On “Black Oval Shapes,” “Folk Song,” and “The Fish”

In September 2014, Tomaž Šalamun was released from the hospital because the doctors could do nothing else for his cancer. He went to Bled, Slovenia, where, no longer able to write or type, he dictated forty-five short poems to his wife, Metka Krašovec. He considered this set of poems, which includes “Black Oval Shapes,” his final work. He died on December 27.

“Folk Song” is one of Šalamun’s most famous poems in English. The version that appeared in Selected Poems (1988) and The Four Questions of Melancholy (1997) was translated by Charles Simic from a Serbian translation of the Slovenian poem. Because of its popularity, this is one of the poems that I felt most nervous to retranslate, but I took comfort in the fact that my translation stems from the original poem rather than from another translation.

The most significant difference between Simic’s version and mine comes in the poem’s second line, where Simic uses “their speech” and I use “the voice.” I also follow the order of the words “voice” and “people” as they appear in the original while Simic reverses them. In Slovenian, “glas” means “voice,” which could apply to one person or to “the people.” Glas happens to be the title of Šalamun’s book published three years after the book containing “Folk Song,” and it’s translated as The Voice in The Four Questions of Melancholy: New and Selected Poems. (Because Slovenian doesn’t employ articles, a translator must decide if a noun will have “the,” “a/an,” or no article before it.)

The other major difference between Simic’s translation and my own is how we translated “lopov,” which means “villain,” “scoundrel,” “rogue,” “ruffian,” or “rascal.” (“Thief” would be “tat” in Slovenian.) I chose “scoundrel” because it contains the same number of syllables as “lopov” and works well, lyrically, with “drunkard” in the previous line.

When I heard Šalamun read “The Fish” in Adelaide, Australia, in March 1998, I was spellbound by the speaker’s relentless, roving observations and narration of the poem as he composed it. Two decades later, I was captivated all over again when I returned to that moment by diving into the poem in Slovenian.