#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews DISTANT TRANSIT by Maja Haderlap

Maja Haderlap grew up in the border region of Carinthia in the south of Austria, a member of the Slovenian minority. The baggage that comes from growing up traumatised with inherited, transgenerational trauma – Slovenian Carinthians were persecuted during the Second World War – comes across strongly in Haderlap’s most recent volume of poetry. She deals with memory and history, with the volatility of where ‘the border strip / swung back and forth’, and where ‘villages / went astray’.

Haderlap began to receive recognition after publishing several volumes of poetry in Slovenian. At the age of fifty, she wrote a novel in German about her family’s and community’s experiences during the Second World War: Angel of Oblivion, also translated into English by Tess Lewis (Archipelago Books, 2016).

distant transit is Haderlap’s first poetry collection in German, and it has to be said that her relationship with German is marked by distress. The collection is sprinkled with Slovenian place names, plants and insects, myths and folklore; the German influenced by Slovenian diction and composition. ‘In my voice / the first language crystallises and / learns the codes of memory by heart.’ Haderlap writes openly about the push-and-pull experience of being situated between two languages, of the pressure, confusion and conflict it creates, and how that affects everything. The poet wonders what happened ‘when language left me’. This is a question often asked by people of diverse backgrounds who end up in the linguistic no-man’s-land, the forever ‘in-between’, whether as the result of immigration or shifting borders and territorial power grabs.

In fact, what Haderlap captures so well in her poems is the near interchangeability of language and identity. Language is, after all, mentality, identity. The poet shows how enriching it can be to experience this linguistic borderland, but also how difficult and dangerous it can be. Lethal, even. After all, minority languages are prone to disappear, to being devoured by more dominant ones. But minority languages can also prove resilient, put up a good fight, become stronger by feeding off the oppressor.

The poems in distant transit are quite intimate in their microscopic exploration of ordinariness. Apart from the convoluted history of her people, Haderlap also examines the natural world, Slovenian folklore and mythology. There is something gentle, like lapping waves in her lines, with an occasional surf breaking over the reader’s head with a surprisingly cold or salty spray. Though the droplets are no fine shower. They fall heavy and loaded. And even though everything seems to be balanced, measured and precise, even though there is not a surplus word here, the quiet tone cuts right to the quick.

Reviewed by Anna Blasiak

DISTANT TRANSIT

by Maja Haderlap

Translated by Tess Lewis

Published by Archipelago Books (2022)

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Anna Blasiak is a poet, writer, translator, journalist and Managing Editor of the European Literature Network. Recently she translated According to Her by Maciej Hen, published a bilingual poetry and photography book with Lisa Kalloo Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime, and a book-length interview with a Holocaust survivor, Lili: Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation with Anna Blasiak.

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