Artikel
Welcome to Slovenian poetry - September 2004
18 januari 2006
Not all states are dream states and not all of what they have to say about themselves is automatic writing. But the fleshed-out self-portrait which a culture’s own consciousness of itself allows is – however unsystematic, unscientific, even tendentious – nevertheless a real Presence.
In a way, literature is the most important Slovenian spiritual project. The reason for this is complex, and yet simple: until Slovenians acquired their own state along with its institutionalized attributes of power, the function of supreme national ‘co-ordination’ had been assumed by the awareness of a unified language, the existence of which was most clearly manifested in literature. This is why, from the mid-19th century onwards, literature was a kind of substitute for the Slovenian yearning for independence. With the help of literature Slovenians – as well as other small nations – resisted external political pressure (Germanisation, Italianisation, Nazifascism, Yugoslav centralism) as well as internal exclusivistic ideologies (clericalist Catholicism, communism). Therefore, when we speak of Slovenian literature – the predominant form of which, since the Romantic expression of the great poet France Prešeren (1800-1849), has been poetry – we primarily think of the traditional art discipline, which in specific historical circumstances was much more than that: it was the fundamental way of national existence.
In the late sixties and throughout seventies poetry has broken with the described poetic tradition and set a new poetic law, according to which Slovenian poetry (no longer) has any other national-cultural role but to be ‘pure’ poetry. Franci Zagoričnik (1933-1997), Tomaž Šalamun (1941), Iztok Geister Plamen (1945) and Aleš Kermauner (1946-1966) were the leading protagonists. They managed to heal the poetic generations that succeeded them both of elegy as well as of revoltism. One of them, Šalamun had many followers; nowadays, he is the most widely translated, as well as the most internationally recognized Slovenian poet – especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. No doubt, he represents the most daring gesture in Slovenian poetry, which the literary historian Taras Kermauner has described as ludism. The latest contrubution to the Slovenian site thus presents probably the most astonishing poetic vision of contemporary Slovenian poetry.
Slovenia, as critic Drago Jančar has pointed out, is neither reliably ‘Central European’, nor necessarily able to escape that formulation when it looks at itself, at the world which surrounds it.
Countries, like people, are never in storage. Their identity is, as Descartes pointed out, their continuing consciousness. They live themselves, trapped in the reflexivity of a consciousness which is simultaneously in and of the moment and aware of itself as having identity, having a history, the dimension of the past.Not all states are dream states and not all of what they have to say about themselves is automatic writing. But the fleshed-out self-portrait which a culture’s own consciousness of itself allows is – however unsystematic, unscientific, even tendentious – nevertheless a real Presence.
In a way, literature is the most important Slovenian spiritual project. The reason for this is complex, and yet simple: until Slovenians acquired their own state along with its institutionalized attributes of power, the function of supreme national ‘co-ordination’ had been assumed by the awareness of a unified language, the existence of which was most clearly manifested in literature. This is why, from the mid-19th century onwards, literature was a kind of substitute for the Slovenian yearning for independence. With the help of literature Slovenians – as well as other small nations – resisted external political pressure (Germanisation, Italianisation, Nazifascism, Yugoslav centralism) as well as internal exclusivistic ideologies (clericalist Catholicism, communism). Therefore, when we speak of Slovenian literature – the predominant form of which, since the Romantic expression of the great poet France Prešeren (1800-1849), has been poetry – we primarily think of the traditional art discipline, which in specific historical circumstances was much more than that: it was the fundamental way of national existence.
In the late sixties and throughout seventies poetry has broken with the described poetic tradition and set a new poetic law, according to which Slovenian poetry (no longer) has any other national-cultural role but to be ‘pure’ poetry. Franci Zagoričnik (1933-1997), Tomaž Šalamun (1941), Iztok Geister Plamen (1945) and Aleš Kermauner (1946-1966) were the leading protagonists. They managed to heal the poetic generations that succeeded them both of elegy as well as of revoltism. One of them, Šalamun had many followers; nowadays, he is the most widely translated, as well as the most internationally recognized Slovenian poet – especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. No doubt, he represents the most daring gesture in Slovenian poetry, which the literary historian Taras Kermauner has described as ludism. The latest contrubution to the Slovenian site thus presents probably the most astonishing poetic vision of contemporary Slovenian poetry.
© Fiona Sampson, Iztok Osojnik
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