Afterword

Cvetka Lipuš is a nomadic poet who writes in the Slovenian of her own Austrian Carinthia and, at the same time, thinks in the German and in the English of her two other linguistic homes: Austria and the United States. Poetry enables her both to feel most at home in language and to express herself in it most skilfully. For this reason, in her seventh collection of poems (her first in some time), a collection originating in America rather than in Europe, she writes, “When we are alone we slip off into the past / as into a bathrobe. How softly it clings to us” (“Watch Us Float”). But this bathrobe, paradoxically, speaks to her journeying from language to language, from culture to culture, from Železna Kapla/Eisenkappel in Carinthia—where she was born into the family of the author Florjan Lipuš—to her studies in Celovec/Klagenfurt and Vienna and her fifteen years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And then to life in Mozart’s city of Salzburg. In her poetry Lipuš experiences new surroundings and simultaneously realizes: “In whatever direction I go, the days walk behind me / like obedient puppies behind their master” (“Open End”). For this reason she may, concurrently, sink into herself, into questions that, as she herself says, “we prefer, actually, to avoid: how are we to fit our own story into the wider one, how are we to say that we are part of a story that transcends our own?”*

Lipuš brought herself to our attention with her debut collection, Pragovi dneva [Thresholds of the Day], in 1988; this was followed by Doba temnjenja [Times of Darkness] (1993), Geografija bližine [Geography of Closeness] (2000), Spregatev milosti [Conjugation of Mercy] (2003), Obleganje sreče [Siege of Happiness] (2008), Pojdimo vezat kosti [Let’s Go Tie Up Some Bones] (2010), and Kaj smo, ko smo [What We Are When We Are] (2015). Four of her collections have also been published in German translation. Her poetic voice is independent and original; it pierces our mundane, automatized perception; it goes beyond the barrier of language and culture to discover new territories of freedom and into them seductively invite the reader:

Sins, betrayals, murders, deceptions,

beauty spots on a heated complexion.

Touch the right place: I shall clothe them

into a verse and knock on the door of a sonnet.

Her poetry laces traditions together and, in so doing, leaps over the geography from New York to Kuala Lumpur, so that it endows the reader with delight in poetry as a pathway across the border between language and culture.

Tomaž Toporišič
(translated by Tom Priestly)

* Quoted in Valentina Plahuta Simčič, “Nagrada Prešernovega sklada: Cvetka Lipuš, pesnica” [Prešeren Fund Award: The poet Cvetka Lipuš], article and interview in Delo, Sobotna priloga [Saturday supplement], “Kultura,” 5 February 2016.—TP