Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Convertiendse en Characoteles / Sorcerers Changing into Their Animal Forms (detail), 2013, oil on canvas. Arte Maya Tz’utujil Collection.
AGNI 70
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The Blood of Libraries
Tomaž Šalamun (1941–2014), a Slovenian born in Zagreb, Croatia, is considered one of the great postwar Central European poets. Among his books translated into English are The Blue Tower (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), On the Tracks of Wild Game (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), and Soy Realidad (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014). Šalamun taught at the Universities of Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Massachusetts, Pittsburgh, and Richmond, and was invited to be member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1971. He also spent several years as cultural attaché to the Slovenian Consulate in New York. He lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Ana Jelnikar is completing her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Apart from translating Richard Burns’s poetry collection Black Light into Slovenian, she has translated five collections of contemporary Slovenian poetry into English. Her most recent publication is the anthology Six Slovenian Poets (Arc Publications, 2006, co-translated with Stephen Watts and Kelly Lenox Allan).
Joshua Beckman is the author of numerous books of poetry and translation, including his most recent, Take It (Wave Books, 2009), and the translation Five Meters of Poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). He lives in Brooklyn and Seattle and is an editor at Wave Books.