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    The Master of Insomnia: Selected Poems
    The Master of Insomnia: Selected Poems
    The Master of Insomnia: Selected Poems
    Ebook147 pages1 hour

    The Master of Insomnia: Selected Poems

    By Boris A. Novak

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    About this ebook

    A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, The Master of Insomnia is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Aleš Debeljak has written: "The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the "big picture" will inevitably overlook the essential . . . [Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDalkey Archive Press
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781564788191
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      Book preview

      The Master of Insomnia - Boris A. Novak

      The Master of Insomnia

      Selected Poems

      Boris A. Novak

      With an Introduction by Aleš Debeljak

      Translated by

      Michael Biggins, Mia Dintinjana,

      Evald Flisar, Richard Jackson,

      Erica Johnson Debeljak, Boris A. Novak,

      Lili Potpara, Andrew Wachtel,

      and Irena Zorko

      CONTENTS

      Cover

      Title Page

      OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S

      SLOVENIAN LITERATURE SERIES

      INTRODUCTION

      THE GARDENER OF SILENCE (1973–75)

      A handkerchief

      Every evening

      Light

      Shadows

      No wind

      Dawn

      Tide

      No land

      Every sail

      The bank

      The circle

      An echo

      A monument

      A child

      A poem

      A flower

      A tree

      Touch

      Snow

      These lines

      A poet

      STILL LIFE WITH VERSES (1977)

      Still Life with Verses

      A Dream is Snowing

      Poem

      Uni-verse

      THE DAUGHTER OF MEMORY (1981)

      The Wings of Time: IV. Winter

      CORONATION (1984):

      (wreath of sonnets)

      1–15

      Sonnet of Sonnets

      THE FORMS OF THE WORLD (1991):

      (A Textbook of Poetic Forms)

      Night Elegy

      CATACLYSM (1991)

      The Tower

      Absence

      Vertigo

      The First Poem

      Southeast of Memory

      THE MASTER OF INSOMNIA (1995)

      Past and Present

      Black Hole

      Brothers

      Springtime

      Keeping Awake

      Exile

      Letter

      Father

      Intérieur

      Rapid Disintegration

      ALBA (1999)

      Alba

      Borders

      Your Little Bottles

      Your Scent

      Orpheus and Eurydice, Gare du Nord

      ECHO (2000)

      Living Shadow

      Horse, Rider, Lake

      Confession

      Perpendicular Land

      GLOWING (2003)

      Discovering the Everyday

      Our Supper

      Our One House

      RITUALS OF FAREWELL (2005)

      Birthday

      Timelessness

      Give Us Each Day Our Daily Death

      Death in the Feet

      From Beginning to End

      Soul

      The Hairclip

      Magic Suitcase

      Intimate Things

      Decisions: 11

      My Doppelganger

      To the Poet I Was

      LPM: LITTLE PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY (2007)

      My Grandfather Anton Novak, Tausendkünstler

      Turtles

      The Secret of Life

      Ragology (The Study of Rags)

      One Poem about Three People and Two Coats

      Butterflies

      The Image of a Partisan

      The First and Last Home

      Jealous Pajamas

      FRAGMENTS FROM THE EPOS (2009–12)

      Tidying up after the Dead

      A Final Account

      About the Author

      Slovenian Literature Series

      Copyright

      OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S

      SLOVENIAN LITERATURE SERIES

      Minuet for Guitar

      Vitomil Zupan

      Necropolis

      Boris Pahor

      The Succubus

      Vlado Žabot

      You Do Understand

      Andrej Blatnik

      The Galley Slave

      Drago Jančar

      INTRODUCTION

      THE SLEEPLESSNESS AND POETRY OF WITNESS

      ALEŠ DEBELJAK

      A distinct image, a fragment of memory: I stand in the foyer of the splendidly dilapidated Kazina Palace in the center of Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. The palace houses the offices of the fortnightly student publication Tribuna, of which I was the editor in the early 1980s. The newspaper was one of the few independent intellectual forums in Slovenia.

      But wait, hold your horses! What is Slovenia?

      Slovenia was in the 1980s one of the six constituent republics of what was a larger federal state, Yugoslavia. Except for a few political experts, academics, and adventuresome German, Italian, and British tourists, nobody in the West really knew then what Slovenia was or what its culture was like. In the fog of the Cold War, it was only a marginal part of East European terra incognita, but today the country is an independent nation-state and a member of the European Union. Thus, a brief outline of the vagaries of Slovenian collective existence is perhaps in order.

      In July 1991, Slovenia made the headlines all over the Western world. Its mercifully brief Ten-Day War, together with the larger convulsions of the Yugoslav breakup, brought about a major change on the map of Europe. Riding on the heels of the disintegrated Soviet Union, the end of the communist ancien régime, and German unification, Slovenia held a public referendum, rooted in the natural right to self-determination, which formed the legal foundation for its seeking independence from the moribund Yugoslav Federation. For the first time in the history of this tenacious Southern Slavic people, Slovenians were free to live in a state of their own. This event had been hoped for and, against all odds, anticipated by many Slovenian writers for years.

      ROMANTIC FOUNDATIONS

      As in other Central and East European countries, writers in Slovenia were traditionally invested with the obligation and the attendant risk to act as the keepers of the national flame, guardians of our moral, social, and spiritual values. Specifically, it was the language itself that represented our most cherished national treasure. Why? Because Slovenians lacked full-fledged political, economic, or social institutions that would have helped maintain a sense of national unity. Naturally, this sense tends to be better developed in countries that have—at least historically—attained some form of statehood or another. Slovenians have been less fortunate. They’ve lived under royalist, fascist, and communist regimes, respectively, as they failed to reach a goal to which all European regions aspired: statehood.

      But the Slovenian people, its language, and its books were around long before the independent Republic of Slovenia was established. Squeezed in between the Germanic, Italian, and Hungarian cultures, and ruled by often predatory political regimes, the Slovenian language was more or less the only buffer against the threat of collective obliteration. Small wonder that today six thousand books are published annually for and by a tiny population of two million, an industry in which elite poetry collections routinely come out in editions of five hundred, while popular books of verse may be published in editions of up to three thousand.

      The forests that cover more than fifty percent of Slovenia continue to provide raw material for printers, just as the contradictions of its collective life continue to provide material for its literary achievements.

      These achievements arise out of processes long underway. The

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