Srečko Kosovel
(Translated from .Slovenian by Ana Jelnikar & Barbara Siegel Carlson)
STREET LAMP
Why be human if being human
is so difficult? Become the lamp
by the roadside that quietly sheds
its light on man.
Be as it is, for as it is
he will always have a human face.
Be good to him, this man,
and impartial like a lamp
that quietly illuminates the faces
of drunkards, vagabonds, and students
along the solitary road.
Be a lamp
if you can’t be human,
for being human is difficult.
A human has just two hands
but he should help thousands.
So be a lamp by the roadside
shining on a thousand happy faces,
shining for the lonely, the aimless.
Be a lamp with a single light,
man in a magic square
signaling with a green arm.
Be a lamp, a lamp,
a lamp.
**
BREAD
Room 24. Five beds in the room, five white beds. In the
windows—darkness. Outside a lone lamp shines on the deserted
street. For whom? Why?
Perhaps a wayfarer will turn and wonder: Where, how?
But why tell you this. Five of us in the room. Five students.
A young, dark Bosnian—his eyes looking out toward another life—
reading Tagore. Two Slovenians bent over mechanical drawings
on the table, their hair falling across tense, driven faces.
Five lives, and all drawing light from the same lamp bent low
over the table, a lamp with a green shade.
Quiet. Only the scratching of pens and the rustle of paper.
It’s eleven o’clock. Eleven for me looking at Hodler’s “Spring,”
eleven for the young Bosnian reading Tagore, then looking away
as though he were sitting by the white shores of the Ganges.
Eleven for him studying, and eleven for the two of them drawing.
One thought, one dissonance: Bread.
“I’m hungry.”
All the worlds crushed. Faces crumpled. Straight lines gone
crooked and mathematical proofs mere riddles. Tagore hushed,
spring stopped.
A new mystery appeared: Bread.
“Bread.”
I turned to the desolate street where the light burned like
a thought trembling in the winter cold.
Then I saw a man walking down that desolate street. He
put out the light, for it was already eleven. A keeper and
an extinguisher of light. His mind far from the pilgrim.
**
IN GREEN INDIA
In green India among quiet
trees that bend over blue water
lives Tagore.
Time there is spellbound, a cerulean circle,
the clock tells neither month nor year,
but ripples in silence
as if from invisible springs
over ridges of temples and hills of trees.
There nobody’s dying, nobody’s saying
goodbye—life is like eternity, caught in a tree…
********
Srečko Kosovel (1904-1926) is one of Slovenia’s most exciting poets of the first half of the twentieth century. Translated into a number of European languages, he is today considered one of Central Europe’s major avant-garde voices. In his prematurely cut-off short life, Kosovel managed to produce a vast body of diverse work, encompassing over a thousand poems, hundreds of pages of essays, prose pieces and notes that continue to engage both readers and scholars alike. The most oft-cited poet and thinker in his collected works is Rabindranath Tagore. A major intellectual influence that propelled the young poet in search of answers to some of the most pressing issues of the day, such as imperialism and nationalism, Tagore also inspired hope. Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel (tr. by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) is the first U.S. edition of his work.
Ana Jelnikar is a literary translator and scholar, currently working at the Research Institute of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. As well as the translator of nine collections of Slovene poetry into English, she is the author of Universalist Hopes in India and Europe: The Worlds of Rabindranath Tagore and Srečko Kosovel (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of two books of poetry Once in Every Language (2017) and Fire Road (2013). She is co-translator (with Ana Jelnikar) of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel (2010) and Open (2018) as well as a co-editor of A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives (2017). A 3rd poetry collection What Drifted Here is forthcoming from Word Tech in 2022.
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