communist leaders put these demonstrations down, banned the magazines, and arrested several people, including Tomaz Šalamun (1941–), who is today the most internationally admired Slovenian poet. At the time, however, he was a fledgling enfant terrible with many parodies of canonical patriotic poems to his credit. Šalamun’s talent for poetic absurdity, irony, and playfulness made it possible for him to declare, following his spiritual godfather Arthur Rimbaud, that all dogmatic tradition is the “game . . . of countless idiotic generations.” His contested emancipation of verse from under the shackles of obsessive, single-minded nationalism had far-reaching consequences for the nascent autonomy of Slovenian writing.
As a result of the political clampdown, the writers of the ’70s retreated from the public arena to rediscover “language as the house of being.” They explored the limits of lyrical and narrative techniques, the vertigo of linguistic transgressions, the abandonment of coherent plots. In these works, irony and poetic absurdity were employed as protection against, not as a challenge to, the external reality.
After a decade of passivity, the patience of our intellectuals wore thin. The early 1980s saw the launching of another new magazine, and the reviving of public literary debate. Called—appropriately— Nova revija (The New Review), the poems, novels, testimonies, and short stories published in its pages helped to gradually peel off the layers of institutional lies. The leading poetic voice was that of Dane Zajc (1921–2005), a doyen of dark premonitions. The horrors of Titoism, a political system then much admired among the Western left, were laid bare.
In the larger Yugoslav state, Serbian political appetites began to be seen as a threat to the other nations in the federation. The communist-dominated Serbian government took over the federal administration, appropriated more than half of the federal hard currency reserves, attempted to alter the educational curriculum in favor of Serbian authors, and imposed brutal apartheid on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Slovenia called for a political cohabitation that would satisfy the constituent nations but retain the Yugoslav frame. The increasingly arrogant Belgrade authorities, alas, glibly dismissed the possibility of compromise. Slovenia had to choose: either remain under the heel of a corrupt communist authority or establish an independent state.
Following passionate public debates, writers led the democratic opposition in drafting the declaration of Slovenian independence. Stimulated by such actions, even the Slovenian communists began resisting the centralized government in Belgrade. After a public referendum, the independent nation-state of Slovenia was declared in July 1991. The Ten-Day War ensued. Despite the shortness of the conflict, it was by no means small: it spiraled into brutal excesses that engulfed the entire region, and hostilities still simmer beneath the surface of the ex-Yugoslav states, despite the Dayton accords in 1995 that nominally ended the wars for Yugoslav succession.
But now, at last, back to Tribuna. Tito, the undisputed leader of Yugoslavia, died in 1980. The decade between his death and up to the Yugoslav breakup in 1991 was marked by the rise of civil society and an increased critique of the communist regime. The student paper I was editing at the time eagerly joined the fray. Tribuna was guided by youthful naïveté and a dissident attitude that didn’t take long to incur the wrath of the communist authorities. The paper was brought under the close scrutiny of government censors, and the editors were assigned “shadows,” secret policemen meant to scare us off the task at hand.
So, standing beside me in the foyer of Kazina Palace one day was a bespectacled and black-bearded poet, nodding with understanding of and support for my commitment to both Tribuna’s politics and my own creative ambitions in poetry. Even today I can vividly remember the gentle, soothing tone of his voice and the confident though not self-aggrandizing things he said. He spoke as a man with both experience and faith, as a man who had followed the “moral imperative” within him as well as the starry sky above.
I trusted this poet, in short, because I felt I understood him—though he was a generation senior to me. I liked his writing and his many lyrical translations and was impressed by his performances at the numerous informal critical groups that made up literary life.
His name was Boris A. Novak.
Novak was then chief editor of Nova Revija. Gathered around this monthly magazine were most, if not all, of the best and brightest in the Slovenian intellectual community. Novak’s leadership coincided with the period of a government crackdown on Nova Revija, which had become a serious thorn in the side of the ruling elite. Despite pressure on him exerted through both informal channels and mass media campaigns of character assassination, Novak never abandoned his commitment to the political ideals of an open and democratic society.
Novak’s attitude was shaped by his immersion in two cultures and two languages, the byproduct of a childhood spent in the then-capital of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, a Serbo-Croat-speaking city. Novak was born in Belgrade in 1953 and attended elementary school there. His adolescent arrival in Slovenia necessitated a rediscovery of his mother tongue. His family’s urbane tolerance and his father’s past as a high-ranking officer in the Partisan anti-fascist movement during the Second World War are all prominent forces that cemented Novak’s commitment to the universal, if utopian, values of solidarity, equality, and brotherhood.
SHOW OF SOUND AND MEANING
No less important, however, Novak never abandoned his commitment to the idiosyncratic aesthetics of sound and meaning, which he propelled to ever more beautiful heights. Novak’s first book of poems, Stihožitje (Still Life with Verses), was published in 1977; its untranslatable neologism of a title metaphorically closing the distance between the term still life and the magic of verse. This was followed by sixteen further collections to date, most of which have enjoyed the approbation of literary critics and the general reading public alike. In addition to these collections, Novak has published an enviably large number of children’s books, puppet and radio plays, and works for the stage. Additionally, Novak assisted in staging numerous plays in the most important theaters in the country, and was employed for several years as a literary adviser at the Slovenian National Theatre.
In his poetry, Novak often explores the aesthetic potential of traditional verse forms, pursuing the mysterious connection between the sounds and meanings of words. Which is to say that he seeks nothing less than poetry’s true source. His poetic language successfully appropriates everyday words, using them in new combinations and coaxing unrealized possibilities out of them. He thus allows us to see how extending the limits of what is said can broaden the limits of the known. It was for an innovative paraphrase of the Arabian Nights—1001 stih (1001 Verses), a book published in 1983—that the author received the premier literary prize in Slovenia: the Prešeren Award.
BEARING WITNESS
After a year-long teaching stint at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, Novak returned home to became president of the Slovenian PEN Center. He led this prestigious organization during the period of escalating conflicts between the republics of the former Yugoslavia, and in the shadow of the increasingly totalitarian ambitions of Slobodan Milošević, who strove to dominate the entire federal entity in the name of all Serbs. This desire for domination eventually led to the eruption of the aforementioned TenDay War in the summer of 1991. Then, with a flick of the dragon’s evil tail, war swept into Croatia as well, and, later, with particular cruelty, into the towns and villages of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Novak quickly organized the Slovenian PEN Center as a key distribution point for all the international assistance (collected at national PEN centers around the world) sent to ease the suffering of writers in besieged Sarajevo. Small wonder, then, that Novak responded to the Balkans wars in a poetic idiom: first in his poetry collection Stihija (Cataclysm, 1991), and later, at the height of his creative career, in Mojster nespe∂nosti (The Master of Insomnia, 1995), which is populated with harrowing images of individual despair in the face of violence. Still, the book exudes an aura of fragile hope, without which its readers might be overwhelmed by apathy and moral indifference. Such moral indifference
