Aus dem Vorwort von Jeffrey Young zum Buch ANDES by Tomaž Šalamun, übersetzt von Jeffrey Young und Katarina Vladimirov Young, Boston 2016.
“All I know for certain is that, as translators, we heeded Šalamun’s advice to stay literal. We tried to stay as faithful as possible to what Šalamun wrote the way he wrote it.
There were moments of untranslability when we had to take certain liberties, which Šalamun encouraged and approved, but for the most past, whenever we strayed from the literal path, we could inevitably end up on a road to nowhere and hat to retrace our steps back to the source, which is the line, the individual word or words, the modd, the syntax, the sound, and rhythm – all these components of language that Šalamun works with the way a painter works with oil and brushstrokes or a stonecutter works with chisel and stone. Or the way medieval mystics worked with language to tap pigeons from walls, to create ‘something from nothing,’ as Šalamun once described me in an interview, or as he writes in Andes‘s first poem, ‘Among the Chestnuts’, speaking of his ‘child’: ‘I made him out of / shadows and firmed him with / halva.”
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“Or the reference in the poem ‘Hedgehog’ to the ‘ostrich with gabon’ we quizzed him on this and he admitted, sheepishly, ‘Oh yesm that doesn’t make any sense. But please leave it as it is.’ So there you go.’