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Aleš Šteger

BURNING TONGUES

edited & translated by Brian Henry

Aleš Šteger was born in 1973 in Ptuj, Slovenia – where he grew up – then part of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Tito, which gained its independence when he was 18. He published his first collection in 1995 at the age of 22, and was immediately recognised as a key voice in the new generation of post-Communist poets not only in Slovenia but throughout central Europe.

Notable for its moral engagement, Šteger’s poetry is acutely precise in its observation and concentration as well as multi-layered and technically versatile, ingenious and inventive, adventurous and playful yet serious in intention. Above all, his poems are incessantly curious in their investigations which the reader is invited to share – and he loves to ambush the reader with the unexpected.

His influences are mainly European, including the Serbian master poet Vasko Popa, as well as German and Spanish-language poets he has translated into Slovenian, such as Bachmann, Benn, Huchel, Neruda and Vallejo. He has added his own strand of writing to the distinctively European genre of prose poems in pieces which describe everyday objects in minute terms, only to explode in the imagination through what he perceives in them. He is also known for his prose books and experimental writing including his Written on Site pieces.

‘Emerging in the aftermath of the wars that broke former Yugoslavia into many countries, Šteger has become one of the most significant European poets of the new century. In his hands it is as if poetry were giving up its last secrets, when books don’t open to speak but to whisper, and metaphors are instantly dispersed by a galactic wind. We are fortunate to have these selections from five of his books and also new poems, translated beautifully by Brian Henry. More than a new Selected, this is a gift to the English language and a bridge between worlds.’ – Carolyn Forché

Front cover portrait by Matej Pušnik

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Aleš Šteger

BURNING TONGUES

NEW & SELECTED POEMS

EDITED & TRANSLATED BY

BRIAN HENRY

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

fromKASHMIR(1995)

About the Realistic and Romantic Schools

With Closed Eyes

Thirst

Lullaby

Walnut

Kashmir

A Thousand Doors

For You

fromPROTUBERANCES(2002)

36 Seconds

Zero Gravity

Citrus

Protuberances

Anticyclone

Sandwerder

Ptuj–Pragersko–Ljubljana

Still Life

Plié

Between Bread and Salt

Returning Home

Europe

fromTHE BOOK OF THINGS(2005)

A

Egg

Knots

Stone

Grater

Urinal

Chocolate 6

Raisins

Ant

Umbrella

Bread

Hand Dryer

Stomach

Pupa

Knives

Jelly

Bandage

Mint

Shoes

Sea Horse

Saliva

Toothpick

Cork

Windscreen Wipers

Hayrack

Wheelbarrow

Earring

Salmon

Shit

Paper Clip

Aspirin

Parcel

Chair

Candle

fromTHE BOOK OF BODIES(2010)

The children in our village

For two days I’ve been cleaning

Your private apocalypse

For whom do the angels play?

I wake up without my right hand

Many weeks nothing

She was a little girl with pompoms

We go 17 miles on foot

Here is just one of the entrances 7

The smell of rotting logs

She spends her afternoons sitting

With a cheek pressed

Above the red button it says

Still, when I turn the corner

After only half an hour

Who mediates for you?

A German Shepherd beside a girl

The ancient Roman walls

The closer the deadline

Of all the healers

I’ve scattered my body

The word BARE

The word BUT

The word EATS

The word END

The word FOLDS

The word HERE

The word HOLE

The word LIMPS

The word MISSING

The word NEAR

The word NO

The word PASS

The word PFFF

The word SAVES

The word SEEDS

The word SULLIES

The word TATTERS

The word WAITING

The word WALKS

The word YET

fromABOVE THE SKY BENEATH THE EARTH(2015)

The Boy

Gnashing Teeth

The Revolt Against the End of Summer

Time Is 8

Man and Truth

WWW

Olympics

O E

My Body Is a Central Committee

Erasure of Possibilities

Magic Square

The Whole World Is a Uterus

My Mother

Permanently on Loan

The World Is Without Culprits

Sweet Snow

The Sky

White Shirt

Elementary Laws

Lindens in the Desert Sand

I Feel Everything

Behind a Curtain

No One

A Place

Above the Sky Beneath the Earth

Five Assertions

fromTESTIMONY(2020)

You ask me

Ancestors

Between this

On a plate

Ant

The world will return

Rain teaches us

When someone asks

NEW POEMS

In the children’s hospital

My dear father

My little god

Only tonight 9

Mountain

In front of the border

Swimming pool

Syracuse

Outside a station of the metro

What are our poets smiling at?

An old poet

Pines

Dead kitten

The Sun Walks Behind Me

What is half an hour

The Autobiography of H

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Note on translator

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT 10

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

I first met Aleš Šteger in 1999 at the Days of Poetry and Wine Festival in Medana, a Slovenian village on the Italian border. Thanks to a recommendation by Tomaž Šalamun, I’d been invited to read at the festival, which Šteger founded in 1996. While Slovenian poetry was already important to me, spending time in Slovenia and meeting Šteger and other Slovenian poets turned it into something of a preoccupation. A few years later, I started translating Slovenian poetry, beginning with Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices. In 2006, when I went to Lipica, Slovenia to participate in the Vilenica International Literary Festival, I met with Šalamun to discuss the manuscript. I expressed surprise that none of Šteger’s books had been translated into English yet and asked Šalamun which book I should start with if I wanted to translate Šteger’s poetry. He immediately suggested The Book of Things, which had appeared in Slovenia the year before. A few days later, at a café in Ljubljana, I began to translate ‘A’, the first poem in that collection. Since that day, I have translated a few hundred of Šteger’s poems.

With my Šteger translations, I strive for accuracy while keeping in mind the need to create parallel primary texts that work as poems in English. This doesn’t mean that I want my translations to read as if they’d been written in English; on the contrary, I feel that it’s important for a translated poem to maintain stylistic aspects of the original even if doing so resists quick comprehension. As a translator, I’m constantly aware of the pitfalls of clarification and over-interpretation, which can dispel the mystery or ambiguity of the original in the pursuit of accessibility. Because these are poems, not technical instructions or newspaper articles, I view mystery, paradox and ambiguity as features to be retained, even embraced. While I might alter the syntax of the original in order to avoid unnecessary awkwardness or confusion in the translation, I maintain stanza structures, line logic and repetition as well as idiosyncrasies of punctuation (such as the use of commas where full stops would more commonly be used, or the absence of commas where they’d usually appear) and syntactical constructions 12that seem slightly peculiar or unfamiliar in English. I aim for a middle ground between domestication and foreignisation, where a poem in English not only emerges from a poem in Slovenian, but also reflects and, I hope, honours the original.

While translating, I view a poem as a sonic scaffolding where certain moments in the architecture of the original poem (such as alliteration, assonance or internal rhyme) don’t always match those corresponding moments in the translation but are compensated for somewhere else in the poem. I also work to retain the formal and stylistic integrity of the original, which seems especially important for poems with unusually long sentences and poems such as ‘The word ____’ poems from The Book of Bodies, whose verticality, unconventional syntax and wordplay are as integral to the poems as their meaning. Although I use my experience as a poet when I translate, I’m careful not to impose my own aesthetic preferences on my translations. If a poet-translator attempts to align everything they translate with their own poetics, they risk producing translations that sound like their own poems. While a resolutely literal translation of a poem might sound more like an artefact than a poem, a translation that takes too many liberties or over-embellishes the original can sound like an entirely new, different poem, essentially becoming more imitation than translation. If I deviate from the original (say, by changing a word in order to adhere to a formal constraint in the original), I check with Šteger to make sure that the change is justified.

Whenever I’m in Slovenia, I meet with Šteger to discuss my translations of his