Slovenian feature
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THE POETIC WORD AS HOME AND THE WORLD
By Robert Titan Felix
Translated by Martha Kosir-Widenbauer
Slovenian poetry was born at the beginning of the 19th century duringthe period of Romanticism. Until the end of World War I, it representeda sanctuary and a refuge for a nation without a country, confined withinthe Austro-Hungarian “prison of nations” that demanded from the poetscertain external responsibilities and limited their creative freedom.After World War II, the national and linguistic boundaries wereabolished; however, poetic creativity faced another challenge in tryingto find gaps within the totalitarian socialist regime where criticalthought and the creative freedom of the poets could be established. Areflection of the totalitarian reality became the crucial theme of highmodernism in which a preference for strongly metaphorized language wasimposed by reality itself. Since the political reality was not to bequestioned, it was only possible to talk about it through symbolicspaces (with the help of ancient myths, etc.). The search for poeticfreedom became the nucleus of the ultra-modern poetic engagement thatsearched for the word beyond every implication, since every meaning isnecessarily ideological. In the times of postmodernism, a demand forautonomous literature was posed in an even more radical way, which triedto avoid not only anti-regime mockery but also engaged dissidence. Inother words, through an attempt to extract the literary from thepolitical, it exposed the constrictions of antagonism that did not allowfor creation for creation’s sake (mere creation). However, after thefall of totalitarianism and the disintegration of the state, poetrycould begin returning to itself again.
Josip Osti, whocreated a large part of his literary work in the Bosnian language, wasreborn as a Slovenian poet. After love had brought him to Slovenia, thewar in Bosnia and Herzegovina kept him there. He discovered the magic ofthe Karst region and let himself be captivated (through a commandingopus to a life hardly-begun) by his “brother in insomnia,” SrečkoKosovel, the Slovenian poet of the Karst who died in his twenties. JosipOsti produced several magnificent poetry collections in the Slovenianlanguage in which he depicts a house built by the sweat of his own browamong the ruins of his memories. It is a house that the murderous handof nationalistic bloodshed transformed into a site of fire. JosipOsti’s poetry is a canto to the unexhausted and inexhaustible power ofhumanity that contains the strength to rise from any ashes.
Peter Semolič emerged as a poet when the Slovenian scene was mostobviously determined by postmodernism that he, nonetheless, neverbelonged to. Through his turn to pronounced intimism and his reductionof the poetic world to the reflexive uncovering of personal lifeexperience, he in many ways traced the path that some of the youngestpoets have chosen. The members of this current of narrative realitypoetry search for their poetic engagement and the ideologicalsuperfluity in detailed tales about the meridians of their ownordinariness.
Barbara Korun on the other hand,discovers utterly distinct possibilities of poetic expression. Her denseand rhythmic poetic speech primarily draws from the expansiveness ofintimacy, but it takes place in the fissure where ritual intoning adds asacred character to the real and where it manifests itself excessivelyas its internal dimension. Her poetry becomes a monologue to thesanctity of the world.
The four poets introduced in thisselection were born in the 1970s and belong to the youngest wave ofcontemporary Slovenian poetry. Their poetic experience in many waysreflects all the changes that the country underwent during the periodwhen they were forming as poets. They lived through their poeticbeginnings in a time when the experience of the country’s disintegrationand the end of totalitarianism were already over, and they were stilltoo young to be profoundly touched by these changes. When Sloveniadeclared its independence, and the country was born in 1991, there wasno need for poetry to replace it anymore. The postmodern solipsism (anecessary antipode to the combative art of the predecessors), whichgenerally affected the prose and was barely echoed in poetry, was chewedup and rejected like tasteless gum. A question that was asked was whatto write in a concluded and de-poetized time. The space that wasdiscovered, however, still displayed an unbelievable field ofpossibilities. Poetry returned to the world (of intimacy) and to itself.
Aleš Šteger is without doubt the most important poet ofthe young generation. His beginnings are marked by a sophisticated,highly aesthetisized poetic speech which, through the strategies ofreassigning meanings and effacing the presence of the extracted realitythrough metaphysical encoding and innovative use of the genitivemetaphor, continues the legacy of modernism. It does not arrive at mereplay but poetizes the all-encompassing availability of theworld-in-creation through hymn-like, ecstatic diction. In thecontinuation of his poetic course, through the multiplicity of the selfand a significant expression of dispersion and evasion not only ofreality but also of consciousness, he arrives at the mythification ofthe essence of the world, where it becomes manifest to him that theinexhaustible space of the symbolic can extend out of any ever so banalreality.
Lucija Stupica discovered the poetically richshady spaces between the brightness of the sun and the transparency ofthe moon. The outside world, which she touches through an image, is inher delicate and polished speech often present in painful clarity (ofapparent simplicity) without its symbolic density being possiblyoverlooked. The elegiac dialogue of the lyric subject with the world itis placed into and with itself, takes place on the perimeter where thebody aches from the terrible nearness of the unattained touch, and wherethe consciousness is present always only as a step before or after. Thisconsciousness is extended between the anticipation ofcontinuously-evading reflections and the nostalgic letting go of whathas been flushed away and abandoned.
Gregor Podlogarbuilt his poetic beginnings on the rich legacy of mystical poetry. Hesearched for a word that would point to the beyond in the language ofthe world. Through a confrontation with the impossibility ofinternalizing the “experience of the East”, his poetic path has broughthim to an interesting form of reality poetry which, through linguisticinvention, discovers entirely new aspects of the real world and theunrebuffed possibilities of poetic language.
StankaHrastelj focused her poetry on the world of intimacy and eroticdesire. A segment of her poetry that is no less notable, however,represents an uncovering of the hidden nuances of the world in which thelyric subject speaks from a perspective where the narrated realityseemingly overlaps with the reality of the narrator. It creates poeticmaps of real worlds with obliterated edges through which the body andits insatiable desire travel.
Notes:
Paragraph 1: disintegration of the state: the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991.
Paragraph 2: Srečko: A visionary and poet, considered to be the Slovenian Rimbaud. See www.uvi.si/eng/slovenia.org
