Pratik : PRATIK SPRING 2021 ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: SLOVENIAN POET BARBARA KORUN'S POEM, "HENRY MASSON"

Friday, July 30, 2021

PRATIK SPRING 2021 ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: SLOVENIAN POET BARBARA KORUN'S POEM, "HENRY MASSON"

BARBARA KORUN

HENRY MASSON,

46, a French black worker, lost his hand at work and was given the hand of a German student who had died in a car accident.

Marseille, late 20th century

I have the hand of God, God’s hand.

So beautiful it makes me cry.

And I can move it, I, I move it. See?

Thumb, forefinger, little finger…

The finger of God moves by my will.

How is it written?

Whoever is touched by the finger of God…

I am God’s finger.

Whomever I touch awakens.

Or dies, unless already dead.

My arm is black,

but my fingers are white, soft, thin.

Who would have thought God a German?

Nothing is the same.

Whatever I touch becomes light.

I create out of nothing, destroy into nothing.

When I sleep my hand glows in the dark,

on my chest.

Translated from the Slovene by Barbara Siegl Carlson

Barbara Korun’s first collection Ostrina miline (The Edge of Grace) received the National Book Fair Award for a debut collection. For her fourth book Pridem takoj (I’ll be right back) she received the Veronika Award, and Golden Bird Award. Together with jazz composer and percussionist Zlatko Kaučič she recorded a CD Vibrato tišine (Vibrato of Silence, 2006) with poems of Srečko Kosovel, Slovene avant-garde poet. She organizes readings of Slovene women poets and is active in volunteering at the asylum for refugees. She received two international awards for poetry in Italy. Vmes (In between, 2016) is her sixth collection of poems.