Andes

by Tomaž Šalamun, Jeffrey Young (Contributor), Katarina Vladimirov Young (Contributor)

Poetry. The penultimate work from renowned Slovenian poet Toma Salamun, ANDES was written less than three years before his death in 2014. Together, the poems of ANDES are an exceptional and unusual journey that confronts both life and death across diverse continents, peoples, cities, languages, and histories. In his eulogy for Salamun, the Slovene poet Miklav Komelj said: " Salamun achieved this highest level, where the real question regarding his poetry isn't what someone thinks of it, or if someone likes it or not, but solely, if we are able to endure it or not." Like life and the human condition itself, these poems are at times challenging but also absurd, celebratory, and ecstatic and completely worth it."

Genres: Poetry

133 pages, Hardcover

Published October 30, 2016

About the author

Tomaž Šalamun was a Slovenian poet, who has had books translated into most of the European languages. He lived in Ljubljana and occasionally teaches in the USA. His recent books in English are The Book for My Brother, Row, and Woods and Chalices.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tomaž Šalamun's music is only hinted at in Jeffrey and Katarina Vladimirov Young's translation, which seems, as the translator's note says, largely literal. This does produce a haunting strangeness that seeming fitting for a work in which the poet's own death looms as the prime subtext. That said, this strangeness does not always seem as developed as one would like or as some of the poems I have read by Šalamun in the past. The Youngs and Bad Ocean, however, still deserve a lot of credit for making sure Šalamun is available in English and some the richness of Slovenian verse is rendered much easier for us to sample.

[Quoth the Robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Lust is lust."

Tomaž Šalamun's penultimate collection, Andes, centers itself on his understandings of life and how we move with it incongruently. The lines that stood out to me the most in this collection felt animal or instinctual, where I knew the feeling Šalamun was creating with grosteque preciseness. While there were some lines that stuck themselves into me like a rock, largely, I felt outside of this collection. Šalamun gives a pillow to the reader and then unnaturally, swipes the pillow away.

"why do you go / so far? Don't you think you go / too far?"

This constant tossing motion never allowed me to feel this collection. I also want to note that I am not familiar with Slovenian writing and this was my first experience reading Slovenian work. Due to this, I'm aware that this maybe the style of Slovenian poetry, and if so, I recognize my need to open myself further to this art.

[M- S__ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Typical of most poetry in translation, you definitely get the feeling that you're missing important pieces of information in this collection. There are some interesting thoughts on death and some interesting imagery surrounding it, particularly of a laughing corpse under a neon light. But many of these poems just don't seem to say much at all. Along with the throughline of death and mortality, there were a lot of poems that referenced animals to no real end. They just kind of felt like half thought out ideas. I'd definitely like to read more of Salamun to see if the interesting bits of this collection fit into some larger theme in his work though.

And mad props to Black Ocean for consistently putting out this kind of interesting work we might not have access to otherwise.