Slovakia

I’m still really sad that I didn’t quite get to Slovakia when I went to Europe for the first (and so far only) time. I made it to the Czech Republic and met a wonderful girl in Poland who had made her way into Poland on foot, after a mixture of hiking and hitchhiking—she was on her way from Slovakia. And now that it’s Slovakia’s Constitution Day, I’m thinking about it again and wishing I could have made it… Some day I will.

I had no idea that around 500 years before the common era Celts settled in what is now Slovakia—they stayed for a long time, before the Slavic tribes started arriving about a thousand years later. Hungarians later annexed the territory, and the region became integrated into the Kingdom of Hungary. Well and good, but of course the Mongols were coming, and their invasion, combined with the famine that followed, resulted in huge population losses.

Another thing I didn’t know? Bratislava—which was known as Pressburg—was the capital of Hungary until 1848 when the capital moved to Budapest. The region didn’t have a good time under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and so in 1918 it combined with Bohemia and Moravia to form Czechslovakia. I think I still hear people so Czechoslovakia as often as I hear the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 1968 Soviet tanks arrived—obviously what is known as Prague Spring took place in, well, Prague, but as part of the same country at the time, Slovakia certainly felt the effect of Soviet occupation.

And of course when communism ended during the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Slovakia became a separate nation.

Feel journalistic? Slovakia has a great spot at number 3 on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

Perhaps you merely feel poetic. Well, today’s poem is “Skin is a Wrapping of Bones” by Ivan Kolenič. It comes, once more, from New European Poets.


Skin is a Wrapping of Bones

Every day one verse.
Every morning one powerless lampoon
from sadness and icy grass, oxygen
in the roots of summer—how they sprout
from your bitten tongue. You keep
it red, well-hidden and perfectly
protected behind sharp teeth
which recollect blood. So what
I say is, “Skin is a wrapping for bones,
for veins, for the army of hurt…”
(you can do nothing about it) even if
you shelter your silky remembrance
in a glass jar of preserves.
So, not one stupidity—in the ashtray
my hair smolders, in the dark
someone horribly strange comes close to me.
Here endeth the blues—should I say more?

—Ivan Kolenič
from New European Poets
translated from the Slovak by Stefania Allen and James Sutherland-Smith