Anxious Moments.

Cooper, Henry R., Jr.

The fewer speakers of a given language, the more intense seems the pressure on the poets writing in that language to transpose their works into a language of mass communication. The tiny domestic market, even when it is comprised of such avid book-buyers and readers as the Slovenes are, will not suffice. All the world is the stage for the youngest generation of Slovene poets, as the two volumes of translations under review amply attest.

In Double Vision four writers, the oldest of whom is thirty-eight and the youngest thirty-three, are teamed with four translators. Jure Potokar, the senior poet, and Brane Mozetic, the next oldest, have the good fortune to be translated by Michael Biggins, a native speaker of English with an expert command of Slovene. As a result, their poems--twenty for the former, nineteen for the latter--work well and sometimes even brilliantly in English. Mozetic's sexuality crackles. The drama of Potokar's final, isolated lines leaves the reader emotionally limp. We come away with at least some sense of the power these poems conjure in the original.

Likewise, maybe even more so, for Alojz Ihan, in the inspired translations by Tom Lozar, a native speaker of English and Slovene, to whose eternal credit are the beautiful translations of Edvard Kocbek's poems "Na vratih zvecer / At the Door of Evening." Ihan's verse is concise and clear. In Lozar's working it seems to race through the brain and head straight for the heart. Since Ihan is a medical doctor, the temptation to compare his technique to surgery is hard to resist, but the comparison does him a disservice. We are here in the presence of a master of language, a thoughtful observer of the human condition. How fortunate that we have at least one sample of his work in the original Slovene. (Each section of the anthology is in fact introduced with one original poem, translated on the facing page; I deeply regret that all the poems were not presented in that way.) In "Sesti dan" (The Sixth Day) Ihan addresses God's "motivation" (if we can speak of the Divinity in such terms) for creating humans: God will have no one to share creation with unless He "makes a grab for the clay," as the poet puts it. One small admonition to the translator here: I do not think it was advisable to "correct" (if that is what he did) sesto noc to "fifth night" or sedmi dan to "sixth day." The poet's counting seems to me both correct as it stands and intentional.

The first poet in Double Vision (the arrangement is either alphabetical or reverse-chronological) is Ales Debeljak, represented by nineteen poems, seven of which are translated well by Michael Biggins and twelve far less successfully by Christopher Merrill (who knows no Slovene) and Debeljak himself. According to the translator's introduction to Anxious Moments, which contains all nineteen of Debeljak's poems in Double Vision plus twenty-one more, the poet prepared "a rough English version" of his texts for Merrill, and from these Merrill "tried to write poems." Unfortunately, it shows. If we compare any Biggins translation with a Merrill-Debeljak translation, the latter suffers.

Biggins: "The river susurrates. As it has for so long, it seems. Storks or birds resembling the storks in nature books prepare to leave, for their uninterrupted southward flight" (Double Vision, 31).

Merrill-Debeljak: "The river rushes on. As it has for a long time. Herons, or wading birds that look like the herons in field guides, are getting ready to fly south" (Anxious Moments, 60).

Debeljak is too important a poet to render into English in this way. As the forty poems in his own collection Anxious Moments clearly show, he has a vision and an interest which reach beyond the narrow confines of his linguistic homeland. Like Tomaz Salamun before him, Debeljak draws much of his inspiration from America: San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, an American girlfriend or two, the wide-open spaces, an absence of that constricting tightness of home, with all its oppressive memories and "the disappointment of everything we were and will be." Nevertheless, Debeljak is distinctly un-American in the elegiac tone of his poems. Moroseness, depressiveness, the somber view of a grim reality which we might call Slovene or "mitteleuropaisch" or simply late-twentieth-century, overwhelm and undercut the American elements of his work. Like his predecessor France Preseren, the first and finest Slovene poet, whose laureate he is, Debeljak exemplifies the writer who is trapped: by language, culture, history, circumstances (though in Debeljak's case it would seem not by emotional circumstances, at least not yet). Like Preseren, Debeljak has a lot of valuable things to say. To Slovenes he can say it directly. To the rest of us he needs a better intermediary.

In a sense Slovene literature has come full circle. Preseren eschewed the language of mass communication--German--in his day so that he could teach the ladies of Ljubljana to read and appreciate Slovene. He fenced off a domestic market for Slovene, as it were, to allow it to grow and prosper. Modern Slovene poets, thinking and creating in the very language that Preseren devised, seem eager to move beyond Slovene and back into a language of international communication. This strikes me as fitting, for it reflects the maturity of modern Slovene literature, which can compete successfully in the world literary market. The Slovenes are fortunate to have good poets, and the world is fortunate to have good translators of Slovene who are capable of doing just that.

Henry R. Cooper Jr. Indiana University