Balkan Fragments: The Erosion of Naive Memory and its Dangers Ales Debeljak Versió original en anglès Escriptor, professor de filosofia de la Universitat de Ljubljana. Versión original en inglés Escritor, profesor de filosofía de la Universidad de Ljubljana. Original version english The Yugoslav perspective has been an extremely important one in my personal and creative development. For example, my very first experience of a metropolis was of a Yugoslav one. I believe I can remember to this day that secondary-school excitement I had upon entering a new territory: like the full lips of a slightly vulgar but enormously sensual girl, the streets of Belgrade seduced me in the early 1980s with promises of romantic opportunities and flashing revelations of Balkan wisdom. I remember well that first ascent from the main railway station through the canyons of the faded palaces, which I was later told mimicked Sutjeska architecturally, all the way up to the wide Terazije. Along this boulevard I strolled, enjoying the gaily-coloured, relaxed manner of the passers-by past the Hotel Moskva. This was where, after his return from Britain, having spent decades there as an emigrant, the aged Milos Crnjanski lived until his death. I don’t know why I didn’t stay in the USA when, many years later, I myself followed the call of foreign shores, but perhaps it had to do with my being struck for the first time by the depressive force of the circumstance called exile presented in the pages of Crnjanski’s Roman o Londonu (A Novel of London). In the display window of the bookshop in the Albanija building, I quickly skimmed the titles of books not yet available in Slovene. These included books from which, in Serbian translations, I later came to know for the first time the descent into the hell of desires in Lautremont and the cold ironic perfection in the poems of Josif Brodski. I lost myself among the beer-soaked tables around Konj, and felt and fought my way through the affected hedonism on Knez Mihajlova Street, finally coming to rest under the trees in a lush park on Kalemegdan, in which devilishly quick gypsies had just fleeced a naive provincial boy in a game involving three matchboxes. Why feign ignorance? I was fascinated by this city! It embodied all that Ljubljana wasn’t. Belgrade gave me my first experience of a dangerous and titillating cosmopolis which Vienna, for example, couldn’t do for me; nor did I expect that from the city of the Hapsburgs, even though it is closer to the Slovenes historically, socially, geographically and supposedly also in terms of mentality. The experience of Belgrade primarily revealed to me some kind of special – how shall I put it? – urban self-confidence. Well, perhaps it wasn’t sophisticated in terms of Western standards, which were unknown to me at the time. But, so what? It still knocked me for a loop. Perhaps it’s because of the pure innocence of my first memories of the city that I haven’t summoned up the energy to travel to Belgrade since 1991, the year of the beginning of the wars which caused the collapse of Yugoslavia. There is every indication that I do not wish to spoil the sweet naiveté of those memories, however sentimental this may sound. The Serbs’ conviction of their own importance and their belief that they are always right –even when split into factions of dangerously militant insanity, the destructive results of which were witnessed by countless Croatian and Muslim villages in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo– was fuelled by a mixture of spontaneous unpredictability and streetwise ways with which Slovenes are still unfamiliar. Half enviously and half in opposition, I observed the effects of this explosive mental mixture in my Serbian acquaintances in Paris, Amsterdam and New York, during our meetings here and there after I started circling more frequently outside Slovene borders. Take Stevan Markovic, who was one cool dude: a handsome, violent goodfella from the streets of Belgrade, later a bodyguard to Alain Delon. He succumbed to some major criminal ambitions after his intoxicating arrival in Paris and rapid rise into high society, until his supposed death at the hands of a hired killer in a conflict between the Corsican and Yugoslav Mafias. This very same Markovic fascinated me as strongly as only a romantically enraptured boy can be by violence. This youthful intoxication with the poetic fantasies of crime, an egotistical vertigo of essentially abstract evil, also appears several times in my early poems, especially in the book Imena smrti (The Names of Death) (1985). That is, I always found Serbian vitality to be slightly foreign, but at the same time entirely close enough to find it extremely attractive. This was the life passion: a passion for life and art, and a life of art beyond conventions which I was to later find in the top- flight literature of Rastko Petrovic, Danilo Kis, Vasko Popa and primarily Milos Crnjanski, rather than in the biographies of criminals. In my early period, Crnjanski even influenced me with his poetic Sumatraism, similarly to the way my verse was inspired by the mood poetry of Josip Murn- Aleksandrov and the lyrical harmony between the prophetic impulse and the wealth of impressionistic strokes in the works of Srecko Kosovel. But if from Murn I mainly received incentives to use my personal experiences, which are transformed into a universal picture when one is able to purify them of all which is trivial, and if from Kosovel I adopted the lyrical crystallization of the vibrations of the soul, which can surpass the concrete reality of a given biographical situation in a few basic spots because it speaks with a tongue of rare beauty and solitude, then Crnjanski imparted to me the first signals of what I received only later on from a detailed reading of Kocbek’s poetry and diaries. Especially in Lirika Itaka, and that elegy utterly unsurpassed in south Slavonic literature, Lament for Belgrade, written by Crnjanski in exile. (Has any Slovene poet ever written such a very individually felt and at the same time historically complex elegy for Ljubljana? Perhaps, but I don’t know of one). I eagerly absorbed messages from the wide world with which a poet’s sensitivity to experiences is naturally integrated. I believe I know today what I then only suspected: that only against the background of large tectonic shifts and historical earthquakes may a poet’s ear for his own fate hope to receive an energy charge of inevitability, and thus also take upon itself the fatal weight of the collective experience, simultaneously, in all its marvellous and disgraceful accents. If I consider this carefully, I am unable to avoid the impression that with these early excavations into the treasury of modern Serbian poetry –certainly also under the influence of conversations and socializing with Serbian poets and critics, with whom I consorted heavily during the 1980s and collaborated with on a series of publications, from the Polja of Novi Sad to the Knjizevna rec (Literary Word) of Belgrade– I was probably wishing to unconsciously overcome the type of absence that presses down on 20th century Slovene literature as a nightmare: a cosmopolitan mentality, the sovereignty of a large city, a self-confident walk through the library of the world’s constellations! How many writers and poets do we Slovenes have, for example, who in fact served their apprentice years in Paris, the capital of the last century until World War II?! Let us think: there is, for example, the practically-undiscovered-until-yesterday Vladimir Bartol, while Edvard Kocbek was slightly remote in Lyon; after the war we naturally cannot neglect to mention the notorious salon lion Joze Javorsek, but apart from that a Vienna district, and perhaps a few student years in Prague, a hop to Munich and... a sad ending of mostly crumpled biographies. The modest content of the Slovene literary tradition in this biographical sense is seen primarily in the fact that nothing remains for young poets who would wish to experience, and thus also receive inspiration from, the adventurous, dynamic and risky path of a chosen artist, a predecessor in the constellation of lyrical visions, but to either rely on their own imagination or reach for the annals of other national traditions. To whom could I have referred among Slovene writers, for example, in American poetry circles when, after moving to New York at the end of the 1980s, I said I was a Slovene poet? At least my Serbian friends could rely on Vasko Popa, a long-term candidate for the Nobel Prize, and Danilo Kis, who is still held in very high regard among the American literary elite. But I don’t wish to moan about the limiting fact of Slovene anonymity. I prefer to say that, after I overcame my initial low spirits, the very absence of a large cosmopolitan tradition freed me in a way. Because if we lack a tradition of cosmopolitan, creative self-confidence, then each of us is left to create such mythology him/herself. In my slowly developing existential and aesthetic orientation, I received the greatest support from Tomaz Salamun, who constantly encouraged and emboldened me, and also opened a few important doors with his personal connections. Exactly that: a personal stanza. In the long run, Salamun himself managed the gesture of transgression of the national frame, not only in a spiritual, but also in an entirely direct physical sense. This perhaps overly lengthy detour has been necessary for me to explain at least briefly the degree to which direct confrontation with literary creativity in the former Yugoslav territory was important for my own Bildung.