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Archipelago Books

distant transit

distant transit

by Maja Haderlap, translated from the German by Tess Lewis

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Infused with movement, Maja Haderlap’s distant transit traverses Slovenia’s scenic landscape and violent history, searching for a sense of place within its evershifting boundaries. Avoiding traditional forms and pronounced rhythms, Haderlap unleashes a flow of evocative, captivating passages whose power lies in their associative richness and precision of expression, vividly conjuring Slovenia’s natural world – its rolling meadows, snow-capped alps, and sparkling Adriatic coast. Belonging to the Slovene ethnic minority and its inherited, transgenerational trauma, Haderlap explores the burden of history and the prolonged aftershock of conflict – warm, lavish pastoral passages conceal dark memories, and musings on the way language can create and dissolve borders reveal a deep longing for a sense of home. At its core, distant transit is an ode to survival, building a monument to traditions and lives lost.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861160
Pages: 150
Publication Date:

Praise

The Slovenian Austrian poet Maja Haderlap explores the mystery and art of translation in a new collection called “distant transit.” Her poems, translated from the German by Tess Lewis, are intellectually provocative and slyly profound.
—Ron Charles, Washington Post

These poems by a Slovenian Austrian writer contemplate the difficulty of feeling at home in a land defined by violence.
—The New York Times

Though Haderlap wrote these poems in German, a language with a broader reach than Slovenian, Tess Lewis’s English version conveys the poet’s fraught relationship with her languages, and the ways in which Slovenian haunts the composition as well as the mythology and folklore of the collection . . . I sense that the gravitas of these poems has its source in both “rivers”: the extra-lingual psyche and the Ljubljanica, the river of Haderlap’s home terrain, troubled with memories and remnants of war.
—Heather Green, Harriet Books

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