Three Poems by Katja Gorečan, translated from the Slovene by Martha Kosir
Hana
hana is a poet.
that is to say, she wants to become one.
in other words, she’s waiting for others to approve of her.
she’s trying to find her voice.
well, who isn’t, right?
hana sends her poems
to all (mainly) self-absorbed poets.
she also submits them to different contests,
yet, year after year
her poems fade into oblivion.
she still likes to write, without having the slightest notion
of what she’ll make of herself in the coming years.
but she knows
I don’t want
a large family home,
a perfect man, or a regular
job, which she one day may have to have.
hana is currently twenty-one,
yet she still gets carded
every time she goes
to buy cigarettes.
she cannot survive the day without them.
she bites her nails so short
her hands are covered in
blood stains. she doesn’t seem nervous
at all, but she remains in constant waiting,
without knowing what or who she’s waiting for.
let’s move on.
Hana and Her Period
you may find it disgusting
but hana often enjoys smelling her
menstrual blood.
she finds it refreshing and unique.
she remembers the day she got her first period.
she remembers barely having any pubic
hair, but that will be discussed in the next chapter.
hana has a particularly hard time with her periods.
she usually suffers from severe cramps, sometimes too
she pretends to have them,
and sometimes she faints simply to show her frailty.
getting her period for the first time,
hana realized she had become a woman!
then she went to the store with her mom and bought the biggest of pads,
the ones used especially at night because they have wings.
this is how hana found out she was a woman.
and that she was fertile, but it was not yet time
for her to have sex.
if we’re truly realistic – she had no one to have sex with
because she had naively decided to lose her virginity
with the right man, a man she loved
and would live with for the rest of her life.
such thoughts raced through my mind at the age of eleven.
hana smelled her menstrual blood
for the first time at the age of seventeen.
she liked the scent and continues to take sniffs,
but she doesn’t tell anyone, because people would think
she was out of her mind.
later, of course, they would dedicate a special biography
and adore her profusely
for being such an exceptional woman. even though no one knew me.
it remains obvious.
hana and her period enjoy a special relationship.
hana has just admitted to another lie.
she shared her blood-tasting adventure with
her ex-boyfriend, who, of course, found her
depraved
disgusting
and above all
UNFEMININE.
what’s written in this book
is nothing but secrets and they should remain so.
for our country is one of the few where people have the ability
to keep their own and the neighbors ‘secrets.
hana has been found unfeminine here,
for she tastes her menstrual blood.
menstrual blood is a fluid
that must not be touched,
it’s toxic and can cause serious damage
to the respiratory and cardiac systems.
or to reason.
Hana and Poetry (Hana Has Had Enough)
as for poetry, hana would prefer to stay quiet,
but I can’t
she began to hide her poems and bury them in the ground,
so that they might be discovered one day.
as for our country’s poetry, hana simply wants to scream.
our fatherland will make you despise what you love.
hana will never say what she thinks
because then her poetic journey would be over.
hana thinks, but she won’t admit to it.
hana wants to read her poems,
hana wants to publish a book,
but hana will never succeed because
hana is not a typical poet
(what typical is, hana doesn’t know, but she does know it’s not her),
and most importantly – hana has no connections.
hana has had enough.
she no longer feels like fighting with the poets.
why should she have to fight for her poetry?
hana likes to observe the self-proclaimed poetic stars,
all fashioned after the same principle.
they publish a collection every year,
participate in thousands of performances,
where they theorize about and feign love.
they receive the same award each year,
or maybe every other year?
she sees the same faces everywhere, with the same attitude
what are you doing here, you female child, you are not welcome,
this is for us, the parnassus, the cream of the crop,
and until we die, you don’t even have enough to buy yourself a burek
(or how the faith of the civilization was lost)
then they get drunk and become aggressive
striking out with their masculine power,
power that hana will never have,
so she may as well get lost and go back to where she came from.
she even thought of throwing herself down on her knees
and begging them
please read my poems, they really don’t suck,
but today she’s still too tired and too weak.
someday you’ll have good poems, but never as good as mine.
hana won’t stop writing,
she’ll simply become apathetic to all the outbursts and blows.
that’s exactly what we want.
that’s why I always prefer to strike where it hurts the most.
and this is where hana splits the poets into two classes:
those who stay human
and those who turn into beasts.
Katja Gorečan published her first poetry collection, Angels of the Same Origin (Angeli istega porekla), in 2007, at the tender age of seventeen. Her second collection, The Sufferings of Young Hana (Trpljenje mlade Hane), was published only four years later, in 2012. It was nominated for the Jenko Award (one of the most prestigious literary awards in Slovenia) and selected for the 15th Mediterranea Young Artists Biennale (2011). In 2017, Gorečan published a collection of choreopoems entitled Some Nights Some Girls Are Dying Somewhere (Neke noči neke deklice nekje umirajo). In 2023, she published her first novel entitled Maternity Booklet (Materinska knjižica). Gorečan works in the field of contemporary performing arts, as a producer, playwright, and author.
Martha Kosir earned her Ph.D. in Spanish literature from Vanderbilt University. She works as Professor of Spanish and Program Director for Global Languages and Cultures at Gannon University. In addition to translating poetry from Slovenian into English, she has done poetry translations from English into Spanish, from Slovenian into Spanish, and from German into Spanish and English. Her translations have been published in Sirena: Poetry, Art and Criticism; Contemporary Slovenian Poetry; The International Poetry Review; The Drunken Boat; Solstice; Source, and SlavFile. She has likewise completed translations into English and Spanish of several poetry collections by the Slovenian-Bosnian poet Josip Osti. Her research focuses on translation studies, film, and cultural studies.
Katja Gorečan published her first poetry collection, Angels of the Same Origin (Angeli istega porekla), in 2007, at the tender age of seventeen. Her second collection, The Sufferings of Young Hana (Trpljenje mlade Hane), was published only four years later, in 2012. It was nominated for the Jenko Award (one of the most prestigious literary awards in Slovenia) and selected for the 15th Mediterranea Young Artists Biennale (2011). In 2017, Gorečan published a collection of choreopoems entitled Some Nights Some Girls Are Dying Somewhere (Neke noči neke deklice nekje umirajo). In 2023, she published her first novel entitled Maternity Booklet (Materinska knjižica). Gorečan works in the field of contemporary performing arts, as a producer, playwright, and author.
Martha Kosir earned her Ph.D. in Spanish literature from Vanderbilt University. She translates poetry from English into Spanish and from Slovenian into Spanish and English. Her translations have been published in the literary magazine Sirena: Poetry, Art and Criticism, the journal Contemporary Slovenian Poetry, The International Poetry Review, The Drunken Boat, SlavFile (a publication of the Slavic division of the American Translators Association) and Source (a publication of the Literary division of the American Translators Association). She is a professor of Spanish at Gannon University.
