Smugglers

May 18, 2015
Slovenian poet and critic Debeljak (Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems) examines isolation, reconstruction, and historical and cultural change in post-independence Slovenia. Set in various locations around his home city, Ljubljana, this series of tonally folksy, yet formally rigid, long-lined poems (each in four quatrains) echoes with the mingling of historical and personal intimacies that haunts the speaker at every turn: “hidden sins are public virtues/ and all conversations are recorded, microphones are in the wall,” he writes, “and the dark sheen of freedom: see you in the next war.” The book is distinctly historical, and thereby political, yet Debeljak’s insistence on formal consistency, humor, and adherence to his subject, along with translator Henry’s efforts at retaining his syntactical and cultural idiosyncrasies, put the personal, and traditional, experience of those historical events at the forefront of this collection. A troubled national history and the continuing traumas of a young nation may well strike readers as the heart of the collection: “your words sound sincere when they are least true,/ the shapes of orange explosions would deserve the attention/ that every developed nation devotes to its sages,/ new styles of reading and promises broken like jumps/ over flames.” Debeljak’s engaging, accessible, eye-opening poems turn cultural dislocation into its own strange pleasure. Bilingual edition.