A Difficult Spring, Boris Pahor

(Litterae Slovenicae 2-3, 2009, 124-125)

A Difficult Spring (Spopad s pomladjo) is the second of Boris Pahor’s three literary works about the experience of Triestine Slovenians in wartime Europe. The novel tells the story of the release of a concentration camp prisoner after World War Two. Following his release, he is diagnosed with tuberculosis and stays in a French sanatorium where he falls in love with a trite and pretty young nurse whose capriciousness strikes him as a betrayal of the camps and all who died there, and yet also as the very source of life.

Barren Harvest, Dane Zajc

(White Pine Press, 2004)

Barren Harvest is the first book length collection of poetry by Dane Zajc, one of Slovenia’s most important poets, available in English.  The selection spans some forty years of disturbing, incantory, and powerful work by this great Slovenian poet.  “The translator, Erica Johnson Debeljak, captures the repetition of syntax and imagery in these translations to help preserve the rhythmic qualities of the original Slovene,” says reviewer Brigit Bates in the November 17, 2004 issue of Verse Magazine.

Anton’s Circus, Peter Svetina

(Vodnikova Založba, 2008)

Anton’s Circus is an award-winning title from Forget Me Nots, a bilingual series of Slovenian children’s literature. The series includes other marvelously illustrated titles by the best Slovenian authors of children’s books: Desa Muck, Andrej Rozman, and Evald Flissar among others. All the books are translated by Erica Johnson Debeljak.

Blind Spot of Time, Milan Dekleva

(Litterae Slovenicae I/2007/XLV/110)

Blind Spot of Time is a bilingual selection of poetry by the Slovenian poet Milan Dekleva.  Milan Dekleva, one of the leading contemporary poets in Slovenia, is both playful and metaphysical. An accomplished jazz pianist, Dekleva brings the sparks of improvisation into his poetics of anxious modernism.  Blind Spot of time is his first book length collection in the English language.