Barren Harvest: Selected Poems

by Dane Zajc, Erica Johnson-Debeljak (Translator), Aleš Debeljak (Editor)

Zajc, born in 1929, is one of Central Europe’s most important poets and a founding father of post-World War II modernism. This is the first comprehensive volume of his work to appear in English and presents the entire creative arch of Zajc’s vision from early poems to his mature work. Having been incarcerated in communist jails, Zajc’s political resistance to the dictatorial regime gives his work an urgency that propels the reader into a vertigo of sinister and evil. His poems speak of the profound solitude that is the destiny of contemporary man, using the vocabulary of the natural world and of bodily sensations to illuminate both the mortal and lethal aspects of the human condition.

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Dane Zajc se je kot eden najpomembnejših slovenskih književnikov druge polovice 20. stoletja uveljavil z ostrino skoncentrirane misli in presenetljivo svežino izraza. Njegovo ustvarjanje obsega poezijo in dramatiko (t.i. poetična drama), njegovi eseji in intervjuji sodijo v vrh slovenske literarne esejistike. Bil je tudi tudi pomemben ustvarjalec otroške in mladinske književnosti. V zadnjem desetletju je aktivno sodeloval z igralcem in glasbenikom Janezom Škofom, nastopila sta na številnih odrih v Sloveniji in v tujini. Umrl je 20. oktobra 2005 za posledicami raka.

Reviews

[SARDON · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a time when poets often drop names and dates of current events to cover their lack of innate poetic power beneath the veil of "social relevance," reading Dane Zajc is a great pleasure; especially when you consider that, unlike certain U.S. poets whose so-called radical politics rarely encounter an immediate threat, he lost family members and experienced much personal hardship beneath the Slovenian communist regime.

Although I rolled my eyes at the back cover's description of Zajc's poetry as incantatory, the only other poet I've found to have an equally natural sense of rhythm is Lorca. But unlike the Spanish poet's strong surrealist inclinations, he takes the expressionist route by often adhering to concrete imagery transmuted through the lens of subjectivity. For instance, in the title poem, the "barren harvest" refers both to the skull of a young wartime victim--the poet's brother--and the trail of pointless destruction left in the wake of war. Quite miraculously, he avoids sentimentality in addressing such a personal experience and also manages to subtly convey layers of meaning in lucidly poignant poetry. I believe that, when the merely rhetorical works of trendy, politically biased poets fade into a deserving obscurity, "Barren Harvest" will stand shoulder to shoulder with poems such as F.T. Prince's "Soldiers Bathing" and nearly anything by Wilfred Owen.

Thankfully, however, Zajc's poetic mind was far too teeming to be mired solely in the dull redundancies of war. He addresses the entanglements of sensuality and austerity--carnal fullness and spiritual emptiness--in this collection's longest poem, "Gothic Windows." His poem, "The Last Side of the Mountain," suggests a traveler's double-journey toward, perhaps, the mystery of the afterlife when "a swirling voiceless gravity/blossoms the other face of the mountain/with open blade-like petals." By rendering his imagery without explicit denotation, many of his other poems have the same heft of fables and myths as found in the subtly spiritual undercurrents of Georg Trakl's darkly autumnal landscapes (an earlier expressionist who wrote also during regional warfare).

What I've personally found to be the most powerful aspect of Zajc's is his use of second-person perspective; it is neither distracting nor intrusive, but can be effectively unsettling in how closely the reader may find the words to be those which he or she had never yet dared to speak. He seems to have embraced second-person perspective because it most intensely conveys the paradox at the center of his poetry: the communication of solitude in a world whose expansion increasingly isolates the individual. "Rain" is the finest of these poems; here's an excerpt: "Rain exists for itself. It doesn't fall through your/thoughts because of you./Locomotives pass through you during the long nights./ They beckon to you memory, pulling it into the wide/ expanses that you don't like to visit."

Another powerful moment, here more fixated on the inadequacy of language before our deepest desires, comes from the closing lines of "Eyes": "Bulls rush across your mouth./A hand rises up from the murmur of words/cast off on the road and wipes out her eyes./And you are defeated./And your mouth is crushed/like grass on the road after the herd has passed."

Often, lovers of language may seek for the extravagant and unexpected figure of speech, but Zajc extracts more potency and poignancy from common, natural images than some poets do from their most prodigal flights of fancy.

This collection is a perfect discovery for American readers who are curious to see how well the tradition of expressionism has continued, flourished and even transcended oppressive, war-torn environments; it is also a perfect--though belated--rebuttal to that fool of a sociologist who claimed that poetry after the Holocaust would be a barbaric impossibility.

[John Hyland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just picked this up during my coffee break at a little bookstore in South Buffalo. It was on the $1 rack, and I figured, heck, can't go wrong.