Anthologists: Angeliki Dimouli, Katja Gorečan
Translators: Angeliki Dimouli (with the participation of Lara Unuk)
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Larisa Javernik, Katja Gorečan, Aleš Jelenko, Petra Žišt, Aljaž Koprivnikar, Mihael Lajlar, Dijana Matković, Blaž Božič, Muanis Sinanović, Kaja Teržan
Find the book here
This anthology presents a sample of poems written by ten young Slovenian poets, selected and compiled with the valuable assistance of Katja Gorečan, who is also featured in this book.
The selection process was based on two main guidelines: First and foremost, poets had to be young (not more than 35 years) and secondly, they had to have at least one published poetry book. What’s impressive is that all poets from this generation are also involved in various genres of art besides poetry. This observation only adds to my first impression from when I visited Slovenia back in 2011 and took part in some of the local Slovenian festivals.
Slovenian poets are politically-minded – they are, after all, the children of a generation that lived through harsh political times. Their experiments with form and structure are prone to produce a new form of conceptual poetry which, very often, is unfortunately lost in translation. Young Slovenian poets are quite determined in their writing and well-travelled members of the global community, yet based on a small, but artistically very productive country. Slovenia’s literary festivals are an institution, one that brings to the fore a generation that will be talked about more in the future.
My warmest and most sincere gratitude goes to Katja Gorečan for her constant willingness to explain purely Slovenian concepts and also to Lara Unuk, who gladly translated into Greek one of the ten poets in this book.
Angeliki Dimouli
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About young Slovenian poetry
Young Slovenian poetry presents many different aspects and establishes new fields of expression, while also engaging in experiments and restoring the old writing traditions.
This we can see, for example, in the writing of Aljaž Koprivnikar, whose poems have some sort of narrative structure, giving us stories that are lost in time, explore structures or even experiment with simple voices or different words that when put together, re-create the vanished meaning, which may be hidden, but is never lost. His poetry, for example, allows us to see reality through they eyes of his Alzheimer-stricken grandmother and glimpse at his questions about memories and remembrance.
In poems by Larisa Javernik and Dijana Matković, we see the use of intimate stories drawn from their own lives or the lives of others around them, in order to build poetry that is continuous, because poems are so closely connected to one another that they actually create life that lives in the verses; and even if such life isn’t real in the actual sense of the word, it manages to make the imagery appear real and vivid enough for us to see people take shape in front of our eyes, or even feel their pain as it rises from the lines. On the other hand, we have poems from Mihael Lajlar that also point at an intimate individual space, yet aren’t narrative. His poems are secretly metaphorical, using images from the world of dreams, or images that are blurred. Petra Žišt’s writing comes from her experiences of her world travels as both an anthropologist and a poet. Her poetry combines the different voices of researcher, observer and person who is part of the world in every possible meaning of the word. She often experiments with using foreign words in her poetry. Kaja Teržan, on the other hand, builds the world through contact with her body, within the personal space that she has to rebuild again and again, from childhood reminiscence up to her current life. The identities of grown-up woman, mother and contemporary dancer are used to express her body in combination with words. Karlo Hmeljak’s and Aleš Jelenko’s poems communicate the feeling of playing and creating new words and new worlds. This doesn’t mean that their poetry is merely joyful or childful – it also means that the world as we know divides reason into parts that have to be remade to create meaning. Tibor Hrs Pandur and Muanis Sinanović present reality from various viewpoints, occasionally through the writer’s humor, which is sometimes distant due to its poetic quality, while other times it stands as part of literature, and the main characteristic of their poetic imagery is brutal honesty, while also displaying banal situations of nowadays society without restrictions. In a similar vein, Blaž Božič’s poetry presents a strong uncompromising contrast and his poems attempt to trigger something that exists outside the reader through the use of association.
The names featured in this anthology of Slovenian young poets are merely a few representative voices of Slovenian poetry and its poets, who are building the pantheon of Slovenia’s contemporary poetry scene through various festivals and workshops. Some of them have also established themselves as poets and gained wide recognition in countries outside Slovenia.
Katja Gorečan