Distant Transit
The poet, novelist, and dramaturge, Maja Haderlap, grew up in the long-contested border region of Carinthia in southern Austria, as part of a Slovene minority that was persecuted during WWII for resisting Nazi rule. Haderlap’s prizewinning autobiographical novel, Angel of Oblivion (Archipelago Books, 2016), delves into a history of violence and trauma that affected generations of Carinthians. Her new poetry collection, Distant Transit, grapples with memory and time-slippages in the same landscape where “the border strip / swung back and forth” as “villages / went astray.”
Though Haderlap wrote these poems in German, a language with a broader reach than Slovenian, Tess Lewis’s English version conveys the poet’s fraught relationship with her languages, and the ways in which Slovenian haunts the composition as well as the mythology and folklore of the collection. In one poem, which characteristically ties landscape to language, the speaker looks “for words discarded / like scrapped tools,” reflecting:
[…] in my voice
the first language crystallizes and
learns the codes of memory by heart:
spomin, spomenčica, spomenik
memory, forget-me-not, monument
The three Slovenian words, which also form the poem’s title, are drawn from a single root and evoke the different kinds of remembering enacted in this collection: a simple recall; a flower as figure of the natural world representing resistance to forgetting; and a “monument,” memory hardened into symbol.
In the poem “translation,” Haderlap wonders:
is there a zone of darkness between all languages,
a black river that swallows words
and stories and transforms them?
After musing on this perilous passage between languages, the poet asks, “can each word, / then, risk the transit […]?” The book itself seems to answer in the affirmative, and yet the poem on the facing page, “ljubljanica river of memory,” describes a place parallel to the linguistic abyss, a river “heavily burdened / with lances, clasps, and axes,” one in which “water sinks,” and where “the nightmare of earlier massacres / clings fatally to the river’s trench.” As a reader, I sense that the gravitas of these poems has its source in both “rivers”: the extra-lingual psyche and the Ljubljanica, the river of Haderlap’s home terrain, troubled with memories and remnants of war.