Moss & Silver

by Jure Detela, Raymond Miller (Translator), Tatjana Jamnik (Translator)

Overview

Poetry. Translated from the Slovene by Raymond Miller with Tatjana Jamnik. Jure Detela--poet, activist, and mystic--was a key figure in the vibrant avant-garde movement that defined Slovenian culture in the 1980s. The forty-four poems of MOSS & SILVER anticipate the radical environmentalism and animal rights activism of the 21st century while engaging in a passionate dialogue with wide array of poets from William Wordsworth to Kobayashi Issa. Although he often railed against the "defenders of Slovene [traditional poetic] beauty" and "the tyranny of metaphor," Detela was a meticulous craftsman who employed a stunning variety of rhythms and stanzaic forms.

MOSS & SILVER (Mah in srebro), originally published in 1983 by Obzorja (Maribor), is the first book of Jure Detela's poems to appear in English. This bilingual edition has been translated by Raymond Miller with Tatjana Jamnik, and includes an introduction by Slovenian poet and critic Iztok Osojnik and a translator's afterword by Raymond Miller.

Cover artwork by Mina Fina. Cover letterpressed at UDP.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937027940
Publisher:	Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jure Detela was born in Ljubljana in 1951. Although he was an important figure in the tumultuous avant garde movement that dominated Slovene culture in the 1980s, he nevertheless stood somewhat apart from its main currents. Detela was a true renaissance man: as a thinker, he was in many ways far ahead of his time, anticipating Derrida, Žižek, and others in his environmentalist activism and consistent critique of anthropomorphism; as a poet, he was widely read, and conducted an ongoing dialogue in his verse with an astounding array of poets from many different traditions-from the Greek classics and Japanese haiku masters to the English and German Romantics and French Decadents (even Emily Dickinson is addressed in one of his poems). He was also an accomplished critic and art historian. Jure Detela died in Ljubljana in 1992, from complications resulting from a hunger strike against the Yugoslav regime in Belgrade.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/04/2018
Slovenian avant-garde poet, art historian, and activist Detela’s subtle, enchanting second collection, originally published in 1983, is the first of his books to be translated into English. Wary of symbolism, poetic devices, “metaphorical kitsch,” and—most of all—poetic subjectivity, Detela’s often spare, haikuesque poems reveal a keen attunement to “the nests/ of future/ centuries,” a “vigilant love for/ alien consciousnesses,” and “a position for my actions/ without violence/ only with a body/ that is faithful, to its very/ last cell, to the thought/ that beings express/ themselves, not me.” In a sense, this sets Detela (and this translation) against the grain of both 21st-century American poetry and the Soviet realism that dominated the Yugoslavia of his youth. Instead, Detela pioneered an opening into what is now called ecopoetics, which looked to classical Japanese haiku and also directly addressed Western poets such as Dickinson, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Shelley, and Trackl. Through his peer Iztok Osojnik’s introduction and translators Miller and Jamnik’s notes, this dual-language edition contextualizes Detela’s life and practice, adding a wealth of insight into the inspiration for each poem and characterizing the sincerity of Detela’s convictions: “The image of other bodies is no/ criterion for my humanity.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly