Barren harvest:
Selected Poems of Dane Zajc

translated by Erica Johnson Debeljak
Edited and introduced by Ales Debeljak

$14.00 96 pages ISBN 1-893996-67-0

December -- sample [PDF]

Dane Zajc (born 1929) is the greatest living Slovenian poet which is saying a lot in a nation of two million that emerged out of a disintegrated Yugoslavia and is full of poets and writers, guardians of spirit and
national consciousness. Zajc, a member of Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences and a laureate of many distinguished literary awards, has seen a publication
of his work in several European languages. Barren Harvest is, however, the first comprehensive volume to appear in English translation, presenting the entire
creative arch of Zajc's vision from early poems to his mature work. Zajc, a founding father of post-WWII modernism and a former inmate of communist jails, was inspired by a political resistance to the dictatorial regime that gave his work an urgent character and by
aesthetics of existentialism that privileged a raw, unmediated and sensuously immediate experience. His poems speak of an profound solitude that is the destiny of contemporary man, using the vocabulary of natural world and bodily sensations to illuminate both, the mortal and lethal aspects of human condition. This is poetry with of uncompromising
seriousness, propelling the reader into a vertigo of sinister and evil world which may be redeemed through the fleeting moments of erotically charged unity with the cosmic forces and the woman's body. Disturbing, incantatory, and powerfull, these lyrical visions are
as vital as they are inspiring.

" 'And instead of a word/a lump of ashes rolls
down/your blackened throat' says Dane Zajc, by general
consent the greatest living Slovenian poet. Enough is
a line or two of his apophatic power, and you are
there for good. In his landscape, his voice, his
destiny, his beauty. He is a prophet, a seducer, and a
sage. O, you'll be defined, burned, and relieved,
reader. You won't forget him."
-Tomaz Salamun - Four Questions of Melancholy