Visiting Poet: Brian Henry on Tomaž Šalamun

On Tomaž Šalamun

Whether or not he’s explicitly present in the text, Tomaž Šalamun’s presence electrifies every one of his poems. As one would expect of a poet who wrote more than 50 books over five decades, Šalamun works in multiple modes, from the relatively straightforward lyric narrative to what he called his own kind of Language poetry. While he is most visible in his transparently autobiographical poems, he is also clearly present in his more mystical, resistant, and disjunctive poems. And in his poems that lack a narrator or clearly identifiable speaker, he’s still lurking in the space of the poem.

This is one of the reasons that I find his “interview” poems especially intriguing. “Jonah” is the most famous of these, but I gravitate toward the poems where the identity of both speakers remains uncertain since they invite the reader to participate in the making of meaning, as well as in the process of questioning and answering. They captivated me when I first encountered some of them, in earlier translations, in The Four Questions of Melancholy (1997): their indeterminacy, their tone, the hazy landscape (physical, mental, linguistic) that they created. Why would a poet with such a magnetic presence seem to disappear from poems entirely dependent on the two voices (and presences) in them? Is he one of the speakers? If so, the one who asks the questions or the one who answers them? Is he neither, or somehow both? The framing of the poems—the situation—is open to the reader. The poem could be a casual conversation revolving around small talk, part of a radio interview, or an interrogation by the secret police.

The first three poems included here are from his second book The Purpose of a Cloak (1968), which, like Poker (1966), was published in samizdat. The Purpose of a Cloak is largely governed by a collage aesthetic, and there are two tables of contents, so each poem effectively has two titles. These poems precede “Jonah” and “Driver,” which appear in Šalamun’s third book, Pilgrimage for Maruška (1971). There seems to be a slight—yet monumental—tonal shift in the interview poems between The Purpose of a Cloak and Pilgrimage for Maruška. “Driver,” especially, adopts a more menacing—yet somehow also comforting—tone. The doubled questions and doubled answers in the first four lines, to me, make all the difference, as does the way the poem trails off at the end with an uncharacteristically long answer.

Tomaž Šalamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb, Croatia, and raised in Koper, Slovenia. He is the author of more than fifty books of poetry and his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. A curator and conceptual artist prior to becoming an acclaimed poet, his honors include the Prešeren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, the Mladost Prize, the Jenko Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. He served as Cultural Attaché to the Slovenian Embassy in New York and, in addition to serving as a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University, held various visiting professorships across the United States. He died in Ljubjiana, Slovenia, in 2014.

Brian Henry is the translator of Tomaž Šalamun’s Selected Poems and Woods and Chalices, as well as Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers and six books by Aleš Šteger, most recently Burning Tongues: New and Selected Poems. Henry is also the author of Permanent State, ten other books of poetry, and the collection of essays, Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation. His work has received numerous honors, including two NEA fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and the Best Translated Book Award. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.