Days of Poetry & Wine »Grand Poetry Night«
Moderator: Aleš Šteger
Participants
Eli Eliahu (ISR), Carolyn Forché (USA), Anna Gual (ESP), Ivan Hristov (BGR), Kristina Kočan (SVN)
Carolyn Forché (1950) is an American poet, translator, and human rights activist. Her debut poetry collection won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1976 for the best young poet. Having received a scholarship, she then spent some time in El Salvador and worked for Amnesty International. It was often these experiences that served as the foundation for her following poetry collections, which have regularly received the most prestigious American literary accolades. She held many university lectures and does so to this day. She is also an established and acclaimed translator (she translated authors such as Georg Trakl, Mahmoud Darwish and others) and widely respected for her human rights activism.
Carolyn Forché’s creativity is heavily influenced by her humanitarian experience. She has spent over four decades waking sleeping, comfortably situated readers with a heavy reliance on people’s testimonies and experiences. Her Poetry of witness, nestled in between the monstrosities of Auschwitz and refugees on the Rio Grande River, intensely and honestly explores pain and suffering, resulting in her being dubbed a political poet by many critics, because she is an exact observer of the violence and horrors of our time. She incessantly reminds us on the need for tolerant mutual relations. The selection of her poetry, through which the readers can come in touch with her creative opus, was prepared and translated by Kristina Kočan. Most of the poems in the selection is from the collection In the »Lateness of the World« (2020), for which the author was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Forché will also write an autopoetic essay for the Slovenian release of her work.
Days of Poetry and Wine, one of the most prominent Central European poetry festivals, successfully unites poetry with enology. Every year in the last warm August days the festival hosts over twenty poets from all over the world along with selected domestic winemakers. Korean phenomenon Ko Un, American poet C. D. Wright and Swedish nominee for the Nobel Prize Lars Gustafsson are just some of the 500 prominent names of past festivals. The main emphasis – poetry and wine – is accompanied by a thoughtfully made programme in the field of music, visual, photography, film and other arts for all ages and interests.
