translated from the Slovene by Miriam Drev
from BECKETT – MY ADVOCATE
2
where a blind alley ends
where you train silence to be voice
what is a bird’s twittering
without your word
how do you appear
without water in yourself
you’re made of air and light
you say body and here you are
you say space to take up the body
say body without space
last but not least there is truth
just saying stay and be and still
and from the onset of old age
there’s nothing more
try to articulate waiting
you say Mercier and Camier
you have a bike stolen without wheels
and you go on a journey
with a bag crammed with things
and it gets lost
then you say beckett my advocate
you say night and you are
you say i am and you’re naught
7
you are a small god without awareness
in possession of live water
in possession of wise advice
you swim across a river traverse a mountain chain
and muddy marshes
and you break through thickets
you are the master of your garden
a male variety of cinderella
a bit dull
saint george of sorts
who never stops short
in a heavenly parade
you are tragic groundwork
for greek religion
hollow in the middle
in the centre of the world
Zoran Pevec, born in 1955 in Celje (Slovenia) poet, literary critic, essayist and editor. He completed his PhD on the topic of Slovenian urban poetry according to the Poetic Almanac of Youth 1982 (a monograph with this title was also published in 2018). His poems have been translated into several languages and he has published nine collections of poetry. He has selected and translated poetry collections in English, German and Croatian as well as written manuals for writing poetry. From 2021 to 2023, he was the vice-president of the Slovene Writersʼ Association, where he is the chairman of the Commission for Events, and since 2023 he has been a member of the board of SC PEN. He received the “Knight of Poetry” award (2006) for the best poem of the year in Slovenia, the “Cup of Immortality” in 2013 for the best 10-year poetic opus in Slovenia, in 2018 he was nominated for the Veronika Award, for the best poetry collection of the year, and in 2019 for the Jenko Prize, the Stann Prize for the best poetry collection of the last two years.
Miriam Drev is a poet, novelist, literary translator from English and German, as well as a literary critic and publicist born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2022 her sixth book of poems Ancestral Healing was published, receiving the Veronika Award (Veronikina nagrada) in 2023, for the best Slovenian poetry collection of the year. Her poems have been translated into many languages and are published in several anthologies of Slovene poetry as well as in literary magazines abroad. She lives as an independent writer and translator in Ljubljana.
