Šalamun Tomaž:
To Edvard Kocbek On His 70th
I have avoided you, great poet
and thinker, because you were too heavy
a burden. Fiercely I drew a line behind me,
in order to be at ease, light,
agile. An infinitesimal mote of sunlight,
dancing as it crunches the muses’ host
for a joke and spits the seeds of all oranges
high in the air. You were
clearly powerful, not an orange. So that
the glint, so the show, so that children
point up at the colorful flying kites. I was
the apple tree unaware who had
watered its soil. Today I know who,
more than any among us, is the shaper
of our freedom. Now I am shaken
with feeling and I’ll quickly raise my glass
to your health. You see, precisely because it’s
a holiday I must continue
with my crunching. I sense that
joy strengthens with every moment.
Tomaž Šalamun
(1941 - ) A poet, and since 1996, a Slovenian cultural attache in New York. He graduated in art history from the University of Ljubljana and worked as a free-lance writer in Ljubljana. Salamun, who was in 1973 honored by the Preseren Foundation Prize/National Book Award was in the 1960's the leading figure of Slovenian poetical avant-garde. He has published extensively since his first two books in samizdat (Poker; The Purpose of the Cloak) appeared in 1966 and 1968, respectively. His work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Child of Europe (Penguin 1991) and East European Poetry (Ardis, 1983, 1985). A former fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program and a Fulbright fellow at Columbia University in New York, Salamun was also in residency at the art colonies of Yaddo and MacDowell. His recent books in English translation include The Selected Poems (Ecco Press 1988; edited by Charles Simic) and The Four Questions of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997; edited by Christopher Merrill).By the same author
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