The Master of Insomnia. Boris A. Novak

Birthday

       Timelessness

       Give Us Each Day Our Daily Death

       Death in the Feet

       From Beginning to End

       Soul

       The Hairclip

       Magic Suitcase

       Intimate Things

       Decisions: 11

       My Doppelganger

       To the Poet I Was

      LPM: LITTLE PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY (2007)

       My Grandfather Anton Novak, Tausendkünstler

       Turtles

       The Secret of Life

       Ragology (The Study of Rags)

       One Poem about Three People and Two Coats

       Butterflies

       The Image of a Partisan

       The First and Last Home

       Jealous Pajamas

      FRAGMENTS FROM THE EPOS (2009–12)

       Tidying up after the Dead

       A Final Account

      About the Author

      Slovenian Literature Series

      Copyright

       OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S SLOVENIAN LITERATURE SERIES

      Minuet for Guitar

      Vitomil Zupan

      Necropolis

      Boris Pahor

      The Succubus

      Vlado Žabot

      You Do Understand

      Andrej Blatnik

      The Galley Slave

      Drago Jančar

       INTRODUCTION

      THE SLEEPLESSNESS AND POETRY OF WITNESS

      ALEŠ DEBELJAK

      A distinct image, a fragment of memory: I stand in the foyer of the splendidly dilapidated Kazina Palace in the center of Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. The palace houses the offices of the fortnightly student publication Tribuna, of which I was the editor in the early 1980s. The newspaper was one of the few independent intellectual forums in Slovenia.

      But wait, hold your horses! What is Slovenia?

      Slovenia was in the 1980s one of the six constituent republics of what was a larger federal state, Yugoslavia. Except for a few political experts, academics, and adventuresome German, Italian, and British tourists, nobody in the West really knew then what Slovenia was or what its culture was like. In the fog of the Cold War, it was only a marginal part of East European terra incognita, but today the country is an independent nation-state and a member of the European Union. Thus, a brief outline of the vagaries of Slovenian collective existence is perhaps in order.

      In July 1991, Slovenia made the headlines all over the Western world. Its mercifully brief “Ten-Day War,” together with the larger convulsions of the Yugoslav breakup, brought about a major change on the map of Europe. Riding on the heels of the disintegrated Soviet Union, the end of the communist ancien régime, and German unification, Slovenia held a public referendum, rooted in the natural right to self-determination, which formed the legal foundation for its seeking independence from the moribund Yugoslav Federation. For the first time in the history of this tenacious Southern Slavic people, Slovenians were free to live in a state of their own. This event had been hoped for and, against all odds, anticipated by many Slovenian writers for years.

      ROMANTIC FOUNDATIONS

      As in other Central and East European countries, writers in Slovenia were traditionally invested with the obligation and the attendant risk to act as the keepers of the national flame, guardians of our moral, social, and spiritual values. Specifically, it was the language itself that represented our most cherished national treasure. Why? Because Slovenians lacked full-fledged political, economic, or social institutions that would have helped maintain a sense of national unity. Naturally, this sense tends to be better developed in countries that have—at least historically—attained some form of statehood or another. Slovenians have been less fortunate. They’ve lived under royalist, fascist, and communist regimes, respectively, as they failed to reach a goal to which all European regions aspired: statehood.

      But the Slovenian people, its language, and its books were around long before the independent Republic of Slovenia was established. Squeezed in between the Germanic, Italian, and Hungarian cultures, and ruled by often predatory political regimes, the Slovenian language was more or less the only buffer against the threat of collective obliteration. Small wonder that today six thousand books are published annually for and by a tiny population of two million, an industry in which “elite” poetry collections routinely come out in editions of five hundred, while “popular” books of verse may be published in editions of up to three thousand.

      The forests that cover more than fifty percent of Slovenia continue to provide raw material for printers, just as the contradictions of its collective life continue to provide material for its literary achievements.

      These achievements arise out of processes long underway. The dominant one must be seen in a history that lacks splendid military victories but is replete with linguistic resistance to foreign rule. For all practical purposes, Slovenian history is the history of the Slovenian language. It is a language that, in addition to singular and plural, also uses a rare dual form. In other words, it’s made for intimate, personal, and erotic confessions.

      Although written records in Slovenian (sermons, confessions, poems) had appeared sporadically from the eighth century on, these were little more than fragments. It was fifty years of Protestant Reformation that gave Slovenians a systematic orthography, alphabet, and standardized language. The first book in Slovenian appeared in 1550, one of twenty-two that would be written by the father of Slovenian literature, Primož Trubar: a Protestant preacher who had fled to Germany from the religious persecution in his native land. Thanks to his efforts, Slovenians could read the Old and New Testaments in their mother tongue half a century before the publication of King James Bible.

      However, after the aggressive Counter-Reformation, it was Roman Catholicism that