Brian Henry is the translator of Tomaž Šalamun’s Kiss the Eyes of Peace and Woods and Chalices, as well as Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers, and six books by Aleš Šteger, most recently Burning Tongues: New and Selected Poems. Henry is also the author of Permanent State, ten other books of poetry, and the collection of essays, Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation. His work has received numerous honours, including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and the Best Translated Book Award. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Photo Credit: Tara Rebele
Judges’ Citation
Kiss the Eyes of Peace is an extraordinary English selection of poems from the entire body of work of one of the best Central European poets of the twentieth century, Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, presented by poet Brian Henry with precision and power.
Kiss the Eyes of Peace is an extraordinary English selection of poems from the entire body of work of one of the best Central European poets of the twentieth century, Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, presented by poet Brian Henry with precision and power. The English reader experiences this poetry at its finest, with its characteristic post-Dada, unlimited freedom, and a peculiar and unmistakable lightness of diction. Šalamun turns our reading habits upside down—he creates avant-garde linguistic structures in which the poem hangs on the question, on the collision of the concrete and the surrealistic, where a dance of imagination begins. A hypnotic sequence of extremely condensed phrases makes Šalamun’s absurdism a realistic portrayal of a contemporary world where strangeness can be a source of extraordinary beauty. This selection restores faith in the glory and power of poetry, in its wild freedom and beauty.
Selected poems
by Brian Henry
Destiny rolls me. Sometimes like an egg. Sometimes
it stomps me on the shore with its paws. I scream. Struggle.
I pledge all my juice. I must not do this.
Destiny can extinguish me, I’ve already felt it. If
destiny doesn’t blow on our soul, we freeze in an instant.
I spent days in a terrible fear that the sun
wouldn’t slip away anymore. That this is my last day.
I felt how the light slid from my hands, and if
I didn’t have enough quarters in my pocket and Metka’s
voice wasn’t gentle and kind and concrete and real
enough, my soul would escape from my body, as it will
someday. You must be kind with death. Everything
is together in a moist dumpling. Home is where we’re from.
We’re alive only for an instant. Until the lacquer dries.
Copyright © 2024 Brian Henry, translated from the Slovenian written by Tomaž Šalamun, Kiss the Eyes of Peace, Milkweed Editions
Lacquer
the Slovenian written by Tomaž Šalamun