Smugglers

Bilingual Edition | Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry The poems in Smugglers move through rapid historical shifts and meditations on personal experience, exploring the depths and limits of comprehension through the people and geography of the Balkans. Ultimately, Aleš Debeljak’s urban imagination creates a mosaic—intimate and historical—of a vanished people and their country. Every poem in Smugglers is sixteen lines long—four quatrains, a common form for Debeljak. This structural regularity is reinforced by a commitment to visual balance, with each poem working as a kind of grid into which the poet pours memories and associative riffs. “Paperboy” I climbed through the window of southern light,which some saw in the dark, and walked to the cityI knew well. My pockets were heavy and wet snowfell: piles of newspaper were waiting for me. An urgent matter: whoever loves risks many formsof amazement. Leaves rustle, headlinesand popular commentaries in the upper left cornerburn. Acc