Debeljak Aleš:
Elegies From The North I
Earth. Red earth. And tall grass as far as you can see.
You’re pressed to the ground. Hidden from unwanted
glances. Utterly still. A quail by your ear. Are you
turning into stone? No: you‘re just listening to shadows
fall over cornfields. A bead of sweat - a tear? - slides
down your cheek. In the distance a mountain rises
steeply. Naked. Without trees or flowers. Imprinted on
the sharp-edged horizon. On its peak, lost in the clouds,
generations of stag hunters wander for centuries.
Glistening of the setting sun. All the signs say: end of
Indian summer. If I hear it right, nothing comes from
your lips. Are you dumb? Blind? Perhaps you’re
searching through memory for the shapes of all
prints - footsteps in the snow, old songs and cognac in
the evening, small white towns with castles and turrets,
the smells of Sunday afternoons, the river running
under granite bridges. As if this, too, escapes you. Here,
under the empty sky of ancient tribes you never heard
about, you’ll end your way. I, of course, always return.
You don’t. Which makes all the difference.
Aleš Debeljak
(1961 - ) A poet, essayist, translator and prominent literary cartographer. Debeljak graduated in comparative literature from the University of Ljubljana and received his Ph.D. in Social Thought from Syracuse University, New York. He is a former Fulbright fellow at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow of Budapest Institute of Advanced Study. Debeljak published five books of essays and five books of poems, including Anxious Moments (White Pine Press, 1994; originally Minute strahu, 1990). A translator of selected poems by John Ashbery, he won the Prešeren Foundation Prize / Slovenian National Book Award and Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize-Tel Aviv. His books have appeared in Croatian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, German, and Italian translation. Debeljak has edited Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian sections for Shifting Borders: East European Poetry in the Eighties (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993) and edited Prisoners of Freedom: Contemporary Slovenian Poetry (Pedernal Press, 1993).Author's web page
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