The way your breasts point as, teenager, you curl up
in the bathtub, and the way they lie flat on your chest
as you twist and turn in your bed, six, seven decades
into your life, there’s a satisfaction in that,
as there is in doing a handstand and kickover bridge, although
you can’t really stand still or transition, rolling down a grassy hill,
you are a solitude long before being told of the concept of loneness,
too small on a drag lift that frightens you, on your own atop
a slope you can not ski down, alone on a barren
hilltop with a parachute before the jump: effort and cold,
warmth and joy, all at once in this winter with sleds
and horses and the feeling that you would rather walk
by yourself than add to their burden. At last summer comes,
sun sizzling on skin on your stomach, the smell of lust,
exhaustingly lustful thoughts year after year,
so you choose a boyish girlhood in jeans,
shades of blue, short hair, climbing, swimming,
a childhood outside of girlhood
and late middle age outside of womanhood
like someone at the bottom of the ocean clinging
to seagrass, like something out of its element.
What is your desire? A heavy silk kimono, a red undergown.
Crystal blue water, cliffs, dark nail polish peeling,
a dry, firm hold of a hand and, suddenly all that space
splintering into specks of light, and it’s not just air particles
reflecting the sunlight, what glows is the sky from within,
and you, less and less a spectator, no longer a witness,
dissolve in the glowing. There are bees or small wasps landing on the red,
a crow high on the roof and stalks growing into the possibility of flowers,
weeds and grasses, overgrown balcony shrubs—they let totality burst in,
these signifiers of wilderness, which is rare, and yet remains
the grounding force, a surrender, here for comparison, a neutral value.
I wish all these perfect, tense women would take a moment
to relax, to dream, to turn irresponsible, sleepy,
to let themselves feel attracted to each other, to stop
performing. We move very slowly, mostly lying down.
There are many other animals among us,
there have been since forever,
except now we feel them all, the largest among them
letting us stroke their soft fur.
You weep, you sleep, you don’t care to speak.
Nothing is expected of you. You can not have a driving permit,
you can be alone, you can not feel,
here no demands are made.
You perform your ritual before work, brushing your teeth,
locking and unlocking twice, all this is fine.
You completely forget your loved ones, your everyday chores,
all meaning. Sitting on a warm rock, scratching in the wind,
you are a monkey, a branch with ants filing along it, debris in the air,
spots of flickering light, you are no longer there, you are one,
a suspended, emptied image, merged with its surroundings,
a woman squatting, fading without disappearing,
a genderless being, part of the land.
You have crossed over, we all feel this light.
End of the world, beginning
Jana Putrle Srdić
translated from the Slovenian by Katja Zakrajšek
Read the original in Slovenian
Listen to "End of the World, Beginning" read in the original Slovenian by the author:
Translating a poem begins by identifying the key features making it effective as a poem. In “End Of The World, Beginning”, these are the imagery and the pace of the lines—intense and steady at once, with just enough stopping points to catch your breath and mark a change in direction. I often feel that once I have that general flow of the text down, the rest follows in time, and so it is here. The long lines help, giving more room for the sort of manoeuvring that is unavoidable in pairs of languages with such different syntaxes as Slovenian and English.
Vivid, evocative images come thick and fast in the poem, growing, developing and merging; I am particularly struck by the imagery of light developed at the centre of the poem and reemerging at the very end. One of the challenges here is to keep in mind the text as an artistic whole, meaning you might need to let go of a solution that appears ideal locally in order to avoid unintended word repetitions across an entire passage. On another level, while you want to render the images as precisely as possible for the reader to experience, you have to refrain from explaining and clarifying too much; the poem doesn’t say everything, rather inviting the reader to put in imaginative work of her own. In this, too, literary translation is an art of balance.
Translating into a language in which the author herself is fluent presents an additional level of complexity to the process, with more deliberation and negotiation around translation choices than is usual. Ideally, this is also a wonderful opportunity to fine-tune the translation. In this case, for instance, it turned out that in my initial version, the opening sequence leaned a little too much into loneliness, downplaying the addressee’s independence, so the author and I played around with it until we got the balance right. As much as it is true that a translation generally takes on a life of its own, if the poet is not just able to read the translation but might even be called upon to perform public readings in English, their collaboration is crucial for them to be able to feel at home in the translated poem—and invite their readers to enter it.
Vivid, evocative images come thick and fast in the poem, growing, developing and merging; I am particularly struck by the imagery of light developed at the centre of the poem and reemerging at the very end. One of the challenges here is to keep in mind the text as an artistic whole, meaning you might need to let go of a solution that appears ideal locally in order to avoid unintended word repetitions across an entire passage. On another level, while you want to render the images as precisely as possible for the reader to experience, you have to refrain from explaining and clarifying too much; the poem doesn’t say everything, rather inviting the reader to put in imaginative work of her own. In this, too, literary translation is an art of balance.
Translating into a language in which the author herself is fluent presents an additional level of complexity to the process, with more deliberation and negotiation around translation choices than is usual. Ideally, this is also a wonderful opportunity to fine-tune the translation. In this case, for instance, it turned out that in my initial version, the opening sequence leaned a little too much into loneliness, downplaying the addressee’s independence, so the author and I played around with it until we got the balance right. As much as it is true that a translation generally takes on a life of its own, if the poet is not just able to read the translation but might even be called upon to perform public readings in English, their collaboration is crucial for them to be able to feel at home in the translated poem—and invite their readers to enter it.
Jana Putrle Srdić has published four poetry collections, a novel, short stories, articles on emerging art and essays. Her poetic writing focuses on nature, non-humans and queer relationships, often involving plants, animals and landscapes alongside the human world. Her work has been shortlisted three times for national Slovenian awards and published in West Branch, Fourteen Hills, Tupelo Quarterly and is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review. She has been selected for 10 Books from Slovenia (Center for Slovenian Literature; 2015; 2021; 2023). Her books are available in multiple translations, and she has given readings of her work around the world. Her short novel, Po celi ravnini pod nebom (Beneath the Sky Across the Entire Plain; CSK, 2022), is translated into Spanish by Julia Sarachu (Por toda la llanura bajo el cielo; Gog y Magog, 2024) and is forthcoming in English (Generous Press, 2026). janaputrlesrdic.eu
Katja Zakrajšek is an award-winning translator and comparatist working from French, English and Portuguese into Slovenian and sometimes from Slovenian into English. She translates contemporary fiction (Marie NDiaye, Bernardine Evaristo, Adriana Lisboa, Sheila Heti) as well as poetry (Warsan Shire, Mosab Abu Toha, Olivia Elias, Valeska Torres), theatre (Tony Kushner), philosophy (John Rawls, Alain Badiou) and young readers’ literature (Clémentine Beauvais, Elizabeth Acevedo). Believing in decolonising and diversifying literary canons, she prefers to focus on traditions and spaces underrepresented in translation, in particular African and Afro-Diasporic writing, where the authors she has translated include Ahmadou Kourouma, Ken Bugul, Emmanuel Dongala, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, Akwaeke Emezi, Mia Couto and—upcoming in 2025—Conceição Evaristo. Her Slovenian-to-English translations include works by philosopher Lia Lola Kotnik and poet Anja Zag Golob.
