#RivetingReviews: Morelle Smith reviews SLOVENIAN POETRY TODAY, edited by Herbert Kuhner & Peter Kersche
This tri-lingual (Slovenian, German, English) edition of Slovenian poetry is ambitious and wide-ranging. All the poets included in Slovenian Poetry Today write in the Slovenian language; we have poets from Slovenia, from the Carinthian Slovenian minority in Austria, and from Trieste.
Central European and South-Eastern European countries, including the Balkans, because of their history of conflicts, the rise and fall of empires, and the changing boundaries of nation states, have many minorities, speaking an assortment of languages. Attitudes to minorities and their languages vary across the different countries. I have been told that in 1920 following World War I and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Corinthian Slovenes were offered a referendum. They could choose to remain part of the much-reduced territory of Austria, or join the newly formed kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that became Yugoslavia. They chose to remain part of Austria.
Translation from one language to another is clearly important for cultural exchange and enrichment between nations; all the more important, then, for translation between different languages spoken and written in the same country. Switzerland has put great efforts into translation between the four major languages spoken in its country, and into treating all the languages equally. But in countries where the language of the majority is clearly the dominant one, this equality of expression can become more problematic.
Herbert Kuhner, one of the translators and editors of this collection, is a prolific writer of poetry and prose. He has a particular sympathy for minorities, perhaps because he and his family experienced persecution in the inter-war period. For decades now he has been a tireless translator of Slovenian and German poets. Just to give two examples – in 1984, along with Feliks J. Bister, he translated a bilingual edition of Carinthian Slovenian poetry. And his translation of Edvard Kocbek’s poetry (entitled Roki/Hands) was published in 2015: the title poem is included in this edition.
‘I’ve lived between my hands/as if among two thieves./ Neither knew /what the other was about.’ —Edvard Kocbek: ‘Hands’
Kocbek’s poems show a deep understanding of the complexities of human nature, with tenderness and humour alongside his visionary search for truth.
The themes in this anthology are varied. There are painful wartime memories (some of the writers experienced WWII as children), and there is also humour, as in Edvard Kocbek’s ‘The Comedians’. There is also sensitivity towards nature, with many of the poets revealing an intimate connection with land, landscape, weather and seasons.
‘I love snow/because it covers/the black and brown mud/of late autumn … /and it transforms the trees and roofs into altars of ice./ It’s only my roses/ that worry me.’ —Gustav Janus: ‘The First Snow’
‘Dust on the soles of the sky/ you come from nowhere.’ —Kajetan Kovic: ‘Dust’
‘You be the sea, I’ll be the moonlight’s/white mast/and the love of the first night.’ —Kajetan Kovic: ‘Romance’
Pavle Zidar uses concrete and vivid imagery – bread, salt, fog, the sun and the sea. His ‘Thoughts of a Snake’is intriguing and unusual, showing a sympathy and an imaginative kinship with these creatures, as he wonders: ‘Does the snake think/ that it eats/ in order to live? /Its thoughts are delicate sounds and tones/ sensations like those conveyed by Mahler. In ‘Encounter’ he extends a capacity for feeling: ‘O you are the rain/rain/and I am the unknown terrain/the scorched earth.’
Dane Zajc is another who feels an imaginative sympathy for animals: in the poem ‘Scorpions’:
‘They’re recluses/they’re sensitive to light/they live on the sawdust of darkness/their abodes are worm-holes’.
It’s so refreshing to read these varied themes, the different points of view, subject matter, the sensitive and often surprising handling of words and language. The land and landscape of which we are a part, the terrain, the heights, valleys, the lakes, rocks, woodland and plains, the minerals, the climate, all weave themselves into our expression and experience. And each language has its own way of forming our perceptions and the ways we express ourselves. These translations give us insights which would otherwise have been out of our reach. So we are thankful to the translators and editors for bringing light to such a variety of visions. I’ve only mentioned a few, but there are many more poems to savour – tactile, tender, thought-provoking. Like ‘Bridge’ by Andrej Kokot:
Someone came and ordered:
BE A BRIDGE!
And I became a bridge.
Men and gods traversed
my concrete ribs
and trod my bent back.
In time
my strength diminished,
step by step,
until it was no more.
Yet my crooked girders
straightened themselves
and I was a man again.
Now I avoid mankind.
I fear I’ll be ordered
to be a bridge.
Reviewed by Morelle Smith
SLOVENIAN POETRY TODAY
Edited by Herbert Kuhner & Peter Kersche
Published by Austrian PEN (edition Erhard Löcker, Wien, 2023)
June 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Morelle Smith writes poetry, fiction, essays and travel articles. She is particularly interested in European literature and wrote the first book in English about the writer and traveller Annemarie Schwarzenbach (The Buoyancy of the Craft, diehard, 2021). Her work has been translated into several languages including Albanian, Romanian, German, French.
Read Morelle Smith’s #RivetingReview of ERASED by Miha Mazzini, translated by Gregor Timothy Čeh
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Read Morelle Smith’s #RivetingReview of A SWARM OF DUST by Evald Flisar
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