I reviewed Tomaž Šalamun's On the Tracks of Wild Game (translated by Sonja Kravanja) for Tarpaulin Sky:
Šalamun’s poems can be playful and absurd with the language toggling at
lightning speed between high and low registers–no doubt proving a
translator’s nightmare for Kravanja, also the translator of Šalamun’s The Shepherd, The Hunter
(Pedernal Press), which won the Columbia University Translation Prize
in 1992. They’re stark and often funny, but sometimes also tender and
soaring in historical gravitas. The shorter poems often suggest an
immediacy that just isn’t there, luring the reader into an intense
identification before suddenly shutting him out. Yet, far from being
left frustrated and scratching his head on the wrong side of the door,
the surprising new distance invites contemplation...
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