Foreword

In “Passage” (as in many of her poems), Cvetka Lipuš reminds us that we come to know ourselves by each day’s experiences: “I thread days onto the year’s necklace. / The dark ones and the light ones, as they travel / through me, all start to gleam.”

The more experiences that travel through us, the greater our capacity to perceive the world. Lipuš expresses her experiences in Slovenian, which, like all languages, is a habitat for a group’s knowledge. Translated into English by Slavic scholar Tom Priestly, What We Are When We Are provides English readers, for the first time in book form, access to the knowledge of this gifted poet. And what is lost in each poem’s translation? As a monolingual person, I take heart in Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who, in his acceptance speech for the Neustadt Prize, said, “The poem as it is presented is a manifestation of another, invisible poem, written in a language behind the common languages. Thus, even the original version is a translation. A transfer into English or Malayalam is merely the invisible poem’s new attempt to come into being. The important thing is what happens between the text and the reader.”

Each time I read a translated poem, an image, a thought, a perspective, once hidden from me, is revealed. I am given a new experience, a chance to widen the scope of my perceptions. Sometimes that new perspective is a recognition that, regardless of language and culture, we share many of the same root concerns and questions. Seeing the familiar in the strange is not only a comfort but expands the gift of empathy.

Much of Lipuš’s work is concerned with the hidden, the invisible, the buried—the strange but familiar forces that reside just outside of our consciousness, as when “somebody in the depths of consciousness / makes for the surface, somebody within me / suddenly grabs my wrist” (“The Look of Consciousness”). Thresholds and liminal spaces are also felt throughout the book, and the poems move with the rhythm of breath, drawing us into Lipuš’s dreams and imagination, then releasing us back into her present.

In “Sleeplessness,” we read,

I shut my eyes and

sibilant consonants unscrew themselves from words,

they rent the five thousand fifth floor of the

Tower of Babel and they lose their harmony.

And later in the poem,

Just for a moment I shut my eyes and

shares fall on stock exchanges.

An alligator in the Florida swamps munches

the foot of a tourist and excretes it

in the shape of a cowboy boot

size thirty-eight.

Lipus’s imaginative leaps are playful and, at the same time, often so startling as to have a visceral effect. We feel ourselves launched from the ordinary into the extraordinary. We sense a glimpse of the unconscious, the hidden. Our perceptions widen.

Lipuš’s ability to step outside of herself creates arresting images. Probing the surreal experience of moving into a new house but feeling only the presence of its past inhabitants, Lipuš writes, “On the mailbox is written my name. Now I / check every day to find out if I have arrived at the new address.” And in the wonderful “Dear Life,” she situates her consciousness inside a body that no longer seems entirely her own. “Now that I am older than myself,” she begins. Such lines stopped me in my tracks, their insights exhilarating in their inarguable truth.

This is a magical book: magical in Lipuš’s imaginative powers and magical in its transformation into English. In “Holidays,” Lipuš writes, “On the neighbouring deck chair / crosswords in a language unknown / to you are being solved.” Originally written in a language unknown to me, What We Are When We Are may not have solved the questions Lipuš asks of who we are? what is real? what matters? But the ideas and thoughts the book provokes not only expand our perceptions of these questions, they also make us feel less alone with them.

Donna Kane