Written by
Taja Kramberger |
Every dead one has a name,
only the names of the living make us falter.
Some names are impossible to utter
without a stammer and a fidget,
some can only be spoken
through allusion,
and some, mostly women’s,
are forbidden in these parts.
Every dead one has a name,
engraved in stone,
printed in obituary or directory,
but my name must be undermined,
every few years
soiled and substituted
with another one.
A decade ago,
a high-ranking party official warned me:
Stay a poet, as long as there’s still time.
Still time? Time for what?
I have also become a social scientist
and an editor and an organiser
and a translator and an activist
and a university teacher.
Unbearable - all these things -
all trespasses of the old parcel borders
that were drawn by the dirty
fingers of fraternities.
I air all the rooms,
I ignore all the ratings,
I open all the valvelets.
And they have put me out in the cold –
like the dead.
But every dead one has a name.
© Taja Kramberger, Z roba klifa / From the Edge of a Cliff, CSK, Ljubljana, 2011
© Translation by Špela Drnovšek Zorko, 2012
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Written by
Taja Kramberger |
For Taslima Nasrin, in sisterhood
There is no fatwa in this land,
what are you thinking,
this is Europe.
A place without borders and
without internal wrinkles,
without possibilities for asylum and exile.
There is no fatwa in this land –
it is divided into
thousands of small conspiracies,
tiny murders per partes,
which seem like coincidental misfortunes
and sap your blood, drop by drop.
There is no fatwa in this land,
what are you thinking,
this is Europe. No one
foresaw the exit from Eden,
no one is responsible for it.
There is no fatwa in this land,
it is replaced by countless
cunning tattling friendships,
humiliations at the workplace,
the disabling of every shift,
treading in place
in a thick, impassable ether,
in a treasury where your every move
crosses a laser beam five times.
The mechanisms for
the prevention of breathing multiply,
the windpipe squeezed just enough
for several molecules of oxygen
to enter.
There is no fatwa in this land,
what are you thinking, this is Europe.
A sovereign union
of the poor and the tycoons,
no more borders, but also no
decency or dignity.
There is no fatwa in this land,
but when you die, we will
cash in your death as well,
sell it five times over
to raise its value.
After death we will make you
immortal, now
you be quiet and
leave us
your achievements and success.
Did you mention asylum or exile?
Why? There is no fatwa in this land.
© Taja Kramberger, Z roba klifa / From the Edge of a Cliff, CSK, Ljubljana, 2011
© Translation by Špela Drnovšek Zorko, 2012
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Written by
Taja Kramberger |
My dear students,
little pigeons from the Forja factory in Buenos Aires.
The institution we built together has become
a hangar for hanging pieces of discounted meat.
Go out into the world with bright faces –
leave the twilight of ignorance and dullness, you have experienced all
that is necessary to understand the meaning
and responsibility of the creative person in the world.
Göttingen 1937, Tlatelolco 1968, Koper 2010.
Important burnt-out sites of hopes and comprehensions,
the only worthy investments in the future.
Nothing can excuse the actions of madness,
what is left after is merely the disinfectant
smell of crime and some newly
decorated vultures.
Beware of them! The smiles
on their faces
are veils of death.
© Taja Kramberger, Z roba klifa / From the Edge of a Cliff, CSK, Ljubljana, 2011
© Translation by Špela Drnovšek Zorko, 2012
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