Spaces of Poetry at the Edges of Language (and the Question of Translation)

The paper Spaces of Poetry at the Edges of Language (and the Question of Translation) re-examines the traditional structuralist approaches to understanding the specifics of verse in light of more modern under-standing of the inherent limitations of all language representations. The history of poetic innovations is interpreted as a result of poetry's specific capability to reflect these limitations and to somehow express the unintelligible or linguistically inexpressible that lies beyond lan-guage. After the exposition of the problem the paper applies this un-derstanding of poetry as one of the possible tools for understanding the problems of translating modern poetry, which often poses the questions of unintelligible or linguistically inexpressible on many different levels of the text as demonstrated in an analysis of a modern Slovene translation of one of Mikhail Yeremin’s poems.