Poetry
Pesmi
Not translated into English
Srečko Kosovel · 1927
Synopsis
Sixty-six early poems, collected a year after their author's death by a friend. They belong to his first manner, that of a quiet lyricism, and the landscape of the Karst, his native region, returns in them constantly. The collection gives no hint of the radical constructions, made of typographical signs, mathematical symbols and collages, that the poet was writing at the same time and that appeared only forty years later.
Context
He left more than a thousand drafts, including some five hundred finished poems, and had published only in journals; the collection he was preparing had been rejected. His friend Alfonz Gspan published these early poems in 1927; Anton Ocvirk gave a revised selection in 1931, then in 1967 gathered the constructions hitherto unknown, which changed the image of the poet. In French, he is read in selections of poems translated by Zdenka Štimac and, since 2025, in the Intégrales translated by Mathias Rambaud.
Who it is for
Short, quiet poems, easy to approach; for the other side of the work, one must turn to the constructions published in 1967.
Prizes and reception
Compared to Rimbaud, to Attila József and to García Lorca, he is regarded as one of the great modernist poets of Central Europe.