Slovenian poetry: anthology “My Neighbor on the Cloud”. – Culture

In the first poem of this volume, the speaker develops a small portrait of the city in which he lives. We are in Ljubljana, probably in the 1960s. The man stands on the balcony and sketches the boring routine of an ordinary day, from looking at the newspaper in the morning to hearing the same radio reports. Then he looks at the backyard: “The bottles are piling up in the yard, / high-rise buildings are growing next to them, / the neighbor from the thirteenth floor steps / in the afternoon on the cloud and goes for a walk, / he observes the world, everything is in perfect order, / He loves watching the allotment gardeners / and constantly confuses them with writers.”

It is an extremely fitting opening poem that Matthias Göritz, Amalija Maček and Aleš Šteger chose for their anthology of Slovenian poetry. Not just because the title of the large collection is captured right from the start. Not only because the author Edvard Kocbek, with his very own irony, inscribed the verses as an incidental criticism of ideological distortions and spying.

But also because Kocbek shows in his multi-toned expression of the unoriginal that Slovenian poetry consists of highly original voices. And above all, because the confusion between allotment farmers and writers is a good point of the poem. If one can trust the afterword by the publishing team, 3,500 books are published in Slovenia every year, including 300 volumes of poetry. With just two million people living in the country, an incredible rate.

“Slovenia is so / tiny, you could / miss it,” Tomaž Šalamun once wrote. He was one of the greats of Slovenian poetry. From the very beginning, he did a lot to ensure this external perception: so that people could never miss him, he said goodbye to traditional lyrical means, incorporated methods of surrealism and futurism into his verses and recharged them. And he oriented himself internationally, repeatedly living and teaching in the USA. He shared his awareness of the ruptures of the 20th century with poets like Veno Taufer and Niko Grafenauer, who decided to stay in the country and work locally for democratic structures or for the development of a poetry scene.

One of the great achievements of this anthology is that it shows what different tones, characteristics and temperaments make up the structure that is so lightly called “Slovenian poetry”. Andrej Brvar’s block-like long lines, which are deliberately kept in the “most prosaic, poor, natural form”, meet Grafenauer’s highly artificial “voices (…) on the edge of meaning”.

Göritz, Maček and Šteger make a clear temporal cut in their selection. For example, they forego the romanticism that is so important for Slovenian poetry and start with the period around the First World War, in which, according to the edition team, Slovenian poetry really took on its own contours. To then gather around 80 voices that reach well into the 21st century, Ana Svetel, the youngest poet, was born in 1990.

How do you organize such a wealth of poems? Göritz, Maček and Šteger tried to unite two very different principles, the chronological and the thematic. And they combine the focus on distinctive individual voices with choir-like parts. So there are chapters here, in sometimes good alternation, about important poets such as Dane Zajc or Ifigenija Simonović (the proportion of female poets within these canonical figures could have been a little larger) and chapters with titles such as “water & earth” or “kinship & close” spread a diversity of voices.

Surprisingly, the chronological idea is also retained in the thematic chapters in that the poems are arranged according to the birth years of the writers. The fact that, despite this strict requirement, it has mostly been possible to link the poems to one another via motifs and linguistic particles or to create tension with one another is an art in itself. What makes reading difficult, however, is the lack of dates of origin. Was a poem written in 1960 or 1980? Does it come from an early or a late work? Such questions remain open.

Nevertheless, it is very stimulating to go on a journey of discovery in these verses in which the earth repeatedly shakes and “all the fireflies race” (as Šalamun once said). Although there are so many different voices, quite a few of the selected poems are linguistically rather familiar, which can also be seen in the Slovenian originals printed. The editors also often focus on poems that are scenic or narrative-oriented, especially in the second half of the book.

Between the karst and the coast: the poems celebrate village life

All the more exciting are those voices that venture forward formally and gain their strength from playing with language. Srečko Kosovel, for example, who tried no less than to design a new mysticism, “a mysticism of man”. Born in 1904 (and died at the age of 22!), he absorbed the imagery and ways of speaking of Expressionism and Dadaism. He reflected critically on the war and put his verses on himself like tattered masks: “My poem is explosion, / wild disruption. Disharmony. / (…) My poem is my face.”

Slovenia’s landscape is characterized by forests, karst areas and the small section of sea coast between Koper and Piran. So it is not surprising that village life is repeatedly sung in the poems, that animals, plants and water formations of all kinds appear. One of the few poets who brings the paradoxes of the big city into their verses is Svetlana Makarovič (born in 1939). , who lives in Ljubljana.

Her close look at social violence, from the repressions of the post-war period to patriarchal structures, also migrates, in a phantasmagorical transformation, into her poems with their strong sound and rhythm. In a litany-like manner and often with ironic refraction, she takes up bits and pieces from fairy tales, prayers and children’s songs. Anyone who sings their “lullaby” to their child will probably not have a peaceful night: “Don’t be afraid, / don’t be afraid, / the wind only sings / what it will be like / when we are no longer, / (… .) He will open your chest and dry up your heart.

The composition even suggests the language of the sea

In his translation, Ludwig Hartinger has beautifully captured the song-like tone, which is evident in the numerous repetitions, the shortened sentences and, in German, in particles such as “eh”. A very large proportion of the translations of the entire volume come from the edition trio themselves. There are also older translations, for example by Klaus Detlef Olof or by Fabjan Hafner, which, not least, make it clear what a long lead time such a large-scale project has. With so many poems translated, it goes without saying that the German versions are very different. All in all, when reading, you can experience “silence and voice” in equal measure – and even sense the language of the sea.

“You just open your mouth / the transistor will do everything else,” writes Edvard Kocbek in his Ljubljana poem. But that’s not the case. In this poetry wonder box, almost everything is done by the mouth, as the vocal sound of the verses, which is sometimes fire, sometimes water, drifts here into fantastic worlds, there sketches social reality. Or the whole universe unfolds, swirling, flickering, always close and strange in one.