pH nevtralna za življenje in smrt

by Lidija Dimkovska

"Dimkovska pins readers to the wall with rapid-fire linguistic energy."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[Dimkovsaka has the] stunning capacity to transform the ridiculous into something poignant and utterly precise."—Boston Review

From the intersection of boundaries, Macedonian poet and novelist Lidija Dimkovska scrutinizes life's customary and trivial details to expose the consequences—both confusing and edifying—of living in an age of contradictory ethics. These poems are packed with unusual connections and surprising detail, and populated with family characters as well as Bruno Schultz, Laurie Anderson, and George Steiner. Bilingual presentation, with Macedonian en face.

From "Ideal Weight":

Our river can be seen only through a small basement window.
And nobody dies absolutely any more. The middle-class scrapes
the price tags off presents, decorates windows with laser stars, plays shadow theatre
with rubber gloves on. It makes faces at you as you cry:
"I exorcise zombies professionally! Be free again!"
and I know if you're too fat or too thin life and death are one and the same burden.
Only someone of ideal weight can carry the cross upright . . .

Poet and novelist Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Macedonia and she earned a doctoral degree in Romanian literature in Bucharest. She has published six books of poetry and one novel; her work has been translated into twenty languages. Dimkovska lives and teaches in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century

Unknown Binding

First published April 10, 2012

About the author

Poet and novelist from North Macedonia living in Slovenia. Born in 1971, Lidija writes in Macedonian. She has published seven books of poetry, three novels, one American diary and one collection of short stories which have been awarded and translated into 15 languages (English, German, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, French, Croatian, Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian and Latvian).

Lidija has participated at numerous international literary festivals (Princeton Poetry Festival, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Vilnius, Manchester, Chicago, Zagreb, Vilenica, Medana, Struga, Leipzig, Lido Adriano, Manchester, Kazan, Dresden, Taipei, Cork, Warsaw, Berlin, etc.) and was a writer-in-residence in London, Berlin, Iowa, Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Krems, Tirana, and Split.

Reviews

[Lauren]

• pH Neutral History By Lidija Dimkovska, translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid, 2012 by @copper_canyon_press

#ReadtheWorld21 📍North Macedonia

Quite a brilliant #poetry collection - themes of memory, identity, geography, death, religion, food...

Poems were often tinged with subversive and morbid themes (what can I say? I love the dark and sinister with a dash of blasphemy...)

Some poems felt like free association in the process of reading and then circled back to a larger theme in the end.

🌟 Kudos to the translation team for capturing some of that slyness and wit in their translation.

Here's a snippet of one that caught my attention (for obvious reasons):

From DIFFERENCE

Between birth and death life has no guarantee,
The only service station being the one still within ourselves.
...
...
No matter which hand I cross myself with,
The four sides of the world
miss the heart.
I’ll protect it with a print on my t-shirt
of Che Guevara’s head, or religious messages:
Taoism: Shit happens.
Buddhism: It’s only an illusion of shit happening.
Islam: If shit happens, it is the will of Allah.
Jehovah’s Witnesses: Knock, knock: shit happens.
Christianity: Love your shit as yourself.
 
Dimkovska has a few other works available in translation, including a novel A SPARE LIFE, and another poetry collection. Want to get my paws on those 👐

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantastic, fantastical poems; I enjoyed their energetic, fast-paced inventiveness throughout, though I couldn't really make head or tail of many of them.

They can be very bleak--although I felt like I understood best, actually, the poems in the first section, Poems About Life and Death, which I took to be mostly about death. Here's the brutal but characteristically imaginative opening of "National Soul":

Since my brother hanged himself with the telephone wire
I can talk to him for hours on the phone.

And there is also caustic commentary, I think, on culture and politics. This is the ending of "Ideal Weight":

And nobody dies absolutely anymore. The middle class scrapes
the price tags off presents, decorates windows with laser stars, plays shadow theater
with rubber gloves on. It makes faces at you as you cry:
"I exorcise zombies professionally! Be free again!"
and I know if you're too fat or thin life and death are one and the same burden.
Only someone of ideal weight can carry the cross upright.

[Nia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zgodovina so karaoke: ponavlja tisto česar se je življenje naučilo iz knjig.

[tamarra kovačević · Rating 4 out of 5]

¨Mi pa nismo begunci samo zato, ker bežimo, ampak tudi zato, da bi bežali.¨

Knjiga je bila na razstavni polički v knjižnici Otona Župančiča. Hvala za odličen bralni predlog.

[World Literature Today]

"The latest selection of poetry in English of the prominent Macedonian poet Lidija Dimkovska (b. 1971) points out the ironic-parodic optics with the title itself, which undermines dominant topoi, stereotypes, and ideological patterns that constitute human experience and the role of women in modern civilization as well as the Balkans and Eastern Europe." - Bojana Stojanović Pantović, University of Novi Sad

This book was reviewed in the July 2013 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/1aUeAzX

[Queer · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is so much here to love. The work entices with unexpected word combinations, lines that tease and relatable scenarios. Sometimes I felt like I was watching a movie the language was so evocative. Other times I definitely felt like I was in the middle of a word puzzle.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense, alienating, haunting, political, fierce, morbid in a good way, this is a great start to my attempt to read the finalists for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in poetry!