Review: Night is More Abstract by Miklavž Komelj
| Translated by | Dan Rosenberg |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Language(s) | Slovenian, English |
| Format | 208 Pages |
| Publisher | Zephyr Press |
| ISBN | 9781938890383 |
Reviewed by Amanda L. Andrei
Mouse bones, owl pellets, and small silver pails appear amidst the dregs of communism, karma, and resurrections as Komelj’s poems play with size and scale from the minute to the epic. This fresh translation, Night is More Abstract: New and Selected Poems, imparts the abstractness of night not only on a mundane level, but also on a cosmic one (Zephyr Press, 2025).
Born in 1973, Komelj is a Slovenian art historian, writer, and poet with seventeen books of poetry; this new translation by poet Dan Rosenberg brings in selections from seven of those volumes as well as brand new poems.
In “The Red Flag,” a lyrical whirlwind highlighting the crimson color, the poet is in conversation with filmmaker Pasolini’s Italian poem “Alla Bandiera Rossa” (“To the Red Flag”). Both poems scrutinize the red flag’s connotations with communism, class, and poverty. Komelj takes it further: “to get back to cherries, to get back to blood.” These earthy images are contrasted against Hitler, Christ, the narrator’s memories of a socialist society, and a confident sense of the mysteries of heaven and earth:
Did the gods, when they saw
the blood, find in their mouths
the taste of cherries?
(I know that feeling.)
It’s not just objects and ideologies that make their appearances. Along with dictators and religious figures, an international cadre of philosophers and artists march across the poems along with anonymous and transient folks—saints, sinners, and laypeople mingled alike. From an old man near a parking lot to the early theologian St. Augustine, from a tattooed woman on a bus to the Egyptian god Horus, Komelj conjures multiple historical and contemporary characters into his work, treating icons and strangers with equal reverence and ferocity.
Take “The Lullaby of Isis,” originally from the 2021 collection The Burning Book, in which a narrator—the Egyptian goddess Isis of magic and motherhood—considers the “down of baby hair” as it becomes a quill while she touches the head of her child Horus, the god of Sun and Sky. The tone is maternal, royal, domineering, and religious, then shifts along with its stanza structures, transforming into a series of smaller poems under the guise of the lullaby. It breaks into more fragments, the quotidian rubbing up against terror:
In the middle of the road—
a bird—
no—a black plasticbag—
no—
a slipper.How
they scream in the next
room!
The poem pulls in Latin and Italian; verses repeat as if chanted by a chorus. The words could be Isis still singing, or they could be the Sun God himself, finding his way across terra firma and repeating:
This is not a forest at night—
this is a night forest.
What you find within your might
is your greatest mystery.
Rosenberg provides a heartfelt translator’s note that emphasizes his conundrums, guiding questions, and principles as he encountered the Slovenian and multilingual poems. Pointing out conflicting translator goals and priorities, especially when teasing out assumptions of what Slovenian readers would know from Komelj’s personal poetic allusions and imagery, he muses, “Is my goal even to create an analogous experience, in English, to what Slovenian readers might encounter in his work? Is the stable notion of Slovenian readers even coherent?”
The question is as philosophical as Komelj’s verses. Who receives these tides of mundane and cosmic images, and what do they do with them?
As systems, cultures, and attitudes shift in disproportionate and unpredictable ways across the world, these questions are worthwhile for any translator as they consider their audiences and for whom they translate. Ultimately, Rosenberg’s translations reflect his desires and actions to “simply honor what is most exciting” and to create a richly textured English translation.
“I did my best not to smooth what he made rough,” he explains. In doing so, Komelj and Rosenberg present readers with a witching hour that screams, a darkness that glows.
Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, theater critic, and community archivist, named as one of three Rising Leaders of Color by the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) for their 2023 cohort of theater journalists. She writes epic, irreverent plays that center the concealed, wounded places of history and societies from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women, and she co-translates from Romanian to English with her father, Codin Andrei.
She is the founder of The Palangga Archives and has presented her work on the archives at the Filipinx Studies Conference at UC Davis’ Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies. She has an MA from Georgetown University and an MFA from the University of Southern California.
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