Politically, Europe and the US have bifurcated. In word, image, thought and action, however, an energy continues to bounce back and forth, an energy that we can only hope undermines the rightward movement towards ultranationalism. “Europe” figures in many American discourses as either a point of origin to push back against, or a post-colonial skein to completely overcome. But the idea of the European Union is also now one of the best wedges against ultra-nationalism, even as it allows for multiple languages and literatures to thrive.
Croatian Poetry Festival
I will not attempt to cover journalistically all that transpired at Goranovo proljece (“Goran’s spring”) poetry festival in Croatia between March 19th and March 22, 2026. It would be like trying to cover a cosmos. Suffice to say, the festival, which honors the anti-fascist Croatian poet Ivan Goren Kovacic (1913-1943), began in Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, then moved to Rijeka on the coast and Lukovdol (Goran’s hometown) in the mountains, before ending up back at Zagreb for the last night.
Even before the festival began, on my first morning in Zagreb, the Croatian poetry, film, theory and music worlds enveloped me when I met with Petar Milat, one of the founding members of the Multimedia Institute/MaMa: publishing house, cultural enabler, temporary autonomous zone now installed long term at the center of the city, a space still not completely renovated after Zagreb’s huge earthquake in March of 2020. Milat was equally comfortable talking about the Austro-Hungarian patrimony of the city and the American political philosopher Michael Hardt, whose book Empire MaMa published in Croatian translation very early.
Croatian poet Karla Kostadinovski, Zagreb
Across the four public events and many private interactions of the festival itself there were two main energies at work, one a hive of activity among Croatian poets, including the laureling of an older poet for lifetime achievement and an award to a young poet to whom the future of Croatian poetry is entrusted, 79 year old Milko Valent receiving the first of these awards, poet and lesbian activist Karla Kostadinovski receiving the second. Croatian musicians such as Darko Rundek, Anna Kovacic, and Iva Bobanovic performed as well throughout the festival. At the same time a cast of international poets had been invited to come to read from their work, translations into Croatian on a screen behind us accompanying us as we read in our own languages, as well as a Croatian language anthology of our writing available at each event, the poets traveling together by bus from place to place on the itinerary.
These poets came from Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Samiland in Finland, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Haiti, and the U.S. With the Haitian poet living in Paris, and my becoming in 2023 a dual US/Austrian citizen, this was very much an intra-European affair.
The Croatian poets and the visiting foreign poets did read together and interact, but also pursued their own agendas, much of the Croatian activity remaining opaque to the cast of visitors, untranslated into English or other languages. (The visitors spoke to one another in English, but also in Nordic languages and some French.) North Macedonian poet Doko Zdraveski and Slovenian poet Tone Škrjanec were veteran enough to have been educated before the breakup of Yugoslavia and had learned what was then called Serbo-Croatian alongside their own languages; thus, they were in interesting positions, knowing Croatian, aware of many conversations. Presiding over it all was Croatian poet extraordinaire Marko Pogačar, the general director of the festival. He and his partner had twins the morning of the second day of the festival! Yet he was everywhere. Pogačar’s energy, in writing and in life, suffused the event. See his book in English translation, Dead Letter Office (The Word Works).
North Macedonian poet Doko Zdraveski, Zagreb
If journalism is impossible here, poetry itself will still find its way. On the bus, on our walks through the cities, at the events, I spoke quite a bit with Danish poet Lars Emil Foder, and with Krystal Sunesen, the publisher of the Danish press Ekbatana (they are in fact a couple) about their work, Foder publishing a series of poems in the form of weather reports and also moving in the direction of the troubadour’s song at different times in his performances, Sunesen speaking of her commitment to Danish poetry and her confidence in a burgeoning small press scene in Denmark, with 500 to 600 presses in a country of three million people. (Her books can be found at www.ekbatana.dk)
I spoke with Hungarian poet Peter Závada about Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a fertile source of thought, in poetry as well as in philosophy; Zavada will be in NYC on a Fullbright at CUNY in autumn of 2026. Icelandic experimental poet Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl told a funny story about coming to NYC to visit the FLARF poets and walking the length of Sunset Boulevard in Brooklyn looking for his host’s apartment. Norwegian poets Aina Villanger and Monica Aasprong both read from their work intriguingly; Sara Halstrom and Jenny Tunedal were a strong Swedish contingent; Svetlana Cârstean dazzled in Romanian, English and French. Haitian poet Makenzy Orcel and his Croatian translator, University Professor Vanda Mikšić, told me about his collaboration with the extraordinary French-Senegalese filmmaker Matti Diop on the film Dahomey, which both documents the return of art objects of ritual importance from France to Benin, and renders the voice of one of those objects, #26, “King Ghezo” during the course of the return, the poet Orcel tasked with realizing and performing the voice of the object. (I saw Dahomey two weeks later in Paris and felt the anxiety of a statue boxed up for its return – to an equally antiseptic museum space. Don’t objectify the object; objects have subjectivity too!)
In fact, a certain animism was in the offing at times during the festival. Finnish poet Maria Matinmikko read from what she called “sentences”, sentences that had the possibility of morphing into poems, which were clearly something more than sentences, a sentence a sentence, a poem language animated differently. In English translation by Kasper Salonen, Matinmikko’s text reads:
3. do not imagine that ambiguity is any less important
than clarityFrom what direction should the vista be described?
Storm Over a Landscape: maw and womb. From where
can I orient myself away from it, the landscape in my
coattails, as a particle? From where do I enter the
landscape, the nature of the angle of entry?
Some blinding shimmer. The flash of fish scales
in the morning haze: the wake of a halo, the smoothing
of a ripple, on the edge of a loop.
Some enchanting mist. It spreads into the gaps between
ruins and sheets like landed clouds. Two thirds are out of
sight. Foam, slats hidden in fog. Still traversible: the mist
is sifted through teeth and joints, the lighthouse light
somewhere. Bird voices within hearing distance, perhaps
imagined, asleep in flight. The remains of the cavalry brushed
to the side of the road, perhaps imagined, dead of exhaustion.
Some wisp of hair flickers, the smell of rotted corpses. Some
rhythm deep near the ground, pasts grooved into the eyes of trees.
The sharpened matte of light is shredding the mist sticky.
The gums of the swollen clouds crumble into drizzle… 1
Land and the meaning of the word “land” appear prominently in Sami poet Nillias Homberg’s work as well. (Both Homberg and Norðdahl had booklets translated into Croatian available, through the largesse of Versopolis.) In conversation, the streets of Zagreb peripherally appearing in perception, I spoke of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s claim that language is constitutive of perception, not descriptive of it, and that Whorf claimed there were 16 different words for snow in Inuit. This was to set up my joke that in Yiddish there are 64 different words for “idiot”. But before I could get to the joke Nillias Homberg interjected, if I understood him correctly, that there were 200 hundred different words for snow in Sami. In Underfoot, his book translated into English and published by White Pine Press, Holmberg writes: “Studies show that a land with its language intact/is rarely decorated in funeral crepe.” Also too:” Talk and Land /I can’t keep from asking/can yearning rejoin/Siamese twins ripped apart”? Nillias’ novel is now being adapted into a new opera in Finnish.
In addition to the booklets by Norðdahl and Homberg that were celebrated on the evening of the 18th in a bookstore in Rijeka a third book was in the offing, huge in its scope: an anthology of modern and contemporary Polish poetry in Croatian translation. Polish poet Ilona Witkowska was with us, and it became her responsibility to represent for the whole book, in which she is the last poet to appear. Since her poems are terse, to the point of extreme brevity, this was almost funny. Her poems, I sensed, were graceful as well as pointed, nuanced as well as sardonic, and talking with her, one felt both their lightness and their weight. I hope there will be more translations of her work into English to follow.
Polish poet Ilona Witkowska, Croatian poet and festival director Marko Pogocar, book signing, Rijeka
Goran Čolakhodžić Croatian poet, translator, and our guide, along with Ana Brnardic, through much of the festival - also speaks of landscape in his poetry. Here is a translation that gives us a glimpse into Croatian sensibility:
In the morning, space is not yet healed
from people, from errands, as are not
the mucosa of the lustful,
and already we wait for the day to return,
for the void to be filled.
In the throat, on the eyes: the acridity of early dawn,
the necessity to move, to start off, the breaking away
from sleep, the clenched fist in the stomach
before coming to visit, before climbing
the stairs, washed with dirty water, that lead
to school(as child, as teacher)
to hospital(I fear)
to prison(I remember the dread in my dreams).
And those bare columns oblige us in some way, somehow they say
“It’s not that simple”,
they pierce, they exhaust. In the morning,
when we most directly face illness
and its finality,
when the bare dawn in our lungs
comforts us most and makes the harshest demands.
2
It is also true that on March 23rd, the day after Milko Valent received his lifetime achievement award, we all learned, after dispersing, that his award had been rescinded, on the basis of an unearthed interview in which he appeared to rationalize pedophilia. Meanwhile there are no translations into English yet available for the new poet, Karla Kostadinovski. What is happening in one culture often remains opaque to the others. (This is necessary, so that intrusive languages like English do not conquer all.)
Not only in Croatia is there mystery. On opening night I read my poem “Banned in Iran”. When I had sent it to Marko Pogocar to be translated into Croatian months before - before the beginning of the war - I could not have known how relevant the poem might be, however indirect it might seem. Not only about what is forbidden in Iran of course, but in the USA too, the moon as feminine agency under attack, Thanatos ascendent, destruction, assassination, killing and war crimes celebrated.
Banned in Iran
Leonard Schwartz
I intuit the brilliance of the moon
in this room without windows or sense of time.
After all the most archaic unit is the moon
and language is lit with its reflected fire.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its barracudas at low tide circling the mirror.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
it's a single mother falling asleep next to her child
It isn't the moon I'm after,
it's a woman upbraiding the dawn's indifference
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a mindful wraith, a rattling mystical June.
Room service, please send up six units of moon.
In solitude waking and dreaming are more easily one
As is impossible with others, unless you happen
to be in love or on the phone with the moon.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
what will not transform is the will to transform.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
rolling a carriage through hutongs in the rain.
It isn't the moon I'm after:
wild dogs, gypsies, desperate men
Camping out in the ruins of Byzantium's walls.
Inside the mosque I think about moons.
Low slung chandeliers and bowed believers
populate the interior of the moon room eclipsed.
Scatter moon dust over the menhir
if you can find moon dust and menhirs.
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a peal of thunder and a rain of pearls
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its a great imam whose eyes ban idiocy
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its the ghost of a wolf haunting the Luberon
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its those wild dogs tearing up a crescent flag
It isn't the moon I'm after,
its the moon I'm after
Its the wound in the moon, the woo
in the moon, that womb in the moon
The screw in the moon, the spitting cobra
in the closet, the V imprint on the spitting cobra
It's the moon I'm after,
It's the moon I'm after, etc.
Photo Credits
1. Croatian poet Karla Kostadinovski, Zagreb. With permission of the author.
2. North Macedonian poet Doko Zdraveski, Zagreb. With permission of the author.
3. Polish poet Ilona Witkowska, Croatian poet and festival director Marko Pogocar, book signing, Rijeka. With permission of the author.
4. Leonard Schwartz. Photo credit: by Jonathan Blanc / The New York Public Library.