Debeljak Aleš:
Migrations
Everything, you see everything: the dimness of the concert hall, dusty
violins hurriedly placed on the parquet, the breathing of flies,
a whistling teapot, a cartridge discharged into the dim dawn,
a carpet’s hunting motive, an inscription in the tongue of two prophets, things
that drown in endless light, cries which rise up to the sky,
the shine of metals, a basilica, the smell of a garden, the dark verse
of a sonnet, a column of children and weeping women, who
carry newborns in their wide skirts, a thin stream of plum
juice which soaks into the turned earth, trodden by retreating
battalions. Everything. The fresh tranquility of cemeteries, the painful metastases
of forests in which the known world will rattle to an end. Ancient order
of violence which returns to the hearth. How quiet the house is now.
The girls’ choir has fallen silent. But the track to the East will certainly remain.
No one can erase it. And you know that the steeple clock tolls for you and us.
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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