Andrej Medved: GARDENS OF METAPHORS, GLOOMY WATER LILIES OF PLEASURES

Presentation of a poetry collection by Andrej Medved: Gardens of Metaphors, Gloomy Water Lilies of Pleasures. The event was hosted by Simona Kopinšek.

Andrej Medved (1947) has published as many as twenty-eight poetry collections, receiving for them the award of the Prešeren foundation, the ‘Čaša nesmrtnosti’ award, Jenko’s award and Veronika’s award. Apart from poetry he is also an author of essays and dissertations on aesthetics, art theory and philosophy, as well as a translator from French (Artaud, Bataille, Michaux), German (Arp, Heim) and Italian (Pasolini). He is editor to the Hyperion and Artes editions, dedicated to the original and translational poetry and theory, and a museum councilor at the Coastal galleries of Koper and Piran. Two of his recently published books are Pictura poesis, essays on painting and sculpture, and Fantasma epohé: poetry and/as play: Slovene avant-garde poetry 1965-1983. He is therefore a versatile creator, impacting in several fields the development and plethora of literary, philosophic and fine arts’ culture.

From the foreword
Medved’s poetry, as well as the collection concerned, stems from tremendously complicated paradoxes, cleft into seeming instances of nonsense: in his poetry, the world as it is changes into a labyrinth of ever different and ever new riddles. We may ask ourselves: is what he is talking about really “it”? Are the designed symbols, growing from the paradoxes and the nonsense, truly symbols that we can still control, still perceive them as poetic messages, or is there a new quality present in them, the presence of conspiracy forms? Is Medved’s poetry a space opening to absolute freedom or to absolute randomness? Is, then, the writing of its images the truth, or the appearance of truth, or the truth of appearance, hidden from us precisely because the appearance has taken the place of reality; because the reflection, luster, glittering, shining, lighting, burning and flashing have covered the true form of things?

Denis Poniž

The program is supported by the Slovenian Book Agency.
Support: EU-EACEA, ‘Kultura’ program Brussels, Ministry of culture, Municipality of Maribor, Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Youth.