Interview by David Wojahn

David Wojahn

Tomaž Šalamun was a hugely prolific poet, publishing over fifty books in his native Slovenia. There are several other selections of his work available in English, but your Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems 1964-2014 is the first career-spanning collection. What factors did you consider in making a representative selection of such a massive body of work? He was also a very eclectic and protean poet, who worked in a number of styles, something which must have further contributed to the challenge. 

Brian Henry

It was an intensive process. From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to include at least one poem from every one of his Slovenian books, for the sake of being comprehensive and also because his previous volume of selected poems (The Four Questions of Melancholy, published in 1997) represents only half of his body of work—it stops with his twenty-sixth book, Ambergris. But including at least one poem from all fifty-two of his books also meant that I had to limit how many poems I could include from a single book. So I decided to limit myself to a maximum of ten poems from each book. There are 240 poems in Kiss the Eyes of Peace, so each of his books is represented by an average of four to five poems. But I translated way more than 240 poems. In the end, I translated around eight hundred, which sounds like a lot until you consider that Šalamun published over four thousand poems. 

My selection process had multiple stages. The first stage was reading all of his books in English and making a list of poems that I wanted to retranslate. There were some poems that obviously needed to be included—poems like “Jonah,” “Who’s Who,” “History,” and “Folk Song”—but I also tried to identify poems that might benefit from being retranslated. Then I went through all fifty-two of his Slovenian books and made provisional translations of every poem—basically, very rough drafts. Deciding which poems to translate fully was the next stage of the selection process. Then I went through all of my translations and gradually narrowed the selection. I ended up cutting a lot of poems that I love. 

I also wanted to represent the full range of Šalamun’s poetic style—there are quite a few poems in Kiss the Eyes of Peace that stand out from all of his other poems that have appeared in his English books, which I hope broadens American readers’ sense of the scope of his work. There were also some overtly personal and overtly political poems that hadn’t appeared in English before, and I wanted to incorporate those into the portrait of Šalamun created by the book. About one hundred of the poems in the book haven’t appeared in any of his previous books in English.

David Wojahn

How would you describe Šalamun’s work to a reader unfamiliar with his poetry? Whenever I try to characterize it for another writer or for my students, adjectives pretty much fail me: his writing had such energy, and he possessed such a genius for startling metaphors, but such efforts at trying to pin his method down don’t do his writing the proper justice.

Brian Henry

I agree, it’s really difficult to describe his work—in part because any description of such a prolific poet’s work is bound to distort it and omit a significant portion of it. For example, he’s routinely described as an “avant-garde” poet, which is true in many ways, but not particularly illuminating or helpful. Some of his best poems are quite straightforward, whether they’re autobiographical, narrative, or descriptive. But if I had to choose one word to describe his poetry, I’d use “destabilizing.” His poetics consists of destabilizing syntax, logic, poetic form, perspective, sense of self, conventional notions of time and space . . . but he’s always present in his poems, at the center of the circle. 

David Wojahn

Who were the poets Šalamun drew inspiration from? You can hear his debt to the French and Spanish surrealists in some of his poems. And he had connections with the New York School. But he also wrote poems in strict forms, particularly sonnets. Who were the models he was most influenced by, and how did he adapt and personalize their methods?

Brian Henry

Definitely the surrealists and John Ashbery (especially Three Poems) and Frank O’Hara. In the early 1970s, he was also drawn to language poetry and second-generation New York School poets, especially Ted Berrigan and Bob Perelman. But early on, he was deeply influenced by Rumi, Blake, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Russian poets like Khlebnikov and Mandelstam, and the Yugoslav poets Vasko Popa, Edvard Kocbek, and Dane Zajc. Interestingly, he was reading these poets in different languages. For example, he read Eliot in Slovenian, but he read Williams in Italian. And he also read poets in Croatian and Serbian. I think this contributes to the polylingualism of his poetry: he wrote in Slovenian, of course, but his poems also include words, phrases, and passages in Croatian, English, French, German, Latin, Italian, and Spanish. 

Šalamun’s approach to the sonnet fascinates me. He didn’t write traditional sonnets (they don’t rhyme or scan, and there’s no consistency in syllabics). But he was clearly drawn to the lyric space of the sonnet, whether it was a fourteen-line block of text, three quatrains and a couplet, two quatrains and two tercets, or seven couplets. I think there was something about the possibilities and constraints of those fourteen lines that attracted him. He wrote hundreds of them over fifty years.

David Wojahn

Kiss the Eyes of Peace selects work from a poetic career that spanned five decades. How do you think Šalamun’s work evolved over that period? I’m especially interested in hearing how you think his late poems differed from the writing of his early career.

Brian Henry

His early books were more overtly experimental, especially Poker and The Purpose of a Cloak. But even then, there were relatively straightforward poems, and a lot of poems in standard-looking forms, such as quatrains, though he would often do innovative things in those forms. His poems have always dipped into autobiography, sometimes in a direct way, sometimes in a more cosmic way (as in “Acquedotto”). Couplets—especially poems consisting of seven couplets—dominated his work during his final decade of writing. But even though poems in couplets might appear more conventional, Šalamun maintained his wildness and imaginative force throughout his writing life. His poems never became predictable or staid; his interests never narrowed. 

David Wojahn

Slovenia is a very small country, but it’s produced a host of significant poets in the last century, several of whom you have translated, particularly Aleš Debeljak and Aleš Šteger. What prompted you to study and translate contemporary Slovene verse, and what are the particular challenges of bringing Slovenian poetry into English?

Brian Henry

I met Debeljak when he read with Charles Simic in New York in spring 1995. Anxious Moments had recently come out. My friend Andrew Zawacki and I loved the book, so we went to the reading, then Andrew invited Debeljak to read at Oxford, where Andrew was pursuing a master’s degree. We had just started editing Verse, and because of our enthusiasm for Debeljak’s work, we commissioned a special feature on younger Slovenian poets for the magazine, which appeared in 1996. So Slovenian poetry was on my radar quite early, when I was in my early twenties.

But Tomaž was really the reason that Slovenian poetry became so central to me. I met him in March 1998 in Australia, where I was living for a year, when he read at a literary festival in Adelaide. I was living in Melbourne, but I went to Adelaide to interview him for Verse. We quickly became friends, and I visited him many times in New York after I returned to the US and was living in New Hampshire. He arranged for me to be invited to Aleš Šteger’s Days of Poetry and Wine Festival in 1999, which is where I met Šteger and some other Slovenian poets. That festival was an incredible experience. Life-changing, really. I went back to Slovenia to participate in another festival in September 2006, after I had spent the summer translating Woods and Chalices, and told Tomaž that I wanted to translate a book by Šteger. He recommended The Book of Things, which I translated, and I’ve translated five more of Šteger’s books since then.

I wouldn’t say that Slovenian itself presents any particular challenges for a translator that other languages, particularly Slavic languages, don’t also present. And most poems present a host of challenges to any translator. But the biggest challenge for me, aside from navigating Šalamun’s singular style, is maintaining a consistent voice for each poet when translating multiple poets. I don’t want my Šalamun translations to sound like my Šteger or Debeljak translations, and I don’t want any of my translations to sound like my poems. I want each poet to sound like themselves, albeit in English with me as the conduit.

David Wojahn

Do you have a guiding set of principles that you follow when you undertake a translation? Pound thought that some qualities of a poem—its use of figurative language, for example—could be fairly exactly rendered in translation. But Pound thought that other elements—the poem’s rhythms and its music, for example—would almost always elude a translator. 

Brian Henry

I try to be as accurate as I can while also working to create a poem in English. I don’t want my translations to be lifeless artifacts—what Valéry called “anatomical specimens.” But I also don’t want them to be imitations or versions that take too many liberties or overshadow the original. I approach most poems, especially shorter ones, as a scaffolding of sound. My goal is to reproduce that sonic scaffolding in another language while retaining the meaning (or at least my sense of the meaning, since poetry translation requires constant interpretation). I also think of what Tomaž sounded like when he read his poems—the rhythms and tones—and try to recreate that in English. When I finish translating a Šteger book, I like to meet up with him in Ljubljana so that he can read his poems in the original and I can read my translations, and I try to make sure that my translations’ rhythms, tones, and duration match his originals as much as possible.

David Wojahn

How do you think Šalamun’s work has influenced your own poetry? 

Brian Henry

Reading his poems in English definitely influenced some of my early work. The first poem in Astronaut (2000) adopts the call-and-response form of some of his early poems like “Jonah,” and I couldn’t have written Quarantine (2006) without A Ballad for Metka Krašovec. But I think a deeper, more fundamental kind of influence emerged in 2006, when I started to translate his poems myself, rather than simply reading existing translations. Digging into his syntax in Slovenian, trying to reproduce his approach to lines and line breaks, as well as his experimentation with language, rewired my brain for a while. It would take six hours to translate one poem (I’m much faster now!). Quite a few of the poems in Brother No One (2013) were written while I was translating Woods and Chalices.

David Wojahn

We both spent a good deal of time with Tomaž—you much more so than I. He loved American poetry, and he taught creative writing at a number of American universities. When he was teaching for you at the University of Richmond, he visited a graduate class of mine at VCU—they’d been reading an earlier selection of his poems, The Four Questions of Melancholy. Afterward, one of my students, Tarfia Faizullah, who is now a very highly regarded poet and teacher, said that he was an “old soul.” That descriptor seems right to me; there was something compelling and magical—I can’t think of a better word—about Tomaž’s presence. Can you say a few words about what Tomaž was like as a person and about how he must have been a personal as well as artistic inspiration for you? It had to have been greatly rewarding to consult with him, often in person, when you translated his poems.

Brian Henry

I think Tarfia was absolutely right. Tomaž seemed to exist outside the usual boundaries that most of us function within. His mind seemed to be operating in many places and many times at once, and I felt like he could be entirely present but also completely elsewhere, or everywhere. And I think your word “magical” to describe Tomaž is perfect. He was such a special person, with such a magnetic presence, and he contained multitudes. Some people have described his demeanor as aristocratic or courtly, mainly because he was always polite and elegant and moved easily in various social circles, but he was also wild, feral like a child can be feral, wise and naive like the very young and the very old, both ravenous and restrained, astonishingly intelligent and shrewd yet also innocent. I’ve never met anyone like him and feel so fortunate to have known him. I always felt like anything was possible after spending time with Tomaž. And he made poetry seem like the most important thing in the world. Which it is. He showed us that.