Despite his short lifetime of twenty-two years and the brief creative period that it implies, Srecko Kosovel stands--with Ivan Cankar and Oton Zupancic--among the most important Slovene poets of the twentieth century. Kosovel, more so than nearly all of his contemporaries, absorbed the cultural, political, and social impulses in the Europe of his time and integrated them intensely in his poetry and essays. For this reason he belongs to European and world literature. His complete works were not published until fifty years after his death. Many of his individual poems have been translated into several major and minor languages, but complete translations of his works exist only in French and German.

Srecko Kosovel was born on 18 March 1904 in Sezana, about ten miles to the east of Trieste, in the Slovene region Karst, which gives its name to the mountain plateau north of Trieste and east of the Isonzo...