Aleš Šteger


Aleš Šteger is a Slovene poet, writer, editor and literary critic. Aleš belongs to a generation of writers that started to publish right after the fall of Yugoslavia. His first poetry collection Šahovnice ur was sold out in three weeks after publication and indicated a new generation of Slovenian artists and writers.
Štegers books have been translated into 16 languages and his poems appeared in internationally renowned magazines and newspapers as The New Yorker, Die Zeit, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, TLS and many others. Among other prizes and honours his English translation of Knjiga reči won two mayor U.S. translation awards.
Aleš received the title Chevalier dans le ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French State. He is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
Besides writing and translating from German and Spanish Aleš is also the programme director of Beletrina academic Press that he co-funded.
From 1995 to 2004 and from 2008 to present, he was the initiator and programme director of the international poetry festival Days of Poetry and Wine. He worked also as programme director of the Terminal 12 - programme strand at the Maribor 2012 European Capital of Culture.
Since 2012 he is working on a performative writing project Written on Site, making one public writing performance each year.
Among his editorial work, the most noticeable is a new revisited collection of poems by Edvard Kocbek published in 2004, which includes a number of Kocbek's unpublished poems as well as an insightful essay on Kocbek's poetic language written by Šteger. His editorial work also includes other major Slovenian poets, Gregor Strniša, Dane Zajc, Tomaž Šalamun and Niko Grafenauer.
In 1998 Šteger won the Veronika Award for his poetry collection Kašmir and in 2008 he won the Rožanc Award, the highest prize for essays written in Slovene language, for Berlin.

Quotes

“Simply one of the most enjoyable poets to read in Europe right now, Aleš Šteger is cultivated and often brilliant poet. He maintains an air of philosophical sophistication while imbuing his work with a laconic nature and aberrant minimalism that makes it distinct and vivid in the memory. A leading light in the rich Slovenian poetry community.”
3:AM Magazine, Maintenant #45
“Šteger focuses on things, a central concern of European philosophy ever since Husserl, and of European poetry since Rilke. Šteger takes an original approach to this question by not systematically pursuing the “thing-in-itself” and attempting to bring words as close as possible to it, as Francis Ponge did.”
Poetry Today, The Antioch Review, Volume 70, Number 1, 2012 about “The Book of Things”
"Steger has a tremendous capacity for juxtaposition, and the poems offer a great many startlingly moments… flair is in not pausing at the virtuoso moment but brushing past as it drops."
Rain Taxi
"…the things described in this book are defamiliarized and here, often, Steger is at his best. The way he personifies an object, or the metaphor he uses, is never obvious, but it always makes complete sense."
Three Percent Review, "The Book of Things"
"...a smart, startling, and wildly pleasurable book.”
Kenyon Review, "The Book of Things"
Steger’s efforts sometimes bring to mind such Western European figures as Francis Ponge and Craig Raine, who also sought to make household things look new and strange. Yet Steger brings a melancholy Central European sense of history- his objects tend to remember, or cause, great pain: “It pours, this poisonous, sweet force,” Steger writes of “Saliva,” “Between teeth, when you spit your own little genocide.”
Publisher’s Weekly, “The Book of Things”
It is a rare treat to have an English translation before the ink has dried on the original. By which I mean, a mere five years after the book’s Slovenian publication, Brian Henry has brought these poems to life for those of us not lucky enough to read Slovenian. Henry’s translations are impressive for sheer acrobatics.
Guernica, a Magazine of Art and Politics, “The Book Of Things”

Poetry