Edinburgh Reading, Feb. 8, 2009

Here's Rob Mackenzie introducing the poets at the "Poetry at the Great Grog" reading on February 8, 2009, in Edinburgh.
If the venue does not look like a bar (which is what the Great Grog is), that's because it not: it's a beautiful room at St. Cuthbert's Church. The reading was relocated after Rob realized that the Great Grog would probably be full of rugby fans in the evening after a Scotland-Wales match in Edinburgh!

The first reader was Alan Gay.

Then came me.
My set list:

The Day after Writing a Poem
Doggerel
Expat
The Seven-Year-Old Atheist
Edge
Pipe Smoke
Origin (by Dieter M. Gräf, tr. AS; note that the poem is incorrectly titled at the link)
In the breaks between the trees (by Ilma Rakusa, tr. AS)
The Letter Scale (by Jacques Réda, tr. AS)
Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong
Aftermath
City
September Rain

After me came Jane McKie.


And then Tim Turnbull.


When I'm a participant, I find it hard to comment on the other readers, but I did enjoy them all, each in their own way! One thing's for sure: I'm glad I did not follow Tim, who is a wonderful performer!

My Yugoslavia

The Winter 2007/08 issue of Passages: The Cultural Magazine of Pro Helvetia, contains a beautiful short essay by Ilma Rakusa, "My Yugoslavia," which I had the pleasure and privilege of translating.

For as long as I can remember, the country called South Slavia — for that is what Yugoslavia means — has belonged to me. As a child, I lived for a while in Ljubljana, and even when we moved to Trieste, we regularly visited my father's Slovenian relatives. My father also took my mother and me along on business trips to Zagreb and Belgrade. That was an adventure, for we travelled by car, and the roads were bad. Once, on the way to Zagreb at night, we ran over a rabbit, and a little while later, we were stopped by a farmer looking for a fugitive thief.

Passages is available from Pro Helvetia.