These poems by Aleš Šteger, in Brian Henry’s translation, come from a longer sequence, in which Šteger manifests our inattention to language by calmly and deliberately unpacking the ontology of ordinary words. For Šteger, different words might have different ontologies, and he attends to the particular ways such words are situated within linguistic routines and commonplaces that here expand to produce a shared relation to history and a picture of social life. Ontology becomes poetry, and poetry is figured as origami: a kind of manual labour abetted by the hand of time and the things time makes unimaginable or mysterious. “The word folds” represents an arbitrary beginning, a history so imprecise it cannot be distinguished from legend and myth, except that what it singles out may be at once general and personal. To say “Once, there were…” is human, the work of an indifferent memory as well as an indifferent language. But the word near documents not only the desire for language to meet with the world, but the feeling of intimacy that lingers in other people’s words, including Šteger’s own. – The Editors and the Poetry Staff
Aleš Šteger
Translated by Brian Henry
The word near
The word NEAR.
A word that wants
To expand the body.
To embrace until
Annihilation.
A word that wants
To be near,
To be more,
To be where
A word gives up.
Someone hears
Someone else gasp
In his name,
Rips him
From the dictionary.
Someone smells
Someone else’s fear
In their hair.
He burns grass.
Someone tastes lamentation
With his fingernails.
Drools on an envelope.
The word NEAR.
A word that wants
From someone
Who is someone
To be,
To be
More and more a word
That cannot
Fall asleep
In any other
Words,
A word
That cannot
Be
Nobody.
The word folds
The word FOLDS
An image
Over an image.
Meaning
Doesn’t increase.
Only the terror
Of coincidences
Is assessable enough
And the edges
More clearly
Marked
By paradoxes.
Another today
Folds itself
Into the word ONCE
And into the word
That does not see.
Concealment
Is an axiom.
Masters of origami
Are known
To hide
Between their own
Fingers
Without stopping
Their time-consuming
Task.
Like the hands
Fold
Paper,
Time
Folds
Words.
Little birds, little ships,
Hats made from
Old magazines
Are massacres,
Epidemics.
A cataclysm folded over
A motorcyclysm.
A surreal
Cynicism?
Image over
Image.
Memory
Folds you
Into the indifferent
Word ONCE
And the word
That is not visible.
October 2019