a shutter some far-off god is opening halfway. Grass Psalm Seekers after sources and rivers, messengers of useless desires, traveling merchants, a spider in its web: they keep me company this early evening hour, in the privacy of a groggy soul who stands and smokes and three kids sleeping upstairs. In a dream, my years of devotion grind by, and an image unfolds less real than I would want. Look at it: translucent, not the least bit shy, it radiates like an apparition over a desert others have discovered; but all the same it suits me, so big and unsatisfied, like a monologue running without a break, it lasts as long as the pain of harvest grass when left to rot. Look at me as I tremble, you cannot miss how I reach for you, my partner I do not know. Yet you alone can fix my sight, you’re a welcome guest in every house, you detect the failures in my speech, you forgive the stutter that I am. Hymn to the Favorite City The ground is soaked with weeks of high water, and thieves of sanctuaries beside the lagoon are on the run, my eyes follow them, somewhere close, a robin’s breast collapses under the pressure of a thumb: only a little while before the dock a slender boat leans against is covered with drops of blood, useless as a song two people can hardly hear. Well, maybe it’s merely a melody without words. This city has baptized a dozen generations in the sacrament of war, but I go on all the same. As if I had a choice. The harlequin from the Palazzo Grassi, the one who inspired Picasso, has meaning for me only when I see you rendered blue, faint and luxurious, with the violence beauty uses to enter certain homes: indivisible, unable to end, like a cloud that houses thunder, beneath which I work my memories and widen channels and clear out passageways, so the voice that surges out of you can spill downstairs to the living room, and cross the yard in a rush basket I can barely see. Carried by the echo through whirlpools and across the shores of death, it says: no. The Promise I never look over my shoulder, no idea where I’m headed and not an ounce of fear, falling like fluff from an eiderdown quilt, sinking in the afternoon air, real as an hour of solitude or the fragrance of an herb. My wounds are healed over and all five senses in sync, harmonized to the birds and the sky, the grimy wall of an underpass with graffiti scratched in a child’s hand, announcing I was here. But not only here, my lord, as you know, I go where you want me to be— tonight, for instance, I am a wave you push across the Old Square, underground through a parking garage, over the banks of a lazy green river and over the files on a drawing desk of another architect. Come, a whisper says, and again I flood the channel, at one with the darkened air above the city and the steppe, like the pillow you smooth and soften up for someone unable to sleep, lying along the world as it slowly goes out. Blind Faith Don’t leave me, don’t run, cruel like lava across a continent. Don’t slip away, an arrow’s shadow into the writing, the wall. At nightfall the presence of eyes, never to be forgotten and big, like saying goodbye to a flag and its figures, delivered to your mercy long ago—has it really been years?— me, a fugitive, fleeing from errors, rumors that turn into family legend sure as the embers of houses turn to stone. Don’t leave me now as my debtors have left me, don’t send me back to the foot of a cross, silent on a hill, or the towns where I wandered streets lined with trees, trying to get rid of semen that boils, looking for refuge in fur that itches and wets at the very sight. Don’t leave me now, as I do not abandon the harvest fruit, I smear it on you wherever you want me to. Every move of your body a test, trying me and the truth, your panting says you’ll stay here after all. I give up myself, ask nothing. Don’t want to interrupt these hands that steal, like gun smugglers, along the inner arch of your thighs, celebrating the rare hours. In the name of a law known only to you you bend me, tenderness to the tight cord, and multiplied by a hundred under the eyelids you drone and take my sight away from me. The Émigré Writer on the Dragon Bridge Open suitcases, it used to be thought, hide destinies unknown out here: from hotel to airport and further than that, through centuries of wind, the passengers touch Orion, looking for comfort in rituals, in a sleepy countryside, a consolation they no longer get from photographs and books about the lives their ancestors led. The everyday request could be a prayer, medicinal tea, the bitterness of endless explanations, or a language that refuses to obey, like scattered coins, or a ceiling so low it suffocates, big things putting fear in little souls. From the south, a seductive heat that everyone remembers: for everybody, of course, is guiltiest when love is at stake. The one thing they still hunger for rises without a sound from the platforms and uncomfortable waiting-room chairs, and hangs, deceptively, like haze above a fence, which groans and splits beneath him and allows him, for only a second, to rise— why would he be an exception— before it escapes into a river that swells against the drought, taking with it the suitcases, carrying off the books, toward a delta, a false reprieve, a song that’s poorly sung. A Letter Home I long for a comfort that cannot be measured, forgotten caves where Bach can’t reach, the bell that sounds for a monarchy not found on any globe, for the feverish concentration of hunters who oil and polish their guns. I long for the salt that tears contain, the marrow that boils in my bones, I long for the miracle opening up like a mouth when nothing comes out. If I am the only one listening, the percussion of grace in my loins is what I become, pulling the trigger like no one has taught me and no one would know how to gauge. Alone on a trail that nobody knows I follow the line of your neck. Your head is tilted back, I give myself to whatever it is that strains my muscles and forces me to flower like the scatter a shotgun fires, singing at last from a single place called Rome, Medina, Jerusalem, which is home to me as only one place can be home. Translated from Slovenian by Andrew Zawacki and the author (from New and Selected Poems, Persea Books, New York City, NY, forthcoming 2009)
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