Milan Dekleva
Sosledja
Nova revija 2001
Milan Dekleva (b. 1946) is a poet, writer, dramatist, essayist, translator and librettist for children's musicals. His early poetry erupted from a radically postmodernist language, building poetically a new reality with its destructive-constructive, playful energy. The collection of short stories Bird Rescuer (1999) is different: It portrays man's anxiety in a world perverted by violence and philosophical and scientific manipulations which is beyond conveying anything but insecurity and the threat of annihilation. The threat of nonsense is articulated in the collection of verse Man in Panic (1990), while the collection Transcended Man (1992) in its meditative phrases searches for a way out - by foregoing Western metaphysics and plunging into a joyful abandon to being: "Observe the pelvis of a flower, how it unfolds." The "observer of a flower" no longer agrees to being smothered by anthropocentrism, but wants to experience the multiple cosmic Oneness. This is symbolized by the "Dinggedicht" in the collection Sequences (2001): In them, beings and phenomena are given voice; birds, rocks, plants, silence no longer reflect man, but coexist with him confidently, while their speech intertwines in verse: Oneness is the leitmotif of this collection of poems/piece of music.
Vanesa Matajc
Vanesa Matajc is the Winner of the Best Young Critic ("Stritar") Award.
Translated by Tamara Soban.
Published for the Slovenian presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair,
October 2002, by the Center for Slovenian Literature.
There is Still No Name for You
For anything more will we be able to die.
Close by heaven's abyss kneels the last grace.
The stone embraces nakedness, again tries to take it.
Peace is complete to the depth, you can hear the night fall.
You have grown out of the superstition that life goes through everything.
We have looked you through and through and have not recognized you.
With your beauty you entered our marrow, seizing us all.
For you there is still no name: we would fear it all too much.
From their decaying material the patched homes run with tears.
We are theirs, pressing ever closer in brightness.
Our breath becomes harsh and divinely thin.
We'd dwell heroically in ignorance, like in a school exercise.
The Origin of Language
Women talk the jargon of shattered flowerbeds.
The sick talk from pain.
Stones from stoniness.
The stars mumble the gravitation of light.
To the prophet and illusionist the voice lends revelations.
The meadows are littered with alphabets of ants,
the cantilena of towns is a criss-cross of errands.
Only freedom speaks the patois of its own being,
which is freedom.
That speech is on the boundary.
It convenes the whole world
to the human ear.
Encircles us, as death encircles life.
Like wide-open doors we flap in time,
the hundred times safeguarded secret
of worthlessness.
Translated by Alasdair MacKinnon