Srečko Kosovel (1904-1926) was born near Trieste and was raised in the Karst, a desolate region of rockwork in Slovenia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following the outbreak of World War I, his parents sent him to school in Ljubljana, where he began to write, experimenting with a wide variety of styles—impressionist, symbolist, expressionist, futurist, Dadaist, and surrealist. He studied at the University of Ljubljana, became active in the literary world and founded a literary review (Beautiful Vida). In 1925 he prepared a manuscript for publication called The Golden Boat, alluding to the Bengali poet Rabindranth Tagore, but it was subsequently lost and never published in its original form. In 1926 he died of meningitis at the age of 22, leaving over 1,000 poems as well as prose writings, essays and vignettes totaling several hundred pages. Kosovel’s poetry has been translated into several languages including French, Italian, German, Russian, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and Catalan. An early modernist, he is considered one of Slovenia’s foremost poets of the 20th century.

Barbara Siegel Carlson is a poet and literary translator. Her poetry collections include Once in Every Language (Kelsay Books, 2017) and Fire Road (Dream Horse Press, 2013). She is co-translator with Ana Jelnikar of Look Back, Look Ahead: Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and co-editor with Richard Jackson of A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives (Bridges Press, 2017). Carlson is poetry in translation editor of the journal Solstice. She teaches English to students of other languages and lives in the Boston area.

Ana Jelnikar (b. 1975 in Ljubljana) is a literary translator and research associate at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is the author of Universalist Hopes in India and Europe; The Worlds of Rabindranath Tagore and Srecko Kosovel (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2016). As a literary translator (and editor) she has a number of publications to her name including Look Back, Look Ahead: Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel (co-translated with Barbara Siegel Carlson, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Meta Kušar Ljubljana (co-translated with Stephen Watts, Arc Publications, 2010) and Iztok Osojnik’s Drugje/Elsewhere (co-translated with Maria Jastrzebska, Pighog Press, 2011).