Varja Balžalorsky Antić

- Slovenia -

Varja Balžalorsky Antić (Koper, 1979) is a Slovene poetess, literary theoretician, and translator. She teaches literary theory and world literature at the Faculties  of Arts in Ljubljana and  Maribor. She has authored a poetry debut Klobuk Vere Revjakine B. (The Hat of Vera Revjakina B., LUD Šerpa, 2018) and a theory debut Lirski subjekt. ZRC SAZU, 2019). Her poems are translated into French, Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian, Spanish and Portuguese. She translates from French (H. Michaux, P. Bourdieu, J. L. Nancy, R. Chartier, P. Quignard, H. Lefebvre, S. Germain, L. Febvre, J. Le Rider) and from Serbian ((M. Pantić, B. Vasić, I. Antić, L. Blašković, A. Marković). Her monograph The Lyrical subject is forthcoming in 2021 at Peter Lang. 


The Hat of Vera Revjakina B. is a poetry debut that – by absolving from a tight narrative structure - steps beyond the poetics of everyday life which seems to underline contemporary Slovene poetry. The book is a collection of severely present, of intensely awake poetry that does not lean into great ideologies, but does not refrain from great poetic effort; a collection that doesn't believe in great politics, only in its own great power It is a “product of a dissolution of strict separation between literary and theoretical, between postmodern and modern” (Muanis Sinanović) Balžalorsky Antić's poetry is “one of the biggest discoveries within contemporary Slovene poetry” (Aljaž Koprivnikar), simply because it mobilises tradition and simultaneously detects the pulse of the present, of contemporaneity (Muanis Sinanović)

The Hat of Vera Revjakina B. “splashes into the reader's face as boiling water, full of synesthetic experience”(Tanja Petrič) Water is the leading metaphor of the collection, divided into four parts. Throughout the collection, the poetess is travelling between countries and landscapes that serve as a well of impressions; at the same time, these idyllic moments often dissolve into “graveyards” - be it historical (Goli otok), actual (the seas of floating bodies) or even hidden, produced by consumer society, by our relentless exploatation of workers. But it is not only geography (geopolitics?) that plays an important role in this collection -  a collection driven by firm, autonoums language -, it is also the images of almost anonimous women and, as already mentioned, an intimate relationship to poetry.