Borders
Orpheus and Eurydice, Gare du Nord
ECHO (2000)
GLOWING (2003)
RITUALS OF FAREWELL (2005)
Give Us Each Day Our Daily Death
LPM: LITTLE PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY (2007)
My Grandfather Anton Novak, Tausendkünstler
One Poem about Three People and Two Coats
FRAGMENTS FROM THE EPOS (2009–12)
About the Author
Slovenian Literature Series
Copyright
OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S SLOVENIAN LITERATURE SERIES
Minuet for Guitar
Vitomil Zupan
Necropolis
Boris Pahor
The Succubus
Vlado Žabot
You Do Understand
Andrej Blatnik
The Galley Slave
Drago Jančar
THE SLEEPLESSNESS AND POETRY OF WITNESS
ALEŠ DEBELJAK
A distinct image, a fragment of memory: I stand in the foyer of the splendidly dilapidated Kazina Palace in the center of Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. The palace houses the offices of the fortnightly student publication Tribuna, of which I was the editor in the early 1980s. The newspaper was one of the few independent intellectual forums in Slovenia.
But wait, hold your horses! What is Slovenia?
Slovenia was in the 1980s one of the six constituent republics of what was a larger federal state, Yugoslavia. Except for a few political experts, academics, and adventuresome German, Italian, and British tourists, nobody in the West really knew then what Slovenia was or what its culture was like. In the fog of the Cold War, it was only a marginal part of East European terra incognita, but today the country is an independent nation-state and a member of the European Union. Thus, a brief outline of the vagaries of Slovenian collective existence is perhaps in order.
In July 1991, Slovenia made the headlines all over the Western world. Its mercifully brief “Ten-Day War,” together with the larger convulsions of the Yugoslav breakup, brought about a major change on the map of Europe. Riding on the heels of the disintegrated Soviet Union, the end of the communist ancien régime, and German unification, Slovenia held a public referendum, rooted in the natural right to self-determination, which formed the legal foundation for its seeking independence from the moribund Yugoslav Federation. For the first time in the history of this tenacious Southern Slavic people, Slovenians were free to live in a state of their own. This event had been hoped for and, against all odds, anticipated by many Slovenian writers for years.
ROMANTIC FOUNDATIONS
