A Search for a Unique Speech

18 januari 2006 Dane Zajc was looking for a unique expression for the traumas of the 20th century - and for his own -, and he found it. Hence his importance as a poet. His poetic “recherché” began with the collection Pozgana trava (Scorched Grass, 1958), and continued with Jezik iz zemlje (Language of the Earth, 1961), Otroka reke (River Children, 1963), Ubijavci kaè (The Snake-killers, 1968), Potohodec (Pathwalker, 1971), Rozengruntar (Master of the Roses, 1975), Si videl (You have seen, 1979), Voranc (1978), Mlada Breda (Young Breda, 1981), Belo (White, 1982-1984), Zarotitve (Conspiracies, 1985), Kalevala (1985), Znaki (Signs, 1987), Grmaèe (Rocky Peak, 1993), and finally Dol dol (Down Down, 1998).
In his earliest poems, heavily marked by war, Zajc broke with ideological taboos and blew up the lyrical chamber tone by turning to the archaic animal world, which juxtaposes its own laws to the destructive human rage. Dry is the "laughter of the hyenas", in vain the roaring of a "big black bull", but the most horrible emptiness is the emptiness inside a man:

We animals know, have known for some time (...)
You humans are alone. From the emptiness around you,
the icy fire of your shards
gradually sucks in and eats the air.
(‘The Path-walker's Second Poem’)

Fish and snakes, birds and scorpions, goats and white weasels are much closer to the Creation than Man, alienated because of his rational mind and megalomania. Man sometimes remembers his mythical origins - his relation with Nature – but can no longer find a way to wholeness: his innocence is destroyed. At this point begins his inability to express himself:

Then you want to utter a word.
But your mouth is full of ashes (...)
Then you make a new language of the earth.
a tongue that speaks words of soil.
(‘Lump of Ashes’)

"Language of the earth" is a code: it is only the newly established wholeness with being that enables authenticity and abolishes that desperate state in which words disintegrate like lumps of ashes in the mouth. How could we describe it, Dane Zajc's "language of the earth"? It is expressive and rhythmical, colorful and conjuring, elementary and elliptical, clear and yet polysemous. In a paradoxical way it combines meaning with pure sound, affirmation with negation. This, at places, gives it a mystical quality, propels it towards magic formulae and litanies. This quality is particularly evident in the poem ‘Asskalla’ (1975). In which the repetition and acoustic disassembly of the name – “Asskalla, Asska, Ass, sska, lla” - together with a sequence of anaphoral sentences culminate in a veritably enchanting staccato:

…Such blue flame on the skin
Asskalla
the movement the animal that you are
Asska
The carrier of secrets concealments
sska
The slanted glance of Eve's animal
Asska
The embers pupated
Lla..."
(‘Askalla’)

The play on repetition is even more complex in the poem ‘One and the Same’, in which Zajc groups a limited set of words into new and new paradoxical statements:

He's in a different world. The same.
He's different in the same world. The same.
He's the same in the same world. One upon the other.
One and the same.
(‘One and the Same’)

This, however, has nothing to do with the aesthetic of art for art's sake, or even with concrete poetry. What Zajc, in one of his essays, denotes as "play on rhythm, words and silences", is a sign of a search through the incomprehensible and inexpressible where, after all, resides the "self" - "the atomic nucleus of oneself'. Who am I? How am I? asks Zajc in repeated attempts at encircling the Self with the help of interrogation and negation: "Is this hand what it is? Yours? Who resides in it? The one, who does not, is it you?" Zajc, in a unique way, enables the reader to take part in the search by letting the language group around in the white spaces of silence:

When a word is uttered
When white
When frozen
When unexpected
When silence falls (...)
When we are in a room
When we are the room
When we are cymbals cymbals cymbals
When we are all the voices
When silence falls
When everyone everyone is inaudible
When it drops from the unconnected
When from another place when from
the unheard of
When silence falls.
Voices. Snow. Silence.

The dialogue with silence and the principle of negation distantly relate Zajc to Paul Celan. However, the strict rhythm, archaic images and biblical-mythical metaphors of his "language of the earth" bring up other associations. For instance with the poems by the French surrealist poet Michel Leiris, as is demonstrated by the following structural comparison:

I saw Mother (in my dreams)
I saw her slashing (in my dreams)
her throat vein with a bread knife (in my dreams)
I saw her on sheets (in my dreams)
blood flowing from a long wound (in my dreams)
flowing from the narrow ugly wound (in my dreams)...

In Leiris's poem from the novel ‘Aurora’ (1946) the content is quite different, but we are surprised by the similarity of verse structure and rhythm:

The flax of Thought (the flax of Thought)
a tender meadow of some mouth with moist outlines
(the flax of Thought)
at a time when a raven (the flax of Thought)
extracts the curves from silence (the flax of Thought)
(‘Aurora’)

It is undoubtedly possible to draw a comparison with the lyrical poems by Paul Eluard or Yves Bonnefoy as well, but this does not bring us much closer to Zajc's specific poetic universe. His universe, as we mentioned at the beginning, possesses its own alphabet, which has become increasingly clear over the years. In his latest collection of poetry - Dol dol (Down Down, 1998) - Zajc's themes and literary procedures are beautifully concentrated, so to speak driven to quintessence: silence and whiteness, snow and animals, loneliness and love, death and nothingness, negation and repetition. What the title itself suggests - a descent into the underground - is revealed to be poetically concise and levitating at the same time. The verses are governed by a dream-like transparency, where white animals "on the black grass of night" sing white songs (Belo petje), where solitudes find themselves and "icy fires" burn, where water and stones speak and rain defends the lyrical Self from itself, where shadow reigns and sentences appear from it: "quite possibly everything vanishes. Perhaps / only love its spark remains" (‘There Is No’).
Dane Zajc does not write reflective lyrical poetry, but the enchanting poetry of existential casting - and ecstatically gentle love poems. From them emanates the distant breeze, which reveals the master of silence:

you lie high up all white
light as snow
with legs tucked up

high up on a black slope
you are the entrance to the other world
the opening to the land of snow
solitude and consensus (...)
I'll drink you white
I'll lie down on you white
I'll eat you snowy
as I'll fall with you into
the fathomless snow...
(‘ Mouth Without Mouth’)

The joint falling of two people in love into the white eternity transcends similar, and yet quite different "falls": "we will fall / soon / on our dispossessed bones " (‘White’), or: "Did you hear a sound / Was it falling / In the jagged silence / On the world's graveyard / Covering white with white" (‘You have seen’). It seems that Zajc's latest poems relate bitter pathos of transience with lucid relaxedness. Nothingness still lurks behind objects and words, soil "only quietude / etches itself/ on the vast background of silence" (‘V spomin’), ashes and solitude are still perceived as brothers, but these facts are accepted by the Self with calm readiness manifested in the very rhythm of sentences:

When everyone is lost
in the nothingness of sleep
in the water of dreams in the pool of murmur

when no one in the sleeping world
thinks of me hears me
in the space of dark oblivion

when the Milky Way has journeyed across
half the sky and the Big Dipper sinks
behind the Giant Summit

when all the connections are frozen
when all the heads are covered overheadand only I

am still awake and all alone
the truth of my present
my past future

and I know that one day things will be all wrong
and who will then stay awake and who will be asleep
my love. Who?
(‘Who’)

What reigns here is an elegiac tone, and not the staccato of abyssal disillusion. Less hardness, less breaks, more simplicity. The images are pregnant with meaning - "hard night of dead fathers / white mothers" -, and the language achieving maximal effect with minimal means is laconic. Zajc has always been master of this kind of expression. Let us remember the description of a bowl (‘Kalevala?, 1985) reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi's still lifes:

A chalice. In the untouched. In the emptied out.
In the quiet of a white landscape. In the voiceless.
In the elongated snow forms. Soft.
In the touching of the mouthless wind.
The chalice.
Bulb-shaped. Of round proportions.
On a white table-cloth with soft folds.
Overlapping one another. In the creases of quiet
changing now visible now veiled
the chalice...

What is one supposed to admire most in this poem: its sensual simplicity or its music, its silence or its mysteriousness? And mysteriousness is related to clearness, to the material aspect of the object described: a kind of metaphysics of the physical. Dane Zajc understands these paradoxes in the same way he understands the balance between pathos and the quotidian, between magic incantation and ironic, cold alienation.
Although Zajc's poetry in no way excludes personal elements - a fallen partisan-brother, mother, natural landscape and his own "inability of expression" are very present -, in the lyrical melting pot they change into generally applicable codes. This is of crucial importance, as Zajc's poetry is neither pure personal expression nor propaganda. He consistently rejects any political tendencies or any engagement whatsoever, which - in the Communist era - won him the fame of a rebel poet. In the Central European region in which - according to Danilo Kiš – “homo poeticus”, unfortunately, has become “homo politicus”, Dane Zajc clearly decided to remain “homo poeticus”. "Poetry is least related to matters such as society, political system, kingdom or regime. This is why it is least useful. It resembles a conversation with a person, who does not exist, but who, nevertheless, n an unusual way enters the contours of a poem, although distant in space, time and life." (Play on words and silences) Dane Zajc is simply a poet. A poet who listens to his inner voice, the "magic substance" of rhythm, and who does not deny his drive because he has no choice: "a single poem tells us that in a certain moment we are not alone if a thousand years ago another was lonesome too."

Poetry as communication through space and time. This sounds modern and ancient, irrevocable and soothing. And we need this kind of comfort, at the beginning of the third millennium as well. Translated by Lili Potpara
Poetry translated by Sonja Kravanja