The Mysterie Of Tomaz Salamun’s Poetry Essay, Research Paper

The Mystery of Salamun s Poetry

Well edited by Christopher Merrill, The Four Questions Of Melancholy is a collection of poetry containing selections from each of Tomaz Salamun’s 25 works. Although images of the larger world, war, politics, and peace pervade his works, there are also images that speak to the more personal and immediate. This paper analyzes the concept of Tomaz Salamun s poetry, attempts to deepen our understanding of the struggle endured by a Slovenian poet who does not see freedom everywhere in the streets.

The poetry of Tomaz Salamun criticizes the often-absurd universe of politicians, and legends emergent out of everyday events. Without a doubt the Leninist-Stalinist society in which Salamun is raised plays a major role in his development as a poet. During Tito s regime in Yugoslavia, poets could be arrested and could spend a year in jail for impolite references to any number of public officials. While in other circumstances, political repression raises a feeling of revolution among artists and especially in poetry of revolt; rejection and denouncement, in much of Eastern European poetry takes on a much more rebellious, clever and even mocking tone. It is because Salamun is a free man who likes his country and likes his country free that Salamun feels the need to talk about the wrong doing during the period of oppression. In “History,” a poem that brilliantly satirizes the moral self-importance of Stalinism, the poet shows the bars of the prison that Slovenia lives under:

“Tomas Salamun is a monster.

Tomas Salamun is a sphere rushing through the air.

He lies down in twilight, he swims in twilight (Salamun 77).

Against the cruel, often humorless background of Tito s Communism, “high spirits” is the form Salamun s poetic rebellion most often takes. In poems where politics do not appear, Salamun s vision and enthusiasm take readers across thrilling terrain like in the poem Words where the divine power of a man makes nature change:

You catch water with a pin,

the water turns to slush.

You point at the tree with your hand,

the tree burns (56).

Sooner or later our tribe always betrays us or we run away from it, sometimes it is because we are asked to do some things that our moral standards won t agree with, that is why poets like Salamun have no alternative but to become traitors, a Frankenstein doomed to leave, condemned to revealing truths that unsettle as much as they inspire. This truth that eats people alive that makes people wait in line in front of a shop to get sometimes a piece of bread or meat shows that communism is not always the best answer. In front of this poverty, the author chooses not to remain silent. The main denunciation of Salamun is in the poem I See , in which the author talks about a hunter that disguises himself into sunlight. This hunter who can only been seen has Staline disguised into a sunlight that shines over the years of lies. The personification of objects to talk about problems of society throughout a poem can only be a sign of critique. The use of the two words I see again and again is an anaphoric way to make sure that the repetition is well understood by the readers. The author goes around his town and sees and feels the sadness around him, the churches that are destroyed, the flowers full of tears that are usually a sign of romance and love. When Salamun says, I see corn, how the army goes after the scent of cantaloupe, the night smells in Ca Foscari. he is saying that now the army is gone and the soil can now find the energy needed to grow fruits and vegetables again.

In some poems of Salamun, he is more audacious and does not just use objects to describe people. In some of his poems you see him going forward and putting himself on the line as he begins his poem “Tree of Life”, “I was born in a wheat field snapping my fingers” (175). His images are jockey; yet at times he can surprise the reader with moments of dead seriousness as in “Sand” where he says that he doesn’t control his movements and that none of us do:

I am not the subject.

I am God’s strongbox.

Like a cow, I have to lie “(95).

Communism practiced a genocide based on class, not like Nazis who are more associated with the genocide of the person. The bourgeoisie and other so-called enemies of the people were to be crushed, destroyed like noxious insects, in Lenin’s chilling phrase. In Salamun’s point of view it’s ok to be from the bourgeoisie because he himself wants a part of it like in the poem “The Cross”, “I too must have my share” (27). In Salamun’s youth, he was probably favorably disposed towards communism, and believed that anti-Communists in the West greatly exaggerated the brutality of Marxist regimes in Europe and Asia. Even if communism wasn’t appropriate for a country like America, it seemed the only system that could offer hope for the Third World. So that is why Salamun doesn’t regret Communism but regrets the unexplored possibility of freedom in the system and members of that movement like Staline who is remembered like the Man of Steel and the men who bring terror in many Eastern countries. Communism can work and is working. In countries like China, communism is working well, but it’s mainly because they are more open to the world of capitalism and their economy.

The poetry of Tomaz Salamun can be remembered and characterized by an unusual playfulness, often touched with the absurd, but steeped with a sense of compassion on political issues and many other topics. The struggle of the classes in Slovenia is real. In the Four Questions of Melancholy, Tomaz Salamun really identifies the problems but leaves the door open for our answers. So I leave you with this question: Can we or can we not be all equal with one political system?

Work Cited

Tomaz, Salamun. The Four Question of Melancholy: New and Selected Poem. Trans.

Christopher Merrill. Edal. Ed. Christopher Merrill. Fredonia: White Pine Press, 1997.