Smugglers

by Aleš Debeljak, Brian Henry (Translation)

The poems in Smugglers move through rapid historical shifts and meditations on personal experience, exploring the depths and limits of comprehension through the people and geography of the Balkans. Ultimately, Aleš Debeljak's urban imagination creates a mosaic—intimate and historical—of a vanished people and their country. Every poem in Smugglers is sixteen lines long—four quatrains, a common form for Debeljak. This structural regularity is reinforced by a commitment to visual balance, with each poem working as a kind of grid into which the poet pours memories and associative riffs. From "Bookstore": At least you are blessed. Winter's here. In darkness, awake
since yesterday, I came to browse again through the titles of old
books, wobbly skyscrapers, writers of my youth and stiffened honey.
No opening hours on the door, a minor poet with no woman sits behind files in the front. I know him from when
we all shouted in one loyal voice, collected works on sale
for a handful of cents, read the holy Kapital
like zealots. Well, not exactly all. Some of us took another road . . . Aleš Debeljak 's books have appeared in English, Japanese, German, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, Slovak, Finnish, Lithuanian, and Italian translations. He teaches in the department of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. Brian Henry is the author of ten books of poetry and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award. He teaches at University of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Aleš Debeljak was a Slovenian cultural critic, poet, and essayist.

He graduated from comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana in 1985.

Aleš continued his studies in the United States, obtaining a PhD in sociology of culture at Syracuse University in 1989. He was later a Senior Fulbright fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He also worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies Collegium Budapest, the Civitella Ranieri Center and the Bogliasco Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanitites.

During the Slovenian Spring (1988–1992), Debeljak actively participated in the democratization process in Slovenia. He was a professor of cultural studies at the Faculty for Social Studies of the University of Ljubljana.

He was married to the American columnist and translator Erica Johnson Debeljak. They had three children and lived in Ljubljana.

Reviews

[World Literature Today]

"Slovenian poet Aleš Debeljak’s new bilingual volume, Smugglers, contains five cycles and four nonrhymed quatrains. Each of the individual poems pulses with emotional intensity inspired by various streets and squares of the poet’s hometown of Ljubljana—its bars, cinemas, or cemeteries—with dedications to close friends and writers from the former Yugoslavia. Although at first glance it may not seem so, this is perhaps one of Debeljak’s most intimate and exciting collections. The picturesque architecture of Ljubljana evokes the timeless beauty of baroque art and the poet’s attachment to it." - Bojana Stojanović Pantović

This book was reviewed in the January 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly these were pretty damn good. He manages to do both optimism and pessimism in ways that feel new and profound.

[Tobija · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pseudo-sonnets, written in four four-lined stanzas, more coherent in content than earlier author’s (collections of) poems. They are dedicated to some formative localities in author’s native city of Ljubljana and sometimes also to the individuals, who were close to him in the past.