Photo by Yener Ozturk

The heart of Europe is elegant and
dead. Only
children tremble before time crushes
them. We are torn by two
larger facets: Satan, the institution
of the front door and the overhang
of freedom, which converge in
the Pacific. But we
a r e memory. Therefore obligatory
for the world, although our myth is built into
a machine that we no longer have at our disposal.
Our only real historical option is
mercy, the only thing
we truly can no longer
consume or operationalize.
Psychoanalysis is bottom, the night before
the epiphany. All the laboratories of power will
fall.

Tomaž Šalamun
Tomaž Šalamun (1941–2014) published more than 55 books of poetry in his native Slovenian. Translated into over 25 languages, his poetry received numerous awards, including the Jenko Prize, the Prešeren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, and the Mladost Prize. In the 1990s, he served for several years as the Cultural Attaché for the Slovenian Embassy in New York, and he held visiting professorships at various universities in the U.S. The poems in this issue are forthcoming in a volume of selected poems edited and translated by Brian Henry.

Brian Henry
Brian Henry is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Permanent State. He has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices, Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers, and five books by Aleš Šteger. He co-edited Verse from 1995 to 2018. His work has received numerous honors, including two NEA fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, a Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences grant, and the Best Translated Book Award.