THE GLOVE
Distinguished friends of the quill.
You have invited me to speak as a writer from one of the so-called minor literatures.
Minor in the sense that the market share in your bookshops of books written by such writers is small. Often this market share approaches zero.
Minor in the sense that we often do not know much about the contexts, and even less about the languages, in which such literatures are written.
We do not know how people wake up in such languages, how they celebrate and mourn, what it is like for them to go for a walk.
Minor in the sense that this is inversely proportionate to our curiosity, especially when we find ourselves in a similar state.
Outside the borders of their language, many writers find themselves in a similar state.
In a state of minority.
And all writers are always at the same time a minority within their own language.
The language of literature is the language of minority.
And if this literature is at the same time written in a language that has few speakers, it is a double minority.
Language, thus understood, is an interface.
Between the I and the space surrounding the I, is language.
Through language, the I touches that space, it takes hold of it, moves words in space, both builds it and tears it down.
Through language, space touches the I, it takes hold of it, moves the ideas that create that I, both builds and demolishes the I.
Language is tactile.
When a language goes for a walk through space, when it becomes speech, when speech traverses space, its tracks and pavement, its asphalt, granite stones, litter and weeds, that's when the I puts on its gloves.
And when I speak, I move about as if I were walking on gloved hands.
And when we walk on our hands, then we have the sky like an abyss under our feet.
This idea is something I've borrowed from Paul Antschel, who in 1946 walked past Slovenia.
Slovenia then was part of Yugoslavia, and Paul Antschel, while walking past that space where people wore the gloves of my language, changed his gloves.
Paul Antschel was someone with more than one pair of gloves.
Gloves, likewise, were the only thing remaining to him on that long postwar march from Bucharest to Vienna.
Gloves and his bare existence.
He took off the gloves of the German language, turned them inside out, and wore them that way — inside out.
And with that, Paul Antschel became Paul Celan.
Even Paul Celan once borrowed something.
It looks as if borrowing is a fundamental activity for people who wear gloves.
Anyone who speaks is a debtor, and at the same time an issuer of promissory notes.
The ear is an organ for incurring debt, the mouth an organ for lending.
And the vestiges of exchanges, the yarn of debtors and lenders, are interwoven back through time.
History may be nothing other than an attempt to reconstruct the course of intertwining exchanges.
Like trying to locate a single strand of hair from the floor of a barbershop on its busiest Saturday morning ever.
The ground is covered with mounds of hair.
One hair has gotten stuck to my right glove.
Is it mine?
I raise it toward the light.
Whose is it?
On whose head did it grow?
And where?
In our case, in the case of the infinitely debt-ridden, of the endless issuers of loans, it's impossible to go bankrupt.
It's impossible to prevent increasing debt.
Even the deaf listen.
Absolute silence doesn't exist.
Only being silent is possible.
But the bald people keep talking.
They keep raising questions.
The people with close-shaven heads often no longer have that possibility.
The possibility of traversing space with language has been taken from them.
Language has been taken from them.
Even their last glove has been taken from them.
Barehanded, they stand behind the barbed wire.
We all know the scene with the barehanded, staring from behind the barbed wire.
Scenes from camps of different types.
We're used to these types of images.
We're used to the assembly of people who do not talk.
We're accustomed to the mute.
He who walks on his hands, who enjoys the privilege of wearing gloves.
He who walks on his head, with the sky under his feet, as an abyss.
He who clings to this world, aware of the possibility that at any moment it may disappear.
He who touches with his skin turned inside out.
His ear will grow.
His hearing will grow for those who cannot speak.
It will grow for the memory of the earth, on which this people, who cannot speak, are standing, where we pass by.
So too will the movement grow, with which he raises to the light the hair that got stuck to his glove.
The movement with which he tries to find the head, to trace the thoughts from which that hair has grown. FOTO POT 1
I don't know what there can be, at the moment, so terribly, so marvellously, decisive for me in the thought of that glove leaving the hand forever.
Says Andre Breton in Nadja.
That is one of the heads through which this single hair has grown.
A hair without beginning? Without a first head?
A hair without a head with any notion of a first head, a chosen head, an elect head.
And thus does a trace of this thing, an almost transparent shimmering of this hair, exist in my head?
I shut my eyes.
The interweaving of images, of lighter and darker surfaces, spaces and spaces.
I try to remember March 2007.
Leipzig.
At a reading, I lost a pair of gloves.
The gloves were a gift from someone I love.
Like all gloves, they were much more than a pair of gloves.
They were an interface.
So it's no surprise that the loss of those gloves resembled dyslexia.
I stepped out of a taxi into a snow bank, and the gloves were gone.
Like a letter that suddenly disappears from a word.
Like a word that, absent the vanished letter, suddenly changes the meaning of a sentence.
Like a sentence that, one word misspelled, suddenly lights up and becomes visible.
Like the twin brother of that misworded sentence; like an old sentence that with a letter missing, a word altered, disappears from a head.
For two days I looked for my gloves.
I tracked down the taxi.
I went back to the hotel.
I went back to the restaurant.
I went back to the library where I had had the reading.
I asked the waiter, the receptionist, the maid, the driver.
Nothing.
The word gloves was gone.
Touch was gone.
Traversing space was gone.
I was paralyzed, as if I were left hanging between earth and sky.
Around me there grew a fence.
On the third evening, I was sitting in a bar with friends.
In the wee hours our conversation arrived at the idea of refuse.
The idea of trash.
The idea of recycling.
The idea of favelas built from things thrown away.
The idea of artificially keeping alive people whose brains are dead.
The idea of the turning point.
Of turning old into new, of death into life, of waste into something useful.
One of the people talking brought up, as an example, gloves he had found three evenings before on the balustrade of a library.
Black gloves with brown stitching.
Soaked and crushed, they were lying in the snow.
Now they were in his hotel room, drying.
My gloves.
Like a miracle.
A turning point.
They were returned to me.
Just as they had to let me traverse the never again.
To traverse muteness.
As if they had meant, with their being lost, to stamp the promissory note into my attention.
What is it that lends to something so negligibly small an infinite weight?
Something like a hair?
A hair in a barbershop on a Saturday morning, when it's completely full.
A hair stuck to a glove.
A hair stuck to a glove that a month after visiting that barbershop I would lose and find again.
A glove that lost me and found me again.
It let me go and caught me again, but this time I was turned inside out.
Folded over many times.
We touch each other with those folds.
The glove finds me in a gallery. FOTO POT 2
I wander through the rooms and come across a name.
Through it, a hair is growing.
A hair I now lift toward the light.
A hair growing through the heads of Breton and Celan.
I traced it up to here, the very last several millimeters of its growth.
Of its economy of simultaneous borrowing and infinite lending.
I'm walking through an exhibition, following this discarded hair.
Max Klinger, the author of the exhibition, left behind a picture that rolls after the discarded glove.
The Glove, the title of a series of prints, stares at me.
For a moment it tries to escape through the window. FOTO POT 3
It continues staring at me.
I'm standing in the middle of the gallery.
In my hands I clench the lost, crushed gloves that found me again the night before.
As if I had found a missing letter.
As if I had found a possibility being opened by a missing part.
The possibility of changing a word.
The possibility of borrowing a word.
The possibility of lending this word to others.
Possibility means space.
Without looking for words, we exchange.
The images of Klinger's prints, Breton, Celan, the glove, an I and a you reading this.
For the thinnest sutures, surgeons use blonde hairs instead of thread.
So it's good when someone in the operating room has long, blonde hair.
Hair stitches us together, it creates clumps of intermediaries.
We are meant to walk behind the hair, with gloves on, with the sky under our feet.
That's what Klinger's print is saying.
Over and over I walk through the space of this utterance.
After a while, the pictures are hanging inside me.
Between I and space, sometimes there is no difference.
That's when silence is most utterly meaningful.
Perhaps it is because of these prints that I would later set off on a journey.
As I'm leaving, as I'm crossing the border, as I'm speaking with a lonely border guard about a border that in a couple of months will disappear, about the disappearing place of the border guard's profession, I still don't know that I'm making my way through another gallery each time.
The stitches gets thinner and thinner.
They stitch together Slovenia and Hungary.
It's hardly visible, this seam, and it weighs no more than a hair stuck to a glove.
But despite its thinness, it holds together spaces that seem quite far apart.
To seem: but language doesn't seem, it touches.
The seam joins what was separated.
To join what is separate.
What is left hanging, fragmented, in our idea of the whole.
To make whole this idea.
To walk.
With a rucksack, two pairs of socks, and a brush. FOTO POT 4
To step through words.
Thirty-five days of stepping through words.
First the words igen, köszönöm, jó napot.
Through the names of towns, Szentgotthárd, Orfalu, Letenye.
But these names of towns are other names at the same time.
Names within names.
Names behind names.
As I walk through the names Szentgotthárd, Orfalu, Letenye, I am walking through the names Monošter, Andovci, Letenje at the same time.
And although I am surrounded by a plain, although wheat grows from a palm outstretched toward the clouds and the fields cannot be counted on ten fingers, I am walking the entire time through a narrowness.
The names aren’t exclusive, they're possibilities I’m jostling through.
My step is unpredictable.
Wavering.
I touch.
I only understand what is not yet a word.
My body traverses.
My ear collects debts.
The debt of signs with Hungarian, Slovenian, and German names where the villages begin.
The debt of signs with only Hungarian names where the villages end.
What begins with at least three names ends with only one.
When I look back my tracks lose their way.
My tracks lose their way.
When, where will they catch up to me again?
The tracks are more of a subject than the I.
In the fields, corn leaves brush against each other with a sough, palms in the wind.
Lying under willow trees.
Children playing by a stream with its hanging branches.
Plaiting braids on which to swing to the other side.
A great heat.
I still don’t understand more than a handful of words, but from day to day my step is firmer.
From day to day, the asymmetrical position of blisters on my feet makes it clearer to me.
Each leg walks a different path.
A miracle that the torso succeeds in keeping the two together.
After five days of walking.
After five evenings of washing the same t-shirt, same underwear and socks with soap in a sink.
After five days of following the glimmer of hair in villages full of barking, I step into a new hall of this open-air gallery.
Since the beginning of my journey I have been in a gallery.
Villages, towns, woods, clouds, people are all exhibits in this gallery, but I am not aware of it.
In this gallery there are crashed cars in the middle of a field. Recycling? FOTO POT 05
What once traversed distances, what once transported travelers and luggage, now lies abandoned in the middle of a field.
Waiting for boys to take apart the wreck and use it for spare parts.
Sometimes it’s the same with ideas.
They crash.
They stop functioning.
Silently we take them apart.
Then use them for new ideas that do run.
Again we travel.
At least for some time.
Sometimes that’s how it is with memory.
Sometimes that’s how it is with blistered soles.
Recycling?
How to recycle the sadness of a boy sent at fifteen into the trenches of the first world war?
A boy sent to the front, a boy who has fallen.
His stone likeness stands on the roadside. FOTO POT 06
In these regions the monuments are usually erected in praise of heroism.
Marching, muscled bodies, cannons, eternal fame.
This monument has none of that.
What village has allowed itself such an unheroic warning?
It’s name is Nemesszer.
Is it possible to recycle history?
When some locale traverses the language of history turned upside down, of history turned inside out like a glove, when speech becomes the speech of fallen boys, of those tortured and marked.
When history is not the history of heroic deeds.
What sort of place can this be and for whom?
It’s a cold morning, it rained the night before, only a few cars on the street, fog in the valleys.
That’s the first room in the gallery, a few dilapidated houses, a tavern with a big sign BIKERS WELCOME, a man hidden in his raincoat fishing at the lake.
Wet asphalt.
There it lies.
A sister to my lost and rediscovered pair.
A glove. FOTO POT 07
Actually it's lying on the edge of the roadway.
The idea of a glove has an edge, it always marks an edge.
The edge of what we touch, what we reach with our thought.
The edge of what’s small, of what still attracts our attention.
The edge of the barely audible.
The edge of asphalt and grass on a rainy morning on the way to Letenje, a town on the Croatian-Hungarian border. FOTO POT 08
A town where Croatian and Hungarian are stitched together.
A town where the words of either language enter each other like sewing needles into cloth.
Like surgical needles into skin.
A site of suture.
Where meandering leads through the words da, hvala, bok.
There at the edge, different monuments everywhere.
Private monuments.
They do not exist in Hungary.
Monuments of those who fell in another war.
In a war of constant traversal.
A monument to the motorcyclist who got killed in an accident.
The monument marks the site he was unable to traverse.
A ring of stones.
A placard with names and the years 1985–2005.
A smiling face in a semicircle, practically still a child.
Blue plastic roses.
An extinguished candle.
Countless extinguished candles on the roadside in Croatia.
The recycling of history.
Countless extinguished candles on my walk through the names of towns: Čakovec, Varaždin, Krapina.
BIKERS WELCOME.
When I through the names Čakovec and Varaždin, I am walking at the same time through the names Csaktornya and Varasd.
Familiar names.
Distant names.
I dreamt of them as a child.
Beyond the hills in the near distance.
There, the hair grows from people’s heads in my language.
Here, in the language of neighbors.
We all are overgrown.
Our I grows over us like a briar.
Every now and then this briar dries up and around us is left a cage made of dead words and ideas.
We look at a certain space the way a gravestone in the Varaždin cemetery looks at the cemetery. FOTO POT 09
I look at it. It looks at me.
We exchange cages.
It is turned away from the oldest part of the cemetery.
The oldest part of the cemetery is called Pekel, the word for Hell.
It is beautiful and still, as if it were a part of heaven.
And when I traverse it, crushing the gravel, the feet are relieved of their pain.
I traverse it. It traverses me. I walk with the increasingly heavy luggage of images.
I walk through places where everyday life, gods, and fairytales are sometimes stitched to each other very strangely. FOTO POT 10
And the fairytales are old and the fairytales are new.
And the stitches are old and the corn is new.
A lot of corn along the road. FOTO POT 11
And many paths overgrown.
The villages are different from each other.
In the village of Nova Vas, most of the houses have signs in front of them advertising pigs for sale.
Big signs.
In front of other houses are signs for the sale of wine and potatoes.
In front of each house in the village of Nova Vas is a bench.
But there is no one to sit on those benches.
Only pigs, wine, and potatoes.
And empty benches.
I’ve been on the road for eleven days.
I wake up with the dawn.
In the morning fog, I walk along railway tracks that stopped operating in 1991.
I walk past the last station on the line, Kumrovec.
The birthplace of Josip Broz, known as Tito.
The railway tracks curve like a seam, a little to one side, a little to the other.
A little in my language, a little in the language of my neighbors.
A little on a territory called the European Union, a little on a territory that one day will be called the European Union.
The bushes overgrowing the tracks don’t care about the European Union.
They don’t care about the naming of territories.
The don’t care about the names Slovenia, Croatia.
They care only that they stitch the abandoned railway tracks with the Croatian word žbunje, with the Slovenian word grmičevje.
It’s been sixteen years since the glove lying alongside the tracks last trimmed them. FOTO POT 12
It points southwest.
Following the border.
Along the seam.
They are leading me through days.
After fifteen days, I arrive at the name of some village.
Lukovdol.
In the village, Slovenians planted linden trees around the church.
Inside the church the masses are held in Croatian.
Next to the church is a tavern.
Populated by Slovenes and Croats.
Together they speak a language that is neither Slovene nor Croatian, which is both and neither.
Luk in Croatian means onion, cebula in Slovene.
In the Slovene dialect spoken where I come from, cebula is called luk.
Luk has layers without a center.
The onion is a glove within a glove within a glove.
How much contact without a last point of contact.
Contact without any notion of ending or beginning.
A gloved intermediation.
Lukovdol is where the poet Ivan Goran Kovačić lived.
He wrote in dialect, in the language of luk and cebula.
He threaded words like hair through the needle's ear and sewed the separated parts together.
In his house are lists of words. FOTO POT 13
The words often belong to both, and at the same time to neither, of the two languages.
They belong to Croatian, but often they are not Croatian.
They belong to Slovene, but often they are not Slovene.
These words tell us that every person is his own dialect.
That every person is an indeterminate minority.
We are buried in the demand to be determinate.
There are people who are trying to unearth themselves from this demand. FOTO POT 14
Their gestures sometimes leave signs behind, written in the language of a minority.
The signs say: we are all inchoate Ariadnes.
The words we write are the threads.
The threads are woven out of hair.
And the hair leads through a labyrinth of demands and limitations.
Where, seemingly, everything is possible.
Seemingly, by seeming: language is tactile.
I've been on the road for nineteen days.
Contact with the space around me becomes increasingly strange.
Increasingly people tell stories.
About a time when they were cooks in the Yugoslav National Army.
About a time when a woman's husband came home from his job on a trans-oceanic liner.
About a time when it was still possible to win a lot of money in the lottery.
About a time overgrown with thorns.
Each overgrown time is a better time.
Better than the time of today, the time of traversal.
My language is becoming more flexible, more slippery.
And more and more vulnerable.
Although it must have known this by heart for a long time.
Although, but still it shuts up when faced with how easy it is to separate. FOTO POT 15
In Istria I walk through places where in the twentieth century people changed their passports seven times without ever leaving their place of birth.
I look down the hill.
An oven, like a rusted life, that must have tumbled all the way down the slope.
Recycling?
From a side street comes a pick-up truck.
Behind it, a boy.
When he sees me, he sticks out his tongue.
A bit further, a stone well.
On top of it, a rusted flag from the year 1903.
A steel pipe like a tongue sticking out.
Dried out.
The wind starts blowing, and the first light yellow leaves fall onto the asphalt.
Summer, which only just began, acquires the smell of sea salt and of its own end.
The glove showing me the way has become entirely rigid. FOTO POT 16
It waits for me at the Bloke border crossing, between Slovenia and Italy.
The thread here may be softer, but the stitches are everywhere visible.
Beyond the frontier, a softer aesthetic of the bizarreness of suburbs. FOTO POT 17
The recycling of things abandoned.
I step through the words si, grazie, ciao.
Through the names Trieste, Trst, Triest.
Through names that have five names, Italian, Slovene, Croatian, Istrian, and German.
Finally, sycamores everywhere.
Their supple, generous shade.
Although it is very narrow here. FOTO POT 18
Next to the football stadium are bare concrete walls.
They lead to Rizarna.
Monumento con inportancia nationale.
The only concentration camp on Italian soil during the second world war.
The word is so stiff that it cannot be folded.
No gloves, only the looks of those who have never come further than here.
Those whose last gloves were taken from them here.
Those whose possibility of traversal has been taken from them.
The commander of Rizarna was a Slovene from Trieste, Odilo Globočnik.
Caro Globus as the Führer addressed him in personal letters.
He who walks on his hands walks slowly.
He knows that he’ll never be able to walk the entire world.
An entire world does not exist.
There exist only small worlds, enclaves, liberated territories, refuges, asylum.
A globe is possible in the totalizing thinking of appropriators.
And in the thinking that reveals the inanity of the totalizing thinking of the appropriators, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for example.
To climb up above the bay, to look out over the sea. FOTO POT 19
A few roofs of houses, seagulls and the rippling of salt.
The whole world.
A few kilometers further, interred in the drone of a nearby highway, a Karst cemetery for those fallen in the first world war. FOTO POT 20
I pass between the names Anton Umek, Ernest Angeli, Wladislaw Floczak, Osman Huskic.
I step as if I were marching forward backwards.
I was the last generation that had to take Fundamentals of Marxism in high school.
The teacher was always repeating:
We may have to take even two steps backwards in order to go one step forward.
Today the times are different.
But it seems that crazy teacher was right.
I step forwards, but here, touching this seam, I move backwards.
As if we had yet to grow any hair at all.
As if we had never been in debt.
As if we did not know the meaning of the sign for victory, made by the crushed fingers of a glove on the roadside outside Duino. FOTO POT 21
As if we did not know that it was proclaiming the victory of the logic of loss.
The logic of separation, the logic of preventing traversal.
Whose victory is it?
The gutters are full of crushed beer cans.
The gutters are full of crushed cigarette boxes.
I try to read what’s written on them.
Crushed letters, but the second part of the warning is usually legible.
KILLS. TÖDLICH. UCCIDE.
I’ve been on the road for twenty-five days.
Before me the Julian Alps rise in the middle of the gallery.
The gallery space is enormous.
Everywhere, installations of springs, water flowing out of rocks.
The villages are tidy, but empty.
Enormous gardens, but no one in them.
The villages at midday are like ghost towns.
The villages in the morning and in the evening are like ghost towns.
I start to walk up between the woods. FOTO POT 22
Narrowness and narrowness.
It is already getting dark when, having passed over the mountain, I reach the valley.
Val di Resia.
Rezija.
Two thousand people pressed in this narrow valley between high mountains.
Narrowness can sometimes protect you.
Inaccessibility is sometimes a protection.
The people speak four languages.
But not independently.
They speak them simultaneously.
Slovene, Italian, Friulian, German.
They understand each other.
The rest of us listen and conjecture. FOTO POT 23
The idea of Babel is not the idea of building a tower, the idea of communication.
The idea of Babel contradicts any kind of construction. It is the idea of isolation.
The angels’ message is incomprehensible, although each single word looks familiar.
The words are reminiscent of other words.
Which ones they are, it is impossible to tell.
Dyslexia.
Too many letters have been changed.
The message is incomprehensible.
There is only a trace, polyvalent directions for movement. FOTO POT 24
And the glove?
It is not only a direction, not only a signpost.
The glove waits as part of the I, in order to say something.
It waits so that something can be articulated.
Between the I and space there is language.
It is impossible to take it off.
Sometimes we can only fold it.
Language folds, wrinkles. FOTO POT 25
On the border of Italy and Austria.
I’ve been on the road for twenty-eight days.
I step through the words ja, danke, grüß Gott.
There are high dams here.
In Villach they are celebrating. FOTO POT 26
In Beljak they are celebrating.
Thousands of people dressed in traditional costume.
Music and beer.
As if I were walking through a honeycomb.
Two drunken musicians.
One throws his arm around my neck.
I’ve already played on every continent, he says.
Then, accompanied by an accordion, he sings about the beauty of home and the alpine peaks.
Yesterday I performed in front of a large audience, ten thousand people, he says.
Ten thousand people were weeping, he says.
I still get tears in my eyes when I think about those ten thousand, he says.
Everywhere are hanging little gingerbread hearts.
Everywhere posters of Haider.
His slogan: The others are all talk, Haider’s all action.
In the villages, stones that tell stories about the end of the first world war. FOTO POT 27
About the conflicts between the army of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and the Austrian army.
About heroic defense.
About the referendum, when this part of Carinthia went to Austria.
About the moment which for the last ninety years has been the primary political motor in this region.
About the thick suture, stitched over and over again.
To build on resentment is easy.
To separate is easy. FOTO POT 28
There are big dams here, big enough for countless tears.
But a very small thing can provoke a strong commotion. FOTO POT 29
A small thing.
For example, a name.
Semislavce. Sant Lamprecht.
To write the name of a place in the language of the minority provokes a strong commotion.
Ninety years since these names were last written publicly.
In Carinthia there are high dams.
Here and there I walk through a feeling of extreme beauty.
Here and there I walk through a feeling of wanting to escape.
It seems that I’m not the only one with this desire. FOTO POT 30
I’ve been on the road for thirty-two days.
The border increasingly tangles itself between my steps.
The border between countries, between languages, between cultures.
The border of my steps, of my next hours, of my sight.
Borderborderborder.
I walk past stones marking a border, overturned. FOTO POT 31
They were put here by an international commission in 1920.
The Slovenian ones are freshly whitewashed. It was necessary to change the inscription Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia with the inscription Republic of Slovenia.
The boletes and blueberries and ferns and pines on either side do not acknowledge this border.
I step between marks that indicate the centimeter up to which a highway belongs to one country and after which it belongs to the neighboring country.
I like these kinds of highways. It is impossible to drive on one’s own ground without driving at the same time on the neighbor’s ground.
To be forced into communication.
Into building towers of Babel.
To touch, to be a language, pressed into a narrowness between an I and space.
A glove. FOTO POT 33
Then the road turned through a forest.
It approaches me. FOTO POT 34
Walking counter to my direction.
Counterclockwise.
Counterclockwise to history.
Limping.
Two steps backwards for every step forward.
He poses no danger.
A stray dog without its right front leg.
Where is he going?
How is it he can move at all?
When we meet he doesn’t even look at me.
Not one for talking.
Capable of indebting others through silence.
I’ve been on the road for thirty-four days.
When someone journeys a long time on foot, after a while he can tell by the barking of dogs whether people in a village get along with each other.
No barking in this forest.
No words.
When he limps past, it’s as if I were seeing a mirage.
The black angel of history without one of his four gloves.
I’ve been on the road for thirty-five days.
It will rain soon.
On the hilltop there is a stone. FOTO POT 35
It marks the meeting point of three borders: Slovenia, Austria, and Hungary.
All around, heaps of garbage from tourists.
All around, commemorative placards.
Recycling?
My circle comes full close here.
Again I return to my labyrinth.
It freezes my fingers.
Although it’s August, although it’s over thirty degrees celsius, my fingers are frozen.
Is the sky that walks beneath me as cold as this?
Out of the forest an echo of barking.
And who will throw away the next glove?
Translated from Slovene by W. Martin with the author
© Aleš Šteger
© for the translation: Catalan PEN, simona.skrabec@gmail.com