Slow Sailing E-Book

Uroš Zupan

• Herausgeber: Slovene Writers' Association
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Litterae Slovenicae
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 203

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Uroš Zupan (1963) is one of Slovenia's most prominent contemporary poets and he has made his mark on Slovenian poetry of the past 30 years. Slow Sailing presents the author's own selection of the best of his best. This collection, which covers a period of more than two dozen years, is both personal and stern, since the author deals with his own poetry. From his delving into the golden age of his individual past to a sensuous hymn to soft summer light and the miracle of life that does not exist without the arts, Slow Sailing invites us to discover and re-discover one of post-independence Slovenia's most distinctive poetic voices, while also offering a unique insight into Slovenian poetry at the turn of the millennium. The greatest Slovenian poet of the middle generation, his work has not been translated much (and not at all into English); the book is already part of the Slovenian canon and contains Zupan's own selection of his finest poems. He is already included in school literature curricula.

Leseprobe

I/2022/LX/155

Uroš Zupan: Slow Sailing

Original title: Počasna plovba

© Uroš Zupan, 2014

© Translation: Michael Biggins and Slovene Writers’ Association, 2022

Translation: Michael Biggins

Essays: Uroš Zupan

Afterword: Richard Jackson

Editorial Board for Litteræ Slovenicæ 2022:

Tina Kozin, Tanja Petrič, Tina Vrščaj

Editor of this Issue: Tanja Petrič

Proofreading: Nada Grošelj

Published by Slovene Writers’ Association, Ljubljana

Dušan Merc, President

First digital edition, Ljubljana 2022

https://litteraeslovenicae.si/

ISSN 2712-2417

Price 12,99 €

URL: https://www.biblos.si/isbn/9789616995856

Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani

COBISS.SI-ID 110199043

ISBN 978-961-6995-85-6 (ePUB)

Uroš Zupan

Slow Sailing

Translated by

Michael Biggins

With an Afterword by

Richard Jackson

DRUŠTVO SLOVENSKIH PISATELJEV

SLOVENE WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION

I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures.

Frank O’Hara

I don’t know of a single masterpiece that lacks flaws or is without imperfections.

Andrey Tarkovsky

Be very selective about the feelings you want to express, because otherwise you could get as subjective as an infant that’s crying in its crib. No one can deny that this infant is expressing himself, but no one would call it art.

Bill Evans

My own feelings

are things that happen to me.

Fernando Pessoa

Slow Sailing

This night is a calm sea and

this bed is the raft that

keeps us afloat. With each breath

we touch and practice slowly

counting on our fingers. As we press

together asleep, we can’t help but erase

the boundaries between our warm skins

and the dreams that would just as soon

part and disperse us through time. One

child shifts between us. The other

hovers and floats in your belly.

The silence is equally distributed

among all of us and the bed is

trapped in a perfect calm, no breeze.

We are its living sides, its guard

rails, whether in light or in dark.

The Garden: Bach

There is no death here. All shapes just flow into

each other. Everything hovers and floats. I close my eyes and

see gravel flying into the sky. Some acacias,

profligate with their shadows, scatter the whiteness

of their scent. From the other side of the yard, the far edge of

day, the cherry trees respond. Their language

will turn red soon. The dull brown facades of some buildings,

their windows ablaze, devour the afternoon sun like

many-mouthed giants. Yellow bulldozers have gnawed

into the hillside. I’m little. I pet a tiny kitten that’s shorter

than the May grass. I hear the voices of people going into

and coming out of the house behind me. When they go in, the

cool darkness licks them, and when they come back out, they’re

covered by the dust of the sun. A row of lilacs separates

our yard from the street, separates our yard from the world. Only

some atomized voices and snippets of shadows are allowed

in. Everyone calls me by name and puts a hand

on my head. Here are some words I don’t know yet—

Anger, Fear, Hatred, Pain, Leaving. I don’t know the

spaces behind their sounds. I don’t know anything,

only this yard, the limitless reach of my eyes as they

size up the world. If I lie down on my back, I can see clouds. If I

breathe carefully, the clouds change. Now they are: an airplane,

a dog’s head, a horse, a sheep, hands bringing snow.

Now we all float together. It’s seven seas and nine mountains

from here to the first river and last valley. There’s no end

to the yard. No end to the world. An eternal flame or maybe

just one candle burns in the room of all hours, the intersection

of all days. It doesn’t matter. Pages of the future turn on the

inner side of the gold. Because I’m little,

I don’t know how to read them. Because I’m little, I can

crawl right up under the eyelid of Time. The door to the light is

wide open, upholstered and soft. It doesn’t whack anyone

or keep anyone out. I lie on my back and watch and breathe

silently. At any instant the yard will turn into a cloud. That way

it can last longer in the archive of the sky.

Tractor Drivers Are the Best Philosophers

Every house has its squirrel.

Light-colored houses have dark squirrels

with little white bellies. Dark-colored houses

have squirrels brown as foxes. When the dark

squirrels get angry, they drive the brown

squirrels out, which squeal as they tumble from

one bingo card onto the next. Every car has its own

squirrel. Sometimes every seat

in the car. And in some cases there are

two squirrels to a seat, holding

paws, because they’re afraid. Every

tent bears the trace of a squirrel

that caught scent of the pancakes, and

every dream has at least one imprint

of a squirrel paw on some distant star.

I knew a squirrel that once

swam the English Channel.

The squirrel said, “It wasn’t easy. I ran

out of acorns and sports drinks

before I even got halfway across.

The waves soaked my tail and I

was constantly being pulled underground.”

I once saw a squirrel that was bigger than the Eiffel

Tower. It caused traffic jams.

It didn’t live in a house. It didn’t go to

school. It had to sleep in the ocean.

It used the sky for its covers.

I read about a squirrel that had

plastic surgery so that others would call her “Babe.”

I heard of a squirrel that

behaved like a single mother.

Her former husband had been a tractor driver.

He ate a macrobiotic diet, bathed in the

fountain of youth and listened to Bach fugues.

Tractor drivers are the biggest philosophers, that’s

why they have the most squirrels of all. They

never get lost on transcendental highways

or in inaccessible music. In summer they sit

on druid stones, drinking beer in the

shade and pondering questions

like: What is the nature of squirrels?

When they hover in mid-air, they behave

like black angels that would like to become

squirrels. That’s when clouds of

sugar froth begin to fall most

intensively onto their fragile lives.

Yellow

(Suddenly, one spring)

I

The fire-gutted remains of quiet days

shine in a slight, pallid glow.

Well-rested light sets its

slow, lazy gestures before us.

Winter is no longer heard speaking

embittered words.

II

Every book has its season.

Russian books are for reading in March and April.

III

For years the old doctor lectured me

about flowers and decorative shrubs

that I recognized by their color.

He was dead and his words

emerged from a pale sfumato,

“Forsythias are blondes.”

If I stared at one for a long time in April

I could imagine it as a woman.

IV

The bare branches of the beeches sway

over our embarrassed shadows.

The clouds live hundreds of floors further up.

Any time now they’re going to move them here

and there will be storms again.

V

My style requires words and evening light.

My style requires alternating rituals

of clouds and an exhausted speed.

VI

The gentle devastation

left behind by the spring storm

slowly begins to heal over.

The day’s shining edge sinks toward memory.

The air loosens up like a dozing,

invisible veil.

VII

If we’re sad, we clasp our hands,

hide behind sunglasses

and let a

vague image of heaven fall onto us

like the shadow of a tree

that we walked past obliviously.

VIII

The mornings are fresh. A cool breeze brings air

tasting of sky. The branches carry the last

chattering remains of autumn’s leaves. Some narcissi

deposit their annoying scent in the kitchen. Crows caw

from a nearby trash heap. Blackbirds scratch through

some shallow ditches. A magpie turns all its attention

to some shiny object as it flashes in the grass. The

emerald neck of a pigeon glints in the sun. At the place where

its wings clasp onto its tail it has a pattern

resembling Kline’s Accent Grave.

IX

“I’m always nearby,” says the shifting shape,

“I don’t cast a shadow. Don’t breathe. Don’t dream. Don’t

have an address, except here, inside, in your bodies. You experience

me as a strange, almost flabby embrace that neither

holds tight nor lets go, but simply is.”

X

First Czesław Miłosz settled among the spirits.

Then the pope came in through Christ’s gate.

A good poet and a bad poet.

Which one is more deserving of life everlasting?

XI

An excerpt from “Lucky Coincidences”:

Summer stretched like a cat waking up.

The darkened hours of sunny days were

there to relax us and the river wrapped

around our bodies like a wintery glass, to take

our breath away for an instant and drive the blood

through the skin. Then we swam up to the surface, as though

swimming away from fate, surprised at the amount of

life that had suddenly collected inside us.

XII

The city approaches, bathed in a

yellow, misty languor.

The scorched scent of air follows it.

Looks for its remains in blood

filled with hesitation.

XIII

The narcissi hold firm in their vase.

The orchid has faded; immersed in

thought, it accumulates a new store of juices.

The bamboo feeds on water and light

and boldly grows toward the ceiling.

XIV

Spring gathers prismatic impressions and

various moods.

It promises something and almost delivers.

Then reconsiders and snatches it back.

XV

And now our lessons on impossible

homecomings may recommence.

The planet with its atmosphere and

unchanging map of rivers

waits at the far end of the courtyard.

Old friends with old faces

sit on the stone fence.

They look at you, as though you can sense

they’ve been talking about you wordlessly,

just with some good-natured, startled mimicry

woven into the language.

The lessons on impossible homecomings go on forever.

A Psalm—Magnolias in April Snow

Let’s bite through the chains trapping our words, father, let’s melt

the iceberg of silence that looms up between us,

I’m ready, I’ve turned off my cell phone,

locked the door, there’s nobody else here in my world.

Now my psalm will sing of my dreams,

you call them dreams, the sources of flourishing,

the water magnolias drink before they

open amid April snows, the evenings

that have burrowed into my skull,

long scarlet clouds flying over the earth,

you see them father, you see beyond them,

even as the cool feathers of night enfold

your outline standing there in the doorway.

No, these are one thing you can’t rank,

as you assign things their place in the schedule of fleeting days.

I can’t, father, I won’t try.

I have no intention of squandering endless hours

in the jaws of your offices, amongst all the sipping lips,

cheap perfumes, and brandy-swilling

sex deprivation of your business associates.

For me it’s about poetry, long wild lines of poetry

that gallop like horses through the traveler’s longing,

like cold, crystal clear water that I submerge in naked,

poetry that gives me air,

poetry that I can pound into the paper forever.

Poetry measuring time, my time, our time,

the only thing that sets milestones to our passing.

Now I’ll sing you a psalm about a world you’ll

never set foot in, about heaven and hell,

about ecstasies that consume me, about Icarus falling,

about the magical union, the divine connection that

jazz musicians feel when their instruments talk

to shadows, etching kaleidoscopic images

in the unknown and sweet-smelling night, the empty streets

as the last drunkards lurch home

and cats poke their heads out of trash bins.

And now my psalm will sing to you of Kafka, about how

he wrote a long letter to his father and never

summoned enough courage to send it.

No, you’ve never heard of Kafka,

even though you did subscribe to One Hundred Great Novels,

even though you did dust the bookshelves each weekend.

Too unstable a world for you,

too elusive.

My friends have told me about their

painful experiences with their own fathers,

I just wanted to beat him up, one of them said,

thank god he died, cancer,

cirrhosis of the liver, we all heaved a sigh of relief,

each of us ashamed to admit that we’d been

crying in secret.

And what about us, father,

we’ve been meeting for years, the way trains meet

and pass at specific locations, at precisely set times,

cool as steel, amid a burst of speed,

with their live cargo inside.

We’re stubborn, the two of us, stubborn.

Now it’s time, father, for you to hear my psalm,

a psalm that breaks free of these talons of darkness,

that sets fire to leaves on forest paths, that

descends like a bird onto hillsides, a psalm

whispered by fishes and stones, a psalm whispered

by men of sun and rain both.

I’m getting ready for war, father, for war,

and you know that I’m going,

you’re more afraid than I am,

yes, there will be bastions of habit destroyed,

let ivy conceal their ruins, let the princess sleep on.

There will be nails broken and skin furrowed

and there will be casualties, many motionless hours

breathing noiselessly amid four walls,

on bridges that lead over metaphors of eternity,

the only rations the dust of dreams, and

the sole refuge the diaphanous shape of some fantasy love

and there will be no reward of pieces of silver

and I won’t feel like Judas Iscariot

when he was bought to betray the one

he loved most of all,

and perhaps I’ll prevail, or perhaps be defeated,

but I’ll always be reminded of you

when I see some smooth shaven office worker

who’s never tried anything new,

who’s never broken a rule, who curses

at not finding a parking space,

who wrote his wife the dreariest love letters,

and you’ll be reminded of me, too,

when you’ll be drinking beer somewhere alone and

everything crumbles around you to bits and you say

for the first time in your life to hell with it all,

all that can wait,

and for the first time in your life you’ll sense

that there exists something else, something exceptional,

some crescent moon overhead and some moments of brilliance

that open us up like those magnolias

in my dream, magnolias opening in the April snow.

Locomotives

(A warmth that never goes dark)

A few months ago we visited the graveyard of old locomotives.

It was dusk and the day’s warmth was draining away with the light

which at that time of year is its synonym. And the darkness gently,

by fractions of an inch, drizzled down and accumulated, falling into the depths, the way

the abandoned edifices surrounding us, even amid that vanishing,

indistinct netherworld verging on blindness, were falling and showing clear

signs of age, which grew more evident with each passing year:

signs of hunching and being pressed to the earth.

We walked among those big, retired machines still connected

to some other time that had passed by, or that we had left in a hurry,

so we could move from one hour to the next, from day to night, from

life to death faster.

The darkness now opened its mouth wide to swallow the smooth lines of those

prehistoric iron beasts, now placidly grazing in the fast chilling air, still distinct

for the moment, but progressively darkening and sinking into the ever

darker and deeper sands of the night.

I love the smell of rusting iron, the smell of the factory floors,

the voice of the wind as it whips through them, its breath moving from one

space removed from the world into another connected with life,

without lingering in either for long. I love the drifts of dust and the

copper brown pollen of rust that covers the floor and window

sills, the obliterated traces of footsteps onto which human bodies

used to cast weightless shadows. I love the powerful wheels of these stunned

beasts, trapped on tracks that lead nowhere. If I encounter them,

it’s as though I’ve been sent home, but that home is no longer a house, it’s

an illuminated space that a child’s footsteps have measured countless times.

I knew more and dreamed more about locomotives than other kids, but I kept quiet.

Still, that wasn’t real knowledge. It was more like layers of images,

layers of sounds and silhouettes, a kind of spectral refraction of memory,

the refraction of the shape of it, not come to term, which I had no idea

still belonged to me.

When I was still a child I had my favorite books. I still have

them, even the oldest ones that didn’t wander off to distant

relatives and in their interiors, between the covers, still retain

the dense, stuffy, overripe smells of the crib. Among them is a hardback

Book of Trains with pictures. A book full of trains and train cars.

A book that said: grab your suitcases and get ready to travel like our

two young heroes who are about to see far-off lands from the train. A book

with pictures of steam locomotives, electric trains, dispatcher

stations, viaducts and train stations in big, bright capital cities

that had to be someplace on the far side of the mountains, beyond the quiet

and motionless world I lived in, the same place where the invisible

waves came from that got our big wooden radio receiver to

talk and perform the music I listened to as I lay like some

little castaway amid my huge bed that seemed to me as

vast and peaceful as the ocean just before it goes to sleep.

So much real life rose up from that paper, materializing

in the head and imagination of the child and becoming real

life, not like the artificial fire he could put his hand in

without feeling any heat or getting burned. I sailed on the

peaceful wind of that written, depicted world without borders or seawalls, but

the locomotives weren’t just drawings and letters that I didn’t yet know, they were

something else, too.

At that time we lived in a building at the edge of the workers’ development that was

separated from the road by a dense lilac bush whose fading scent

merged every year into the scent of the blooming acacias that grew on the far

side of the road. In old photos with jagged borders I’m usually

sitting on a blanket spread out on the grass, dressed lightly for

springtime, surrounded by playthings I still remember: a sheep

that had buttons for eyes, a plastic, green-trousered duck that quacked,

a little stuffed bear—my vigilant companions and allies in sleep.

On summer evenings as the sun lost its strength, the shadows lengthened and

the brown brick of the buildings in the workers’ development acquired its tinge of gold, father or grandfather would take me to the strip mine to look at the

train engines. The road we took in our adjustable pairs was straight, it led past

the foot of the buildings in the workers’ development, past the Maria Theresa mine, down past a labyrinth of gardens and barracks, past a fishpond surrounded with reeds

where carp with fat bellies would hover up from the mud to the surface to snap up some

chance bit of food, past the mine shaft and then uphill along the steep flanks of

Retje, from which the valley almost looked like a flat surface which at a

certain distance suddenly broke in the air, as though it had slipped and

lost the ground at its feet.

The strip mine was at the end of this trail, shoved to the far edge of a

child’s horizon, to the utmost limits of a child’s capacity. At the time this was

an area in its decline, dissolving in the faded aura of an era that was receding. It was another country, on the far side of language,

a lunar landscape of high

ramparts and dark fields of scree, a landscape riddled with puddles and reservoirs,

with thick clumps of sedge and swamps where in the dark frogs tirelessly croaked

their monotonous language of warm nights, where grass snakes zig-zagged their

way through the reeds, so slowly the water behind them failed to close, because

it hadn’t opened before them in the first place.

The strip mine was a wound, a gash on the skin of the earth that no yellowish, transparent lymph had filled in, but which emanated a smell that followed you

into your dreams and stayed with you year after year, no matter if you changed your

language and country, your name, even your life. The smell of coal. Most of all, though,

the strip mine was a kingdom of bulldozers and tracks, train cars and abandoned train engines

patiently absorbing the heat of the blazing sun

and stoically enduring the driving rain. These were no small, green, diesel

or other electrical mine engines, which reminded me of props from

some dreamlike, inaccessible amusement park behind a fence. These were the

huge, dark monoliths of steam engines.

Did I really ever get near those train engines, those affable ghosts

that ruled over that space? Did I ever climb up onto them? Touch their levers?

Look into their boilers? Behold the world from up there, protected by the all-powerful machine

built to carry me down the tracks as though through the air? Or did I just remain in the little

body of an observer, still bound to the earth, looking from a distance at those dark

monuments, for which those afternoons of gentle sunlight and lengthening shadows

seemed tailor made? I don’t know, because all the memories and the

hours, all the dead ends of time past began to mingle together, layer on top of each

other, sift through each other like the floors of a collapsing

building, rise up like the sea at high tide and flood the dry land which was the

only place from which you could see what had happened. Nothing is certain anymore.

Nothing is present.

It’s May. An unusually hot one. Forests stretching to infinity cover the

neighboring hills. The sky is smeared with a thick, frothy gray and has a lid

fixed on tight from below, keeping the stale, stuffy air trapped under its

weight. Again I walk down the old path as it continually changes, revealing a

landscape newborn. Cats look right and left before sneaking out of the bushes

and carefully crossing the gravel road. Now and then a blackbird perches on the bare branches

of the parched acacias and then, in a language transmitted along invisible wires, alerts others

of his species to the elongated shadow of this outsider. The strip mine has practically

become a plateau hovering in the air, a carpet of young grasses kept company by the

occasional ghosts of parched trees. Here and there the rusty skeleton of a bulldozer

kneels in a hollow. The scent of my dreams is shy, imperceptible,

completely outdone by the scent of the bushes and trees. In the green

cast of the darkening sky the frogs call for rain. All the magic I once knew

has turned into the afterlife of a city that the earth has devoured.

The locomotives have long since gone to pieces. In the end the same thing always

happens—dead industry is subsumed by living grasses.

I’ll be forty years old soon and will never become an engineer.

I’ll never drive trains, pursuing the fading light that accumulates

under the slanting roofs of the evenings. As many years ago

as I’ll be old, a poet died whom I’ve always loved. He said

that a poem has to be like an engine and wrote one titled “Overture

to a Dance of Locomotives.” His books are scattered all through my bookshelves.

The cover of one has a photo where he’s depicted against a background of

blossoming cherry trees. The poet is smiling slightly, looking somewhere into the distance.

Perhaps the photographer knew that he only began to use the word

death late in his life, and that’s why he always used it in settings

that promise new life over and over, a new endurance. On the book’s

cover, which came out shortly before he died, there is an image of mown wheat; perhaps

somebody already sensed something, sensed it would be harvest time soon.

In that book there’s a poem that speaks of a high bridge crossing the River Teja in Spain.

In the poem a shepherd with the help of huge sheep dogs is driving his flock of sheep toward town.

The whole flock—sheep, dogs and shepherd are covered with dust, as though they’ve been on the road

all day long and they’re only now approaching the town, at dusk. One trip is almost over for them, so