Terra Incognita Series – serie

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Slovenia emerged from the former Yugoslavia in 1991 following a brief skirmish that prefigured the Balkan conflicts that persist to this day. Part of one empire or another for centuries, Slovenia was denied a cultural identity of its own. Its writers, however, insisted on writing in their native tongue, thus keeping Slovenian culture alive in the written word. The confused, confusing questions of Europe, ethnicity, empire, and autonomy are often only backdrop to what may of these writers have sought to foreground, namely, an attention to private life and its attendant sorrows and joy. In their work Slovenian authors still insist upon fidelity to a personal dialogue that, far from delaying these tragedies, in fact redeems them. Such poignant, reverent pleas for intimacy amid destruction may be the hallmark of most engaging writing in Central Europe, from which Slovenia is a crucial, distinctive voice.

Listed in Harold Bloom's 'The Western Canon', Jozsef is a major and highly-influential voice in 20th Century Hungarian poetry. This left-wing, schizophrenic poet, who published six books during his brief career, committed suicide at the age of thirty-two by throwing himself under a train. "Everything is old here. The ancient storm / leans on lightning's crooked shoulder / and whistles at the thorn-whiskered rose. / They hobble on bad feet" ('Everything Is Old').

"To the pantheon of East European poets-Zagajewski, Szymborska, Herbert, Holub -- we must now add Martinaitis. 'K.B.,' the poet's common-man alter ego, has one foot in the miseries and fears of the post-Soviet era, one in the usual turmoils of the human self. In Laima Vince's wonderful translation, this poetry is sharp, comic, salty, yet at the same time overflowing with compassion and tenderness." - Alicia Suskin Ostriker