Translations from the Slovenian into German are still sowed rarely, and so I had to search for a long time, until I found finally the "Integrali" from Srečko Kosovel, texts which immediately impressed me very much and to which I felt close.
The line “As burning trees we are tent into the new day” appears to me symptomatically both for his immense work arised in torn times and for its life die away incomprehensibly fast, and in various regard it reminds me of the German poet Georg Büchner: also early perfect, also early extinguished.
Translations from Kosovels native language into German transport above all contents, less the internal poetic form; thus for me only later hearing and reading of the Slovenian original made a real seizing and feeling of Kosovels poetry in its ease and sounds possible.
The contentwise arrangement of the five texts (in reality there are only four, because I divided the two-part "Smrt" on two different pieces) is determined by the apparent pair of opposites death and life. It describes to a certain extent the stations "death picture" (I.), "to dare life" (II.), "death in the middle of the life" (III.), "the easy life" (IV.) and “extended and transcended death picture” (V.).
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My five pieces try to give but also to set against the expressiveness Kosovels an expressive correspondence of their own; try to create a sound area, in which Kosovels poetry becomes possible. Externally they are connected only by very short rests, internally a.o. by an in everyone occurring longing (or: life-addicted?) moment. Briefly lighting up this interrupts the often threatening expressiveness of its environment (I.), let it after-tremble (II.) or shades it carefully (V.) respectively becomes confrontated with tonal hardness (III.) or falls together with the climax of an ecstatic development (IV.). At the beginning the articulated word arises from vocal sounds, at the end it sinks in the non-verbal before the development of language: as if out of distant past something comes "at midnight on the dot" into our memory, in order to back-dip again into the depth of the inside. The vocal staff of two solo woman's voices and choral man's voices represents virtually a smashed choir, as a symbol for a crushed, burst world, as a mirror of separation and separationness of the sexes. So solos and choir are used mostly separately in succession. An into-one-another penetrating with-each-other remains a luckful episode. All five sections are finally formed more or less distinctive in mirror forms (at the clearest IV.), like a cipher for it that death and live form a whole, correspond to themselves reflectedly.
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