The Sleeplessness and Poetry of Witness

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Aleš Debeljak

An image, a memory: I stand in the foyer of the splendid dilapidated palace Kazina in the center of Ljubljana that houses the offices of the bi-weekly student publication, Tribuna, of which I was editor in the early nineteen-eighties. The newspaper itself, at that time one of the few independent intellectual forums in Slovenia, had aroused with the combination of its youthful naivete and its authentically dissident attitude the wrath of the communist authorities. It was brought under the close control of government censors; the editoral staff were assigned "shadows," secret agents meant to scare us off the task at hand.
Standing beside me in the foyer was a bespectacled, black-bearded poet, nodding with understanding of and support for my commitment to both Tribuna's editorial politics and my own creative ambitions. Even today I can vividly remember the gentle soothing tone of his voice and the confident though never self-aggrandizing content of his words. He spoke as a man with experience and faith, as a man who had followed the "moral imperative within him as well as the starry sky above him."
I gratefully placed my trust in this poet because I knew him not only from his literary work and his translations but also from the many informal critical groups that made up civil society and from which the Slovenian "political spring" began to spontaneously emerge in the early eighties. His name was Boris A. Novak. Neither his political views nor his philosophical contributions were negligible in the formation of this progressive movement. His book of poems Stihožitja (Verselife, 1977), its untranslatable title metaphorically closing the distance between still-life and the magic of verse, was followed by a slew of poetry collections, eight for adults alone. All of his books enjoyed the enthusiasm of literary critics and the general reading public alike. In addition to these poetry collections, he wrote an enviably large number of children's books, puppet shows, radio plays and theatrical works. He lent his skills as a dramaturge in the staging of numerous plays in the most important theatrical houses in the country and, for several years, was employed as the dramaturge at the Slovenian National Theatre.
In his poetry, Boris A. Novak, making use of classical equilibrium, formal discipline and aesthetically attractive linguistic methods, imaginatively explores the depths of his central obsession: the pursuit of the mysterious connection between the "sounds" and the "meanings" of words. In other words, he seeks nothing less than poetry's true source. His poetic language successfully appropriates everyday words, using them in new combinations and coaxing out of them unrealised possibilites. He thus allows us to see how extending the limits of what is said can broaden the limits of the known. For one of these collections, an innovative paraphrase of the well-known Arabic fairytale - 1001 stih (1001 Verses, 1983) - the author received the highest literary recognition in Slovenia: the Preљeren Award named for the romantic poet, France Preљeren, the founder of modern Slovenian poetry.
In the second half of the eighties Boris A. Novak became explicitly engaged in political activities. He was doubtless inspired by his openness to two cultures and two languages, the by-product of both his childhood spent in the Serbian city of Belgrade where he was born in 1953 and his return to Slovenia when he had to discover is mother tongue anew. Most of all, he was inspired by a rich family tradition of urbane tolerance and by his father's experience in the Partisan resistance movement which anchored him to a cosmos colored with the universal and utopian values of solidarity, equality and brotherhood.
In the mid-eighties, Boris A. Novak accepted the position of chief editor of the then leading Slovenian dissident publication, Nova Revija (New Review). Gathered around this magazine were, if not all, then most of the best and brightest in the Slovenian intellectual community. Thus Boris A. Novak took the editorial helm of a publication that he himself had helped to establish in the early eighties and which had become the most important forum forcivil society's critical voices and for serious intellectual analysis of the communist regime.
Boris A. Novak's leadership coincided with the period of the most severe repressive crackdown against Nova Revija, which because of its critical editorial policies and its articulated theoretical rejection of the prevailing practices of the republic's communist government had become a thorn in the side of the ruling class. Yet the editor of Nova Revija, despite ceaseless pressure on him exerted though both informal channels and public media campaigns, never abandoned his commitment to the political ideals embodied in the concepts of "open society" and democratic order.
Likewise, Boris A. Novak never abandoned his commitment to the idiosyncratic aesthetics of "sound" and "meaning" which he propelled to ever more beautiful heights. In such a way, he played a substantial role in the destruction of the literary aesthetic that dominated in the sixties and seventies: that is, the aesthetics of neo-avant-garde writing in which content is nothing and experimental style is all.
As important as this movement was in terms of rejecting the values of sentimental humanism, values that had been amply supported by the communist party, the literary program of the neo-avant-garde had exhausted its creative potential. By the beginning of the nineteen-eighties it had become impotent, shamelessly repeating past formulas and living off its past glory.
From this vantage point it is certainly not accidental that after his return from America (where he was the American Bank Professor of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga), Boris A. Novak became the President of the Slovenian PEN Center. He led this prestigious organization precisely during the period of escalating conflicts between the republics of the former Yugoslavia and the increasing totalitarian ambitions of the Serbian leader, Slobodan Miloљevic, who strove to dominate the whole federal entity. This desire for domination eventually led to the eruption of the Ten Day War in Slovenia in the summer of 1991. Then with a flick of the dragon's evil tail, war swept into Croatia and with especial cruelty into the towns and villages of Bosnia-Herzegovina.