Day and night, night and day
we’re travelling to Slovenia:
in the little bus, the silence between us
growing like
a town cut off from the Earth and the Universe.
Still enigmas, like two
lazy flies, each curled up
alongside her window
She, a little old woman, Maruška maybe –
in her lap crumbles a cookie brand-named
“Leibnitz”
as if newly separating a monad from monad
and smiles, staring into the darkness
of the world which is still
the best of all worlds …
She who knows harmony
Maruška, Blažka, Mojca maybe.
In my lap, in a bad light,
on a bad road, I crumble poetry,
page by page, word by word and I hear:
Srečko Kosovel* renounces happiness
because every beauty is part of pain.
In his verses
there is no excuse for God
and the monads He sends
never reach the Earth:
like a deceptive snow they evaporate
in the first layer of the sky.
In my lap, the book of the poet
whose name has in advance renounced
harmony with his heart and soul.
Day and night, night and daz
we travel to Slovenia,
she and I, still unknown to each other …
And the whole universe rocks
on our knees
as if wanting to separate from sleepy God
and find complicity
gently whispering into our ears:
“We’re brothers, born of the same father…”
Translated by: Evald Flisar
*Srečko Kosovel (1904 –1926) was a Slovenian expressionist poet who evolved towards avant-garde forms. Since the 1960s, Kosovel has become a poetic icon, in the league of the most prestigious Slovene literates like France Prešeren and Ivan Cankar. He produced an impressive body of work of more than 1000 poems with a quality regarded as unusually high for his age. Most of his works were published almost four decades after his early death.