It was 19
years ago, almost to the month, that I
first met Tomaž Šalamun, when he showed up in Chattanooga
wearing a long dark coat, and exuding a kind of infectious, very
unselfconscious energy that immediately won over the students. This
poet, who has now gone on to publish over 30 books, who has been
translated into just about every european language and several others,
who has won the major Slovene Award, the Prešeren Prize, as
well
as the Mladost prize, fellowships to Iowa's International Writing
program, Yaddo and the Macdowell Colony, and has been a Fulbright
exchange poet, has become one of a handful of major poets in the world.
The poems he read back then were enthralling in their ability to create
a unique world beside the one we live in yet grafted from it. As an
early translator, Sonja Kravanja, says, he "challenge[s] the
established processes of human thinking." But isn't that precisely what
a poet should do?
"The poet is a hunter, not an expressor," Tomaž says in an interview
from back then, "you express what you already have. The inexpressible
is like the beast in the woods that the hunter always knows only by its
tracks. The very fact that we can't describe it adequately now,
searching as we are with various metaphors and similes, shows what a
powerful thing it is, what attraction it has." The tracks, for Tomaž,
are revealed by the non-sequitors, contradictions, literalized figures
of speech, hyperbolic claims, episodic details, false causalities,
juxtapositions of everyday and historical detail, associative leaps,
askew parallelisms and a host of other devices that the hunter uses to
track but never quite capture his prey. The poet is in a sense always
dislocated. This, too, is true from the beginning of his work, as in
Poker, which begins with an untitled piece, where he comments, "no one
knows how you came to be there." That is why he asks in one poem, "Do
you hear grief through the language?"
And in another poem, "The names that the sun gives itself are not
enough." It is the poet's responsibility to invent names, and so invent
a world we've never seen before. Though there is certainly an
undercurrent of the Balkan troubles with their suffering and atrocities
especially in some later poems, the poems are nevertheless filled with
a lyric joy and an incredible irony that transforms and transcends
those troubles: "Tomaž Šalamun is a monster," he begins a
poem
called "History," and which goes on to mythologize and satirize the
self. "I, after whom Ljubljana can be called antediluvian / and post
Šalamun, am full of joy, Arabic, so / please forgive me
these
lines immediately," begins another poem. In the end, it is this freedom
of imagination that these poems embody that is their most important
gift. It is a vision that is as humble as it outrageous, as earthbound
as it is celestial. He says at the end of "Little Fears,"-"Language is
the savior of love, of flowers / of mankind and the instrument of God
himself." And, we might add, the marvelous instrument of Tomaž
Šalamun..
By Richard Jackson
Vermont
December 2006