Debeljak Aleš:
Bosnian Elegy
for Miljenko Jergovič
Sing, young poet, touch my inflamed skin, tanned by lengthy treks
through trackless hills to the world’s end. Don’t give up now,
though the gunners’ feverish lenses stare at damp stains on the facades
of libraries and palaces that constantly call memories of a cruel century to mind.
Simply list what’s left: flocks of swallows twittering
beneath bygone arches and campaniles, the eternal wisdom of a French novel
we read in bomb shelters, the downy blond fuzz on the earlobes
of babes that disappears so suddenly, dull thuds from Pannonia’s plains.
The smell of gunpowder irritates human lungs. We have not crossed the threshold.
So speak now when deep pools of never consecrated water
make waves. Rings glow in the depths. Things past are joyous.
Believe me, truly: I am ready, sing to me for the last time
of love’s tempests, of the mysteries of women’s shadows, and
marble stairs. Sing, as you sang before you turned gray!
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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