Nothing is Lost: Selected Poems

by Edvard Kocbek, Michael Scammell (Translator), Veno Taufer (Translator), Charles Simic (Foreword by)

Overview

This is the first comprehensive English-language collection of verse by the most celebrated Slovenian poet of modern times and one of Europe's most notable postwar poets, Edvard Kocbek (1904-1981).

The selections introduce the reader to the full spectrum of Kocbek's long and distinguished career, starting with the pantheist and expressionist nature poems of his early period and continuing through the politically engaged poetry written during and after World War II, to the philosophical and metaphysical meditations of his fecund late period.

Readers will be struck by the originality and freshness of Kocbek's sinewy and intense vision, rendered into fluid and idiomatic English by two experienced translators. The Slovenian texts appear on the facing pages.

The opening stanza of "Moon with a Halo"

The man beside me was killed.
He had a mother who bore him
and a father who made him toys,
he had a brother and a playful uncle
and a little girl with blond braids,
he had a wooden cart and a wooden horse,
a trunkful of colored dreams
and a brook where he used to fish.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400826001
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/16/2004
Series:	The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation , #52
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	707 KB

About the Author

Edvard Kocbek was born in 1904, the son of a church organist, in a part of present-day Slovenia that was then in Austria-Hungary. Following the publication in 1934 of his first book of poetry, he published essays that presaged the wartime alliance of this Christian Socialist with the Tito-led partisan resistance. Despite a lengthy postwar publication ban, Kocbek went on to win the Preseren Prize, Slovenia's highest literary award, in 1964. More books of both poetry and prose followed, including his Collected Poems in 1977, which sealed his reputation as Slovenia's greatest modern-day poet. Michael Scammell, who teaches writing in Columbia University's School of the Arts, has translated widely from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian, including works by Tolstoy and Nabokov. Veno Taufer, the author of sixteen volumes of poetry in his native Slovenia and the translator of more than forty books of poetry, is the recipient of the Preseren Prize and several prestigious international awards. His verse, including the collection Waterlings (Northwestern, 2000), has been translated into numerous languages.

Read an Excerpt

Nothing is Lost

Selected Poems

Introduction

EDVARD KOCBEK was born in 1904 in the foothills of the southeastern Alps in a part of the world that is now Slovenia, but at that time was still Austria, and thus part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father was an organist at the local Roman Catholic church, and Kocbek spent so much time helping him that he later described the church as his second home. In high school he studied classics and foreign languages, and by the time he had finished his schooling, World War I had come and gone and left Slovenia with limited independence as part of the newly established Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Kocbek entered the Catholic seminary in Slovenia's second city, Maribor, with the intention of becoming a priest, but after two years left in protest against the rigid rules and narrow outlook of his clerical superiors. It was a sign of things to come, yet despite this early and characteristic rebellion against orthodoxy, he did not lose his faith. "A person's essence," he wrote in his essay "Thoughts on Man" some ten years later, "lies in the conscious and ceaseless realization of God's creative presence in him;" and he continued to practice a highly personal brand of Catholicism till the end of his life.

Moving fromMaribor to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, Kocbek studied Romance languages and literature at the university and edited the Catholic youth magazine, Cross, while also contributing poems and articles to a Catholic Socialist periodical called Fire. As a promising young poet, he attempted to negotiate a middle way between the pious provincialism of much Slovene literature of the time, the avantgarde constructivism pioneered by the poet Srec ko Kosovel, and the self-conscious documentary realism associated with the popularity of socialism. Of crucial importance for his development were two trips to western Europe, one to spend a summer in Berlin, and another on a year's scholarship to France, where he encountered German expressionism and French surrealism first hand, and came under the influence of Emmanuel Mounier and his circle at the Catholic literary magazine, Esprit. Mounier had developed a brand of radical Christian socialism that he called "Personalism," which rejected the idealist notion that men's activities were no more than a reflection of the spirit, and accepted that religion did not hold all the answers to the social problems of the modern world.

Returning to Slovenia, Kocbek wrote an outstanding cycle of poems, "Autumn Poems" in a mode that might be described as metaphysical realism: a religious response to the natural world was combined with an attempt to reconcile the spiritual essence of life with physical appearances. In most of these poems Kocbek ignored traditional rhyme and meter in favor of free verse forms shaped by rhythm and assonance, and introduced a modernist aesthetic to a poetry dominated by folklore and romanticism. Building on this cycle, Kocbek went on to produce several more cycles ("Love Poems," "Comrade Poems," "Poems about the Earth") that he brought together in his aptly named first collection of verse, Earth, in 1934, a work that set the seal on his growing reputation as Slovenia's most original and accomplished young poet.

The poems in Earth were set in his native region of eastern Slovenia, a land of low rolling hills, vineyards, wine presses, pastures, and wooded hills that was intimately familiar to him from his childhood, and they evoke a settled world of peaceful work and play in the pastoral tradition.

The sun is wreathed in cobwebs, the air is homely, as in a curtained cottage parlor, and a heavy fruit has rolled downhill into the rotting wood. Now and then a wheelbarrow squeaks, there is a sudden rustle in the long leaves of corn, and the lazy hum of late bees over the buckwheat.

It is a world in which men and women take their place as an integral part of nature, whether it be peasant women climbing the fields on their way home from work in the evening, or men slipping into sleep by the wine presses after a day spent crushing the grapes. The poet, "an ancient monk" watching "the enchanted world" before him, maintains his vigil while others sleep.

Stars twinkle outside, then the lamp burns low, the dripping stops, and for a long time there is nothing, till down in the valley the morning bell tolls.

The poet's sympathies extend to the animal kingdom too. In one much celebrated poem Kocbek describes a drover and his team of oxen "moving with measured jerks" as they slowly cross a landscape and disappear behind some trees.

Their glistening russet hides smell warm, and as they enter the wood with their dreamy driver it seems they are disappearing forever.

A little later I see the young red oxen nodding out of the wood and up the hill. They haven't changed a bit. In this peaceful land time has stopped.

There was a hint of pantheism in Kocbek's devotion to nature, mixed with cosmic pain ("Earth, I reach out to everything from you, earth / to you I will return, my flesh smells of holy / sacrifice and mortal sorrow ..."). As he watches the women coming from work he experiences a similar emotion: "... their song echoes in the / woods, and I could stuff my mouth with bitter / soil in sorrow over their sound." Lying among a tree's roots as a violent thunderstorm brings premonitions of death, he treasures the thought of his mortality. "Let everything be destroyed except dread / wherein lies intimacy, intimacy."

Kocbek's was a personal horror akin to a kind of holy dread (the Slovenian word groza, usually translated as "horror," can equally be rendered as "dread"). This was in line with the philosophy of personal responsibility that he developed in essays on Kierkegaard and Péguy, among others. Only man, he wrote in another essay, could be the source of meaning and "vital fertility," because "in nonpersonal life we find neither well-being, nor order, nor a combination of sense and utility ... Man represents a heterogeneous reality in a homogeneous being, he cannot be exhausted spiritually, physically, or socially ... The problem of man is in the final analysis a religious problem."

But Kocbek was by no means indifferent to the social and political currents of his time, and was acutely aware of other sorts of horror at large in the world in the mid-thirties. The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, for example, had become a monarchist dictatorship with the new name of Yugoslavia, and an unsavory penchant for political assassinations. Mussolini had come to power in neighboring Italy; Hitler's stentorian threats were being borne on the prevailing winds from the other side of the Alps; and in slightly more distant Spain a civil war had broken out in which the European powers were fighting by proxy, and the twin ideologies of Fascism and Communism had begun their battle for supremacy.

In timid, conformist Slovenia, where the religious and political establishments listened to the Vatican and sided with Franco, Kocbek caused a sensation with an essay, "Reflections on Spain," that he published in 1937 in the Catholic journal, Home and World. By serving Fascism, he wrote, the church in Spain was revealing its inherent bias in favor of the "spiritual bourgeoisie." The only recourse for honest dissenters was to risk heresy by demonstrating their "spiritual bravery" and voting for "a greater and better truth according to their consciences." This was far better than supporting the rank hypocrisy with which the church justified Franco's excesses. The essay split the intelligentsia in Slovenia for months afterward, and Kocbek got the punishment he had anticipated when he was indeed accused of heresy and threatened with excommunication.

Kocbek was moving closer to socialism, but saw that it too was an ideology like any other, carrying dangers of its own. "A revolutionary thrust solely for the sake of establishing authority, order, safety and decorum, without a deeper goal, is more likely to decline into petty bourgeois philistinism than to relax into a spiritual entity," he wrote in one of his essays, and in 1941, on the very eve of war, he noted in his literary journal Act: "The intellectual of today must understand that much depends on his resoluteness. He must opt for a new order as soon as possible, but must not support any particular ideological group completely. He should remain a free agent within it, a creative center of vital experience."

When war did come to Slovenia, Kocbek did not hestitate. He volunteered at once to join the Executive Committee of the Slovenian Liberation Front, a coalition of resistance forces that included both Tito's Communists and Slovenia's Christian Socialists, whose leader he became, and he rose rapidly within its ranks even after Tito's party had taken more or less complete control. In 1943 he went with the Slovenian delegation to Jajce for the second meeting of the Anti-Fascist Council of the Liberation Movement of Yugoslavia, chaired by Tito, and played a prominent role in the Slovenian resistance to Fascist occupation right up until the war's end. By then this decidedly unmilitary poet had attained the rank of general, and for a brief moment served as a minister in Belgrade, before returning to Ljubljana to become Vice President of the Presidium of the National Assembly of Slovenia and Vice President of the Executive Committee of the Slovenian Liberation Front. He was by far the most senior and most important non-communist in the Slovenian government.

Kocbek did not stop writing during the war years, but nor was he quick to publish after the war ended. The establishment of Communism in the whole of Yugoslavia coincided with a new wave of Stalinism in Russia; the institution of an iron discipline and rigid censorship in Marshall Tito's quasi-independent Yugoslavia was no better than in the Soviet-conquered countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It was not until after Tito broke with the Comintern in 1948 that Kocbek ventured to publish his first postwar book, Comradeship, which contained not poetry, but excerpts from his war diaries (1949). The book met with a hostile reception and quickly disappeared from bookshop shelves. Kocbek's unsparing account of some of the excesses of the Communist-led Partisans during the war, including the cold-blooded execution of a group of former prisoners-of-war for refusing to join the Partisans, was too much for Slovenia's leaders to stomach, and the censorship prevented any reprints.

It was Kocbek's book of short stories, Fear and Courage, published in 1951, that brought about his public disgrace and official downfall. The book contained four novellas on the Partisans' wartime campaigns and depicted guerrilla warfare with unsparing honesty, encompassing both its bloody heroism and the senseless cruelties endemic to irregular campaigns. Kocbek did not hesitate to confront his own complicity in these actions and expressed his ethical qualms with an objectivity and realism that had not been seen in Slovenian (or Yugoslav) literature before. It was too much for the Yugoslav Communist Party, which in domestic policies was fully in tune with the Stalinism that it professed to reject. Kocbek's book was anathematized as "political pornography" and immediately suppressed. The entire literary and political establishment was mobilized to vilify and denounce him as an enemy of the people, and he was speedily expelled from all his public offices and forced into silence.

For ten years he became a nonperson. His house was watched, his telephone tapped, and he was kept in enforced quarantine. The predictable result of this persecution (particularly in such a small country) was to turn him into a hero to dissidents and a beacon to a younger generation of poets, so that when a few of his poems did begin to appear again, he became a rallying point for the student radicals of the sixties, and the the patron saint of rebellious literary magazines such as Review-57 and Perspectives (both of which were closed by the authorities). Kocbek, meanwhile, earned his living by translating from French and German and publishing the results under a pseudonym. In 1963, virtually thirty years after his last collection, Kocbek was allowed to publish a new book of poems, Dread, that included selections from his writings over the preceding decades. The book was a huge success and won the Pres eren Prize (Slovenia's most prestigious literary award) in 1964.

While it was clear that the book's title had a very broad range of meanings, Kocbek was at pains to play down any political overtones and emphasize the personal. "Dread," he explained, "is not just an accidental and unusual title for my second collection of poetry, but is also the reflection of the fundamental atmosphere of my life; dread comprises both wonder and opposition, my dread is pure ecstasy, the continuous possibility of conquering despair and nothingness." Nevertheless, while it remained true that, as in everything he wrote, Kocbek filtered his subjects through personal emotion and a spiritual apprehension of reality, his goals in publishing Dread went far beyond the personal.

The poems in this collection explore a far wider range of emotion and experience than those in his previous collection, Earth. They range from celebrations of the joys and sorrows of Partisan life ("Loud greetings to you, my living comrades," "Moon with a Halo," "The Game," "After the Meeting") to meditations on the meaning of the struggle against Fascism ("Drunk with change," "Rain," "Moonlight") to love poems ("Unknown Woman," "The Bay") to musings on death and immortality ("Crucifix in a Field"). Through all of them, particularly the Partisan poems, runs the thread of what one critic, writing about Kocbek's war diaries, called Kocbek's "activist engagement with history," conducted "without ideological or political bias, but from the point of view of a constructive and ... religiously dedicated and responsible person. He juxtaposes the world of cruel political and military pragmatism with original existential questions ... Kocbek-the-believer is always juxtaposed with Kocbek-the-heretic."

Kocbek's conflict between faith and skepticism found frequent expression in these poems in the form of paradox-his quintessential trope. In "The Game" the speechmaker "stammers in his dreams," a lowly peasant "commands the brigade," and "the quiet woodcutter is full of questions." He develops this idea further and with great playfulness in "Dialectics."

The builder demolishes houses, the doctor advances death and the fire brigade chief is the arsonists' secret leader, clever dialectics says so and the bible says something similar: he who is highest shall be lowest, and he who is last shall be first.

In another fine poem, "Hands," Kocbek endows the concept with a metaphysical dimension that ends in a confession. The poet describes himself as living "between my two hands / as between two brigands, / neither knew/ what the other did. / The left hand was foolish because of its heart, / the right hand was clever because of its skill." In a military skirmish he is forced to turn and flee, experiences a stark fear of death, and falls among thorns that draw blood from those same hands.

I spread them like the cruciform branches of the great temple candlestick, bearing witness with equal ardor. Faith and unfaith burned with a single flame, ascending hotly on high.

Dread established Kocbek's reputation as the best poet then writing in Slovenian (indeed one of Slovenia's best poets ever), and also as the "father" of Slovenian modernism, which was being rediscovered and built upon by the younger generation. In 1967 he published Document, a second volume of his wartime diaries, to universal acclaim, and this was followed by the republication of the first volume, Charter, and in 1969 Report, a third selection of his poetry. It emerged that before Report, Kocbek had completed another selection of poems, Pentagram, devoted mainly to his Partisan years, that he had withheld out of political prudence, and this appeared for the first time in a two-volume edition of Collected Poems in 1977, together with two new and hitherto unknown selections, Embers, and Bride in Black.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Charles Simic ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction by Michael Scammell 1

From EARTH 13

Silent birds perch on my shoulders 15

The sun is wreathed in cobwebs 17

A pair of strong young oxen goes slowly 19

The women are coming from work 21

The heavy bole presses the last basket of grapes 23

O noise of waters, collapse of the universe 25

Loud greetings to you, my living comrades 27

Drunk with change I lie on the ground 29

Earth, I get everything from you 31

From DREAD 33

Rain 35

Hands 37

Moonlight 39

Moon with a Halo 41

Crucifix in a Field 43

The Game 45

After the Meeting 47

Unknown Woman 49

The Bay 51

Night Ritual 53

Midnight Wind 55

Dialectics 57

Black Sea 59

The Stick 61

Grace 63

Landscape 65

Migration 67

Things 69

Summons 71

Presentiment 73

Prayer 75

From PENTAGRAM 77

On Night Watch 79

Doubled 81

How Shall I Be? 83

Pentagram 85

The Cave 87

Image in Old Bark 89

Night Doffs Its Weapons 91

From REPORT 93

Parrots 95

Contraband 97

Exercise 99

Girl's Apron 101

Climax 103

Ditty 105

Now 107

Pontic 109

The Game Is Over 111

Play Backwards 113

Longing for Jail 115

My Partisan Name 117

Lippizaners 119

From EMBERS 125

Tree 127

What Happens to the Mountain 129

Unknown Beloved 131

The Time of the Poem 133

Blessed Search 135

From BRIDE IN BLACK 137

Amok 139

What We Were Looking For 141

The Statue 143

Tongue 145

Plea 147

Stammer, Children 149

Girl 151

On Freedom of Mind 153

Ancient Miracle 155

The Generosity of the Poem 157

Now We Are Alone 159

Game 161

I haven't done playing with words 163

What People are Saying About This

Daniel Weissbort

Had Edvard Kocbek not belonged to a small nation and a language of extremely limited diffusion, he would now be numbered among the major poets of the postwar era. This is an extremely valuable book. The translations are impeccable, lucid, and eloquent.

From the Publisher

"Had Edvard Kocbek not belonged to a small nation and a language of extremely limited diffusion, he would now be numbered among the major poets of the postwar era. This is an extremely valuable book. The translations are impeccable, lucid, and eloquent."—Daniel Weissbort

Editorial Reviews

"Edvard Kocbek is a major Slovenian poet. For the past few months, I've been carrying around and traveling with Nothing Is Lost, his selected poems eloquently translated by Michael Scammell and Veno Tauffer. This marvelous body of work spans more than 40 years and confirms that Kocbek belongs in the company of other notable East European poets. . . . Reading [his poems] now, one feels that his pastoral sensibility and vital intimacy with nature, which at times feels mystical, were always infused with a painful sense of time, an agonized feeling of cosmic sorrow."—-Edward Hirsch, Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

Edvard Kocbek is a major Slovenian poet. For the past few months, I've been carrying around and traveling with Nothing Is Lost, his selected poems eloquently translated by Michael Scammell and Veno Tauffer. This marvelous body of work spans more than 40 years and confirms that Kocbek belongs in the company of other notable East European poets. . . . Reading [his poems] now, one feels that his pastoral sensibility and vital intimacy with nature, which at times feels mystical, were always infused with a painful sense of time, an agonized feeling of cosmic sorrow.

Washington Post Book World - Edward Hirsch

Edvard Kocbek is a major Slovenian poet. For the past few months, I've been carrying around and traveling with Nothing Is Lost, his selected poems eloquently translated by Michael Scammell and Veno Tauffer. This marvelous body of work spans more than 40 years and confirms that Kocbek belongs in the company of other notable East European poets. . . . Reading [his poems] now, one feels that his pastoral sensibility and vital intimacy with nature, which at times feels mystical, were always infused with a painful sense of time, an agonized feeling of cosmic sorrow.
— Edward Hirsch

Washington Post Book World