Niko Grafenauer

Dihindih
Mladinska knjiga 2000

Niko Grafenauer (b. 1940) is a poet, essayist, translator and the editor of Nova revija, which played an important part in the creation of the sovereign state of Slovenia by involving the elite Slovenian intelligentsia in the cause. Nova revija continues its critical appraisal of Slovenian cultural, political, and economic circumstances to this day, and Grafenauer with his colleagues is the driving force behind this criticism. Grafenauer"s poetry and philosophical essays on poetry (e.g. Odysseus in the Maze, 2002) are topical in another way: They poetically research man"s existence torn between "being and time". Grafenauer"s poetry is a footprint on the path of Hölderlin, Rilke and Celan. With time, he has developed this post-symbolist and modernist tradition in the direction of Heidegger"s existential-historical thought. Grafenauer"s anthological collection Breathandbreath (2000) is thus a special poetical-existential "travel journal", hovering between presence and absence: A poem is "a white imprint on the white". It is "all-one". It pulsates between speech and silence. It is "a copper engraving of a sonnet, printed onto nothing". It is spoken by a man torn between the pure present time of love and his own passing into nothingness.

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.

The Solitude

Black solitude, cool forehead.
behind it gathered higher
than obliteration so alone, without memory
to drown in white.

farness, stretched to the light allures
towards finality.

flames of never appeased satiety
in an open coronal cup of shedding days,
through space is lasting, what enormity
of never ending fading in the air!

weight, dispersed to poppy seeds of moments,
is cumulating in the bodily tight
embrace of years, weight,
plasmatically spilled into the day, now
and here, over the bream that holds what is,
to the brink, is being
a bottomless abyss, measured
with a plumb of pain?

a wound gazing to a wound, an eye to an eye.
what wakefulness opening the eyelids!
is my blood blending with your pulse
within one circulation?

a farewell, felt by feelers stretched out
towards the lost, and within the soul, twice erased
height of the call with no fulfillment, under the dark
skies of the past in a halo, encircled
by Psyche longer than the light of a candle.
the murmur, gathered with intent to withhold what
the silk reveals, gently folded in distancing.

when will
the black-rimmed dawn appear, or a skylark, along with
a nightingale"s song? two lumps of gravity in expecting bosom,
yet the voice with plagal wingsis to the skies returned.

in gaping air, the riddle mutely hangs: its shadow facing daylight,
but towards the night it is hopingly spread
over the unanimous fall of two lives
into romejulijet"s embrace.

is there still anywhere more absence held in hands
so tightly joined?
on the lips a whisper drawn in a rime of semivowels,
translucent of imperfection, but for the living
a requiem, preserved for eavesdropping never ended.
in it, between the wrinkles,
hidden from the sight, lastingly shines a sorrowful tear
(carbon crystal"s clearest water),
stuck with valences into soft stygian velvet.

an eye, reaching out of life to eternity,
with the look of the light years -
you but to perfection with the world:
Elisheba.

the time behind the eyelid stored:
immer und nimmer.
by fortuitous flesh grown into now:
ichundich, filled up to the throat
with the tears of eros.
added to death: a deafmute verse,
tasted on the lips.

pressed into the being"s pressure what is and is not,
high, without egress, everlasting
weight, lulled towards the earth,
are the dreams from underneath another azimuth assembling?
neither a trap nor an exile, endlessly
within secluded circles.
a solution, trodden by the steps that follow
the nascent death in water, softly shaded
Nebenleben.

between to come and to go, equationally interspaced
I-and-I.
how much in between collected into days!
where am I? the truth is even barer than bare,
and the nought is perfect: beyond the words
that keep my voice within themselves.

Translated by Jože Lazar