{"id":281536,"date":"2011-01-17T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/01\/17\/the-book-of-things\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:28:20","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:28:20","slug":"the-book-of-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/01\/17\/the-book-of-things\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

Literary critic Edmund Wilson, writing in the 1930s, said that the pieces of Gertrude Stein\u2019s Tender Buttons<\/em> were intended to be \u201cprose still-lifes to correspond to those of such painters as Picasso and Braque. A pattern of assorted words, though they might make nonsense from the traditional point of view, would be analogous to a Cubist canvas composed of unidentifiable fragments.\u201d The first two sections of that book are entitled \u201cObjects\u201d and \u201cFood,\u201d and those are the main subjects of Slovenian poet Ale\u0161 \u0160teger\u2019s The Book of Things<\/em> (with a few animals thrown in as well). The collection, which consists of 50 poems\u2014a poem followed by seven sections of seven \u201cthings,\u201d from raisins and bread to tapeworms and windshield wipers\u2014is the poet\u2019s fourth and the first to appear in English translation. While Stein sought to portray her things by breaking them down into tiny linguistic pieces and collaging those bits back together, \u0160teger\u2019s cubism is in the addition of angles: like in Toy Story<\/em>, objects are given literal lives of their own that are here drawn out; the things we so often overlook become the repositories of our own human fears and dreams. The effect is often disarming and although the individual success of each poem is inconsistent, there is enough beauty and surprise in these lines for \u0160teger\u2019s stature as one of Slovenia\u2019s best young poets to be amply justified. <\/p>\n

So, as expected, the things described in this book are defamiliarized and here, often, \u0160teger is at his best. The way he personifies an object, or the metaphor he uses, is never obvious, but it always makes complete sense. That when you open an umbrella \u201che unbuttons his too-tight tuxedo\u201d is an image that could very well become engrained my experience of walking in the rain. The description of a cat as a \u201ccastrated transvestite in fur\u201d also belies a strain of humor, or at least a taste for the uncanny. The effect of such language, however, can at times be discomfiting. In \u201cSausage\u201d we are asked \u201cIs your stomach rumbling again? Come, put it in your mouth. \/ Between the anus and the mouth the appetite of a body for a body.\u201d Though destined to be a lifelong carnivore, the reminder that a sausage is a body in the same way that I am a body is sobering.<\/p>\n

Yet this aspect, this theme of \u0160teger\u2019s poetry is actually not quite as prevalent as one could expect. It\u2019s hard to generalize about the poems because each thing is treated differently and what they may lack in cohesion as a whole is made up in variety (and of course, how can you treat Salmon and Shit the same?). But there are unifying themes: loss, escape from yourself, confusion perhaps, though I may just be projecting . . . For poems ostensibly about things there is certainly a lot of human in here. Consider this, entitled \u201cGrater\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

You remember how your mother, Jocasta,
\nReturned from the pigsty with a gaping palm.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Inside the madness of pain a window opened.
\nShe stepped out and stepped out of her body.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

You remember how your startled father was changing a bandage,
\nHow, mid-escape, the edges of the bandage turned red.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

This time the grater\u2019s whisper is yours. The world is being whittled away.
\nThe apple wedge is getting smaller, but who is there for whom?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Are you merely an instrument of the apple in your palm?
\nSilently it grates you, a ripe Buddhist, idared samsara.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

When it vanishes you, you open your eyes, like your mother
\nThat time, on the other side of the wound.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is, certainly, poetry\u2014an oblique allusion, two words in a row I don\u2019t know (\u201cidared samsara\u201d), a little melodrama (the madness of pain), perhaps even (though we\u2019ll give \u0160teger the benefit of the doubt) a reference to the Buddhist Beats\u2014but it is beautiful and it has power. The feeling is of a view into a private world that is not our own, a view mediated by things, here a bandage, a grater, an apple. There is something behind them: memories that are not ours and that we cannot understand, so it is a testament to \u0160teger\u2019s writing (and Brian Henry\u2019s constantly lucid translation) that we feel them. And what is important beyond that is this idea: that objects might not just be there for us or, perhaps less crazy, that they grow past functionality to become the talismans of our lives, that they are imbued with our personal histories. We create the private lives of objects, but, as \u0160teger writes in the poem \u201cAnt,\u201d they are \u201cthe invisible moving through the visible world.\u201d The poem ends thusly: \u201cAnd there aren\u2019t names for what it is. \/ When it disappears into its maze, only hope remains \/ That at least there are names for what it isn\u2019t.\u201d Stein showed in Tender Buttons<\/em> that the names of things cannot contain them by proving to us that language is not tantamount to the world is ostensibly describes. \u0160teger shows that the names of things cannot contain them because they merely denote a function rather than connoting anything richer. The epigraph to these poems is \u201cA word does not exist for every thing.\u201d No, but a poem does, and we all write them every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Literary critic Edmund Wilson, writing in the 1930s, said that the pieces of Gertrude Stein\u2019s Tender Buttons were intended to be \u201cprose still-lifes to correspond to those of such painters as Picasso and Braque. A pattern of assorted words, though they might make nonsense from the traditional point of view, would be analogous to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[37596,15416,37606,37626,37616,23996],"class_list":["post-281536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-ales-steger","tag-boa-editions","tag-brian-henry","tag-poetry-reviews","tag-slovenian-literature","tag-tim-nassau"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346256,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281536\/revisions\/346256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}