On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Ives, I Did Not Look at the Finish Line

You change horizons, too, when
you swallow saliva, dear

reader. We play with image like
the indigenous, Italicized.

I take whatever I’m prescribed,
low behavior’s 

low behaviors. I did enjoy the
ortolans (I don’t

eat them, like Italians, no, no,
I enjoyed them

as they sang). I pushed the ship
away. I just asked for a little bit.

Hi, c’mon, hi, clutching something
makes it more expensive.

*     *     *     *     *

The Bus Stop

Charles Dickens did beach with peaches,
but there is no reference to this. And

Lady Tuđman has a tremendous pension.
Moses grazed on the pasture. I mean,

he was ushered to the desert, to a chilled
glass hut, to wait for the bus:

Abu Dhabi — Dubai. Then sheikh came by, among
horses and falcons. You’re shivering, sheik said to

Moses. It’s sausage to me. On his left stood a wall
with a peg. The servants were from Karala.

They stood in boats. You’ve got a tunic, a train, and
piebald wooden camels, why do you need

a wall? It is so the falcons don’t leave us, sheik said.
You’re a falcon too, that’s why we’ve come for you.

*     *     *     *     *

On Šalamun, Translation, Opera Buffa, Translation, and Opera Buffa

Time passed. Janaka Stucky’s Black Ocean began to publish an elegant posthumous book series of Šalamun’s translated work in 2015. Reading Šalamun’s work vitalized by Black Ocean in turn vitalized my efforts to make happen what Šalamun would have wanted. Close friends encouraged me to reach out to Black Ocean, and possibilities began to grow roots. Andes (2016) and Druids (2019) were published next, in Black Ocean’s singular effort to vitalize and honor Šalamun’s life work as the formidable contribution to 20th and 21st century Central European poetries that it is. Black Ocean was patient and kind. In this time, I got sober, in 2016, and, in 2020, began to learn to live in recovery. With a digital copy of the 2011 Goga publication, I began to translate Opera Buffa using online Slovars and multiple translation engines and dictionaries. I installed a system of tactics. I would translate a poem from Slovenian to English, then English to Slovenian, then run both of the translated versions of the poems through a separate set of dictionaries and engines, whittling down mistakes. I began many cigarettes and conversations in my head with memories of Šalamun. I began to recall conversations on poems that he and I had had in Ljubljana, in which referents had escaped us both, and sought out the particulars. I began research into the Slovenian, Mediterranean, and global historical polysemy that the Opera Buffa poems hold, in the proper nouns which are wound, with immanence and violence, around the forms of their blasted sonnets and fragments.

So what, OK, what is opera buffa? Opera buffa was a genre of the late 18th century Italian comedic opera, rooted in Naples, celebrated by Turin’s early capital, performed all over Nord Italia. Opera buffa rose to popularity in the epoch between Risorgimento and irredentism, as the desire for state unification reached militant nationalism. Its production faded near 1893, when Giuseppe Verdi, the favorite composer of the hard-line nationalists, staged Falstaff in Milan, just as proto-Fascism would begin to dawn. Opera buffa was a light genre, romantic and slapstick, regional and low-brow, performed in local dialects, about local characters or figures, on the local streets, embroiled in locally relevant ordeals. Opera buffa’s heroes and villains were sweethearts and struggling workers, the love rivals and moronic bosses, greedy landlords, chaotic families, and gossiping neighbors. As a genre, opera buffa began as intermezzo, broad fare to segment the epic durations and the tragic dimensions of opera’s prestige genre, opera seria. Opera buffa would replenish audiences’ emotional stamina; its high-caloric pleasures — the bawdy antics, the merry melodies, and the duck soup buffoons — would give the house some food to sustain opera seria’s next sublime act of noble morals and grievous consequence.

Some roughshod refrains about poetry translation into written English. Poetry translation into written English needs the translator to provide the discrete language that goes against written English, literal translation, and correct word choice; the discrete language that deems unpoetic what a poem’s reader would presume written English need. Silly written English dependencies on propriety and property, such as grammar that always agrees, sentences that always complete, and total structural integrity; all of whatever always has nothing to do with poetry. Poetry translation into written English must reside in the poem-heart, and in poem-time, to provide the indifference of poetry with discrete language to get a poem through the difference in languages alive. Written English is rarely discrete, unless it omits, or condenses. Written English likes to explain, with words. Why, saying it, I notice, why, wouldn’t now be the time to do away with the unpoetic habits in written English; why, yes: now’s the time! Poetry translation into written English only needs a translator to accept the moods of histories and the geneaologies of allusions behind a poetry. I don’t know Slovenian. I don’t think you need to train in languages to translate a poem very well. Just accept a poem’s discrete language, keep several dictionaries and grammar books open on the desk as you work; after that, you just have to accept all of the coming critique.

So what, OK, what is Tomaž Šalamun’s Opera Buffa. It is the poetry of an afterlife of histories fallen on earth’s surface, whose lines form melancholy and jubilant rings of gravity and grace, some kind of value-neutral heaven pooling between the slats on the floors of atrocities from hell. Forced Italianization of indigenous Slavic peoples; Vatican-Ustaše genocide against subaltern populations across the Nazi puppet state of the ISC; the concentration camps in Gonars, Padova, Renicci, and Rab; post-war Partisan reprisals against the collaborationists and bystanders to Fascist mass killings; the contemporary liberal democracies’ wars, vicious prejudices, and internment policies against racialized populations forced to migrate from MENA and India due to external and internal campaigns of oppression and subjection. Hell on earth would be better served by opera seria, so what would opera buffa be, in the middle of the acts of total human horror, what would begin to feel heavenly? Nothing good, really, comic in the sense of the silence of the mirror before the perpetrator who thinks they are the innocent. Local in a sense that the descendant of massacred village A would feel like a survivor even if their ancestors had massacred the villages B, C, and D. Tomaž Šalamun’s poetic vision of opera buffa holds that meaning is a terrible dependence: on who is speaking and who is listening, or who remains silent; on the fact that one neighbor’s comforters are, will be, or have been, another neighbor’s violators; on history’s promise that what is human is not any kind of enlightenment. Only poetry, non-human and absolute collective memory, can voice all reistic fact of immanence, the senseless and impenetrable realities which people deny, take for granted, and reject outright.

Except three Simonidean fragments, each Opera Buffa poem is a kind of mold spore born on the Clare sonnet; each poem is seven couplets, each one full of affinities and divisions, replete with pivots and feet; each line has a power of a little volta ghost in it. Near uniform arrangement and formal repetition in couplet sonnets shape a blazing alterity of contexture and syntax in individual lines to give the Opera Buffa poems their flowering, rotting stature as oxymoronic sonnets. These poems oppose their readers as much as they oppose themselves; their tone feigns as often as it gnashes; they are bound to flowing aberration and riddled with choiceless choice. The Opera Buffa poems hold such fixed patterns that their constancy veers between proliferation and destruction; the couplet sonnets pull lines apart that wire together meaning, the lines broken into ranks that want to break rank again. Or, these are not ranks at all, instead the couplets are: tracks on railroads; bars on prison cells; detachments on patrol; nails. Nails? Nails, yes, hobbed from their wire. The Opera Buffa poems enact lines from an early Šalamun poem, “Eclipse II,” that the author Christopher Merrill set to title his own literary travelogue of Central Europe in the 1990’s, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars: “Only the nails will remain, / all welded together and rusty. / So I will remain. / So I will survive everything” (Merrill, 42). The Opera Buffa poems are the nails that survive everything, sharp with memories and histories, blunt with places and names, sharpened by time’s erosion, blunted by external forces. My job as translator was to make the poems hit how they hit and ring how they ring in written English the way they hit how they hit and ring how they ring in Šalamun’s languages. These translations are just a little jet of rust in the Šalamunian night. 

— Matthew Moore / 7 May 2021

1.  Merrill, Christopher. Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars. Rowman &
Littlefield: Lanham, MD. 2001.